Front Runner for Most Inane Statement of 2018

_{Barry Arrington
December 27, 2018

Intelligent Design

1}_{Categories
Intelligent Design}

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“I believe that the whole idea of conscious thought is an error. ” So says
Peter Carruthers, Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park in this article in Scientific American. Proving once again, that some ideas are so gobsmackingly stupid, it takes a lot of education to believe them. He might as well have said, “I have a conscious thought that there is no conscious thought.” There is really no need to argue against self-refuting piffle like this. There is only one thing to say:

Comments

Eugen @78, If something is not composed of particles or does not have physical properties (e.g., mass, energy, orientation, position, etc), it is abstract, i.e., spiritual. Numbers, distance, time, beauty, ugliness fall in that category. It is amazing how many things fall in that category even though most of us, including scientists, swear they exist physically. My favorite is distance. :-DFourFaces_{December 29, 2018
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Seversky @69 so you think numbers and geometric objects are imaginary? You have a good imagination! :DEugen_{December 29, 2018
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Seversky (again assuming that "you" really exist as a real person), if mathematics (and agent causality) were truly imaginary as you hold in your A-Mat worldview, then mathematics, like pink fluffy unicorns, should have absolutely no effect on the 'real' world of material particles. But that is not the case, virtually all of modern technology testifies to the fact that mathematics, which you hold to be imaginary, has 'real' effects on material particles:
Describing Nature With Math By Peter Tyson – Nov. 2011 Excerpt: Mathematics underlies virtually all of our technology today. James Maxwell’s four equations summarizing electromagnetism led directly to radio and all other forms of telecommunication. E = mc2 led directly to nuclear power and nuclear weapons. The equations of quantum mechanics made possible everything from transistors and semiconductors to electron microscopy and magnetic resonance imaging. Indeed, many of the technologies you and I enjoy every day simply would not work without mathematics. When you do a Google search, you’re relying on 19th-century algebra, on which the search engine’s algorithms are based. When you watch a movie, you may well be seeing mountains and other natural features that, while appearing as real as rock, arise entirely from mathematical models. When you play your iPod, you’re hearing a mathematical recreation of music that is stored digitally; your cell phone does the same in real time. “When you listen to a mobile phone, you’re not actually hearing the voice of the person speaking,” Devlin told me. “You’re hearing a mathematical recreation of that voice. That voice is reduced to mathematics.” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/describing-nature-math.html
Indeed, without the 'non-physical' entities of software and immaterial mind, the computer that you are sitting in front of right now would not exist:
Recognising Top-Down Causation – George Ellis Excerpt: page 5: A: Causal Efficacy of Non Physical entities: Both the program and the data are non-physical entities, indeed so is all software. A program is not a physical thing you can point to, but by Definition 2 it certainly exists. You can point to a CD or flashdrive where it is stored, but that is not the thing in itself: it is a medium in which it is stored. The program itself is an abstract entity, shaped by abstract logic. Is the software “nothing but” its realisation through a specific set of stored electronic states in the computer memory banks? No it is not because it is the precise pattern in those states that matters: a higher level relation that is not apparent at the scale of the electrons themselves. It’s a relational thing (and if you get the relations between the symbols wrong, so you have a syntax error, it will all come to a grinding halt). This abstract nature of software is realised in the concept of virtual machines, which occur at every level in the computer hierarchy except the bottom one [17]. But this tower of virtual machines causes physical effects in the real world, for example when a computer controls a robot in an assembly line to create physical artefacts. Excerpt page 7: The assumption that causation is bottom up only is wrong in biology, in computers, and even in many cases in physics, ,,, The mind is not a physical entity, but it certainly is causally effective: proof is the existence of the computer on which you are reading this text. It could not exist if it had not been designed and manufactured according to someone’s plans, thereby proving the causal efficacy of thoughts, which like computer programs and data are not physical entities. http://fqxi.org/data/essay-contest-files/Ellis_FQXI_Essay_Ellis_2012.pdf
So Seversky, (again assuming that "you" really exist as a real person), to be consistent in your reasoning you would have to say, besides mathematics and consciousness being imaginary, that the computer sitting in front of you right now is imaginary to. Or else, to preserve sanity, you could just admit that Atheistic materialism is completely insane. Sadly, after years of dealing with you, I can safely say that you prefer the insanity of Atheistic Materialism rather than ever honestly admitting Christian Theism is true. Supplemental notes:
(December 2018) (the physical reality of immaterial information) https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/a-new-unified-model-of-specified-complexity/#comment-669817 Information is physical (but not how Rolf Landauer meant) - video https://youtu.be/H35I83y5Uro
bornagain77_{December 29, 2018
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Sev, 69: "Platonic" themes first came up in discussing the reality of some very specific abstract entities of vast general utility -- numbers. Likewise, mindedness is a very crucial issue. KFkairosfocus_{December 29, 2018
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Seversky (assuming that "he" really exists), states:
"I" regard Platonic ideals as occupying the same realm as Middle Earth or The Shire or the Star Wars universe – that of the human imagination.
