Ideologies as epistemic closures, II

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I was in a conversation with a mathematician and an engineer. The engineer, while a nice fellow, is a hard-core materialist, and he said “I don’t think that numbers that can’t be computed even exist.”

The mathematician asked him, “So you think that π doesn’t exist?”

The engineer responded, “If you want to convince me that non-computable numbers exist, what you should do is…”

We waited…

“Compute one of them for me.”

And no, he was not joking.

This is like demanding that one prove massless particles exist by weighing them.

Clearly, such a position is completely closed to counter-evidence and counter-arguments. A large part of the ideology is, in fact, schemes designed to block critique.

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