Why is self-determination an inalienable right for the people of the Falklands, but a gross example of Iranian meddling for the people of Bahrain?
Answers on a postcard please with a twenty pound note and framed photo of William Hague to Wars’R’Us, Oil and Armaments Ltd, House of Lords.
Angrysoba, you are still arguing about religion vs. science. Yes, I have expounded my personal theories on other threads, but on this thread I only wish to establish that Bonifacegoncourt has been acting like a shit, and is scientifically unsupported in so doing. I thought you were opposed to that kind of hate speech? What’s changed since the 9/11 thread?
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Hi Clark, I think it is important to distinguish between a view being espoused as part of a disinterested pursuit of truth and a view being espoused as a tactic. On this thread you have somewhat merged the two. I am interested in the former rather than the latter. You seem to be more interested in the latter but you have suggested more than once on this thread that you are dedicated to the former what with the talk of keeping an open-mind. I have said that I do keep an open-mind and have given you a criteria for accepting your view as the truth if you can express it clearly and if it conforms to scientific testing. I don’t think that is so radical and yet you’ve constantly demanded that I concede something to religion which I won’t – indulging it and holding my tongue and shutting my mouth if my beliefs tread on the delicate toes of the Godly. Sorry, Clark, I am not going to do that.
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As for hate speech, I don’t demand that someone be forbidden from making it but I will still oppose what people say if I think it is racist, inciteful, stupid, bigotted etc… I have made my thoughts known to Boniface that I think he is an anti-semitic shit and never gave him a free pass in the past despite the fact that others nodded along with him about his ideas that the Jews should be packed off to Siberia or wherever. As you know I have also slammed others, such as my erstwhile ally Larry, for suggesting that Muslim posters here are walking time bombs. I have also slammed Mark Golding for his championing of the views of KKK Grand Wizard, David Duke. And most of the time I was almost alone in this except for technicolor, Suhayl Saadi and, sometimes your good self (although you often told me that I should go easy on Mark despite or because of his increasingly unhinged rantings). As it happens, you won’t find me saying “Hur hur hur, Muslims!” Or “Hur hur hur, Christians!” or “Hur, hur, hur, Jews!” and my guess is that I am quite a lot more interested and dispassionate about religion than you seem to give me credit (not that I am looking for credit or pats on the head or anything).
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No, I know nothing of “the Councils of Nicea, Chalcedon, Trent […] and Vatican II”. I glanced at Filioque on Wikipedia, and I can’t be bothered to read all that; it basically looks like trivia to me.
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It may look like trivia to you but it most certainly wasn’t trivia at the time. I recommend watching Dairmaid Macculloch’s History of Christianity. It’s an excellent documentary. I know that you have announced here before that you don’t watch TV but it really is fascinating. You could, of course, read the book but as it is 1000 pages of very small letters it may take you a couple of months as it did me.
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Do you really think that average religious believers care much about such stuff? I think they just let their clergy get on with it.
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Maybe not so much these days, but it was you who brought up the point about religions having their own methods of discussing religious disputes, while chiding me with the idea that I probably didn’t know much about that sort of stuff. I was just giving you some examples, if only to show that you are wrong about that. But now you tell me that most people don’t care about it. This is why it is sometimes difficult to know what you mean.
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So you like taunting religious believers. Great. I think that just adds to the problems of the world.
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I don’t like “taunting religious believers” but I don’t appreciate being told, “Oooh, you mustn’t say that; it’ll upset the vicar!” I do like Monty Python and various books and novels which have found the absurdities of religion a fine vein of comedy. I also like Hobbes, Hume, Paine and various other writers who have added to the human stock of culture and I’m not giving all that up just to make a few humourless killjoys happy.
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Clark, you do come across as awfully puritanical in your disapproval of people who share views opposite of yours and I think it is slightly ironic that both you and Njegos think that atheists have no sense of wonder, awe or appreciation of beauty, art and aesthetics.
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What happens to the physical Universe without animals to observe it is one of the questions that has drawn me to the Universal Mind interpretation. There is also the many-billion years before life on Earth to account for. And the problem of consensus.