And just who is this imaginary "I" that "you" refer to in "your" sentence that does not believe in imaginary mathematics?
What Does It Mean to Say That Science & Religion Conflict? - M. Anthony Mills - April 16, 2018 Excerpt: Barr rightly observes that scientific atheists often unwittingly assume not just metaphysical naturalism but an even more controversial philosophical position: reductive materialism, which says all that exists is or is reducible to the material constituents postulated by our most fundamental physical theories. As Barr points out, this implies not only that God does not exist — because God is not material — but that you do not exist. For you are not a material constituent postulated by any of our most fundamental physical theories; at best, you are an aggregate of those constituents, arranged in a particular way. Not just you, but tables, chairs, countries, countrymen, symphonies, jokes, legal contracts, moral judgments, and acts of courage or cowardice — all of these must be fully explicable in terms of those more fundamental, material constituents. In fact, more problematic for the materialist than the non-existence of persons is the existence of mathematics. Why? Although a committed materialist might be perfectly willing to accept that you do not really exist, he will have a harder time accepting that numbers do not exist. The trouble is that numbers — along with other mathematical entities such as classes, sets, and functions — are indispensable for modern science. And yet — here’s the rub — these “abstract objects” are not material. Thus, one cannot take science as the only sure guide to reality and at the same time discount disbelief in all immaterial realities. https://www.realclearreligion.org/articles/2018/04/16/what_does_it_mean_to_say_that_science_and_religion_conflict.html Methodological Naturalism: A Rule That No One Needs or Obeys - Paul Nelson - September 22, 2014, Excerpt: methodological naturalism (MN). As (Stephen) Meyer defines MN: "scientists should accept as a working assumption that all features of the natural world can be explained by material causes without recourse to purposive intelligence, mind, or conscious agency. (p. 19)" https://evolutionnews.org/2014/09/methodological_1/ Do You Like SETI? Fine, Then Let's Dump Methodological Naturalism - Paul Nelson - September 24, 2014 Excerpt: "Epistemology -- how we know -- and ontology -- what exists -- are both affected by methodological naturalism (MN). If we say, "We cannot know that a mind caused x," laying down an epistemological boundary defined by MN, then our ontology comprising real causes for x won't include minds. MN entails an ontology in which minds are the consequence of physics, and thus, can only be placeholders for a more detailed causal account in which physics is the only (ultimate) actor. You didn't write your email to me. Physics did, and informed you of that event after the fact. "That's crazy," you reply, "I certainly did write my email." Okay, then -- to what does the pronoun "I" in that sentence refer? Your personal agency; your mind. Are you supernatural?,,, You are certainly an intelligent cause, however, and your intelligence does not collapse into physics. (If it does collapse -- i.e., can be reduced without explanatory loss -- we haven't the faintest idea how, which amounts to the same thing.) To explain the effects you bring about in the world -- such as your email, a real pattern -- we must refer to you as a unique agent.,,, http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/09/do_you_like_set090071.html
bornagain77_{December 29, 2018
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To the site administrator and/or programmer: A deleted comment should be replaced with a blank comment with the same comment number so as not to skew the numbers. Thank youFourFaces_{December 29, 2018
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Math Guy: Equally interesting is the fact that so few non-materialists are willing to discuss it., and that while A-Mats keep trying to find a materialist theory of mind, non-materialists seem large uninterested in developing a theory of mind, which must simultaneously account for shared absolutes that are universally experienced, AND non-consensual imaginative features. It seems to me that you cannot have it both ways - you can't dismiss the mind as a solipsistic experiential category while insisting it is home to universal forms and values AND the home of critical thinking, which we rely on in making determinations about the relative reality values of our experience.William J Murray_{December 29, 2018
