Is it only selective attention that causes us to see order in the universe?
There is another, more interesting, explanation for the structure of the laws of nature. Rather than saying that the universe is very structured, say that the universe is mostly chaotic and for the most part lacks structure. The reason why we see the structure we do is that scientists act like a sieve and focus only on those phenomena that have structure and are predictable. They do not take into account all phenomena; rather, they select those phenomena they can deal with.
Some people say that science studies all physical phenomena. This is simply not true. Who will win the next presidential election and move into the White House is a physical question that no hard scientists would venture to give an absolute prediction. Whether or not a computer will halt for a given input can be seen as a physical question and yet we learned from Alan Turing that this question cannot be answered. Scientists have classified the general textures and heights of different types of clouds, but, in general, are not at all interested in the exact shape of a cloud. Although the shape is a physical phenomenon, scientists don’t even attempt to study it. Science does not study all physical phenomena. Rather, science studies predictable physical phenomena. It is almost a tautology: science predicts predictable phenomena. Noson S. Yanofsky, “Chaos makes the multiverse unnecessary” at Nautilus
If we stopped noticing the order, would it still be there?
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See also: The multiverse is science’s assisted suicide
or maybe a method to the madness,
as even a random operating system can be a design choice.
refererence RCCF framework for understanding science
Here we have a universe with zillions of particles belonging to just a handful of types. Every electron has exactly the same properties as any other regardless of their distance from one another. Same with neutrons and protons. And yet, this guy has difficulty seeing order? Aren’t the laws of physics examples of universal order?
Furthermore, Alan Turing was speaking of a hypothetical sequential computer, not a universe of parallel entities.
As to this claim:
And yet one of the most profound discoveries in quantum mechanics, our most fruitful theory in science, is the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle. Which basically says that the universe, at its most fundamental level, is unpredictable, i.e. non-deterministic.
Thus his claim that “science studies predictable physical phenomena” is, as Pauli would state, ‘not even wrong’. Science indeed brought us Heisenberg’s Uncertainly principle itself.
Some people, in prior years, have even used Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle to argue against a completely deterministic universe and for the reality of free will.
Moreover, now quantum mechanics has gone much further than just the Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle in trying to establish the reality of free will, and via Contexuality and/or the Kochen-Speckter Theorem, as well as the closing of the free will loop-hole, has now confirmed the reality of free will within quantum mechanics.
That is to say, ‘science’, (as defined by methodological naturalism, which is the author’s base assumption about how science should operate), cannot explain free-will.
In fact, according to the strictures of methodological naturalism, every time a person simply exercises his free will by raising his arm, that should, by all rights, be considered a miracle.
In the following video at the 12:26 minute mark, Dr. Craig Hazen relates how he performed, for an audience full of academics at a college, a ‘miracle’ simply by raising his arm,,
The author of the article in the OP also falsely claimed:
Contrary to that false postulation, the universe has a very ordered ‘top down’ structure to it. He is confusing things that are governed by thermodynamics (shapes of clouds) etc.., and by the free will choices of people (presidential elections) etc.., with his a priori naturalistic belief that the universe must be, at its foundational basis, chaotic.
He simply has no evidence for his naturalistic assumption.
For prime example of ‘top down’ order/structure, instead of chaos, being imposed on the universe, I refer to the extremely fine-tuned origin of thermodynamics itself:
Methodological naturalism simply has no explanation for the extremely fine-tuned origin of Thermodynamics , whereas Christian Theism predicted it:
Of related interest to this, in quantum mechanics we have something called the ‘Quantum Zeno Effect’. Which is, to put it simply, an unstable particle, if observed continuously, will never decay.
The reason why I am very impressed with the Quantum Zeno effect as to establishing consciousness and free will’s primacy in quantum mechanics is, for one thing, that Entropy is, as was mentioned previously, by a wide margin the most finely tuned of initial conditions of the Big Bang.
For another thing, it is interesting to note just how foundational entropy is in its explanatory power for actions within the space-time of the universe:
In fact, entropy is the primary reason why our physical, temporal, bodies grow old and die,,,
And yet, to repeat,,,
This is just fascinating! Why in blue blazes should my choice whether to observe a unstable particle or not put a freeze on the entropic decay of that particle unless consciousness and free will was and is more foundational to reality than the 1 in 10^10^123 entropy is?