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Well, this doesn’t really answer my question given that I don’t need a Universal Mind as explanation and because I am not the one who thinks that humans (or other minds) are necessary for a universe to exist. I can quite believe that the cosmic soup from which stars and planets were made could have existed without any minds to perceive it and find it somewhat absurd to think that they cannot. But, as I have tried to make clear before, the onus rests on you not me to show me why a universal mind is necessary. Just sayin’
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Angrysoba, you have an interest in history, but you apportion much blame for conflict upon the various religions, and then you follow through and blame virtually all of it on belief in “God”!
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I don’t actually think that. I have a certain Hobbesian/Darwinian view of conflict.
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Are you sure you’re not suffering from confirmation bias? As I understand it, many creeds have lived happily and peacefully alongside each other for long periods of time, but of course, that does not make interesting history. If you study all the conflicts, and find that groups from different areas or backgrounds fight, of course you will find people of different religions fighting each other. But you will also find those groups wearing different clothes or uniforms, eating different rations, and believing different non-religious legends.
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Two things:
1) A few examples would help illustrate your point.
2) Are you sure you are not constructing a strawman argument here?
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Njegos, I’m happy to have offered you at least a glimpse of the theory. For the philosophical background, I’d point you to Margaret Boden’s 2004 book The Creative Mind. You can read her introduction “Creativity in a Nutshell” here: http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/courses/creative-systems/papers/maggie/nutshell.pdf
(Soon after its publication I explained to her that she’d been too glib about contemporary connectionist architectures, so one of her conundrums was out-of-date.)
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To be honest, an introduction to the field of artificial creativity would require a series of lectures at Master’s level, supplemented by private study … assuming you had already achieved at least a 2:1 in a relevant first degree. This may sound elitist, but believe me, some actual postgrads on these courses still struggle to grasp the fundamentals by exam time, despite unfettered access to university libraries and online resources. It’s a bit much to expect a crash course, pitched at novices, condensed into a few paragraphs on a blog board! So I’ll respectfully pass on your invitation and let you take responsibility for educating yourself via t’interweb – although as it’s such a rapidly advancing field the summary publications tend to have a very short shelf life.
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Here is an example from 2001: “Evaluating Machine Creativity”: http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/publications/online/0054.pdf
If you can digest that, it would be a good basis for appreciating how far the field has moved on in the 11 years since then. (Compare the huge advances in consumer gaming, for instance, or the development of Web 2.0.)
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@ Clark: Angrysoba’s right to pull you up on overegging the quantum pudding again: quantum resolution certainly does not imply the existence of any kind of Universal Mind. We covered this, and the alternatives, in a previous thread. However, there is a (non-quantum) scientifically-inspired meme, somewhat analogous to your Creativity notion, that ascribes a form of emergent higher intentionality to large-scale physical systems via an extrapolation of dynamical systems theory. It doesn’t imply spirituality or flout the laws of nature, but it can arguably exert a causal influence (of sorts) on the lower levels (via the nature of emergence). It’s a deeply complex philosophical issue and I don’t have time to hunt for relevant links. (The hour is late and I have to finish teaching prep for a Master’s module in psychology, remark several essays, and assess doctoral research proposals for an ethics committee – before changing mental frames altogether and designing price-comparison software. Most deadlines have already gone whistling past.) The fact I’ve been wallowing on Craig Murray’s blog suggests a relapse of Internet Addiction Disorder (a new psychiatric diagnosis in the DSM-V!) … I actually blocked access to this website via my hosts file for a few weeks for this reason (which is why I didn’t post anything for a long time). I may have to try hypnotherapy next. 🙂
Clark,
For your time and mental energy/clarity , patience and thank you.
If I got a simple organism deep in the earth ,living on hot sulfer at a volcanic opening, and wanted to teach it how all details of a Nuclear Power station works, I would have a problem. It does not have the brain capacity, ears, language, experience of water, earth, wires, brick, …… The difference between it and me are not as big as the difference between me and the creator/force/power… There is NO WAY I have the capacity to get my mind around something so mighty. We are programmed on a biological/ survival level with instincts for security, control, power, esteem . We make a decision on Faith to go with what we feel. Or not. This cannot be proved, or disproved, by Science. Neither can feelings like Love, (not for something but despite it). You can label and pidgeon hole -but not explain.
We have free will. It is childish,but primitavly Human, to fight over faith.
