Multiverse strikes back
| July 31, 2015 | Posted by News under Cosmology, News |
Readers will remember Peter Woit, a most interesting mathematician at Columbia, who is not a creationist (Except insofar as the term no longer means anything except “shut UP about our tax/donor-funded nonsense!!”)
Noting the continued promotion of multiverse theory, he reports,
Symmetry, the FNAL/SLAC run online magazine funded by the DOE, today is running a piece of multiverse mania entitled Is this the only universe?. It’s a rather standard example of the pseudo-scientific hype that has flooded the popular scientific media for the last 10-15 years.Besides the usual anthropic argument for the size of the CC, the evidence for the multiverse is string theory: …
The multiverse is all ridiculous, of course and has nothing to do with serious science research, like the Pluto flyby. It shows how much tax money can be wasted on nonsense.
Here is why it happens
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16 Responses to Multiverse strikes back
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It might well be. It doesn’t really matter to me one way or the other. Why are you so keen that it be false?
This is telling:
In other words, nothing falsifies the theory.
Where have we heard that before?
Something completely different in distant related species – random evolution.
Something highly similar in distant related species – convergent evolution.
Change very gradual and slow – evolution takes time.
Change sudden and rapid – Evolution can be quick when needed.
No change despite millions of apparent years – evolution doesn’t need to happen (in a stable environment/no selection pressures).
Heads or tails, you win. Gotta love this approach to science.
Seversky – it is nothing to do with it being true or false. Why do people not understand this?
It is simply further evidence that science is led by belief systems and driven by opinion and worldviews. Not by following the facts – that is a cover, and it does happen where ego and worldviews are not affected, but the multiverse is one example (where materialistic evolution and abiogenesis is another) that what drives the need for the story and narrative is to satisfy one’s material beliefs and commitment to naturalism.
The same is true of the multiverse – it is not driven by scientific principles but rather the need to explain away something that infers special design and purpose (anthropic principle) and was born out of that. I.e. to support one worldview and reject another.
That is not science. This is the point that we should call on this as rubbish – its not about whether the theory is true or not, it is not testable.
consantly materialists and modern science states you cannot accept a theistic position in science because all things must be explained through natural mechanisms and to say there is a God who did X, Y and Z is unscientific because you cannot test it, it doesn’t predict anything and has no mathematical veracity to it.
Guess what? the multiverse is untestable (see above), doesn’t predict anything and has no mathematical veracity to it.
Most materialists don’t see a problem with this though because it does not negatively affect their world view (in fact it supports it) so they are happy to not call it on its pseudoscience. As soon as you claim an alternative is a god/God then suddenly they get upset and mock you as being unscientific.
Pot. Kettle. Black.
Seversky states,
“It might well be. It doesn’t really matter to me one way or the other. Why are you so keen that it be false?”
So you, whoever the illusion of “you” is in materialism, think that the multiverse might be true but provide no empirical evidence that it might be true other than your own personal subjective opinion?
But why should anyone care what your personal subjective opinion is since there is, given materialism, really no “you” in the first place?
You see Seversky, in perhaps the most ironic twist of logic imaginable, atheists, in their denial of the existence of God, end up denying that they themselves really exist as real persons:
This is all the more ironic since the most sure thing that we can know about reality is the fact that we really exist as real persons.
David Chalmers is semi-famous for getting the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness across to lay people in a very easy to understand manner:
Of supplemental note to what is real and what is illusory, this quote, from a from a fairly dramatic Near Death Experiencer in which the man had been pronounced dead for over 90 minutes, caught my eye yesterday:
Also of note: Don Piper’s experience has now been made into a movie and will be released September 11:
A few more notes along the ‘more real than real’ line:
BA 4
“But why should anyone care what your personal subjective opinion is since there is, given materialism, really no “you” in the first place?”
In essence, you’re asking Seversky to repent of this idea and turn his thinking around.
Technically I believe that’s known as a “you turn.”
“Technically I believe that’s known as a “you turn.””
🙂 Funny
Yes, a “you turn” from his illusory world of atheistic materialism to the real world of Theism:
Music and Verse:
BA: Are there any versions of materialistic philosophy or argument that allow credible or logical support for ‘self’ being real as we commonly/intuitively/instinctually believe? Certainly we all live *as though* there is a real I and thou with some form of free will apart from our sparking neurons. The only alternative is nihilistic insanity and a big gulp of the Kool-Aid. IOW, are the candid admissions of ‘self as an illusion’ quotes you’ve cited outliers not compelled by materialistic assumptions, or is this a not-often-admitted trade secret realized or held by the purveyors but only occasionally let out to see the light?
“Are there any versions of materialistic philosophy or argument that allow credible or logical support for ‘self’ being real as we commonly/intuitively/instinctually believe?”
Not according to these twenty-three philosophers
The Waning of Materialism Edited by Robert C. Koons and George Bealer
Description: Twenty-three philosophers examine the doctrine of materialism and find it wanting. The case against materialism comprises arguments from conscious experience, from the unity and identity of the person, from intentionality, mental causation, and knowledge. The contributors include leaders in the fields of philosophy of mind, metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology, who respond ably to the most recent versions and defenses of materialism. The modal arguments of Kripke and Chalmers, Jackson’s knowledge argument, Kim’s exclusion problem, and Burge’s anti-individualism all play a part in the building of a powerful cumulative case against the materialist research program. Several papers address the implications of contemporary brain and cognitive research (the psychophysics of color perception, blindsight, and the effects of commissurotomies), adding a posteriori arguments to the classical a priori critique of reductionism. All of the current versions of materialism–reductive and non-reductive, functionalist, eliminativist, and new wave materialism–come under sustained and trenchant attack.
http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/.....0199556199
Dr JDD @ 2
Whoever said that evolution had to take place at a fixed rate? Certainly not Darwin. Why shouldn’t it happen faster or slower depending on environmental pressures? How does that falsify the basic premise that living things change over time?
