[FollowingTheDao]

Learning calculus in high school made me question everything. You can never measure anything, never mind the area of a circe using calculus. It will only ever be a "good enough" measurement.

There is a point where all of you will finally come to appreciate the limits of rationalism and materialism and let go a bit more.

[hgsgm]

You seem to have misunderstood the essence of calculus. Calculus provides efficient, high quality estimates for messy real world phenomena.

Calculus put a man on the moon and a camera next to Pluto.

[FollowingTheDao]

> Calculus provides efficient, high quality estimates for messy real world phenomena.

Can it love?

> Calculus put a man on the moon and a camera next to Pluto.

I am not saying the illusion is not useful, but all the things that come out of it are also inside the illusion.

What if Pluto is not as far away as we actually think it is?

[peteradio]

Generally we think things are far away when it takes a longer time to get to them. We have some reasonable assurance that the speed of light is immutable and so we can measure the distance in our frame of reference by bouncing light off of Pluto. Are you nerd sniping sir?

[FollowingTheDao]

I am making the distinction of what we perceive to be reality to actual reality.

Distance is a human concept. The moment we stop thinking distance does not exist. It may be a limitation that we perceive distance as something to be overcome through rocket ships and not through other methods.

Time is also in the same category. If you want to read a good book on the topic read “the end of Time quote by Jason Barbour.

[bmacho]

> What if Pluto is not as far away as we actually think it is?

What if, what if.. um.. nothing, really? Our ships continue to work for a while, (may be t=0), then they won't, and we correct the models or the math.

[hgsgm]

You have moved deeply out of the realm of the scientific, into pure imagination. What if squiglal butterplotz mishric?

[FollowingTheDao]

It’s an imagination where new discoveries are found.

The idea of distance being a human construct is not a new idea and may be the underpinnings of spooky action at a distance.

[pixl97]

Then once you imagine it and write it down in a testable prediction, get back to is. Before then you have no means of getting us here to there.

[papandada]

I have thought it was interesting that, Christians believe, God became human and of all the things in the universe he could choose to teach about, apparently more than anything it is all about love (of a particular kind, actually).

[NateEag]

I think OP understands that calculus is an enormously powerful tool.

I think the OP's point is that much like the Newtonian physics that paired with calculus to put a man on the moon, calculus is a pragmatically magnificent tool that doesn't yield exactly correct or perfectly accurate answers for many questions. Just "enough accuracy for the problem you're solving," in some very real senses.

[peteradio]

Huh, what are we talking about here? Calculus does give exact results. What questions are we talking about? Fundamentally statistical questions are going to have inherent uncertainties, its got nothing to do with Calculus.

[FollowingTheDao]

Calculus make use of the fundamental notions of convergence of infinite sequences and infinite series to a well-defined limit.

What you are calling an exact result is only a limit function. All “things” will measure infinitely.

[peteradio]

Still not understanding what your issue is with calculus. I think so far you only have a problem with its outcomes when you feed it garbage. We expect to see "Calculus" diverge when integrating near the lattice spacing. I don't think we wholly disagree but I am doubtful you are going to make headway fighting against calculus.

[FollowingTheDao]

I don’t have a problem with calculus, I’m just expressing its limitations. Using calculus to know the area of a circle is useful but it never really measures the area of a circle because the area of any circle is infinite.

[zelphirkalt]

It is not really about measuring things, but about reaching a definitive answer given some assumptions. Sometimes our notation of numbers get in the way of writing things shortly (instead of infinite decimal places), other times we can use a fraction and be exact on the paper we write on.

[FollowingTheDao]

If you can infinitely divide a ruler, you can measure nothing.

we only stop because it’s convenient to stop. But that doesn’t make the size of anything have any specific size other than where we stop measuring it.

[hackernudes]

I would say calculus is about solving things exactly using infinitesimals and limits. There's also plenty of equations that can only be solved numerically.

What you're saying is in the practical real world we can never measure things exactly. That's true but that's not what I got from calculus. Irrational numbers come to mind (not calculus).

I come to almost the opposite conclusion as you. It is amazing that we can solve equations in spite of infinities.