Nextus,
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Thanks for posting the TED talk on aesthetics by Dennis Dutton. I seem to remember a similarly animated video by someone who was talking about the financial crisis. I’ll look forward to watching that later when I have time.
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Also, I am familiar with some of Margeret Boden’s work. I have a book which she edited on the philosophy of Artificial Intelligence, which seems to include some of the important works both pro- and contra- such as Turing and Searle. I remember trying to bang my head against the “Chinese Room problem”.
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I know it infuriates “spiritualists”, for want of a better term, but I see no contradiction at all in aesthetics, appreciation of natural beauty and, for want of a better term Dennettian physicalism (which is probably how I conceive of the world and the mind).
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We seem to be on a similar wavelength on this. And thanks again for the links.
Ah! I found the video I was talking about.
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(It’s OT!)
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Clark, I think you will like this too. I can’t really vouch for the ideas so much as I’m buggered if I know the subject.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOP2V_np2c0
Nextus, no, quantum theory doesn’t imply Universal Mind; it rules out a clear separation between mind and matter. That then leaves a number of alternatives that have been thought of so far. Of those alternatives, I find Universal Mind the most conservative hypothesis. How about you? You obviously know quantum physics. I think it’s time you put your cards on the table. You’ve referred to something like “some unexplained behaviour in subatomic particles”. Come on, you must know it’s far “worse” than that. The damn Universe plays peek-a-boo with us, showing every sign that it knows when we are watching. Doesn’t it? Come on, be honest!
Angrysoba, I don’t know much history, so I do what it was suggested I should do regarding the collapses at the WTC; I turn to someone with more expertise, in this case regarding history, you. How about Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel? Domestication of animal and plant species takes a long time, these sort of advances can only be made by stable societies. So, there have been long periods of stability.
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OK, people could have been constantly fighting each other over doctrinal differences on the borders of such societies, but Diamond also considers trade between varied societies. People of differing doctrines must be able to coexist reasonably well, or we wouldn’t have got to where we are.
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So I think of the history I was presented with at school. WWII, the Russian Revolution, Cavaliers and Roundheads – conflict, conflict, conflict. It simply can’t be a representative sample! History as studied and taught carries bias. Historians are interested in “decisive events”, i.e. things that happened fast enough to enable a decent summary to be written, and they concentrate on the actions of the powerful, i.e. the elite. Well, by and large, the elite do not domesticate plants and animals, etc. The slow, developmental advances made by ordinary people just don’t get enough coverage, there are not so many famous names to associate with them.
Boindub, thanks. The difference between it and me are not as big as the difference between me and the creator/force/power… There is NO WAY I have the capacity to get my mind around something so mighty – and – This cannot be proved, or disproved, by Science. Neither can feelings like Love, (not for something but despite it).
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Yes, you’ve elucidated why I get so frustrated in my discussions with the likes of Angrysoba. He expects me to present a complete, rigorous theory capable of being disproven before he’ll even consider the possibility, and I can’t do that, I doubt that anyone can. And he won’t even look at what the quantum stuff rules out.
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Angrysoba, I promise that, if I get reincarnated as some sort of god I’ll try to send you a revelatory vision or something. In the mean time, you could try the “delayed choice experiment”. You don’t need a mathematical understanding to appreciate just how radical the results are. A Universe without mind as a fundamental element is really difficult to support, and would, I suspect, prove so disgustingly inelegant that only hyper-intelligent crazies could accept it.
Angrysoba, I don’t know much history, so I do what it was suggested I should do regarding the collapses at the WTC; I turn to someone with more expertise, in this case regarding history, you. How about Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel? Domestication of animal and plant species takes a long time, these sort of advances can only be made by stable societies. So, there have been long periods of stability.
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Clark, thanks very much for that. Yes, Jared Diamond’s book is excellent, I agree with you, and it is truly a marvel at how mankind domesticated its crops and plants in that way. I also found the idea that people and bananas had migrated from South East Asia to East Africa, via Madagascar, amazing as well. I have seen some criticism of Jared Diamond’s thesis as a “Just-so” story but I tend to find it a very compelling one.
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Yes, it is doubtless true that much of the development of civilization (including crop and animal domestication) required long periods of stability and of course friendly relations with other groups who may adhere to other religions and speak other languages – friendly, or tolerable, traders.
