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In February 1987, a supernova appeared in the Southern skies, and remained visible for several months. Giant squid, with their large, powerful eyes, must have seen it, too. But if you believe that the act of perception takes place at the object, as Professor Egnor argues in his perspicacious reply to my last post, then you will have to maintain that the squid’s perception of the stellar explosion took place at the location of the supernova itself: somewhere in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy about 168,000 light years from Earth. The problem is that the object itself ceased to exist nearly 200 millennia ago, long before the dawn of human history. Even if the squid that witnessed the explosion were capable of having perceptions which are located in intergalactic space, as Egnor contends, they are surely incapable of having perceptions which go back in time.
Before I continue, I would like to compliment Professor Egnor on his latest post, which is nothing less than a literary tour de force. I wish I could write even half as well. The author’s learning and depth of thought are abundantly evident. And although I believe he is wrong, he is at least nobly wrong, for he has succeeded in highlighting a genuine philosophical problem concerning perception: namely, the puzzle of how we can have reliable knowledge of the external world. (Egnor’s original article can be viewed here; see here for my reply.)
Briefly, Egnor contends that even if perception takes place at the location of the sensory organ (a view I defended in my previous post), and not in the subject’s brain, it is still cut off from objects located in the outside world; hence, it can afford us no sure knowledge of the outside world. Additionally, Aristotle’s insistence that perception involves the observer being made like the object she observes, and even possessing this object, only makes sense if the observer makes contact with the object. For these reasons, Egnor holds that his account of perception is the only one which is both true to the teaching of Aristotle and able to explain how we can have genuine knowledge of the external world (bold emphases mine – VJT):
The crux of Aristotle’s theory of perception is that the perceiver “is made like the object and has acquired its quality” (DA II 5)… One is made like an object and acquires its quality by encountering the object, not by watching a movie about the object…
If perception does not occur at the object — if it begins only at the sense organ or the brain — then there is no encounter between perceiver and perceived. If perception begins at the sense organ, and not at the object, then only the sensory stimulus, not the object, is perceived.…
In the Aristotelian view, the perception of an object is the possession of its form. This includes its accidental forms as well as its substantial form. Location is an accidental form (Organon 1b25-2a4). Thus, in my interpretation, possession of an object entails possession of its location — perception of an object occurs at the location of the object.…
There are deeper problems with the notion that perception occurs only at the sense organs and brain. Let us imagine that the Cartesian theater is real and perception occurs only in sense organs and the brain. In this scenario, we only have direct knowledge of our perceptions themselves; we never have direct knowledge of the objects perceived. And in this Cartesian theater, there can be no reliable knowledge of the external world whatsoever, because any attempt at confirmation of knowledge by correlating internal perception with external reality is rendered moot by my inability to perceive the outside world directly. We are trapped inside the theater, and we can’t get out. The Cartesian theater leaves us practically and even theoretically unable to know reality…
And locating perception in the senses, or in the brain and the senses, doesn’t solve the problem, it merely makes the Cartesian theater a little more spacious. Either your knowledge of the world is limited by your skull or it’s limited by your skin. Either way, you’re trapped in solipsism.
Although I made it quite clear in my original post that I reject the notion of a “theater in the brain” where a homunculus views the sensory data which my brain receives, I think it is fair to say that Professor Egnor has exposed a problem with the account I put forward: namely, that it fails to adequately explain how we manage to encounter objects, when we perceive them.
Responding to my objection that the notion of perception occurring at a distance from the observer was simply too bizarre to be true, Professor Egnor proceeds to turn the tables, by pointing out that the Newtonian notion of action at a distance (which scientists came to accept in the seventeenth century) is equally bizarre:
Perception at a distance is no more inconceivable than action at a distance. The notion that a perception of the moon occurs at the moon is “bizarre” (Torley’s word) only if one presumes that perception is constrained by distance and local conditions — perhaps perception would get tired if it had to go to the moon or it wouldn’t be able to go because it’s too cold there. Yet surely the view that the perception of a rose held up to my eye was located at the rose wouldn’t be deemed nearly as bizarre. At what distance does perception of an object at the object become inconceivable?
It is quite true that early theories of gravity and electromagnetism were forced to appeal to the outlandish notion of action at a distance, in order to describe how an object responds to the influence of distant objects. Newton himself had no idea how it could happen, but he famously refused to speculate, writing: “I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses.” Modern physics, however, has dispensed with the need for such a counterintuitive notion, thanks to the development of the concept of a field, which mediates interactions between objects across empty space.
What’s wrong with perception – and action – occurring at a distance from the subject?
In my reply to Egnor’s original article, I did indeed object that the notion of perception taking place at a distance from the observer was a bizarre one; but in addition to that, I put forward a philosophical argument, designed to show that the notion was not only bizarre, but nonsensical. In a nutshell, my argument was that perception is a bodily event, and that an event involving my body cannot take place at a point which is separate from my body. An event involving my body may occur inside my body, or at the surface of my body, but never separately from it. Thus it simply makes no sense to assert that I am here, at point X, but that my perceptions – or for that matter, my actions – are located at an external point Y.
Think of it this way. Suppose that an action or a perception could be spatially divorced from its subject. How could one demonstrate that the action or perception in question – call it A – should be attributed to this subject (Tom), rather than that subject (Mary), who happens to be standing nearby? How would one resolve the matter, if a dispute were to arise as to whose action (or perception) it was?
Again, if we suppose that an action or a perception is capable of being spatially divorced from its subject, then why couldn’t it be temporally divorced as well? Why couldn’t my actions and my perceptions continue, long after I am dead? For that matter, why couldn’t they have taken place before I was even conceived? Professor Egnor’s account of action and perception fails to exclude either of these absurd scenarios.
To my mind, the foregoing objections are absolutely fatal to any philosophical theory which locates the act of perception outside the observer, and at the object itself, even when it is located at some distance from the observer.
Is Professor Egnor’s argument conclusive?
I am a firm believer in the view that when formulating an argument, it is vital to put it forward in the form of a syllogism, so that its validity can be easily assessed. In the absence of a syllogism, the reader is liable to be convinced by the rhetorical force of the argument, rather than its logical force. Accordingly, I have endeavored to reconstruct Professor Egnor’s core argument in logical form, stripping it down to its bare bones:
1. If I am to have direct knowledge of an object when I perceive it, then my perceptions of that object must encounter the object itself – and not an impression, simulation or representation of it.
2. In order for my perceptions to encounter an object, my perceptions must come into immediate contact with it.
3. Some objects which I perceive are spatially distant from my body.
4. Hence, if I am to have direct knowledge of these distant objects when I perceive them, then my perceptions of these objects must (somehow) come into immediate contact with them.
5. But my body does not come into immediate contact with these distant objects, when I perceive them.
6. Hence my perceptions of distant objects cannot be located on or inside my body, but must be located outside my body, at the objects themselves.
At first sight, the argument appears unexceptionable, when couched in this form. However, some of the key terms used in the argument turn out to be rather vague and ill-defined. For instance: I know perfectly well what it means for me to encounter an object, but what does it mean for my perceptions to encounter an object (as stated in premises 1 and 2)? That strikes me as an odd way of talking.
One possible remedy for this problem would be to replace “my perceptions” with “I” in the first two premises. But if we simply say that perception simply requires me to encounter (and come into contact with) the objects I perceive, then we run into trouble in premise 3, which states the rather obvious fact that I don’t come into contact with all of the objects I perceive.
A critic of Egnor’s argument might be inclined to reject premise 2. After all, if Professor Egnor is willing to entertain the thought that the direct perception of an object can be spatially distant from the perceiving subject, then why can’t a direct perception of an object be spatially distant from the perceiving object, as well? If the former is conceivable, then why not the latter?