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Here is a brief lecture by Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor where he defends the idea that even though we use our brains to think and reason that conscious thought is not something that can be reduced to brain activity. He agrees with other modern dualists, like UCLA’s neuropsychiatrist Jeffrey M. Schwartz* who argues that “you are not your brain.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXOX3RCpEbU
[*Egnor doesn’t mention Schwartz in this lecture but he has written about him elsewhere.] https://evolutionnews.org/2009/01/its_time_for_me_to_unshatter_m/
So who has the better argument? Ivory tower “philosophers” who begin their arguments with self-refuting premises, or researchers who actually study the brain first hand? Egnor is a surgeon who understands how the brain works and has opened up peoples skulls to treat neurological disorders. Schwartz has studied the brain using PET scans and fMRI. He has also developed therapies to help people afflicted with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) that assumes that people have free-will and there really is such a thing as mind-over-matter. PS here is an article where Egnor covers much of the same ground as he does in the video. https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2018/september-web-only/more-than-material-minds-neuroscience-souls.htmljohn_a_designer_{December 29, 2018
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Seversky:
For what it’s worth, as an a/mat, I regard Platonic ideals as occupying the same realm as Middle Earth or The Shire or the Star Wars universe – that of the human imagination.
That is too funny coming from a person whose entire position is nothing but imagination.ET_{December 29, 2018
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Math Guy
hazel, I’ll use this thread to answer a question you posed: who are the A-mats that are conspicuously absent from discussion of the platonic realm? That would be those answering to the nom de plume of Seversky, goodusername, William Spearshake, Elizabeth Liddle, and several others which have slipped my mind.
Is it not equally as likely that this is a topic that does not interest those opposed to ID?Ed George_{December 29, 2018
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Math Guy@ 61
I’ll use this thread to answer a question you posed: who are the A-mats that are conspicuously absent from discussion of the platonic realm?
For what it's worth, as an a/mat, I regard Platonic ideals as occupying the same realm as Middle Earth or The Shire or the Star Wars universe - that of the human imagination. They can be said to exist to that extent but whether or not they are 'real' depends on how you define reality.Seversky_{December 29, 2018
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On the new format, I think that, on balance, I prefer it. The only problem is that I find the font a little small and faint for my aging eyes but nothing I can't cope with.Seversky_{December 29, 2018
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kf and JAD, and let's not forget Thomas Nagel, an atheist professor who has spent a long distinguished career studying consciousness, devastating critique of purported materialistic explanations of consciousness in his book sub-titled, "Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False".
Mind and Cosmos - Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False - Thomas Nagel Excerpt: If materialism cannot accommodate consciousness and other mind-related aspects of reality, then we must abandon a purely materialist understanding of nature in general, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history. http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199919758.do "I have argued patiently against the prevailing form of naturalism, a reductive materialism that purports to capture life and mind through its neo-Darwinian extension." "..., I find this view antecedently unbelievable---a heroic triumph of ideological theory over common sense". Thomas Nagel - "Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False" - pg.128
Nagel is also brutally honest as to why he rejects Theism: i.e. he has a "cosmic authority problem".