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I started, but didn’t finish, Jared Diamond’s book Collapse which seems to also explore these themes a bit more; I really should make another effort at reading that book. As I understand he also goes into Tokugawa Japan which was a period of about 250 years in which Japan isolated itself from the rest of the world and lived in almost complete peace. Probably still not much fun for the underdogs of the feudal system but completely free of civil war.
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OK, people could have been constantly fighting each other over doctrinal differences on the borders of such societies, but Diamond also considers trade between varied societies. People of differing doctrines must be able to coexist reasonably well, or we wouldn’t have got to where we are.
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Clark, yes, I agree with this too.
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So I think of the history I was presented with at school. WWII, the Russian Revolution, Cavaliers and Roundheads – conflict, conflict, conflict. It simply can’t be a representative sample! History as studied and taught carries bias. Historians are interested in “decisive events”, i.e. things that happened fast enough to enable a decent summary to be written, and they concentrate on the actions of the powerful, i.e. the elite.
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A lot of conflict is taught in history classes, I agree. And I think it is often what many people find fascinating about it. But I remember in my primary and secondary school we often learnt a lot of “local history” and “social history” in which we were encouraged to look at old bits of cloth that people wore, the type of mugs people drank out of, a series of small walls in an excavation site, some birth certificates, letters and diaries of people of yore etc… in what seemed to me to be a very, very, almost self-consciously non-confrontational style and most of us were bored shitless.
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The most dramatic thing we ever learnt during our GCSEs was about the Luddites.
Nextus:
I will read the link. Thank you.
Angrysoba, thanks. As you know, I’m more interested in finding common ground than in having an argument. The quantum physical stuff is damn annoying, because it rules stuff out without suggesting what should replace it. God’s uneffable (sic) sense of humour, I’m inclined to think…
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I can see why history concentrated on conflict. I see that the trend of teaching had moved a bit between my GCEs and your GCSEs, and yes, it made things boring. Good choice of text books could help. Guns, Germs and Steelseems to be the sort of thing. I must read Collapse. Thanks for the recommendation. Hopefully, I’ll watch the video you linked, when my energy levels and download limit conspire to permit it.
Clark, quantum theory does not prove the existence of mind stuff, nor intertwine mind and matter. Some theories posit a role for a conscious observer, but by no means all. Consult the table on the wiki page on Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics. As I explained previously, it’s rather presumptive to suggest there is an established quantum proof for ontological minds. See Victor Stenger on Quantum Quackery: http://www.csicop.org/si/show/quantum_quackery
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Let’s be clear that mind is not directly detected by quantum experiments (even Delayed Choice). Some theorists invoke it as an explanatory construct to account for apparent temporal anomalies, but it comes at a heavy cost, entailing myriad other philosophical paradoxes. As it happens, I think observer theories are making a profound epistemological mistake.
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Quantum mechanics implies that we need to radically rethink the way we construe nature at the subatomic level; we clearly can’t do it by mapping concepts derived from everyday experience, as doing so leads to paradoxes. Scientific paradigm shifts, from Copernicus onward, have taught us to be epistemologically humble. For example, relativity showed that some everyday concepts don’t make sense on the cosmic scale, which is beyond the human phenomenological range in which we learn to categorise our experiences. Accordingly, it seems arrogant to assume that everyday concepts such as waves and particles would apply to quantum phenomena at the subatomic level, for that is also beyond our everyday phenomenological range. Now, theories that assert a fundamental role for conscious observers in fact compound the epistemic arrogance, because the conscious observer is itself a concept derived from everyday phenomenology, at an even higher level than waves and particles. The fact that conventional physics suggests mind is an abstract emergent phenomenon, with no fundamental causal role, is immensely frustrating for people who prioritise phenomenological constructs in their understanding of the world: they want to couch their ontological explanations in a phenomenological metalanguage. Unfortunately, the subatomic level does not offer a refuge.
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Do you appreciate that when you invoke a ‘Universal Mind’, you are using an ungrounded phenomenological metaphor as a guide to the unknown, with no epistemic warrant for doing so? Conceptual parallels with primitive mystic ontologies hardly count as sound support. (Incidentally, there is a convincing case that God-concepts are also conceptual mappings: extrapolations from our childhood experiences when parents control our environment and need to be appeased.)