Or perhaps we should reject premise 1, instead. Why should it be the case that my direct perceptions of an object have to encounter the object? Surely it is I who encounter the object, via my perceptions of it.
At this point, I am reminded of Fred Dretske’s aphorism, “One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens.”
How the Krakatoa eruption undercuts the corpuscular theory of perception
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However, in this Christmas season, I do not wish to be accused of being uncharitable in my reading of Professor Egnor’s argument. So I’d like to use another analogy, in order to bring out the point which Egnor wants to make. Most readers will be familiar with the volcanic eruption which took place in Indonesia in 1883, destroying most of the island of Krakatoa as well as its surrounding archipelago.
Now, suppose that I had lived about 100 kilometers from the island, at the time of the eruption. In that case, it would have been too far away for me to have actually seen the island exploding, with my own eyes. However, I would certainly have heard a loud noise – the sound of the explosion was heard even 3,000 miles away, in Alice Springs, Australia – and in addition to that, I would have been inundated with particles of volcanic ash from the eruption. Let’s put aside my perception of the sound of the explosion. The question I’d like to focus on is: does my being inundated with particles of volcanic ash count as a perception of the explosion?
The reason why I am posing this question is that it has bearing on what I’ll call the corpuscular theory of perception, which was defended by Cartesians and by atomists in the seventeenth century, and which is still upheld by modern philosophers. On this account, what happens when I perceive a distant body, such as the supernova which was seen to explode in 1987, is that particles (or corpuscles) travel from that object to my eye – rather like the way in which particles of volcanic ash traveled from the Krakatoa explosion to people living in surrounding areas. In the 21st century, we refer to these “particles” as photons of light, but the basic idea is the same as it was in the seventeenth century.
Getting back to Krakatoa: if I had been inundated with particles of ash from the Krakatoa eruption back in 1883, what could I have concluded from that fact? Nothing much, really. All that I could have said was that something had caused those particles to reach me, but I would have had absolutely no idea what it was. My being rained on with particles of ash could hardly qualify as a perception of the eruption itself: being situated at some distance from the eruption, I would have been unable to conclude that an eruption had even occurred. All I could have concluded was: “Something big happened.”
The above example, I believe, serves to illustrate the point Professor Egnor is making, in his critique of theories of perception which locate the act of perception away from the object itself, and either at or in the body of the observer. For what Egnor is arguing is that if these theories are correct, then I am in a similar quandary when I perceive distant objects: all I can say is that “something I know not what” is causing my perceptions. There is no real encounter between the observer and the observed.
An irenic proposal: it is objects which reach out to us, not we to them
At this point, I’d like to make an irenic proposal to Professor Egnor. He has indeed highlighted a genuine philosophical problem when he argues that any veridical perception of an object requires an encounter between the perceiver and the object itself, and he is also correct in saying that corpuscular theories of perception fail to do justice to this encounter. What I’d like to suggest is that instead of supposing (as Egnor does) that my act of perception of a distant object takes place at the distant object itself, which I somehow “reach out to” when I perceive its form, wouldn’t it be more sensible to suppose that it is the object which reaches out to me, when I perceive it?
In other words, what I am saying is that when I perceive a distant star by means of photons emitted from that star impinging on my eye, something is happening which is very different in character from my getting rained on by particles of volcanic ash from the Krakatoa eruption. The vital difference is that the particles of ash failed to manifest the character of the object itself to me: unless I had been a trained geologist, I would have been in no position to know that they came from a volcano, rather than (say) a meteorite. When I perceive a star, on the other hand, photons emitted by that star (many years ago) enter my eye and modify the organ itself, in a way which literally gives me a picture of their source. Looking at the star, I can determine that it is located in a certain region of the sky, that it is highly luminous, and that it is of a certain color. Looking at it through a telescope, I can further determine that it is roughly round in shape. And if the star in question is sufficiently close to Earth, I can even directly calculate its distance, using the method of parallax, and I can also compute its size.
What makes my perceptions both genuine and reliable in this case is that the star, in its act of emitting photons, does something much more than merely projecting particles: it also projects its own powers – in this case, the power to illuminate observers, in a particular way. And when I am affected by the star’s powers, I am thereby informed (literally, “in-formed”) in a manner which enables me to have a veridical perception of the star itself, and to arrive at a genuine knowledge of what it is.
We can now make sense of Aristotle’s statement that in the act of perception, the observer “is made like the object and has acquired its quality” (De Anima II 5), as well as his claim that the perception of an objection entails having a possession of its form. For when I perceive a distant star, I do indeed receive its form, by virtue of my eye’s being affected by the normal exercise of its powers: the star is the kind of object which has a tendency to emit light of a certain wavelength, which we perceive as “red.” Because the star is exercising its normal, regular powers when it affects me in this way, I am able to recognize that one of its characteristics is to appear red, and that another of its characteristics is to shine. I also perceive its position in the sky, and because “the stars in their courses” appear to follow a regular path in the night sky, I know that the star I perceive is not a phosphorescent flash caused by a random disturbance of my optic nerve, but an object, with a well-defined location, shape, color and size.
But, it will be asked, how can a distant object project its powers to an observer? The notion seems a little mysterious. I would suggest that the modern scientific concept of a field (which I mentioned above) may go some way towards dispelling this mystery. Briefly, the idea is that every material object is surrounded by a field of some sort – gravitational, electromagnetic, strong, weak, or what have you. We can never divorce an object from its surrounding field: the two go together like hand and glove. What I am saying is that the field serves to project the object itself: when the object’s field interacts with another body (such as the body of an observer), that body is then subjected to (and affected by) the powers of the object. The effect is not instantaneous; it takes a certain interval of time. But that is unimportant. What matters is that to perceive an object is to fall under its powers, in some way, and to thereby be informed by it, when one’s sensory organs are altered by the normal exercise of those powers.
The key difference between Egnor’s account of perception and mine, then, is that in his account, it is we who reach out to the object, when we perceive it; whereas on my account, it is the object which reaches out to us. And in the case of an exploding star, the object is capable of reaching out to us even after it has ceased to exist, because the photons it projects continue traveling in space, long after it is gone. Objects can thus exercise their powers in remote locations, even when they are no more.
One might ask: is this a case of the star’s actions being temporally divorced from the star itself – a notion which I rejected as absurd in my philosophical argument against the possibility of actions or perceptions being either spatially or temporally divorced from their subject? There is indeed a temporal delay between the action and its effect – just as there would be if a fiend were to plot a murder by enclosing a bomb inside his last will and testament, which was designed to detonate only when it was opened, some time after his death. But even in this case, the dastardly deed of enclosing the bomb inside the will is performed during the lifetime of the fiend – and similarly, the action of emitting light is performed during the lifetime of the star, even its effects are only felt by us much later. Thus there is no “temporal divorce” between the entity and its actions, but only between the actions and their effects.
It seems to me that the account of perception which I am defending here is a lot less odd, metaphysically speaking, than the account put forward by Professor Egnor. It also appears to accord better with common sense. But at this point, I shall lay down my pen, and let my readers judge the matter for themselves. I am also happy to let Professor Egnor have the last word in this exchange, and I would like to wish him a merry Christmas.
What do readers think?
UPDATE: Over at ENV, Professor Egnor has written a reply to my post, on which I have briefly commented below (see here).
To sum up:
Dr Egnor holds that perception is ‘at a distance’.
Dr Torley disagrees and holds that perception is somewhere within his body.
Quantum Mechanics itself, our best description of reality, (surpassing even General Relativity in terms of accuracy and usefulness for modern man), disagrees with Dr. Torley’s claim and agrees with Dr. Egnor’s claim:
a few notes to that effect:
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....ent-591627
Hi bornagain,
I shall reply to your comment at further length in about 15 hours. In the meantime, I’d like to ask: do you believe that animals’ perceptions are also capable of taking place outside their bodies?
