Ref. Old Thread: "Do you believe in God, etc."

[mismused]

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[smutpen]

Re: The curse of the internet.

=========================

As this post came up, my second post went out. It is time, if you will, to accept my apologies for what I clearly intended to convey, and what you have just set at naught.

That you sent two posts aside, this will allow us to reach for that which is finest in humans, the will, and grace to apologize to each other with good hearts.

I say this because your posts did vex the heck out of me to a great extent, and did seem to be aimed directly at me, at my considerations with the use of my meager knowledge.

As I said before, you have much to offer. I hope you continue to do so.

mismused

(now not amused at myself, and braying, as well as praying)

Graciously said.

Since my intent is to communicate, I get really annoyed with myself when I torpedo my own efforts...

 

[mismused]

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[overthebow]

Re: God and I broke up -

I'm not certain it's the end of the relationship, but currently we are not speaking.

And we decided it was OK to date others.





She's just so pissy sometimes!

Good one.

 

[overthebow]

My seven year old daughter was talking about the Pledge of Allegiance and didn't like saying "under God" because he didn't exist, he was just a "imaginary man in the sky". I told her that there was a time when we didn't know much about the universe and couldn't explain things like rain and lightning and thunder. We said that the gods did those things. She said, "Yeah, but now we know what causes them, so god doesn't exist." I asked her where loves comes from. She didn't have an answer. I said that some people believe that God is where love comes from.

 

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[dr_mabeuse]

My seven year old daughter was talking about the Pledge of Allegiance and didn't like saying "under God" because he didn't exist, he was just a "imaginary man in the sky". I told her that there was a time when we didn't know much about the universe and couldn't explain things like rain and lightning and thunder. We said that the gods did those things. She said, "Yeah, but now we know what causes them, so god doesn't exist." I asked her where loves comes from. She didn't have an answer. I said that some people believe that God is where love comes from.

I remember being very excited when I learned that physics has shown that there are only 4 forces in the universe: the electromagnetic, gravity, the nuclear strong force and the nuclear weak force. I was telling a friend about this (we were both high at the time), and he asked me "Where does love come in?"

"Don't give me this warm-and-fuzzy crap!" I thought But I didn't say anything because this was my friend and that's the kind of thing you say when you're high.

That was years ago, and since then I've decided his point was far beyond warm-and-fuzzy crap. Science can give us all these answers and models and predictions, but ultimately it's our human hearts that give these facts meaning, and it's our human hearts that make us ask these questions.

I consider myself pretty hard-headed when it comes to science, and seeing people write about how the experimenter's expectations determines the outcome of the double-slit experiment pisses me off too, because that's just not true. But I still hope that we'll find a way around the speed of light, and I still root for the guys who are trying to find it, just like I root for people looking for life after death, even though I don't think they'll find it. But in the battle of man vs. the universe, I think most of us are rooting for man.

Smutpen gave a beautiful analogy with his example of trying to roll up your shadow and compress it into a ball, which of course is impossible in the physical world. But in fiction and our imagination it happens every day, which is probably why I choose to spend my time these days in a place where everything's possible.

---Zoot

 

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[Clare Quilty]

... The problem is, how does one virtual particle know what's happening to its anti-twin?---Zoot

Faster than light communication?

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Re: Doc, everything may be possible in us

========================

Sorry, didn't like how the message looked.

Quantum super position occurs, an author says, within us each time we move a muscle (to bend an arm, as in the example he gives).

This quantum measurement makes both possibilities real until fully executed.

This same ability, he says, caused a "choice" to be made (I think I got it right) but this quantum measurement on molecules.

That indicates an observer, right? Right, in his sense, because it was what we have become that was "chosen."

Real life out there, in us??? Oh, his name is JohnJoe Mcfadden.

See, this is exactly wrong.

We don't know whether an electron, say, is acting as a partcile or a wave until we look at it, and the act of our looking at it influences what we see. But that doesn't mean that the electron doesn't know what it is. It knows.