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When antiscientific metaphysicians try to caricaturise the scientific enterprise as inherently limited or stumped by obscure phenomena, they invoke all sorts of misunderstandings. Science is a rigorous sceptical methodology, embedded in a philosophical framework of metaphysical assumptions which are required but not entailed by empirical fact. If you’re not committed to Occam’s Razor, then you can have your metaphysics any which way you please – but the attempt to prove these assumptions by strict logical implication is forlorn if there are other competing explanations.
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If you want to discuss these invigorating issues further, there are various meetup groups in London with well-informed people who enjoy debating at this level. I’d recommend Philosophy4All.
Clark, I will put IMO before all comments of mine.
If you returned as an all proving God you would make it so clear that we would have to act in a particular way. Robots. You would remove our Free Will and search for knowledge and truth which is what makes us so magnificent. We will get there and enjoy the journey which is the point.
Eastern religions search for knowledge. Christians have a God that has been wagging a finger and threatening with laws for years. Why did it stop at the old testament.? Your point that all religion is manmade and fallible is clear. Anyone is free to believe the Jewish written history that the ARK held all those animals, Man and Dinosours were made on the same day, the Garden of eden was true, The infinite creator selected one race (the Jews), and the rest of us are shit. Or you can disbelieve it . The new testament is more logical but do we understand it?.
None of this has neccessarily much to do with a creator/ineffible force
Pinoccio will never understand who carved his nose.
Brother Nextus seems to know what he is talking about, if only he would write in English instead of Latin. The rest of you are on the practice slopes of the hot air volcano, but wary of migrating to CiF Belief, because the vapourmeisters over there on Mount Derangement would reduce you to plasma. It is fun to offend the intolerant, because when you dig beneath the
self-love, vanity and hatred at the root of all religion, woo jockeys have only insults. Rather like the dried-up Kirchner braying ‘colonialism’ at the Malouines Marmite-munchers. Yo QED!
OK Nextus, I asked you:
and I get a reference to a table of fourteen possibilities, and an answer of over 500 words, including lots of stuff like ontological, phenomenology, abstract emergent phenomenon, metalanguage, phenomenological metaphor, epistemic conceptual mappings, and metaphysical assumptions. Each of those terms would expand into long definitions themselves.
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See what I meant when I wrote “would […] prove so disgustingly inelegant that only hyper-intelligent crazies could accept it”?
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Look, I know this stuff is embarrassing to scientific minds. It just isn’t the sort of answer we were expecting, or, let’s be honest, hoping to find. But the bottom line is that whenever we determine exactly what happened to a little bit of our Universe, some other little bit is placed beyond our reach, even in principle. The thing that is always common in all this is that something changes whenever someone becomes able to know something about it. We have a bubble under our wallpaper. We can shift it about but we can’t eliminate it, no matter how many complex words we wet our sponge with, because the bubble is us, ourselves.
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Sorry, I’m keeping us both from pressing matters, I know. Shall we just pack it in?
Bonifacegoncourt returns with a load of insults accusing others of being insulting. It must be a self-parody spambot.
“We are on the wrong side of the tapestry” – Father Brown, by G. K. Chesterton.
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tapestry / wallpaper.
Clark:
Speaking of spambots, dare I ask anyone whether computers will one day be able to model humour? Humour for me has always been part of beauty.
Njegos, have a go at The Emperor’s New Mind” and Shadows of the Mind by Roger Penrose. Yeah, I reckon quantum computers may one day manage this stuff, but they’ll insist upon sleeping at times, and you won’t be able to program them, they’ll do what they damn well choose.
Clark, FYI, I did couch my message in simpler terms as well: i.e. quantum physics doesn’t prove the existence of mind stuff, nor Universal Mind, and you are being disingenuous to pretend that experts agree that it does. Simple enough for you? But it left you wriggle room to appeal to further complex theoretical concepts (or at least their populist equivalents), as is the essence of quantum quackery. Forgive me for chasing you into the dark alleys with a torch, my friend.
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Which game do you actually want to play? You now seem to want to pack up the chess board and return to snakes-and-ladders (although you’re not very keen on the snakes). It appears that if things don’t go your way, you want to call a halt to the games and declare a draw, only to start again later. Such intellectual imposturing and dialectical manoeuvring reveals a lot about your debating technique. (I can state that in more pithy terms too, but that’s really Angrysoba’s domain of expertise.)