Dr. Torley, again, shifting the focus to other animals is a fairly disingenuous way for you to try to dodge the contradiction in your own logic that you are faced with.
Do you have a God given mind or not?
As ‘children of God’, indeed since God became human in Jesus, I certainly expect my mind to be much more than a caged up little mouse ‘somewhere inside my material body’ that you have made it out to be.
IMHO, that is a dreadfully impoverished view of the human mind that you are defending in your ‘philosophy’.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Shakespeare – Hamlet – Context of the Quote
http://www.enotes.com/shakespe.....th-horatio
bornagain @ 1
So, when Dr. Egnor looks up into the night sky and perceives a star, at what distance, particularly, is he perceiving and what is the Quantum Mechanical explanation for that particular distance?
When a blind person perceives the sun through warmth – where does the perception take place?
When you look at the moon in a dream – where does the perception take place?
bornagain @ 1
Just to lend some specificity to my question (and it is a serious question, I’m am looking for your answer) let’s say for the sake of argument that Dr. Egnor is stargazing and his attention is caught by the constellation Orion and the really bright star in the center of Orion’s sword.
So, then at what distance is Dr. Egnor perceiving that particular star and what is the Quantum Mechanical explanation for that particular distance?
perception issues have always missed the main ingredient .That is the memory.
We perceive with our immaterial soul. Yet the soul perceices the world by being meshed to the material memory. So all the senses info has to di is inprint themselves on the memory.
this is what happens.
We do accurately see the world by watching the recording in the memory. its only that because its a recording its editted by say 5%. Optical illusions proving this.
all these matters deal with the soul/material connection. So errors are made if the memory as a middleman is not understood.
Charles, since, through Quantum Mechanics, reality is found to be consciousness based and not materialistic based, and since quantum mechanics blatantly defies our concepts of time and space, (in fact Quantum Mechanics quips that “I have no need of that space-time hypothesis’! 🙂 ) , then is is simply mistaken to believe that ‘perception/observation’ of consciousness is strictly limited by space-time as material particles themselves are strictly limited by space-time.
As far as ‘non-local’ quantum mechanics is concerned, it is simply mistaken to view reality as if space-time matter-energy has primacy over ‘non-local’, beyond space-time, consciousness.
As Planck said years ago, and has been amply borne out in Quantum Physics, consciousness is primary and matter is derivative.
bornagain @ 8
I’m sure you didn’t intend to shift the focus of my question to human consciousness in a disingenuous dodge of my question.
I’ll further grant you that “that ‘perception/observation’ of consciousness is [not] strictly limited by space-time” and ask again: at what distance has Dr. Egnor’s unlimited consciousness perceived/observed the star in the center of Orion’s sword?
I hold with Dr. Egnor, the star is perceived at the object and not in our body. I also hold that quantum mechanics bears this out.
Moreover, it is certainly not disingenuous to establish that consciousness is primary and material derivative when debating matters of conscious perception. In fact, I hold it is prerequisite to establish that point first so as to have the proper foundation in place!
bornagain @ 10
A star, like our sun, is a big object, and so I ask yet again, at what distance, how close to it (at its center, its surface, above its surface in orbit), at what distance is that perception?
Hi everyone,
FYI:
Does Quantum Mechanics Require A Conscious Observer? by Michael Nauenberg, Physics Dept. University of Califonia Santa Cruz, CA, USA.
Abstract:
“The view that the implementation of the principles of quantum mechanics requires a conscious observer is based on misconceptions that are described in this article.”
Is he right? I don’t know. I’m not a physicist. However, a few quotes from prominent physicists cited in Nauenberg’s article reveal that there is little scientific support for the view that quantum physics requires a conscious observer:
Richard P. Feynman (Nobel Prize, 1965):
Murray Gellmann (Nobel Prize, 1969):
Anthony J. Leggett (Nobel Prize 2003):
John A. Wheeler:
John S. Bell:
What about von Neumann’s argument, I hear you ask. Nauenberg responds:
Does quantum physics presuppose the existence of consciousness? At the moment, the only honest answer we can give is a Scottish verdict of case not proven.
Charles, I am going to pass on your question. Perhaps you can read Dr. Egnor’s follow up.
Egnor:
Here is the problem with Egnor’s argument. He has completely failed to appreciate the true meaning of the Cartesian theater. He assumes that which he’s trying to prove: the perception of an external object. Any question concerning the distance of perception assumes that such a distance exists in the first place. What kind of self-referential argument is this?
The irrefutable evidence says that we only perceive an internal representation of an object in the brain. Heck, we can even make the blind see colors by stimulating part of their visual cortex with a probe. But Egnor is positive that we see objects outside the brain. Why? Because, he argues, Aristotle said something about perception, Newton believed in action at a distance and quantum mechanics says that the universe is nonlocal.
QM can say anything about nonlocality but we still have to get off the couch to fetch a beer from the fridge. Some things are nonlocal and others are not. Newton was not writing about the mechanism of perception when he formulated his gravity equation. Aristotle, on the other hand, was brilliant in many things but he was also off his rocker in many others.
Finally, consider wearing 3D virtual reality goggles and viewing a landscape. Our visual system is fooled into seeing various virtual objects at various distances. But according to Egnor’s cockamamie hypothesis, we are perceiving actual objects at a distance.
If most ID supporters support Egnor’s crackpottery, I’m afraid for ID. Our enemies would be right to mock us and call us names. I personally want no part of it. I got a movie recommendation for Egnor: The Matrix. It’s about an entire world that was not really there.
PS. Why is vjtorley so kind to Egnor? A literary tour de force? You gotta be kidding me?
vjtorley, given all those one sided quotes from atheistic physicists, that you quoted to support your position, are you now leaning towards atheism and contemplating giving up Christian Theism altogether just so to try to win a debate on the internet?
Your latest couple of posts certainly have me wondering!
Although all the people/atheists you quoted have interesting stories that reveal their a-priori bias, let’s focus on Leggett’s bias in particular
Leggett’s Inequality, the mathematics behind it, and the Theistic implications of it, are discussed beginning at the 24:15 minute mark of the following video:
Here is the article by Dr. Richard Conn Henry that Dr. Paul Giem discussed at the 32:28 minute mark of the ‘Quantum Weirdness’ video
Dean Radin, who spent years at Princeton testing different aspects of consciousness, recently performed experiments testing the possible role of consciousness in the double slit. His results were, not so surprisingly, very supportive of consciousness’s central role in the experiment:
on page 7 of the following (small) survey we see that 55% of the scientists accept that the observer plays a fundamental role in the application of the formalism.
page 7
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1301.1069.pdf
But then we also see that only 6% say that the observer plays a distinguished physical role….how is that possible?
This video at 8:18 mark explains the discrepancy and shows how ‘metaphysical prejudice’ drastically alters what physicists are willing to say they believe about quantum mechanics
bornagain @ 13
Of course you are and it is obvious why you won’t answer a simple question to give an example of what “at a distance” actually means. Dr. Torley’s questions to you were “Socratic” (as were mine), he was trying to get you to think thru your position – he was not disingenuous or evasive.
bornagain, you have little moral authority to demand answers of others when you decline to answer yourself.
Why? He wasn’t willing to put specifics on what “at a distance” actually means anymore than were you. Why do you suppose that is?
Charles, I strongly suspect you are an atheist playing games.
That is why I refer you to Egnor.
Or more appropriately in my case, to Ignore! 🙂
“Spooky action ‘at a distance'”
guess who said that?
bornagain @ 17
You have no clue to whom you’re talking. And that doesn’t give you a pass to be a hypocrit demanding answers of others and yet declining to answer yourself.
Dr Torley
Is it possible that our minds are not bound to the same physical constraints as our brains? I think Dr Egnor argument is correct that we perceive at the object. It is so because without it we would not have any knowledge of the external world. The question we have to ask is perception a mind function or a brain function? If it is a brain function it’s limited to physics. A mind on the other hand does not have those restrictions.
