Re: CHAT: Religions (was: Visible planets)

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.

> 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?

--
John Cowan                              jcowan@reutershealth.com
http://www.reutershealth.com            http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
Humpty Dump Dublin squeaks through his norse
                Humpty Dump Dublin hath a horrible vorse
But for all his kinks English / And his irismanx brogues
                Humpty Dump Dublin's grandada of all rogues.  --Cousin James

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