I believe in strict causality, at least in the macro world, at least in realms accessible to human perception.
The tension between strict causality and free will is well known.
When someone claims to have free will, he or she is saying [my translation] "My outputs are not functions of my inputs." Very well, the question fairly leaps out: What are they functions of?
Heisenberg uncertainty does not rescue free will: a random robot is still a robot.
So I believe(d) in "strong AI", in other words that we could eventually construct an intelligent machine. If the world is reducible to physics, strong AI sort of follows.
Now:
Of late I have been reading widely in Buddhism (no worries; a 52-year-old Jew is not going to convert to Buddhism) and also on the nature of Time. Having convinced myself (on grounds other than his) that Julian Barbour is correct and that the passage of time is an illusion (a phenomenon, a perception...not 'really' real), and mixed up with all the Buddhism I've absorbed...I have come around to the ideas expressed here that "structural science has arrived at the frontier of a deep reality, which is outside of space and time (Drãgãnescu, 1979, 1985), and has opened the doors of a realm of reality in which phenomenological processes become predominant."
Not to say I understand all of this, but it "integrates" much of my reading into a semi-coherent whole.
I am still deeply confused (who is not?) about the nature of time. And why does causality appear regnant at our level?
I was trained as a scientist and engineer; these conclusions represent a difficult and painful journey.
Buddhism (among many other things) tells us to cease our constant conceptualizing; the world cannot be understood via concepts. But my JOB is to do little more than fancy conceptualizing....the outcome of which (among other things) is Neil Armstrong's bootprints on the Moon, rather undeniable.
So conceptualizing works (in a limited regime). But does it lead us anywhere that is not ultimately sterile?
Very strange.
And, BTW, it is fascinating that modern theories of the origin of the Universe can be boiled down (oversimplified) to "LET THERE BE LIGHT!"...
--Boris, bemused
Oddly enough, we see this same pseudo-science slit-filtering process taking place on a daily basis right here in these threads. This guy just defined his religion/god, not science.
All I hope is that I live long enough to see quantum mechanics thrown into the trash heap of ridiculous physics theories. It will happen.
"Nonlocal" is a deceptive way of saying "instantaneous action at a distance" (IAD). Any dynamic physical theory that requires or predicts IAD is bogus. The theory may be bogus because it is fundamentally a static theory (Newtonian gravity) or rotten to the core because it predicts IAD (quantum mechanics).
(i'll have to read it slowly since my eyes are starting to glaze over)
I read philosophy kinda slowly, so this is as far as I got in this one. It is my understanding that consciousness is simply the latest, and maybe not the final, complexification of phenomena that are inherent in all matter and is latent in all atoms or subatomic particles until they become organized sufficiently. Whatever epiphenomena it might be, it is a level in itself but otherwise nothing special--totally natural and material.
Very interesting and something that I have questioned in the way of evolution. Why and how does life come together. There has been simple no success in animating life from inanimate matter. I do not believe that if you could build a cell molecule by molecule that it would be alive. I am relative certain that we are going to find out that quntum physics and sub atomic particles play a huge role in what we know call genetics. As my physics professor once said "Nothing is fundamental".
Regards,
Boiler Plate
Archive initiated.
Kef & Drãg: It is evident that the structural science has arrived at the frontier of a deep reality, which is outside of space and time (Drãgãnescu, 1979, 1985), and has opened the doors of a realm of reality in which phenomenological processes become predominant. This level of reality is the source of all that is phenomenological, and also is the source of the deep energy used and formed by phenomenological information into strings, membranes or elementary particles.An impotant anthropological)principle here is that man may actually realizes where means of measurement break down, yet his ability to understand continues.
AGrand: The principle of life has to be acknowledged as an ultimate principle which is at least as important as the basic physical principle, and which involves just the same extent of “objectivity” as the physical principle.Yes indeed. Basic is as basic does.
AGrand: Regarding the origin of the principle of biology, it cannot result from the physical laws by a physical principle, since the ultimate principle of physics acts just the contrary to the life principle. Therefore, the life principle shows up as an independent ultimate principle above the realm of physics.There is much of interest here, to the Christian, when we consider the Lord's intentions for this Universe -- and the difference there will be in the new.
Kef & Drãg: In their own environment (informatter) the generation of phenomenological senses cannot be described formally, it is a non-formal process, although a general frame of tendencies for such phenomena are perhaps present. This process of non-formal processing might explain the phenomena of intuition and [creativity] of the mind and consciousness.
Not formally definitive for us four dimentional types...
Yet, there are events epiphenomenal to the various activities of the mind (and heart) consciousness (and spirit) which are definitively measurable.... (And really, what isn't that?)
The boy had a peculiar relationship with sound. When a fire engine passed, he was not troubled by the siren's howl or the bell's clang. But when a hornet got into the house and swung across the ceiling in a broad Lissajous, droning almost inaudibly, he cried in pain at the noise. And if he saw or smelled something that scared him, he would clap his hands over his ears.
One noise that troubled him not at all was the pipe organ in the chapel at Bolger Christian College. The chapel itself was nothing worth mentioning, but the organ had been endowed by the paper mill family and would have sufficed for a church four times the size. It nicely complemented the organist, a retired high school math teacher who felt that certain attributes of the Lord (violence and capriciousness in the Old Testament, majesty and triumph in the New) could be directly conveyed into the souls of the enpewed sinners through a kind of frontal sonic impregnation. That he ran the risk of blowing out the stained-glass windows was of no consequence since no one liked them anyway, and the paper mill fumes were gnawing at the interstitial lead. But after one little old lady too many staggered down the aisle after a service, reeling from tinnitus, and made a barbed comment to the minister about the exceedingly dramatic music, the organist was replaced.
Nevertheless, he continued to give lessons on the instrument. Students were not allowed to touch the organ until they were proficient at the piano, and when this was explained to Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, he taught himself, in three weeks, how to play a Bach fugue, and signed up for organ lessons. Since he was only five years old at the time, he was unable to reach both the manuals and the pedals, and had to play standing-or rather strolling, from pedal to pedal.
When Lawrence was twelve, the organ broke down. That paper mill family had not left any endowment for maintenance, so the math teacher decided to have a crack at it. He was in poor health and required a nimble assistant: Lawrence, who helped him open up the hood of the thing. For the first time in all those years, the boy saw what had been happening when he had been pressing those keys.
For each stop-each timbre, or type of sound, that the organ could make (viz. blockflote, trumpet, piccolo)-there was a separate row of pipes, arranged in a line from long to short. Long pipes made low notes, short high. The tops of the pipes defined a graph: not a straight line but an upward-tending curve. The organist/math teacher sat down with a few loose pipes, a pencil, and paper, and helped Lawrence figure out why.
When Lawrence understood, it was as if the math teacher had suddenly played the good part of Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor on a pipe organ the size of the Spiral Nebula in Andromeda-the part where Uncle Johann dissects the architecture of the Universe in one merciless descending ever-mutating chord, as if his foot is thrusting through skidding layers of garbage until it finally strikes bedrock. In particular, the final steps of the organist's explanation were like a falcon's dive through layer after layer of pretense and illusion, thrilling or sickening or confusing depending on what you were. The heavens were riven open. Lawrence glimpsed choirs of angels ranking off into geometrical infinity.
seen it?