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Re: CHAT: Religions (was: Visible planets)

From:Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
Date:Wednesday, November 12, 2003, 19:37
Quoting John Cowan <jcowan@...>:

> Andreas Johansson scripsit: > > > > the belief that exactly 1,114,111 angels can dance on the head of a pin > > > > Is that a figure pulled out of thin air, > > In this context it's a joke, being the highest valid Unicode codepoint > and equal to hex 10FFFF.
Ah.
> > or did anyone arrive at it by some > > understandable reasoning? I'm aware that the question of how many angels > can > > dance on a pin has been discussed seriously, but can't recall seeing an > actual > > answer anywhere before. > > The real dispute was not about any particular number, of course; that's > an absurd caricature. It was, rather, whether the number was finite > or infinite. A modern serious rewording would be: does intelligence > inherently require some sort of material substrate? A physicist might > read it as: are angels fermions or bosons?
Are angels fermions or bosons? - I'm going to remember that one! Now, this isn't my field of physics, but isn't there supposed to be a limit of the information density of space? If so, and assuming that intelligence requires information, that means the number is indeed finite. Andreas