“I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about human life, including everything about the human mind." - Nagel, Thomas, The Last Word, pp. 130–131, Oxford University Press, 1997
bornagain77_{December 29, 2018
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F/N: A reminder of how some naturalists think, and of the evolutionary materialistic scientism that drives it:
Alex Rosenberg as he begins Ch 9 of his The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: >> FOR SOLID EVOLUTIONARY REASONS, WE’VE BEEN tricked into looking at life from the inside. Without scientism, we look at life from the inside, from the first-person POV (OMG, you don’t know what a POV is?—a “point of view”). The first person is the subject, the audience, the viewer of subjective experience, the self in the mind. Scientism shows that the first-person POV is an illusion. [–> grand delusion is let loose in utter self referential incoherence] Even after scientism convinces us, we’ll continue to stick with the first person. But at least we’ll know that it’s another illusion of introspection and we’ll stop taking it seriously. We’ll give up all the answers to the persistent questions about free will, the self, the soul, and the meaning of life that the illusion generates [–> bye bye to responsible, rational freedom on these presuppositions]. The physical facts fix all the facts. [--> asserts materialism, leading to . . . ] The mind is the brain. It has to be physical and it can’t be anything else, since thinking, feeling, and perceiving are physical process—in particular, input/output processes—going on in the brain. We [–> at this point, what "we," apart from "we delusions"?] can be sure of a great deal about how the brain works because the physical facts fix all the facts about the brain. The fact that the mind is the brain guarantees that there is no free will. It rules out any purposes or designs organizing our actions or our lives [–> thus rational thought and responsible freedom]. It excludes the very possibility of enduring persons, selves, or souls that exist after death or for that matter while we live.>>
Then, Provine in the 1998 U Tenn Darwin Day address:
Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5) human free will is nonexistent . . . . The first 4 implications are so obvious to modern naturalistic evolutionists that I will spend little time defending them. Human free will, however, is another matter. Even evolutionists have trouble swallowing that implication. I will argue that humans are locally determined systems that make choices. They have, however, no free will [--> without responsible freedom, mind, reason and morality alike disintegrate into grand delusion, hence self-referential incoherence and self-refutation. But that does not make such fallacies any less effective in the hands of clever manipulators] . . . [1998 Darwin Day Keynote Address, U of Tenn -- and yes, that is significant i/l/o the Scopes Trial, 1925]
And we must not forget Crick:
. . . that "You", your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased: "You're nothing but a pack of neurons." This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people today that it can truly be called astonishing.
Philip Johnson has replied that Sir Francis should have therefore been willing to preface his works thusly: "I, Francis Crick, my opinions and my science, and even the thoughts expressed in this book, consist of nothing more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." Johnson then acidly commented: “[t]he plausibility of materialistic determinism requires that an implicit exception be made for the theorist.” [Reason in the Balance, 1995.] In short, it is at least arguable that self-referential absurdity is the dagger pointing to the heart of evolutionary materialistic models of mind and its origin. For, there is a very good reason we are cautioned about how easily self-referential statements can become self-refuting, like a snake attacking and swallowing itself tail-first. Any human scheme of thought that undermines responsible [thus, morally governed] rational freedom undermines itself fatally. We thus see inadvertent, inherent self-falsification of evolutionary materialism. But, “inadvertent” counts: it can be hard to recognise and acknowledge the logically fatal nature of the result. Of course, that subjective challenge does not change the objective result: self-referential incoherence and irretrievable self-falsification. (An audio clip, here, by William Lane Craig that summarises Plantinga's argument on this in a nutshell, is useful as a quick reference.) That wider context colours how we should understand Sci Am's editorialising in the subhead (which purports to quote or at least summarise Carruthers) and how we should understand the ideas he presents. All of this fits with a dominant view of mind which is fatally self referentially incoherent and necessarily false. KFkairosfocus_{December 29, 2018
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I see, kf. You're probably right.hazel_{December 28, 2018
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probably things from moderationkairosfocus_{December 28, 2018
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Hmmm. All of a sudden the comment numbers are one higher than they were. How did that happen? If that is a feature and not a bug, that would not be good, as we often refer back to previous comments by number. Jack Cole, do you know how a comment got inserted somehow?hazel_{December 28, 2018
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Thanks. Seversky is the only one of those that I recognize as having posted here, so perhaps the others were before my time and are gone now. At 51, ET refers to people who are not allowed here anymore, so that might be some of them.hazel_{December 28, 2018
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hazel, I'll use this thread to answer a question you posed: who are the A-mats that are conspicuously absent from discussion of the platonic realm? That would be those answering to the nom de plume of Seversky, goodusername, William Spearshake, Elizabeth Liddle, and several others which have slipped my mind.math guy_{December 28, 2018
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I figured as much. I know how these things work. However, it would be great to get an email when there was a post on a thread I was interested in. I wonder how others feel about the usefulness of such a feature. Again, I think we all appreciate the work you're doing.hazel_{December 28, 2018
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Hazel to Jack Cole, web designer: Could you possibly put that Subscribe feature back in? That would be extremely convenient.