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Njegos, I also think there are many people who fail to understand humour, particularly those with autistic spectrum disorders … who appear to think like computers.
Sorry, Nextus, the complex part was too complex for me to recognise it as a restatement of the simple part! No, I’m not claiming that quantum physics proves Universal Mind. (I hope you’re only accidentally misrepresenting my argument here). I think it suggests that “all-stuff” is “mind-stuff”. My own belief is that at the quantum level, we are crossing the boundary out of the domain in which everything can be proven or disproven. And no, I’m not retreating from the argument because I feel in danger of losing, precisely because I think that definitive winning or losing disappears along with definitive proof and disproof. I also thought that your “if you want to discuss these invigorating issues further, there are various meetup groups in London” might be a hint that we’re taking up too much space here, which has been nagging at me. I will have to pack it in eventually…
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It’s a daft thing that we can’t even prove our free will to ourselves, despite experiencing it throughout our waking lives. Some people claim that it is an “illusion”, but if so, “who” is being deceived? And there’s that old jibe, “We have to believe in freedom of choice, we have no choice in the matter”. Oh look, that looks like a proposition that is equivalent to its own negation, where proof and disproof, er…
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Minds seem pretty “quantum-ish” to me. You may wonder what is in someone’s mind, but if you ask them, your query changes it. We say that we’re “in two minds”, like a superposition. I know, I know, not proof at all. But we’re at the beginning of the quantum journey; who would have guessed that photosynthesis required quantum sum over histories?
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Dawkins’ The God Delusion did a lot of damage. It convinced the likes of Bonyfacegonadscaught that it is acceptable, nay, desirable, to insult people for having “logically unapproved” beliefs; it’s a new “political incorrectness”. In putting up an excellent argument against doctrinal gods, it convinced many people that science had ruled out all spiritual dimension in the Universe. Of course, Dawkins had to gloss over (some interpretations of) quantum physics to pull this off. He was cheating, like he tried to cheat against Rupert Sheldrake. Now there’s no point attacking Sheldrake. Discrediting him doesn’t get Dawkins off the hook for attempting to cheat.
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I can sympathise with Dawkins’ cheating. If we’re scientifically minded, we have probably wanted the “quantum problem” to go away. I did, for years. You seem to have rationalised it, though it’s taken an awful lot of long words! I’d really like to change tack here, and ask you how your feelings about quantum physics evolved over the years. I don’t think we’ll get any further in the domain of proof and disproof anyway.
Another reason I sympathise with Dawkins is that his field is biology, which has of course been a battle ground for years due to unwarranted incursions by the religious special creationists.
Clark:
My reading list is growing. Thanks.
Nextus –
Perhaps one day words like “algorithmic” and “formulaic” will be terms of praise for comedy but I remain skeptical.
Nextus, I should clarify a point. I stated “you really can’t eliminate mind”. You later referred me to the fourteen-option table, the majority of which do not include mind. The whole reason that fourteen options exist is that none of them are satisfactory; otherwise, one would have “won”. “mind” only has to appear once for it not to have been eliminated.
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Scientists are not unbiased in this; I think most of us scientifically minded people have felt it. Brought up on Newtonian mechanics, etc., we don’t like mind cluttering up our pristine physical theories one bit.
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Incidentally, autistic spectrum people have their own humour which others fail to appreciate. I doubt that these people are really “like computers” at all.
If you want to read of Dawkins’ cheating, see here:
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http://psychopraxis.blogspot.com/2008/01/dawkins-vs-sheldrake.html
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Dawkins had collaboration from the corporate media. Of course, the corporate media would like us to believe that we are merely unspiritual machines, too. Except when they want to rip us off and sell us snake oil, and then they just lie in the opposite direction.