As for your question on do animals have perception? I don’t think it can ever be proven.
Charles, whatever.
Since you don’t seem to understand the simple point that ‘at a distance’ is taken from Einstein’s ‘Spooky action at a distance’ quote, then it is really pointless to discuss anything further with you in that regards is it not? i.e. you got to crawl before you can walk!
bornagain @ 20
Well you could call my bluff and answer my question and see how well I understand, now couldn’t you. Let’s see if you understand the simple meaning of perception ‘at a distance’.
A star, like our sun, is a big object, and so I ask yet again, at what distance, how close to it (at its center, its surface, above its surface in orbit), at what distance from the star in the center of Orion’s sword is Dr. Egnor’s (or your) perception?
Whatever, call me whatever name you like. I’ll pass on playing with Torley’s new friend.
Andre:
Don’t fall for Egnor’s ruse. This is like saying that any textual or video knowledge we have of a foreign country that we have never set foot in, is not knowledge because we do not perceive the country directly.
You know this does not make a lick of sense. If we don’t stop supporting crackpottery among us, ID is doomed.
bornagain @ 22
Would that be where you called me an atheist and assumed I was playing games and my subsequent response that you were a hypocrit for your hypocritical demand of answers while declining answers? That name calling?
And you could cut off the jam on my games anytime by answering my question – call my bluff.
Hi everyone,
Here’s another article from arxiv.org:
Quantum mechanics needs no consciousness (and the other way around) by Shan Yu, Danko Nikoli
The article was published in 2010 and cites Zeilinger’s work. I think we can assume it’s fairly up-to-date.
I say again: case not proven. In fact, it’s not looking good for those who would argue that only consciousness can collapse the wave function.
Andre,
Thank you for your post. Professor Egnor regards perception as a physical act. So does Aristotle. That’s why I think my argument is watertight.
Perception is physical. Understanding is not.
Charles, I answered your question
You then asked this question which makes no sense:
Now, with such a stupid question, either you are being very distractive to the topic, i.e. playing games, or else you have no clue what you are talking about in quantum mechanics.
But to be very specific, I believe photon(s) are ‘perceived’ where they are emitted, no matter how many light-years away they are emitted.
Dr. Torley, real time evidence was provided directly contradicting your position
The idea that a conscious observer is needed in order for quantum wave collapse to occur is ridiculous on the face of it. Nobody ever observes particle decay directly in quantum experiments. The observation of particle decay is always done entirely by machines and the machines are programmed to display graphical representations of the interactions on a monitor for human consumption.
The problem with many Christians is that they want so much to prove that there is a conscious mind or spirit that is separate from the body, that they latch onto any cockamamie nonsense coming from the physics community in order to buttress their misconceptions. When that is not enough, they invent their own nonsense (like Egnor) or try to pass pseudoscientific stories like out-of-body, near-death experiences as scientific facts.
I got news for you people. God does not need the world’s science or human understanding of reality to come to his rescue. When God decides to speak science, the whole world will stand up and take notice.
“The observation of particle decay is always done entirely by machines”
and yet:
vjtorley:
However, there is both conscious and unconscious perception. The latter is purely physical and the former is both physical and spiritual.
Now I don’t see why understanding cannot be physical? It’s strictly about causes and effects, both of which are inherently mechanical.
bornagain, quoting someone else:
And this makes it true? Why? Who is Douglas Ell? Some infallible God? Who do you really worship, bornagain? I’m beginning to have doubts about your faith in God.
Remember this. The world is full of lies. Nothing is given to any of us on a platter. Search and you shall find. Always.
“I’m beginning to have doubts about your faith in God.”
Well, I’ve had a complete lack of faith in your less than omniscient god ever since you told me about him.
Moreover, I referenced an interaction free zeno experiment to back up Douglas Ell’s claim empirically!
bornagain @ 27
So if you and Dr Egnor perceived the photon’s emitted from the “star” in the center of Orion’s belt (and considering your refusal to address that the perceived “image” of that star is a collection of inumerable photons which collectively make up that image) I’ll stipulate for the sake of discussion that those photons (on average) were emitted from the surface of the star, then your perception at a distance is at the surface of the star. The contradictions you now need to address are:
How is it that the photons the photoreceptors in your eye actually receive are an image that is “point like” because it is 1,344 light year distant, yet your ‘perception at the surface of a star’ like the sun should be of an object some 865,000 miles across, i.e. not only not point-like and distant, but vast and so close as to be impossible to perceive in its entirety edge to edge?
But that center “star” in Orion’s sword is actually the Orion nebula. It appears as a star to our photoreceptors on earth, yet if your perception were where its photons were emitted, (or a bit further back, say a few light years) you’d perceive it isn’t a single “star” but rather a nebula. How is it that when you stargaze you see a point-like bright star but your ‘perception where the photons are emitted’ fails to show you the nebula that a telescope shows you? Why doesn’t your ‘perception at a distance’ show you a vast nebula?
Now I can give you complete explanations from classical physics and general relativity for what the photoreceptors in your eyes image.
What is your quantum mechanical explanation for why your ‘perception where the photon’s are emitted’ doesn’t reconcile at all with what the object actually is? Keep in mind that neither you nor Egnor describe “perception at a distance” as a close-up viewpoint consistent with that distance, but rather the exact same distant visual image just perceived from where the photons are emitted rather than the photons travelling the distance to your photoreceptors.
Lastly, in the case of a star that was say, 100M light years distant but went supernova 50 million years ago, your ‘perception at where the photon’s are emitted’ would show a neutron star or white dwarf or even a black hole, whereas the photon’s impinging on the photoreceptors in your eyes would show the star as a point-like object as it existed 100M years ago. What is your quantum mechanical explanation for why your ‘perception where the photons are emitted’ would see 100M year-old photons when their emitter stopped 50M years ago?
You worship a god that you invented. My God said that he regretted having created humans. You can’t have regrets if you know everything. Use your brain, bornagain. Christians do not have to park their brains in a closet, you know. As a Christian, I resent it.
It’s all BS. You can bet on it. Most of physics is BS. These are people who openly and shamelessly profess their belief in time travel, infinity, determinism, continuity and other little kid’s fairy tales.
Charles, here is Egnor’s response (which you apparently did not read)
as to:
“Now I can give you complete explanations from classical physics and general relativity for what the photoreceptors in your eyes image.”
but can you do so without improperly invoking the agent causality of Theists into your explanation?
What????!!!?!?
That’s akin to saying God’s a murderer for causing the flood or that he’s “jealous” in the normal sense of the word.
Considering the Bible makes it abundantly clear that God is omniscient and immutable, it’s your god that was invented by you.
Yeah Mapou, I know, I know, everything and everyone that disagrees with you is BS and a BSer. How you put up with us mere mortals for so long I’ll never know.
I wrote:
Vy writes:
Is this supposed to have an effect or something? Scare me, maybe? ahahaha…AHAHAHA…
Where did this crap come from? You got a demon, dude. 😀
bornagain @ 36
Oh I read it. I see his vague handwaving about what Aristotle thought and Cartesian/Lockean doctrine, and his unsubstantiated assertion “Thus, in my interpretation, possession of an object entails possession of its location — perception of an object occurs at the location of the object.”
I read his simplistic examples, in which the physics of distance, time and scale don’t matter and can be (for his sake) conveniently ignored.
His answer is philosophical musing. It is not an explanation of physical (even quantum physical) reality. Note that I’ve given you an opportunity to explain the quantum physics of how ‘perception where photons are emitted’ reconciles with the reality of the images we see when distance, time, and scale can not be ignored, and you deferred to the answers Egnor didn’t give.
But nowhere in his response nor yours (as you only mimic him) is there any engagement of the physics involved, when distance, time, and scale significantly affect what we see.