Yes, theories get changed to fit new observations. That’s how it’s supposed to work. It’s a feature not a bug. You’d be the first to complain of scientists stuck to a particular explanation regardless of contradictory data.
As I understand it, the multiverse “theory” is a mathematical conjecture and if there is no way to test it, not even in principle, then that is all it will ever be. What’s wrong with playing around with conjectures?
Seversky asks
And yet we find:
Seversky also claims:
Yet the only evidence ever witnessed for the unlimited plasticity postulated by Darwinism is within the theory itself!
Dr JDD @ 3
All of which is just another version of a conspiracy theory, the last refuge of the crank.
Yes, science is practiced by people who have all manner of “worldviews”, religious and political beliefs and are inescapably products of the cultures into which they were born. What are you saying, that scientific theories are just another kind of narrative no better or worse than the Bible or The Lord Of The Rings? Sounds kind of post-modernist to me.
The Scot, James Clerk Maxwell, was what we would call today a mathematical physicist. The theory for which he is best known was able to account for electricity, magnetism and light as all manifestations of the same phenomenon, electromagnetic radiation. For anyone who doubts the significance of his work, rest assured that a great deal of the technology we now take for granted would not exist without it.
He was also a devout Christian, specifically an evangelical Presbyterian. Are you saying that his theory only works because he was a Christian, that if he had been Muslim or Hindu or Sikh or Buddhist it would not? Or are scientific theories descriptions and explanations of the world we observe that are of value, not because of the religious beliefs of their authors, but because they are found, when tested, to correspond to the phenomena they purport to explain?
The multiverse conjecture may indeed be inspired in part by the atheistic views of some of its promoters but that is irrelevant to whether it corresponds to what we can observe.
As for BA77’s pet obsessions, no, I don’t think of consciousness as an illusion. it seems as real to me as anything can be. What is it, though, how does it arise from the physical brain? I have no idea. All we do observe it that without a physical brain there is no consciousness and that changes to the physical brain can cause changes to the manifested consciousness associated with that brain. The two are clearly connected.
As for his favorite quantum weirdness, if nothing exists except when we are observing it, does that mean you vanish when I’m not communicating with you through the net? As for consciousness preceding reality, to be conscious means to be conscious of something. If there was nothing before, what was the consciousness being conscious of? As for the quote from Andrew Truscott in the press release, if nothing exists before you try to measure it, what are you trying to measure in the first place?
Quantum phenomena are weird, no question, but they raise just as many questions as they answer. Quantum weirdness on its own is no more an explanation than emergence.
Seversky
When ‘slower’ includes no significant evolutionary change for 450 million years (horseshoe crabs), then evolution just becomes an ad hoc story which has to claim that the environment, competition, food supply also didn’t change in that amount of time.
The theory is supposed to predict what new observations will look like and therefore give a coherent explanation of the phenomena. If I had a “Red Bike theory”: “All bicycles are red”. And then noticed a blue bike and then ‘changed it’. “All bicycles are red or blue”. I’d hope, at least I’d change the name to “Red and Blue Bike” theory and also have the courage to say the first one was wrong. Beyond that, I should also have the courage to say that I’ve actually got a new theory because the old one was falsified.
That’s what we’ve got with evolution. The same name, but lots of ‘changes’. When the theory is chasing after the observations, then it’s not explaining things and it’s not predictive.
So, if evolution is my Bike theory it is now the “Red or Blue or Green or Black … and any other color we might or might not find Theory”.
The multiverse equals God for some people.
Failing to state that it is a conjecture is a form of lying.
Failing to say that they’re ‘playing around with an imaginary concept’ is equally a form of lying – and manipulation of the public at that.
There’s a lot wrong with that.
as to:
Near Death Experiences, which we have far more abundant evidence for than we do for Darwinian evolution, testify to the fact that consciousness can exist separately from the material body upon death.
As to
Yet the Mind is able to modify the brain (brain plasticity). Moreover, Idealism explains all anomalous evidence of personality changes due to brain injury, whereas physicalism/materialism cannot even begin to explain mind.
Moreover, completely contrary to reductive materialism, mind can even have pronounced effects on gene expression:
as to:
No it means material reality does not exist without conscious observation. I never claimed materialism was the base of reality, nor did I ever claim to be a purely material being. That is your materialistic postulation that was falsified not mine!
For you to refuse to accept the over the top falsification of reductive materialism (120 standard deviations) is just one more evidence as to the dogmatic bias of atheists to adhere to reductive materialism no matter what the empirical evidence says to the contrary!
Of supplemental note to the preceding Wigner ‘consciousness’ quotes, it is interesting to note that many of Wigner’s insights have now been experimentally verified and are also now fostering a ‘second’ revolution in quantum mechanics,,,
Thus, since Wigner’s insights into the foundational role of the ‘conscious observer’ in Quantum Mechanics are bearing fruit with a ‘Second Quantum Revolution’, then that is certainly very strong evidence that his ‘consciousness’ insights are indeed true.
Of note: at the 8:30 minute mark of the following video, Schrodinger’s cat and Wigner’s Friend are highlighted:
Seversky – read that post again in it’s context and you should be able to figure out I was referencing science where world views will influence interpretation. I.e. In origins. Not all science. I am a scientist and I have published a number of peer review articles – I would be rubbishing my own career and it’s work if I was claiming all science couldn’t be trusted.
However even in my field you see personal bias. Science is not as pure as people like to think but even more so when ones personal beliefs and their whole purpose of and in life has the otential to be challenged by the findings.