People misinterpret this to mean that our observation influences how the universe turns out, but that's not what it means at all. The misunderstanding comes from the odd nature of the electron, which has both wavelike properties and particle-like properties. The mistake is in thinking that it can only be one or the other. It's not. It is was it is. What we see is what we look for.

Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy ('The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle') is usually cited as support for these erroneous beliefs. But what Heisenberg showed was that there's a limit to what we can know because of the way we measure things. If you want to see what an electron's doing, you have to at least shoot a photon of light at it, and this interferes with what it's doing and ruins the very thing you're trying to measure. That means that you can't know both its position and its momentum at the same time. But that doesn't mean that the electron doesn't know its position and momentum at the same time, just that we can't measure both simultaneously.

I've seen this misinterpretation of quantum mechanics used to justify everything from the existence of God to psychic powers to free will and life after death, and it's just flat out wrong, no matter who espouses it or how many letters they have after their name. The universe knows exactly what it's doing. It's our inability to measure precisely what's going on that's the problem, and that has to do with the nature of measurement.

---dr.M.

 

[smutpen]

My seven year old daughter was talking about the Pledge of Allegiance and didn't like saying "under God" because he didn't exist, he was just a "imaginary man in the sky". I told her that there was a time when we didn't know much about the universe and couldn't explain things like rain and lightning and thunder. We said that the gods did those things. She said, "Yeah, but now we know what causes them, so god doesn't exist." I asked her where loves comes from. She didn't have an answer. I said that some people believe that God is where love comes from.

Well, of course, I heartily disagree.

Love comes from people, just like hate and every other emotion.

Not from the imaginary man in the sky.

And the Song of Solomon is beautiful, but it is found in the company of much hate and ugliness, like instructions to murder women and children, which people also claimed came from the imaginary man in the sky, when in fact, it came from human minds.

 

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[smutpen]

Re: Re: Doc, everything may be possible in us

See, this is exactly wrong.

We don't know whether an electron, say, is acting as a partcile or a wave until we look at it, and the act of our looking at it influences what we see. But that doesn't mean that the electron doesn't know what it is. It knows.

People misinterpret this to mean that our observation influences how the universe turns out, but that's not what it means at all. The misunderstanding comes from the odd nature of the electron, which has both wavelike properties and particle-like properties. The mistake is in thinking that it can only be one or the other. It's not. It is was it is. What we see is what we look for.

Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy ('The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle') is usually cited as support for these erroneous beliefs. But what Heisenberg showed was that there's a limit to what we can know because of the way we measure things. If you want to see what an electron's doing, you have to at least shoot a photon of light at it, and this interferes with what it's doing and ruins the very thing you're trying to measure. That means that you can't know both its position and its momentum at the same time. But that doesn't mean that the electron doesn't know its position and momentum at the same time, just that we can't measure both simultaneously.

I've seen this misinterpretation of quantum mechanics used to justify everything from the existence of God to psychic powers to free will and life after death, and it's just flat out wrong, no matter who espouses it or how many letters they have after their name. The universe knows exactly what it's doing. It's our inability to measure precisely what's going on that's the problem, and that has to do with the nature of measurement.

---dr.M.

Actually, Doc, you don't have that quite right.

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that an unmeasured quantum partcle has no position or momentum.

People mistakenly associated this with conscious observation early on, but the concensus now (for many reasons) is that any interaction will collapse the wavefunction.

Almost every book I've read on QT strongly emphasizes the fact that although the example commonly used (to 'see' a photon's position, we must hit it with a high energy photon, which changes its momentum) is measurement related, that is not the key to understanding Heisenberg.

It is because the photon has no such properties until we measure it (or until some property is 'measured' by some other entity, like an atom that interacts with it) that measurement of certain complementary property pairs is impossible.

Until some interaction occurs, the quantum entity acts more like a wave; it is "smeared out" in space, so it cannot have properties like position or momentum.

This is a difficult concept to get the mind around, and it gave Einstein fits, not to mention Heisenberg himself.