Hazel, that was part of the plugin that had some of the other features that were undesirable. I'll have to check to see if there is a standalone plugin for that.Jack Cole_{December 28, 2018
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Hi math guy. I think we discussed this on the Ed George thread, and I had a number of posts about the general topic over there. Math facts are true, or not, within the appropriate logical system, irrespective of whether anyone had proved them, or not, I think. Also, I'm inclined to think that Fermat did not have a proof of his Last Theorem, but maybe he did.hazel_{December 28, 2018
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h@41, 52 referring to jad@40 In mathematics, most of the traditional axioms/postulates were self-evidently true to the Greeks of 300 BC. The parallel postulate is completely obvious to someone who is only considering ordinary planar geometry. It took people like Hilbert to illustrate naive assumptions underlying Euclid's arguments, such as the Axiom of Completeness which is now taken as self-evident since its denial would leave the real number line full of gaps. I would have to say that the Axiom of Choice was the first major principle whose validity was somewhat doubted (almost everyone at that time believed the Continuum Hypothesis would be derived as a theorem). Cohen and Godel have shown us that Choice is independent of and consistent with the rest of ZF set theory. But lots of interesting mathematics flows from (or is logically equivalent to) Choice: Zorn's Lemma, Tychnov's Theorem, the existence of a non-measurable set. I am unaware of significant mathematics arising from the denial of Choice. p.s. hazel writes: "Sometimes we have a conjecture that we think might be true but is unproven, and then the goal is to start from that which is already established and prove the conjecture." to which I ask in response: What is the truth status of the conjecture prior to its proof? What if I were to find a truly marvelous proof, but lack space in the margin to write the proof. Only I know its veracity. What is the truth status of the conjecture to the rest of the world?math guy_{December 28, 2018
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Also, I'll note that when at the bottom of the comments, as I am know in writing this, the name of the post is not visible. Could there be a header with that info that was always visible no matter how many comments there were?hazel_{December 28, 2018
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to Jack Cole, web designer: Could you possibly put that Subscribe feature back in? That would be extremely convenient.hazel_{December 28, 2018
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JAD @ 48, as to:
“The major argument that Rosenberg makes,” he writes, “is that physics is the ultimate arbiter of truth, that the physical reality is the only reality, "
If only Rosenberg really believed that were true. Quantum Mechanics has, in no uncertain terms, refuted, not only the reductive materialism that undergirds Darwinian thought, but has also refuted 'realism', which is the belief that a physical reality exists 'out there' completely independent of conscious observation. A few notes to that effect:
"[while a number of philosophical ideas] may be logically consistent with present quantum mechanics, ...materialism is not." Eugene Wigner Quantum Physics Debunks Materialism - video playlist https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL1mr9ZTZb3TViAqtowpvZy5PZpn-MoSK_&v=4C5pq7W5yRM “As a physicist, that is, a man who had devoted his whole life to a wholly prosaic science, the exploration of matter, no one would surely suspect me of being a fantast. And so, having studied the atom, I am telling you that there is no matter as such! All matter arises and persists only due to a force that causes the atomic particles to vibrate, holding them together in the tiniest of solar systems, the atom. Yet in the whole of the universe there is no force that is either intelligent or eternal, and we must therefore assume that behind this force there is a conscious, intelligent Mind or Spirit. This is the very origin of all matter.” - Max Planck, as cited in Eggenstein 1984, Part I; see “Materialistic Science on the Wrong Track”. "The conception of objective reality of the elementary particles has thus evaporated not into the cloud of some obscure new reality concept but into the transparent clarity of a mathematics that represents no longer the behavior of particles but rather our knowledge of this behavior" - Werner Heinsenberg - The Representation of Nature in Contemporary Physics - pg. 100 The Death of Materialism - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM0IKLv7KrE Why Quantum Theory Does Not Support Materialism - By Bruce L Gordon: Excerpt: Because quantum theory is thought to provide the bedrock for our scientific understanding of physical reality, it is to this theory that the