Clark: OK Nextus, I asked you:
The damn Universe plays peek-a-boo with us, showing every sign that it knows when we are watching. Doesn’t it?
and I get a reference to a table of fourteen possibilities, and an answer of over 500 words
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Clark, it is unreasonable to demand that Nextus solve all the problems of quantum mechanix – on his lunch break! – and make the solutions explicable to the assembled ignoramuses here (I include myself as an ignoramus and really anyone who isn’t a full-time researcher in the field). And then when he tries to give a synopsis of the problem, you claim it is TOO LONG!! Maybe if he had more time he would have written a shorter answer. Also, if you don’t know words like ontology, phenomenology and epistemology then it probably explains why you seem to mix up the methodologies of each. In short, ontology is what-there-is, phenomenology is how-things-appear/feel and espitemology is what-we-know. You seem to be saying you know there’s a God because of how you feel. (Yes, I know that is a bit of a caricture, but not much). All Nextus is saying, and quite patiently I think, is that there may be more explanations which will turn out to be better than your intuitions.
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Clark: Scientists are not unbiased in this; I think most of us scientifically minded people have felt it.
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This is very true. People do resort to all kinds of tactics when they have emotional investment in their theories, and scientists are people too (don’t let appearances fool you!). Now, you must at least begin to wonder if the same isn’t true of the bubble-in-the-wallpaper theory of quantum mechanics – by the way, I am not knocking that analogy, I think it is very good.
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Brought up on Newtonian mechanics, etc., we don’t like mind cluttering up our pristine physical theories one bit.
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This just suggests you don’t like Newtonian mechanics. Sure, it may be true that it doesn’t answer everything and that has left a lot of scientists open-mouthed, but it isn’t completely junked. You don’t sell your house because you broke your key in the lock.
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Dawkins had collaboration from the corporate media. Of course, the corporate media would like us to believe that we are merely unspiritual machines, too. Except when they want to rip us off and sell us snake oil, and then they just lie in the opposite direction.
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This shows that you are very upset about something which, as I say, could be the emotional investment I am talking about re: quantum physiX! Just sayin’
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Incidentally, autistic spectrum people have their own humour which others fail to appreciate. I doubt that these people are really “like computers” at all.
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The word “spectrum” is there for a reason (and yes, I know it doesn’t refer to the ZX Spectrum, ha ha!), because people are autistic to a degree and with varying effects.
Clark, your original statement wasn’t so nuanced by any means. A quick recap before we wind up. You raised the topic of quantum physics in this thread to support your sweeping statement that “you simply can’t dissociate Universe from Mind”. Who simply can’t? All of us, apparently … including, oh look – scientists! You referred to the failure of Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg, Planck, and Schrödinger to resist the implication, and dropped in references to Bell’s inequality and the Aspect experiment, concluding “That left consciousness as a fundamental element in our Universe, rather than the “emergent phenomenon” as postulated by Dawkins etc.” You then claimed support from “current science” because “quantum physics seems to suggest the necessity of mind (or better, Mind) for the existence of the Universe.” You were trying to portray your view as scientifically compelling. Angrysoba picked you up this quantum quackery, which you defended. I weighed in with what should have been a simple correction about the extent of the claim. Cue further dodging and equivocation, dilation and rebuke. Then you tried to call a truce. Then you rejected the terms of discourse. Finally you’re declaring that there is no truth and falsity about quantum theory because … weird things happen in the quantum realm. (So there is a quantum superposition of theoretical statements now? Claims about what scientists believe exist in some sort of dual truth state?? Blimey. Radical!) And now what? We can’t eliminate Mind from science because one theory amongst a number of rival theories seems to imply it as a causal entity? I suppose we can’t eliminate Intelligent Design either, because according to at least one rival theory it’s required to explain the diversity of life. Phew! What next, the Redbeard defence?
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This continual weaselling and obfuscating is not a new phenomenon in dialectical coaching. Once the client has faced up to what they’re really doing and broken through the embarrassment barrier, the clarity of their thinking and debating significantly improves. It’s like philosophical therapy. I’ve been asked to give a keynote address on it this summer, and I’d like to distil this debate (suitably anonymised, of course) as an illustration. Thanks.
Angrysoba, “This just suggests you don’t like Newtonian mechanics.” – No, I loved Newtoniam mechanics, and all the science that portrays a one-to-one correspondence between reality and theory. It looked like we’d really cracked it! I expect that most people who learn science feel the same, hence the reaction to some of the implications of quantum physics.
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“Dawkins had collaboration from the corporate media” etc… – No, they really did try to set up Rupert Sheldrake.