Wheeler’s ‘Delayed Choice’ experiments have been very successful in showing that ‘observation’ defies time and space and is indeed ‘action at a distance’ just as Dr. Egnor holds.
Wheeler’s Classic Delayed Choice Experiment:
Excerpt: Now, for many billions of years the photon is in transit in region 3. Yet we can choose (many billions of years later) which experimental set up to employ – the single wide-focus, or the two narrowly focused instruments. We have chosen whether to know which side of the galaxy the photon passed by (by choosing whether to use the two-telescope set up or not, which are the instruments that would give us the information about which side of the galaxy the photon passed). We have delayed this choice until a time long after the particles “have passed by one side of the galaxy, or the other side of the galaxy, or both sides of the galaxy,” so to speak. Yet, it seems paradoxically that our later choice of whether to obtain this information determines which side of the galaxy the light passed, so to speak, billions of years ago. So it seems that time has nothing to do with effects of quantum mechanics. And, indeed, the original thought experiment was not based on any analysis of how particles evolve and behave over time – it was based on the mathematics. This is what the mathematics predicted for a result, and this is exactly the result obtained in the laboratory.
http://www.bottomlayer.com/bot.....choice.htm
The Experiment That Debunked Materialism – video – (delayed choice quantum eraser)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xKUass7G8w
Quantum physics mimics spooky action into the past – April 23, 2012
Excerpt: The authors experimentally realized a “Gedankenexperiment” called “delayed-choice entanglement swapping”, formulated by Asher Peres in the year 2000. Two pairs of entangled photons are produced, and one photon from each pair is sent to a party called Victor. Of the two remaining photons, one photon is sent to the party Alice and one is sent to the party Bob. Victor can now choose between two kinds of measurements. If he decides to measure his two photons in a way such that they are forced to be in an entangled state, then also Alice’s and Bob’s photon pair becomes entangled. If Victor chooses to measure his particles individually, Alice’s and Bob’s photon pair ends up in a separable state. Modern quantum optics technology allowed the team to delay Victor’s choice and measurement with respect to the measurements which Alice and Bob perform on their photons. “We found that whether Alice’s and Bob’s photons are entangled and show quantum correlations or are separable and show classical correlations can be decided after they have been measured”, explains Xiao-song Ma, lead author of the study.
According to the famous words of Albert Einstein, the effects of quantum entanglement appear as “spooky action at a distance”. The recent experiment has gone one remarkable step further. “Within a naïve classical world view, quantum mechanics can even mimic an influence of future actions on past events”, says Anton Zeilinger.
http://phys.org/news/2012-04-q.....ction.html
“If we attempt to attribute an objective meaning to the quantum state of a single system, curious paradoxes appear: quantum effects mimic not only instantaneous action-at-a-distance but also, as seen here, influence of future actions on past events, even after these events have been irrevocably recorded.”
Asher Peres, Delayed choice for entanglement swapping. J. Mod. Opt. 47, 139-143 (2000).
You can see a little better explanation of the “delayed-choice entanglement swapping” experiment at the 9:11 minute mark of the following video
Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser Experiment Explained – 2014 video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6HLjpj4Nt4
Don’t flatter yourself.
You took the claims of God “regretting” to mean God isn’t omniscient (even though the Bible makes it clear that He is) so it’s just as much crap as claiming God is “jealous” to mean what it means in human interactions (even though the Bible says otherwise).
So yeah, it is crap.
A projection is the best thing you could come up with?
*facepalm*
bornagain quoting another fallible god, Wheeler:
This is no better than the medieval church debating angels and pinheads. The science in this is exactly zero. Opinions and interpretations do not count as science. They count as crackpottery, not unlike Egnor’s crackpottery.
Vy:
So crap it is. LOL
Adios.
bornagain @ 42
Until you cut and paste a quantum mechanical explanation specific to Egnor’s perception at a distance (where the photon’s are emitted), you’re wasting everyones’ time and bandwidth.
You have omitted from Wheeler’s quote that he was *imagining* how gravitational lensing might demonstrate delayed-choice phenomena. That hasn’t been tested. Rhodes wrote:
Imagination, whether Wheeler’s, Egnor’s or yours, does not equate to fact.
And as for ‘action at a distance’, ok let’s go there.
Explain how quantum ‘action at a distance’ explains that the Orion nebula appears point-like when perceived at the nebula where the photons are emitted? How does ‘action at a distance’ change the image from the actual vast nebula ‘perceived where photons are emitted’ into a mere point-like, star-like object appearing in our eyes after those photons have traversed some 1,344 light years? How does ‘action at a distance’ account for the differences between what is ‘perceived where the photons are emitted’ and what is perceived where the photons strike our eyes?
Glad to see you acknowledge what you posted was crap.
And what is this:
???
Interesting discussion. I’m inclined toward Dr Torley’s view on common sense grounds, but Dr Egnor makes some good points as well. Not being an expert on QM and Aristotle, I don’t have the expertise to pronounce one side is right or wrong with any degree of confidence!
I wonder if the recent trend in physics to suspect that quantum entanglement is space, while computational complexity is related to time, may be relevant to our discussion.
“Despite the remaining challenges, there is a sense among the practitioners of this field that they have begun to glimpse something real and very important. “I didn’t know what space was made of before,” says Swingle. “It wasn’t clear that question even had meaning.” But now, he says, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the question does make sense. “And the answer is something that we understand,” says Swingle. “It’s made of entanglement.”
http://www.nature.com/news/the.....me-1.18797
You claim that Wheeler’s experiments are just imagination, but his thought experiment has been performed in the lab:
“this is exactly the result obtained in the laboratory.”
Moreover, as pointed out, the Wheeler experiments have been extended, experimentally, to “mimic not only instantaneous action-at-a-distance but also, as seen here, influence of future actions on past events, even after these events have been irrevocably recorded.”
This is not a minor problem for atheists and/or theists who want there to be a diminished role for mind.
Moreover, Wheeler’s Delayed Choice experiments (as well as Quantum Zeno Effect) show that ‘Perception at a distance’ equates to ‘action at a distance’.
You keep (purposely?) ignoring that specific location is not necessary with ‘action/perception at a distance’.
Of note:
That is my last response to Charles.
I’ll save my replies for answering any of Torley’s further challenges to a Theistic interpretation of quantum mechanics.
This is a great topic to talk about, and I think we can possibly do an actual demonstration using tennis.
When a player is about to hit the ball does he perceive where his target is or does he do so where he is? Similarly the person receiving the ball does he perceive where the ball will go or will he do so in his head?
I wonder.
Michael Egnor’s post at ENV is well worth the read, and I really appreciate VJT taking on the issues it raises.
An interesting discussion!
I think that your average citizen has no idea how much of Cartesian thinking they ascribe to without even knowing it.
Since there is no shortage of papers that Dr. Torley could appeal to that seek to ‘explain away’ consciousness in quantum mechanics, (just as there are no shortage of papers that seek to ‘explain away the design we see in biology), and yet since consciousness still refuses to go away from Quantum Mechanics (in fact, the case for consciousness in quantum mechanics grows stronger as time goes by), I think it is good to first lay out a few of the reasons why consciousness, both the consciousness of man and the Mind of God, has become so inextricably bound to debates about quantum mechanics.
First off, reductive materialism which holds that consciousness is an ’emergent’ property from matter, and upon which neo-Darwinism itself is based, is simply incompatible with quantum mechanics.
In fact, in what I regard to be a complete falsification of reductive materialism, physicists have reduced material, via quantum teleportation, to quantum information. (of note: energy is completely reduced to quantum information, whereas matter is semi-completely reduced, with the caveat being that matter can be reduced to energy via e=mc2).