materialist inevitably appeals in support of his worldview. But having fled to science in search of a safe haven for his doctrines, the materialist instead finds that quantum theory in fact dissolves and defeats his materialist understanding of the world.,, The underlying problem is this: there are correlations in nature that require a causal explanation but for which no physical explanation is in principle possible. Furthermore, the nonlocalizability of field quanta entails that these entities, whatever they are, fail the criterion of material individuality. So, paradoxically and ironically, the most fundamental constituents and relations of the material world cannot, in principle, be understood in terms of material substances. Since there must be some explanation for these things, the correct explanation will have to be one which is non-physical - and this is plainly incompatible with any and all varieties of materialism. http://www.4truth.net/fourtruthpbscience.aspx?pageid=8589952939 "If you go back and look at the premises which underlie materialism, They are all presumptions that were made back in the 17th and 18th century. Those (presumptions) are: reality, locality, causality, continuity, and determinism. All of those concepts were assumed to be self evident. And all of them have been disproved by quantum theory. The last one to fall was locality. (John Bell's theory of non-locality disproved locality, which has now been proven I think 11 times in 11 different experiments throughout the world.),,, Anyone who says, "Well, I want to believe materialism and I don't want to believe quantum physics." Okay then, get rid of your cell phone, along with anything you have with a transistor in it. Get rid of your MRIs, get rid of all those things. Because quantum electro-dynamics is the theory which allows those things. It is the most proven theory in all of science." Dr. Alan Hugenot - Hugenot holds a doctorate of science in mechanical engineering, and has had a successful career in marine engineering, serving on committees that write the ship-building standards for the United States. “Reality is in the observations, not in the electron.” – Paul Davies “No phenomenon is a physical phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.” — John Wheeler Quoted in Robert J. Scully, The Demon and the Quantum (2007), 191 New Mind-blowing Experiment Confirms That Reality Doesn’t Exist If You Are Not Looking at It - June 3, 2015 Excerpt: Some particles, such as photons or electrons, can behave both as particles and as waves. Here comes a question of what exactly makes a photon or an electron act either as a particle or a wave. This is what Wheeler’s experiment asks: at what point does an object ‘decide’? The results of the Australian scientists’ experiment, which were published in the journal Nature Physics, show that this choice is determined by the way the object is measured, which is in accordance with what quantum theory predicts. “It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,” said lead researcher Dr. Andrew Truscott in a press release.,,, “The atoms did not travel from A to B. It was only when they were measured at the end of the journey that their wave-like or particle-like behavior was brought into existence,” he said. Thus, this experiment adds to the validity of the quantum theory and provides new evidence to the idea that reality doesn’t exist without an observer. http://themindunleashed.org/2015/06/new-mind-blowing-experiment-confirms-that-reality-doesnt-exist-if-you-are-not-looking-at-it.html The Strange Link between the Human mind and Quantum Physics - By Philip Ball - 16 February 2017 Excerpt: The physicist Pascual Jordan, who worked with quantum guru Niels Bohr in Copenhagen in the 1920s, put it like this: "observations not only disturb what has to be measured, they produce it… We compel [a quantum particle] to assume a definite position." In other words, Jordan said, "we ourselves produce the results of measurements." http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170215-the-strange-link-between-the-human-mind-and-quantum-physics “I’m going to talk about the Bell inequality, and more importantly a new inequality that you might not have heard of called the Leggett inequality, that was recently measured. It was actually formulated almost 30 years ago by Professor Leggett, who is a Nobel Prize winner, but it wasn’t tested until about a year and a half ago (in 2007), when an article appeared in Nature, that the measurement was made by this prominent quantum group in Vienna led by Anton Zeilinger, which they measured the Leggett inequality, which actually goes a step deeper than the Bell inequality and rules out any possible interpretation other than consciousness creates reality when the measurement is made.” – Bernard Haisch, Ph.D., Calphysics Institute, An experimental test of non-local realism - 2007 Simon Gröblacher, Tomasz Paterek, Rainer Kaltenbaek, Caslav Brukner, Marek