Moreover besides the “Quantum Zeno Effect”, recent advances in information theory, as it has been applied to thermodynamics, have now demonstrated that “entropy is a (NOT) property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”
Even the author’s own field of expertise, i.e. mathematics, (in so far as mathematics is applicable to our world and to the universe at large) is crucially dependent of a ‘top down’ structure of the universe that simply can find no explanation within his assumption of methodological naturalism.
Specifically, as the following articles state: “the universe is flat, and this means that parallel lines will always remain parallel. 90-degree turns behave as true 90-degree turns, and everything makes sense.”,,, and,,, “As best as we can measure, the geometry of our universe appears to be perfectly, totally, ever-so-boringly flat. On large, cosmic scales, parallel lines stay parallel forever, interior angles of triangles add up to 180 degrees, and so on. All the rules of Euclidean geometry that you learned in high school apply.
But there’s no reason for our universe to be flat.”
Simply put, if the universe were not exceptionally flat, but the universe was instead governed by chaos as the author presupposes, modern science and technology would have never gotten off the ground here on earth. Nor would we have been able to eventually deduce the ‘higher dimensional’ mathematics that lay behind Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.
Indeed, since the extremely fine tuned flatness of the universe allows us to see that the tiny temperature variations (in the Cosmic Background Radiation) remarkably and unexpectedly correspond to the largest scale structures of the observable universe,,,
,,, Indeed, since a the extremely fine tuned flatness of the universe allows us to see that the tiny temperature variations (in the Cosmic Background Radiation) remarkably and unexpectedly correspond to the largest scale structures of the observable universe, then we have every right to assume that the universe, and all the structures within it, are the result of purposeful intent, not the result of chaos as atheists presuppose.
There is more that can be said in critique of the assumptions that he made in his article, such as how Godel’s incompleteness theorem would invalidate some of his assumptions, but I’ll let it suffice for now to echo Pauli’s refrain in regards to his article, ‘It is not even wrong’.
From the ever-reliable Wikipedia
Seversky you, as an atheist who does not believe in mind and/or agent causality, have a far more profound problem than the ever present ‘measurement paradox’ in quantum mechanics. That much more profound problem is the fact that the ‘free will loophole’ has been, for all practical purposes, closed.
As far as I know, Science is willing to study almost any phenomenon, but collecting enough data to perform any useful analysis can get expensive.
Organized, methodical collection and analysis of Weather is perhaps 500 years old, or perhaps very much younger. The first man who predicted weather in the North Sea using a barometer was nearly burned as a witch when he got too many predictions RIGHT. And he still didn’t know WHY air pressure CHANGED.
And Biologists are STILL trying to make sense of what we can now see inside cells.
So there ain’t much point in collecting lots of cute little datums until you have SOME hope of knowing how to sort wheat from chaff.
vmahuna, as to your observation that,
And that failure is precisely the primary, and fatal, flaw within the reductive materialism that undergirds Darwinian thought.
As Pastor Joe Boot states in the following video,,,
And Pastor Joe Boot is not just whistling Dixie. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, which can be stated as such, “Anything you can draw a circle around cannot explain itself without referring to something outside the circle—something you have to assume but cannot prove”,,,
Gödel’s incompleteness theorem,,,, has now been extended to physics.
In the following article entitled ‘Quantum physics problem proved unsolvable: Gödel and Turing enter quantum physics’, which studied the derivation of macroscopic properties from a complete microscopic description, the researchers remark that even a perfect and complete description of the microscopic properties of a material is not enough to predict its macroscopic behaviour.,,, The researchers further commented that their findings challenge the reductionists’ point of view, as the insurmountable difficulty lies precisely in the derivation of macroscopic properties from a microscopic description.”
To put it mildly, this is not a minor failing of the Darwinist’s reductive materialistic worldview. Besides, as mentioned previously in the thread, the inability of reductive materialist to be able to give an account for why the universe, or any object within the universe, may have the precise structure, shape, and/or form that it does,,,
,,, Besides, as mentioned previously in the thread, the inability of reductive materialist to be able to give an account for why the universe, or any object within the universe, may have the precise structure, shape, and/or form that it does, the ‘bottom up’ reductive materialistic framework of Darwinian evolution is found to be grossly inadequate for explaining how any particular organism might achieve its basic form.