Seeing as reductive materialism, the base philosophy of most Darwinian atheists, is dealt a fatal blow right off the bat before any alternative hypothesis for quantum mechanics is even considered, then quantum mechanics is certainly a promising avenue for a Theist to naturally follow.
As well, in attempts to ‘explain away’ the fine tuning of the universe, atheists inadvertently forget that the Schroedinger equation itself appears to be fine-tuned, and thus is itself in need of explanation.
Moreover, the Schroedinger equation is also where the need for a conscious observer in quantum mechanics first makes itself known.
As well, it is good to point out that the wave function in the Schrödinger equation is mathematically defined as Infinite information
Moreover, information has actually been encoded into the wave function:
Thus every time we observe, (i.e. collapse a quantum wave of), a single photon we are actually seeing just a single bit of information that was originally created from a very specific set of infinite information that was known by the consciousness that preceded material reality. i.e. information that was known only by the infinite Mind of omniscient God!
Two of the most popular ways, that I am aware of, that try to get around wave function collapse without invoking consciousness/God are Many Worlds and decoherence.
Many Worlds tries to deal with the ‘problem’ of wave function collapse simply by denying the reality of wave function collapse:
Yet, contrary to MWI, the following experiment shows the collapse of the wave function to be a real effect,,
As well, in Many Worlds denying the reality of wave function collapse, Many Worlds truly exposes materialism in all its full blown absurdity in doing so. i.e. The particle is given so much unmerited power in the many worlds interpretation (MWI) of Quantum Mechanics that every time someone observes a particle, instead of the wave function merely collapsing, the particle instead creates a virtual infinity of parallel universes.
As to “decoherence”,
Although decohernce is far more plausibe than MWI, the following video is very good for clearly demonstrating that decoherence does not solve the measurement problem:
As to more specific evidence for consciousness in quantum mechanics. That consciousness is integral to quantum mechanics is fairly obvious to the unbiased observer (no pun intended). I first, much like everybody else, was immediately shocked to learn that the observer could have any effect whatsoever in the double slit experiment:
Dean Radin, who spent years at Princeton testing different aspects of consciousness, recently performed experiments testing the possible role of consciousness in the double slit. His results were, not so surprisingly, very supportive of consciousness’s central role in the experiment:
One of the first interesting experiments in quantum mechanics I found after the double slit, that highlighted the centrality of the observer to the experiment, was Wigner’s Quantum Symmetries. Here is Wigner commenting on the key experiment that led Wigner to his Nobel Prize winning work on quantum symmetries,,,
Wigner went on to make these rather dramatic comments in regards to his work:
Then after I had learned about Wigner’s Quantum Symmetries, I stumbled across Wheeler’s Delayed choice experiments in which this finding shocked me as to the central importance of the observer’s free will choice in quantum experiments:
Then, a little bit later, I learned that the delayed choice experiment had been extended:
And then I learned the delayed choice experiment was refined yet again:
You can see a more complete explanation of the startling results of the experiment at the 9:11 minute mark of the following video:
This following experiment also extended Wheeler’s Delayed Choice experiment:
And then, after the delayed choice experiments, I learned about something called Leggett’s Inequality. Leggett’s Inequality was, as far as I can tell, a mathematical proof developed by Nobelist Anthony Leggett to prove ‘realism’. Realism is the belief that an objective reality exists independently of a conscious observer looking at it. And, as is usual with challenging the predictions of Quantum Mechanics, his proof was violated by a stunning 80 orders of magnitude, thus once again, in over the top fashion, highlighting the central importance of the conscious observer to Quantum Experiments:
Prof. Richard Conn Henry stated this after the Leggett results came in
As with the delayed choice experiment, the violation of Leggett’s inequalities have been extended. This following experiment violated Leggett’s inequality to a stunning 120 standard deviations:
The preceding experiment, and the mathematics behind it, and the obvious Theistic implications of it are discussed beginning at the 24:15 minute mark of the following video:
The following video and paper get the general, and dramatic, point across of what ‘giving up realism’ actually means:
But, as if all that was not enough to demonstrate consciousness’s centrality in quantum mechanics, I then learned about something called the ‘Quantum Zeno Effect’,,
The reason why I am very impressed with the Quantum Zeno effect as to establishing consciousness’s primacy in quantum mechanics is, for one thing, that Entropy is, 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 also 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 conscious observation put a freeze on entropic decay, unless consciousness was/is more foundational to reality than the 1 in 10^10^123 entropy is?
Verse:
Putting all these lines of evidence together, the argument for God from consciousness can now be framed like this:
bornagain @ 49
No, my exact words were:
I was specific to your cite of Rhodes claim that “We have delayed this choice until a time long after the particles “have passed by one side of the galaxy, or the other side of the galaxy, or both sides of the galaxy,” so to speak.” Rhodes cited Jacques et.al “Experimental realization of Wheeler’s delayed-choice GedankenExperiment” in which only a laboratory test was done, not a test of gravitational lensing on delayed choice. Download the paper and read it.
I never said that. I just object to your bizzare claims of instantaneous, time-traveling “out-of-body perception” at will, without any explanation, let alone evidence.
You and Egnor seem to think that your minds can instantaneously perceive photons currently emitted thousands and millions of light years away at their source, and transform them into mental images as they would appear thousands and millions of years *earlier* when viewed back on earth.
You imply that while gazing at a star 100M light years away and 100M years ago, your mind perceives the photons at their source, even if the star went supernova 50M years ago and nolonger emits photons, yet your ‘perception at a distance’ regardlessly images them in the mind them as if they were emitted 100M years ago.
All without explanation from Egnor or you (except to cut & paste irrelevant study excerpts that you misapply to the topic at hand.)
The location of generators, slits, screens, splitters, detectors, etc. is essential insofar as correctly performing the observations and measurements are concerned. The experimenters care very much how their equipment is configured. Likewise ‘perception at a distance’ is specific to the location of the object being perceived. The surface of the object emitting the photons is the location you specified. And if that location is very distant from the location of the stargazer, then time becomes a critical factor as well.
You keep slipping “perception” in as if it equates to “action”, and pretending that anything quantum entangled photons can do, your classical perception can do as well, again without any evidence or explanation of mechanism. Perception is “effect” not “cause”. An “observer” in quantum experiments is a detector apparatus, and thus how the observation is made, i.e. how the detector works, results in wave or particle like measurements. And when entangled photons are detected/measured, the entangled partner photon is acted upon even over a distance.
But you want to argue that a classical “perceiver” equates to a quantum measurement that instantaneously acts at a distance, but you forget that in your ‘perception at a distance’ argument, you have no entangled photons and two classical (not quantum) causes of the same effect: The physical eye/retina stargazer on earth (who causes the delayed choice of which star to view) and the intangible “perceiver at a distance” who instantaneously causes the emitted photons at the chosen star to be instantaneously “teleported in space-time” to the mind of the stargazer, yet thousands and millions of years in the future of the photons being emitted.
The ‘action at a distance laboratory experiments show, at quantum levels (not in classical phenomena), that a delayed choice affects an earlier observation. Fine. In Wheeler’s gravitational-lensing, double-telescope thought experiment, the choice of how to measure the photon is delayed billions of years – this is simply a hypothetical extrapolation of the double-slit experiments. Also fine.
But for “perception at distance” to work as you and Egnor describe it, the causative delayed choice is what ancient starlight to gaze upon (a classical choice, not a quantum measurement) instantaneously “perceives at a distance” where the starlight photons are newly emitted’, and causes the image to form in the mind of the stargazer. except that image is thousands and millions of years older than the photons from which it was instantaneously observed. Unlike the double slit experiments, the “perception” isn’t earlier than the causitive delayed choice, rather it’s instantaneous with the choice also causitive (as you describe it).
In ‘action at a distance’, the delayed choice of how to detect the photons causes their earlier observation to change.
In Wheeler’s gravitational-lensing thought experiment, the delayed choice of which telescope to look through causes the earlier photon’s path around the galaxy to change.
