Posted on 12/07/2005 3:31:28 AM PST by snarks_when_bored
"Dubito, ergo cogito; cogito, ergo sum" placemark
Perhaps your point could be made clearer. I confess, I have'nt a clue as to your point. It sounds as though your trying with veiled non-specifics to re-define science. You've managed to bring some confusion to perfectly clear comments.
These are merely complementaries in nature and reason of what I already know to be true by direct Spiritual revelation.
Some (Plato comes to mind) have arrived at the conclusion that God must exist "beyond" through reason. Nevertheless, I am compelled by direct Spiritual revelation that noone could arrive at that conclusion by reason - including Plato - if he did not have spiritual "ears to hear".
I'm not re-defininging anything. Science changes all the time. New evidence frequently requires modifications in our understanding -- sometimes drastic changes.
My view is this: no just deity would condemn one of its finite creatures to infinite punishment, no matter what the finite creature had done, and so if a deity were to mete out infinite punishment for what are essentially finite transgressions, that deity would be unjust and therefore worthy neither of respect nor fealty.
Yes, I liked those passages you quoted, too. Stenger is providing those Kansas IDists the rope they need to hang themselves...
No bragging intended, but I argued these same points when the trial started. Good to see them in the hands of a competent writer.
All our surest statements about the nature of the world are mathematical statements, yet we do not know what mathematics "is" ...
I agree.
... and so we find that we have adapted a religion strikingly similar to many traditional faiths. Change "mathematics" to "God" and little else might seem to change.
I disagree. Attributing to mathematics the characteristics commonly attributed to a deity makes little sense to me.
Don't doubt you for an instant. They're good points, too.
Forgive my barging in; but I have a disagreement with Wittgenstein. He is recapitulating the first of Leibnitz's two great questions: "Why is there something, why not nothing?"; the second being, "Why are things the way they are, and not some other way?"
Leaving the second question aside for now, his answer to the first is: "no answer is possible." Wow. Talk about foreclosing the quest for truthful understanding of reality, of the "all that there is," right from the get-go. Are such questions really that worthless?
To me it seems that all Wittgenstein is saying here is that the scientific method, by itself, can give us no answer. Which is not the same thing as saying "no answer is possible."
I probably belabor this point ad nauseam, but to reduce reality to the methodologies of science leaves us with no recourse but an axiom of the type stated by Rand. In effect, what this maneuver does is to make man "the measure of all things," for it says that the universe is merely what the human mind in the mode of intentionalist consciousness can conceive. It is an attempt to reduce the "all that there is" to observables.
But not all things that exist are "observables." This stance basically says that the observer himself constructs a reality that is confined to three dimensions of space and one of time. It effectively says that no other dimensions, either of space or time, are possible, because man cannot (yet) conceive of them.
In an earlier post you were speaking of the problem of causation, and related an instance (entangled Beta decays) where things "happen" that seemingly have no "proximate" cause. Yet how can you definitively say that there was no proximate cause? Is it not at least (hypothetically) possible that there are proximate causes that may arise in a yet-unidentified "extra" dimension -- "extra" to the four we readily recognize -- that may yet impinge and become effective within the known 4D block?
"Existence exists" is simply a tautology; yet you dignify it by turning it into an axiom. It does not satisfy regardless of what you call it, however, for it does not help us to know more than we already do about the nature and meaning of "existence."
Actually the great Greeks have imagined some extraordinarily helpful clues in this regard in recognizing that existence is a participation in being. Which to a scientist probably sounds like a huge pile of gobble-de-gook.
But to me, there are extraordinarily useful clues here. Plato, for instance, regarded Being, ousia, as the context in which all existents have their "becoming." It is also that into which the becoming things, the existents, finally pass away. Being and becoming (existence) imply different time orders that are synergistically coupled.
Working through some of the implications of classical metaphysics helps to prepare the way for conceptualizations of higher dimensionality that might actually prove useful in theoretical physics. Call me nutz, but I really believe that.
Intuition tells me -- FWIW -- that the answers to Leibnitz's two questions may well be found in extradimensionality/supersymmetry. So I think it's premature to say, with Wittgenstein, "no answer [is] possible."
Certainly an answer is impossible, if we settle for axioms of the Randian type, and just stop there.
Again, FWIW. Thank you, Physicist, for your informative posts.
Just to be clear, I'm not talking about generating the physical result, just a blackbox that will generate the same data result virtually.
The direction I am coming from is that of strong PRNGs. Given some description of the computational parameters of the universe, it should be a (relatively) simple exercise to create a small algorithm that will generate perfectly random data for any computer in that universe that does not have access to the internal state of that algorithm. A slightly weaker version would be an algorithm that will be perfectly random over some unimaginably long interval to any computer in that universe.
I guess my only point is that for any apparently random process, a "cheap" deterministic solution exists. That does not mean by any measure that one is in fact observing a non-random phenomenon or a non-random phenomenon that is discernable as such in this universe. In other words, my discrete systems bias peeking through. :-)
Someone posted the other day that mathematics is the second cheapest science because all you need is a pencil, paper and a wastebasket. Philosophy is the cheapest, because you don't need the wastebasket.
Your post did not make much sense, and you are ignoring the point I made: that science is non-axiomatic. Godel's Incompleteness theorem applies to axiomatic systems.
This is why it is not possible to prove anything in science, as one can only assign a probability distribution to some set of hypotheses but no assertions can be made regarding correctness. In axiomatic systems, you can prove things. To put it another way, in non-axiomatic systems like science, you only make assertions about the relative probability of correctness, not correctness itself.
For non-axiomatic systems like science, the limits of knowledge follow from Bayes Theorem, not Godel's Incompleteness theorem. The ramifications are very different.
Well, Wittgenstein didn't think the question was worthless; the unobtainability of the answer didn't diminish its philosophical usefulness for him. (Reflect on how much brilliant mathematics came out of the failed attempts to prove Fermat's last theorem, and how that fountainhead ran dry with the Wiles proof.) But I'm already over my head in defending him: I've read more about Wittgenstein's ideas than I've read by him, I'm afraid, so don't take my word for it. My reading list grows exponentially faster than my ability to read.
As for Rand, her ideas were more focussed on epistemology, which after all is the realm where quantum physics and evolution reside. Wondering about the existence of existence is a distraction when wrestling with such concrete questions.
The problem is that the kinds of god-like entities one arrives at this way are not particularly compatible with the basic Christian conception, so I'm not sure how this would be constructive toward instilling Christian belief. At best, it might support belief in some other God with more reasonable hypothetical properties (which may or may not have a major religion attached to it).
I'll have to think about this one for a bit. I'm not running on all cylinders at the moment...
Yes, I saw that, js1138. I thought it was a delightfully amusing comment.
All the same, it seems to me that if you have "internalized" this attitude, it will not help you very much in the quest for truth, nor in the ordering of your existence in truth. For the simple reason that the universe does not reduce to "observables" only. Neither are you so "reducible."
But if you think you can get along just hunky-dory all the same, good luck to you.
I think mathematics and philosophy are tools, not ends in themselves. Although there are lots of "pure" scientists, I think science is closer to being a product. Even in its theoretical form it is utilitarian.
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