Zukowski, Markus Aspelmeyer & Anton Zeilinger Abstract: Most working scientists hold fast to the concept of ‘realism’—a viewpoint according to which an external reality exists independent of observation. But quantum physics has shattered some of our cornerstone beliefs. According to Bell’s theorem, any theory that is based on the joint assumption of realism and locality (meaning that local events cannot be affected by actions in space-like separated regions) is at variance with certain quantum predictions. Experiments with entangled pairs of particles have amply confirmed these quantum predictions, thus rendering local realistic theories untenable. Maintaining realism as a fundamental concept would therefore necessitate the introduction of ‘spooky’ actions that defy locality. Here we show by both theory and experiment that a broad and rather reasonable class of such non-local realistic theories is incompatible with experimentally observable quantum correlations. In the experiment, we measure previously untested correlations between two entangled photons, and show that these correlations violate an inequality proposed by Leggett for non-local realistic theories. Our result suggests that giving up the concept of locality is not sufficient to be consistent with quantum experiments, unless certain intuitive features of realism are abandoned. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v446/n7138/full/nature05677.html Should Quantum Anomalies Make Us Rethink Reality? Inexplicable lab results may be telling us we’re on the cusp of a new scientific paradigm By Bernardo Kastrup on April 19, 2018 Excerpt: ,, according to the current paradigm, the properties of an object should exist and have definite values even when the object is not being observed: the moon should exist and have whatever weight, shape, size and color it has even when nobody is looking at it. Moreover, a mere act of observation should not change the values of these properties. Operationally, all this is captured in the notion of “non-contextuality”: ,,, since Alain Aspect’s seminal experiments in 1981–82, these predictions (of Quantum Mechanics) have been repeatedly confirmed, with potential experimental loopholes closed one by one. 1998 was a particularly fruitful year, with two remarkable experiments performed in Switzerland and Austria. In 2011 and 2015, new experiments again challenged non-contextuality. Commenting on this, physicist Anton Zeilinger has been quoted as saying that “there is no sense in assuming that what we do not measure [that is, observe] about a system has [an independent] reality.” Finally, Dutch researchers successfully performed a test closing all remaining potential loopholes, which was considered by Nature the “toughest test yet.”,,, It turns out, however, that some predictions of QM are incompatible with non-contextuality even for a large and important class of non-local theories. Experimental results reported in 2007 and 2010 have confirmed these predictions. To reconcile these results with the current paradigm would require a profoundly counterintuitive redefinition of what we call “objectivity.” And since contemporary culture has come to associate objectivity with reality itself, the science press felt compelled to report on this by pronouncing, “Quantum physics says goodbye to reality.” The tension between the anomalies and the current paradigm can only be tolerated by ignoring the anomalies. This has been possible so far because the anomalies are only observed in laboratories. Yet we know that they are there, for their existence has been confirmed beyond reasonable doubt. Therefore, when we believe that we see objects and events outside and independent of mind, we are wrong in at least some essential sense. A new paradigm is needed to accommodate and make sense of the anomalies; one wherein mind itself is understood to be the essence—cognitively but also physically—of what we perceive when we look at the world around ourselves. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/should-quantum-anomalies-make-us-rethink-reality/
Due to advances in quantum mechanics, the argument for God from consciousness can now be framed like this:
A Short Survey Of Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness Excerpt: Putting all the lines of evidence together the argument for God from consciousness can now be framed like this: 1. Consciousness either preceded all of material reality or is a ‘epi-phenomena’ of material reality. 2. If consciousness is a ‘epi-phenomena’ of material reality then consciousness will be found to have no special position within material reality. Whereas conversely, if consciousness precedes material reality then consciousness will be found to have a special position within material reality. 3. Consciousness is found to have a special, even central, position within material reality. 4. Therefore, consciousness is found to precede material reality. Five intersecting lines of experimental evidence from quantum mechanics that shows that consciousness precedes material reality (Double Slit, Wigner’s Quantum Symmetries, Wheeler’s Delayed Choice, Leggett’s Inequalities, Quantum Zeno effect) Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness: 5 Experiments – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5qphmi8gYE