But in ‘perception at a distance’ (as Egnor and bornagain describe it), the delayed choice of what earlier/ancient starlight is selected by the earth-bound stargazer (the star’s appearance as it was thousands and millions of years ago), allegedly causes (as Egnor and bornagain claim) ‘perception at a distance’ of the corresponding starlight (newly emitted at the stars surface) which will later become the ancient starlight mental image when it reaches earth (even though the perception was instantaneous with the stargazing).
Wheeler didn’t claim selection of which telescope to peer through, somehow instantaneously detects photon’s emitted currently at a star in a way that those photons instantaneously appear back at the telescope, yet also as if thousands and millions of years had passed. Neither do the double-slit experiments claim that changes in detection instantaneously observe photons at the beginning of their path as they’re emitted from the laser.
But that is what Egnor’s and your misapplication of quantum ‘action at a distance’ as a basis for classical ‘perception at a distance’ implies.
I don’t dispute spooky ‘action at a distance’ which has been demonstrated in the laboratory.
I dispute your substituting “perception” for “action”, assuming that classical phenomena behave as quantum phenomena, and presuming two different, simultaneous, instantaneous causes will produce a single, consistent time-delayed effect.
And it isn’t like you and Egnor bothered to think about and explain the mechanisms you implicitly presumed.
Charles, I am done responding to you and will only respond to Torley’s claims against Theism. No offence, but I find you are an unnecessary distraction from my main focus.
bornagain:
Which claims are those? I have never seen Torley make any claim against theism. My understanding is that Torley is a God-believing Catholic philosopher. He may be changing his position a little but you can’t grow unless you change a little.
Your dishonesty is showing, bornagain.
Hi bornagain,
I have been watching some of your videos on the delayed choice experiment, and I have to say that I don’t see how it supports your case.
Here’s an excerpt from the video, Quantum Mechanics – Double Slit Experiment. Is anything real? (Prof. Anton Zeilinger):
Two points:
1. Note that the detectors next to the slits are not conscious observers. They are cameras. The experiment lends no support to the view that a conscious observer is required to collapse the wave function.
2. God is a conscious observer of the whole of reality. Why doesn’t God’s observation of reality cause the wave function to collapse?
I conclude that an act of conscious observation is neither necessary nor sufficient, in itself, to make the wave function collapse. As far as I can tell, the experiment lends no support to either the view that a conscious mind is required to collapse the wave function, or to the view that perception is something we do outside our bodies, as you seem to suppose.
Hi bornagain,
For your information, I am a practicing Catholic. I certainly wouldn’t call myself a good Catholic, but I do believe what the Church teaches. For you to suggest that I am “leaning towards atheism and contemplating giving up Christian Theism altogether” is nothing short of slanderous.
Well, considering that you yourself do not consider denying the omniscience of God, or your own mind, to be making a claim against Theism, then I guess that would explain your inability to see where Dr. Torley has embraced a severely impoverished view of the human mind as far as Christian Theism is concerned,,,
Mapou, I note that you yourself hold tightly to an even more impoverished view of human mind than Dr. Torley currently does.
I guess that explains why you are so gung ho to call anyone a crackpot who dares challenge this largely non-Theistic view.
Do you even believe you have a soul Mapou?
Moreover, I note that Dr. Torley quoted several atheistic physicists (Bell, Leggett, Feynman, Gellmann,) in relation to consciousness and quantum mechanics in order to try to defeat a Theistic view of quantum mechanics just so as to try to defend his fairly non-Christian view of the human mind
If that entire line of argumentation by Dr. Torley, of supporting an atheistic interpretation of Quantum Mechanics in order to try to defend an severely impoverished view of human mind, is not making some fairly large unapologetic claims against Theism, then I don’t know what is.
If you don’t mind, I will wait for Dr. Torley’s response to my comments from 52-56, and give him a chance to defend himself, before I comment any further.
vjtorley, Whether you find yourself a good Catholic or not, I find your claims to be very non-theistic in their overall tone.
Moreover, I am certainly not defending the notion that human consciousness by itself collapses the ‘infinite dimension/infinite information’ wave function. Indeed, I firmly hold that the Mind of God is necessary to complete the collapse of the ‘infinite dimension/infinite information’ wave function.
Moreover, I cited Radin’s experiments on the double slit, and interaction free measurements, to defeat your severely impoverished notion that the mind of man is a ‘caged little mouse’ with absolutely no reach outside his temporal/material body
vjtorley, to be clear, I do not doubt your commitment to Christianity or your sincerity of faith. I am sorry if I, in my brutish debating style, implied otherwise. Indeed, I have seen you, in other areas such as prayer and miracles, give a valiant defense of the Christian faith.
It is just in this area of ‘mind’ that I am having an extremely difficult time reconciling your claims with Christian Theism.
Sorry if I offended you.
Hi bornagain,
Your refusal to apologize for suggesting that I am “leaning towards atheism and contemplating giving up Christian Theism altogether” is baffling, given my express statement that I am a Catholic.
The reason why I quoted “several atheistic physicists (Bell, Leggett, Feynman, Gellmann) in relation to consciousness and quantum mechanics” was NOT, as you claimed, “in order to try to defeat a Theistic view of quantum mechanics,” but rather, in order to show that you had failed to prove that your view of quantum mechanics (which is theistic, but which is by no means the only theistic view) was the correct one.
You have been arguing that quantum mechanics defeats materialism. My answer is: “No, it doesn’t – at least, not yet.”
I note, for the record, that you have failed to answer the two simple points I made in comment #60.
I also note that you have failed to address the arguments in my OP, criticizing Professor Egnor’s view of perception. (Professor Egnor, to his credit, has behaved like a perfect gentleman throughout our exchange of views.)
When you disagree with an argument, you should do it like this: “I think that premise X is wrong, because ……” Which premises in my argument do you reject?
You appear to believe that perception is not a material process. In that case, you disagree with Professor Egnor, who wrote in his original ENV post: “Perception is a wholly material thing — it does have location.”
You insist that I reply to your posts #52-56. Are you kidding me? I just counted around 44 video links on those posts. If you think I am going to sit down and view all 44 of your videos, think again. I work seven days a week, to feed my family. Right now, where I am, it’s 3:39 a.m. (Yes, that’s right.)
You undermine your own credibility by posting so many links. It’s tantamount to information overload. If I were you, I would pick the top three links which I thought supported my case, and use those to make my argument. That would be a good strategy. Three links are enough. Any more than that is overload.
I will however comment briefly on your links in comment #52.
Your first link from arstechnica, “Quantum state may be a real thing” (July 2, 2014), says nothing about materialism. Instead, it criticizes realism. I don’t see how that boosts the case for theism, or against materialism. Not relevant.
The second link, an article by Dr. Bruce Gordon, is at least relevant. The critical premise in his argument is premise P3: “Neither nonlocal quantum correlations nor (in light of nonlocalizability) the identity of the fundamental constituents of material reality can be explained or characterized if the explanatory constraints of materialism are preserved.” This in turn rests on his earlier statement: “The physical world, therefore, is fundamentally nonlocal and permeated with instantaneous connections and correlations. Nonlocalizability is a related phenomenon in relativistic quantum mechanics and quantum field theory in which it is impossible to isolate an unobserved quantum object, such as an electron, in a bounded region of space.” This in turn is justified by the following assertion: “Every time a quantum object or system interacts with another quantum object or system, their existence becomes ‘entangled’ in such a way that what happens to one of them instantaneously affects the other no matter how far apart they have separated.” (Dr. Gordon adds that “no hidden (empirically undetectable) variables can be added to the description of quantum systems exhibiting nonlocal behavior which would explain these instantaneous correlations on the basis of local considerations.”