And, in some sense, all existence depends, according to QT, on the fact that the universe does not know exactly what it's doing. Particles always live on borrowed time, as virtual particles are allowed to borrow enough energy to be "promoted " to existence, but the universe eventually catches up and makes them pay it back.

Weird, yes. Difficult to comprehend, yes. But in no way does it justify (or even have any meaningful relationship to) a belief that consciousness arises out of anything other than brain function, nor that consciousness could possibly arise outside the context of biological evolution or some close analogue.

Inside that context, with communication, social structure, and eventually language, consciousness makes perfect sense.

Outside that context, and especially preceding that context and all other possible contexts, it makes no sense at all.

QT does have some implications about free will (though the word free is a red herring; will is heavily constrained).

Specifically, the quantum world is inherently indeterminate. The block universe which even Einstein thought science implied, in which the future is already determined though we can't see it, does not exist.

QT and Chaos Theory gave the one-two combination to that view of reality. The world is deterministic, yet indeterminate.

We make the future as we go, within limits...

 

[Lucifer_Carroll]

I don't know. I'm more of the cell biology scientist than the quantum theory scientist. It may be my misinterpretations and stupidities but I've never been able to really work with Schroediner's (i know. wickedly misspelled) cat and all the theories about the relationship of the observer and the observed. They've always seemed to be egotistic in their assumptions of the importance of the observer to the observed. It reminds me of the famous philosophy, "I think therefore I am..." that goes on to prove the existance of God. The assumption of the existance of the thinker is in essence unsubstantiated and more logical fallacies follow. Anyway, I know this is like Amicus responding to space exploration, but this is my own reservations about it.

This is a monkey wrench I know, but does it really matter if there is a "supreme" being up there at all? The existance or non-existance of a higher power does not ensure the existance of an afterlife, eternal justice, and universal meaning which is what people really want. I'm not stating my religion or a lack thereof, I'm just wondering if people desire the "him" as much as the "goodies" that "he" is supposed to bring with him.

 

[snooper]

Oy.

Quantum theory and Relativity ...

Both have been tested with incredible rigor, and both have proven accurate to the best of our ability to measure their predictions. ...

So were Newton's Laws of Motion ... at the time he proposed them. Now we have better measuring instruments and can see the discrepancies!

 

[smutpen]

I don't know. I'm more of the cell biology scientist than the quantum theory scientist. It may be my misinterpretations and stupidities but I've never been able to really work with Schroediner's (i know. wickedly misspelled) cat and all the theories about the relationship of the observer and the observed. They've always seemed to be egotistic in their assumptions of the importance of the observer to the observed. It reminds me of the famous philosophy, "I think therefore I am..." that goes on to prove the existance of God. The assumption of the existance of the thinker is in essence unsubstantiated and more logical fallacies follow. Anyway, I know this is like Amicus responding to space exploration, but this is my own reservations about it.

This is a monkey wrench I know, but does it really matter if there is a "supreme" being up there at all? The existance or non-existance of a higher power does not ensure the existance of an afterlife, eternal justice, and universal meaning which is what people really want. I'm not stating my religion or a lack thereof, I'm just wondering if people desire the "him" as much as the "goodies" that "he" is supposed to bring with him.

The early quantum physicists, brilliant as they were, made some utterly unjustified forays into your specialty.

They attached unwarranted significance to the concept of a conscious observer. That's why the whole Schroedinger's cat thing is really kind of stupid. If the cat doesn't qualify as an observer, why should the scientist? Is a grad student enough, or does it have to be a full professor?

In fact, the transition from the quantum realm to the macroscopic occurs when the emitted quantum particle interacts with the device that sends billions and billions of poison gas molecules into the box.

That "ensemble" behaves as a probabilistic average of the possible quantum states within it, which is exactly how every macroscopic thing behaves, which is the only reason that QT has any practical applications. (It has very, very many, if anyone doesn't know that.)

My disbelief in the non-conceptual existence of gods and spirits comes from almost everything I've read of scriptures (of all kinds), history, science, philosophy -- etc. -- but it's biology that makes it seem really absurd.