None of this should be surprising. After all, modern science itself was born out of basic Christian presuppositions of the (rational) Mind of God creating this universe and upholding this universe in its continual existence. In other words, consciousness, although it gives modern day materialists unending headaches, was not a problem at all for the medieval cosmologists who gave rise to modern science in the first place,, Especially since they presupposed the Mind of God, not material particles, as the primary basis for reality:
How exactly did consciousness become a problem? by Margaret Wertheim – Dec. 1, 2015 Excerpt: Heaven and Earth were two separate yet intertwined domains of human action. Medieval cosmology was thus inherently dualistic: the physical domain of the body had a parallel in the spiritual domain of the soul; and for medieval thinkers, the latter was the primary domain of the Real.,,, But perhaps most surprisingly, just when the ‘stream of consciousness’ was entering our lexicon, physicists began to realise that consciousness might after all be critical to their own descriptions of the world. With the advent of quantum mechanics they found that, in order to make sense of what their theories were saying about the subatomic world, they had to posit that the scientist-observer was actively involved in constructing reality.,,, Such a view appalled many physicists,,, Just this April, Nature Physics reported on a set of experiments showing a similar effect using helium atoms. Andrew Truscott, the Australian scientist who spearheaded the helium work, noted in Physics Today that ‘99.999 per cent of physicists would say that the measurement… brings the observable into reality’. In other words, human subjectivity is drawing forth the world.,,, Not all physicists are willing to go down this path, however, and there is indeed now a growing backlash against subjectivity.,,, when I was a physics student the MWI (Many Worlds Interpretation) was widely seen as a fringe concept. Today, it is becoming mainstream, in large part because the pesky problem of consciousness simply hasn’t gone away.,,, https://aeon.co/essays/how-and-why-exactly-did-consciousness-become-a-problem
Verse:
Colossians 1:17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.
bornagain77_{December 28, 2018
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More to JAD at 40. Your “(3) probably true” doesn’t apply to math, as in math things are either assumed true or proven true. Sometimes we have a conjecture that we think might be true but is unproven, and then the goal is to start from that which is already established and prove the conjecture. There are two ways that we occasionally assume that something is true that is in fact yet unproven. The first is with proof by contradiction: we want to prove that P is true, so we assume not-P is true and show that leads to a logical contradiction, thus proving that P is true. The iconic example is the proof that sqrt(2) is irrational. Also, and I have done this a few times, we assume an unproven fact as true as a way of exploring its consequences to see if it will lead us to some ideas about a possible proof. For example, if I assume unproven fact P is true, and then deduce Q, which I know is true, that might help me find a way to start with Q and work backwards to prove P. In this case, assuming that P is true is a learning tool, but not something that directly leads to deductive truth. Just some more thoughts on your post.hazel_{December 28, 2018
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Hazel- I love exposing the willfully ignorant for what they are. The only people I would ignore aren't allowed here anymore.ET_{December 28, 2018
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to ET at 47: But you could push the Ignore button on Ed also. Why bother reading people who have nothing to offer? This is probably more programming than is possible, but an ignore button could hide all the text (just a Read More link), but still leave the post there in case someone want to read something by someone they had marked as Ignore.hazel_{December 28, 2018
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to JAD at 48. Carruthers is not arguing at all that consciousness is an illusion, I don't think. The first four paragraphs make that clear, I think. Can you point to someplace in the article where he says, or implies, that consciousness is an illusion? This is why I think non-materialists, such as myself, can find some interesting things to think about in the article.hazel_{December 28, 2018
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