And to state what should be glaringly obvious, since neo-Darwinian explanations are grossly inadequate for explaining how any particular organism might achieve its basic form, then neo-Darwinian speculations for how one type of organism might transform into another type of organism are based on pure fantasy and have no discernible experimental basis in reality.
Of related interest to the inability of reductive materialists to be able to give an account for why the universe, or any object within the universe, may have the particular structure, shape, and/or form that it does, Gödel stated this, “In materialism all elements behave the same. It is mysterious to think of them as spread out and automatically united. For something to be a whole, it has to have an additional object, say, a soul or a mind.”
And whereas Darwinists, with their reductive materialism, have no clue what the unifying principle could possibly be that is keeping the trillions upon trillions of molecules in our bodies focused on the singular task of keeping our temporal bodies alive “precisely for a lifetime and not a moment longer (S. Talbott)” on the other hand, Theism, especially with recent breakthroughs in quantum biology,,,
,,,is found to be very well supported in its claim that we each have a immaterial soul that is capable of living past the death of out temporal material bodies.
Quantum Biology, as the preceding video made clear, even goes so far as to strongly support the Christian’s claim that God has formed each of us in our mother’s womb.
Verses:
Of related interest to this is, of course, the problem of ‘the hard problem’ of consciousness and/or mind.
.. As to the problem of ‘scientifically defining’ exactly what consciousness is, (i.e. ‘the hard problem’, qualia), Stephen Talbott has a very interesting article that highlights the fact that the more precisely we ‘scientifically define’ something, (its weight length, height speed etc.. etc..), the more we subtract qualitative meaning from what that something actually is.
Here is an excerpt from his article to get this point across:
And therein lies the unavoidable pitfall of scientifically trying to define exactly what consciousness is. i.e. The “hard problem of consciousness” with reductive materialism. Any attempt to try to scientifically define “qualia” necessarily entails a process of subtraction from qualia itself. With the subtraction from the actual qualitative experience of consciousness becoming more and more acute the more scientifically precise, and mathematical, you try to be in your ‘scientific’ description of consciousness. (which, in the case of reductive materialism, entails abstracting away from the actual qualitative experience itself until you are at the level of unseen atoms and particles which have little, if any, bearing to the actual qualitative experience of consciousness itself.
Of related interest to this, it seems that George Berkeley, an 18th-century Anglo-Irish bishop, and a renowned Christian Philosopher, (after whom Berkeley University got its name (via the town of Berkeley, Ca.),,,it seems that George Berkeley may have followed much the same path as Stephen Talbott did in his article, i.e. of starting out with the qualitative experience itself, in order to arrive at his conclusion that God must be the “immediate cause of all our experiences.”
It is kind of amazing that hundreds of years ago, long before quantum mechanics came along, that someone, a Christian philosopher at that, was able to deduce, apparently from reasoning about the qualitative experience of consciousness itself, what we are just now finding out from quantum mechanics.
Here are a few more relevant quotes:
Let me get this straight, the fine tuning of the constants of the universe including inflation cosmology, that supposidly make it “flat” in a Euclidean sense, and a myriad of other constants that have to be “just right” or no universe or a failed universe, but it’s chaotic? In fact they fall on the sword of the multiverse just to get away with how perfect an balanced the contents are, but this knucklehead wants to say it is chaotic? Well if it really acted as if it came from one big hairy random explosion (instead it behaves like a sculpted creation that was precisely coordinated), then he would have a point – also if the microwave background radiation was not so incredibly ordered and already in such a low entropy state from the very beginning (they don’t like to talk about that, but the distribution of the background radiation, which should be terribly irregular, is actually terribly regular and precise (they don’t like to talk about this much, and they used some bizzare statistical techniques to get rid of that nasty “axis of evil” – even though each probe launched after the first was built to get rid of any anomalies like the “axis of evil”, but only showed it more clearly (a preferred axis for the universe), so they had to air brush it out – this universe is highly ordered – this author is the same kind that claims life and birth are horribly ugly (just because in their mind it should be some clean sterile process), and that dang crying baby makes it unordered – really??? One sees what one wants to see, even if the data says otherwise I suppose.
Of course he doesn’t make any sense.
Are scientists that “act like a sieve” not part of the same “chaotic universe”?
If so, what would make them “focus only on those phenomena that have structure and are predictable”?