Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

whatshisface

The complete wave function of your room contains some elephant-like fluctuations in the distant decimal places.

View on HN

A functioning brain is posited to spontaneously appear in about 10^10^50 years due to random fluctuations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain

I'm not sure if a functioning elephant is more or less likely to be honest....

I have met the Queen of England exactly zero times.

The complete wavefunction of you and the Queen of England involves a handshake-like fluctuation in the distant decimal places.

But once either of us dies there won't. Zero can be meaningful in describing the world. I agree infinity, in its truest sense, can't... but zero definitely can.

No, no, null is not meaningful. That's the whole point. It is meaningful as neutral element of a ring, as center of a coordinate system or as limit of some function, sure, but only in comparison to other values and the other values are all that matters. Not having the other values, having literally nothing, the word ''having'' would be meaningless. There is always something.

There's something about nihilism. It's being a self defeating argument, but educating. Then there's constructivism in various senses.

There's something about finitism, too, computable numbers and what not. Infinity is rather ... monotonous.

but how is 0 any different from any other number then?

If you're going to look at more than just integers, infinity is everywhere, in between every number you can count, and then some! 0 is as meaningless but so is every other number!

If you limit to integers or even just whole numbers, 0 is meaningful, just like all the numbers...

0 is a symbol, but that symbol has quite literally no value. It is special that way.

To piggyback, and inflect on, whatshisface's point, the number of times you've met the Queen of England is not a physical thing. You can't describe the Queen of England with a physical function either, even if you could describe her physical body, you can't capture what she means to the United Kingdom, which is at least 40% of the context being dealt with here.

Okay... I meant Elisabeth Alexandra Mary, of House Windsor, born 21 April 1926 at 17 Burton Street, London.

Those are all socially-agreed truths, as opposed to physically demonstrable truths.

And the QoE isn't a discrete entity. Her molecules are constantly reacting and atoms are entering and leaving her. One h2o is some distant decimal place percentage of the QoE

What's the rest mass of a photon? What's the electric charge of a neutrino? What's the spin of a Higgs boson?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com