Consciousness without language? Unlikely. More like those are convenient labels for two complexly entangled components of one system (or process, or pattern - they're all the same thing, I think).

And language without a need to communicate with others in order to exist? Nonsense.

And if there's a magical puppetmaster floating inside you, why the need for all that fragile complicated goop inside, eh?

And if neuroscience has shown that everything that people want to associate with some transient supernatural entity, like love, and morality, and intellect, and anything else you can think of, is profoundly affected by physical and chemical changes that occur in the brain, what is left to be an attribute of this alleged (and utterly undetectable) entit?

That which has no attributes does not exist. And, as QT reminds us, and Relativity, too, attributes always must exist in relation to something else.

Nothing exists independently, but the earth and the moon certainly recognize each other's existence. No need for consciousness for them to interact.

I honestly think a major part of the desire to elevate human-style consciousness to the center of the metaphysical universe is almost exactly analogous to the old belief that the Earth must be the center of the physical universe.

It's a form of arrogance, though many or most don't intend it that way. Among those do embrace the arrogance of it, it often masquerades obscenely as humility. Until it's time for the claws to come out, that is.



But, you're right, too that in a way it's irrelevant.

But, in a way it is relevant because so many people are willing to kill and die over what they think some god wants.

And that's on a good day

 

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[amicus]

Have read but not contributed to this thread, wondering where it was headed.

If I may pretend for a moment to be a snobbish intellectual elete with a rather abrasive and confrontational style, please realize that it is just to get your attention, honey, we can talk later.

The mass majority of mankind doesn't give a whit about Quantum Theory, Uncertainty Principles, wave form and matter or particles and participles.

What I see is an extended masturbatory indulgence by quaking intellectuals who yearn for the God of Abraham but who will not stoop to the level of the minions, the faithful and the believers to ease that search.

It is a fruitless quest and similar to a long ago debate about how many angels could reside on the head of a pin.

This search for a justification in a belief that might offer immortality, through higher math and physics is collegiate at best or maybe just the result of some potent hash.

If this discussion is about whether God exists or not, then as educated, alert, very sharp intellectuals, why not assume the mantle of the station you have attained through your thought?

Why not acknowledge how fortunate you are to have the intelligence to survey the latest theories with the broad based foundation you already have?

Why not realize that the lesser endowed 98 percent of humanity look to you to fulfill your obligation to them and explain to them what the hell it is all about?

Organized religion is and has always been at the core of every society on earth. Why?

Organized religion has been under severe attack since Darwin and the Existentialists and the Huxley's made a frontal assault.

Organized religion took a hit to the head with birth control and hugh hefner in the 50's, by 'free love' in the 60's, by abortion in the 70's, by the ongoing Catholic scandal and the barbarity of Islam in current times.

You are all smart enough to know there is no anthropomorphic fuzzy faced father figure floating somewhere beyond Antares, right?

So what is it that drives man to seek the immortal guidance of a deity? How did it come about where ever man outran the Sabre toothed tiger and the Hyena?

Amicus retreats a few steps into the shadows and stands outside the fire.

 

[Guest]

So what is it that drives man to seek the immortal guidance of a deity?

Woman.

 

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[amicus]

Mismused...

You said...:

"However, may I wonder about one of your comments?"

"This search for a justification in a belief that might offer immortality, through higher math and physics is collegiate at best or maybe just the result of some potent hash."

I offer a sort of apology...one of age, I think, yes, of course one should be filled with curiosity and burn the midnight oil, with whatever chemical mental enhancement one desires..."

I sometimes forget and see only through my aged eyes and do not take into consideration those who may be young and young at heart and pursuing the same paths I did.

Forgive me? and thank you for your kind words...

amicus

 

[amicus]

sweetsubsarahh....


Woe Man

at least spell it right.

 

[Guest]

sweetsubsarahh....


Woe Man

at least spell it right.

Actually, to be grammatically correct, it should be "Woe is man."

 

[amicus]

Yes...I considered that but...I wanted to leave you something to criticize...you did not disappoint.

amicus

 

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