All this shows is that at the quantum level, individual particles in an entangled system don’t have a well-defined location. No instantaneous information transfer needs to take place. The experiments don’t undermine materialism; all they show is that a particle of matter isn’t always located at some point X.
Even if the results observed were taken to refute materialism, they fail to resolve the paradox I raised at the beginning of my OP, about the squid and the supernova. If the two entities were somehow quantum-entangled, then I could see the relevance. But they aren’t: not even you would say that the squid is entangled with an exploding object in the Large Magellanic Cloud, 160,000 light years away, which it has never previously had contact with. Relevance to my argument: zero.
Your next link is a quote from Eugene Wigner. But if you check the article I cited in comment #25 above ( http://arxiv.org/pdf/1009.2404v2.pdf ), you’ll see that Wigner recanted his views in later life: “Importantly, however, Wigner dropped this opinion completely at his final years (Esfeld, 1999).” Here’s the reference:
Esfeld, M., 1999. “Wigner’s view of physical reality.” Studies In History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies In History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 30, 145–154. See section 2.5 on Wigner’s later change of position. A brief excerpt:
Your next three links relate to quantum teleportation. According to the Wikipedia article on the subject, “quantum teleportation concerns only the transfer of information.” That is, “Quantum teleportation is not a form of transportation, but of communication; it provides a way of transporting a qubit from one location to another, without having to move a physical particle along with it.” What’s more, “[b]ecause it depends on classical communication, which can proceed no faster than the speed of light, it cannot be used for faster-than-light transport or communication of classical bits.” I fail to see how this undercuts materialism, or establishes the possibility of perception occurring outside one’s body. Relevance to my OP: zero.
Your next link is to an article over at ENV by Granville Sewell, on fine-tuning. As I firmly believe in fine-tuning, I can’t see how this counts as an argument against anything which I have ever written. It supports theism, but says nothing about human or animal perception. Relevance to my OP: zero.
Your next kink is to an article by physicist Stephen Barr, titled, “Does Quantum Physics Make it Easier to Believe in God?” Unfortunately, it cites out-dated arguments by von Neumann and Peierls, which I refuted in comment #12 above, by citing the article, Does Quantum Mechanics Require A Conscious Observer? by Dr. Michael Nauenberg. Excerpt:
I might also add that if a conscious observer were required to collapse the wave function, then it should be possible to perform tests in order to empirically determine which animals are conscious (e.g. dogs) and which are not (e.g. sponges), by checking whether they were capable of collapsing wave functions. However, no-one is proposing any such tests, so I cannot take von Neumann’s proposal seriously, on this point.
Your final link is to a quote from Wigner, who, as we’ve seen, recanted his views.
In short: none of the links you cited puts a dent in the case I made in my OP.
It is now 4:44 a.m., and with your kind permission, I would like to retire for the evening.
Dr. Torley, you say BA has refused to apologize. Perhaps you wrote that before you saw 64.
Well I am not sure I understand some of the terminology used and I could be missing some of the finer points. But I think the question largely hinges on whether human consciousness and thought are reducible to material causes in the brain. There are many good reasons for believing that that is not the case.
– Intentionality – The qualitative nature of subjective thought vs the quantitative nature of material events in the brain.
– The information problem – That we experience a continuous flow of coherent, related and often complex thoughts.
– Immutability of self – That we always maintain a sense of self, an identity no matter how the brain changes throughout growth and when subjected to damage.
There are others.
If thought and consciousness are not reducible to material causes in the brain and if they are in fact immaterial, then what people generally mean by perception, i.e. that which we become aware of through the physical senses, is only half the story. In this case, the mind–an immaterial mind–is required to complete the perception. But it makes no sense to say that an immaterial mind is located anywhere in particular. And perhaps it is not subject to space and time constraints at all. Many lines of evidence from near death experiences suggest that it may not be. Even the idea of perception occurring at the senses doesn’t make much sense if we are to believe the many cases of out of body experiences where an unconscious person is witnessing their own resuscitation from above. So the immaterial mind could be anywhere and everywhere. The perception that it is localized in the brain results from its being tethered, somehow, to a distinct brain when the brain is intact.
If there is free will, then the first step in the process of perception would be an act of will which would invoke a shift in attention of the mind and then the senses to some particular entity in the visual plane for example. Notice that you can stare at something but not perceive it. You only perceive it once you exercise a consecration of will. If that is the case, then the chain of perceptual causation, it seems to me, given one’s belief in an immaterial mind and free will, would be: 1) an act of will to direct one’s mind to a particular object, 2) the contact of energy to a sense organ, 3) the routing of the signal to the visual cortex by the brain and within the brain, 4) the immaterial aspect of perception–the processing–of the signal by the mind to abstract meaning from the concrete attributes (forms and colors) of the visual system. So in this case, if one’s will, like the immaterial mind, is unbounded by the physical brain, I have no problem believing that it is possible that perception could begin to occur outside the physical body.
Thanks nkendall.
vjtorley,
As to:
Why do I have the impression you just threw something up to see if it would stick?
Do you seriously have another Theistic version of Quantum Mechanics better than the one that has God creating reality when we look at it? 🙂 If so, and it would ‘blow my mind’ any more than that does, I certainly want to see this alternative Theistic quantum theory that you alluded to.
I’ve already mentioned Anthony Leggett’s atheistic bias where he refused to believe, because of his own philosophical bias, the results of the experiment that he himself was instrumental in establishing.
Excluding evolutionary biology, it would be hard to find a worse example in science of someone letting their metaphysical prejudice against God dictate their refusal to accept an experimental result that they themselves were instrumental in devising since is pointed to God.
Nobel prize winner Anthony Leggett, who developed Leggett’s inequality to try to prove that an objective material reality exists when we are not looking at it, still does not believe the results of the experiment that he himself was integral in devising, even though the inequality was violated by a stunning 80 orders of magnitude.
He seems to have rejected his results simply because the results contradicted the ‘realism’ he believes in (realism is the notion that an objective material reality exists apart from our conscious observation of it) and since the results pointed to Theism.
Here is a comment on the Theistic implications of Leggett’s Inequality
Leggett’s Inequality, the mathematics behind it, and the clear Theistic implications of it, are discussed beginning at the 24:15 minute mark of the following video:
Of note: Leggett’s inequality has now been verified to a stunning 120 standard deviations.
Dr. Torley, how much money do want to bet that, even though it is now verified to a stunning 120 standard deviations, Leggett still disbelieves the results of his own experiment that he was instrumental in devising since it points to God?
Although not as overt as Leggett’s bias was, the same type of philosophical bias against God is found in atheist John Bell.
John Stewart Bell, of Bell Inequality fame, remained a ‘realist’ even after non-locality had proven local realism false (or so the story goes).
There is apparently still a lot of controversy over non-locality and its implications for ‘realism’
Murray Gell-mann, a secular Jew by upbringing, is a fairly well known leading atheist.
Richard Feynman’s bias against God is a bit more interesting than the rest of the atheists you quoted.
Feynman had to ‘brush infinity under the rug’ to unite quantum mechanics and special relativity
Feynman expresses his unease with “brushing infinity under the rug” here:
I don’t know about Feynman, but as for myself, being a Christian Theist, I find it rather comforting to know that it takes an ‘infinite amount of logic to figure out what one stinky tiny bit of space-time is going to do’:
bornagain:
You are not an honest debater, bornagain. Maybe you need to be reborn all over again. See you around.
“You are not an honest debater”
HUH?? You’ve repeatedly claimed that, 1. ‘There can be no thinking without the brain’ and 2. that you think God is not omniscient.
If I misrepresented any of those two claims of yours, I’ll be more than happy to retract. Which of those claims do you deny?
Vjtorley,
Really??? Besides reality not existing until we look at it,
,,, Besides reality not existing until we look at it, the view that everything can be explained solely by resort to matter-energy space-time, i.e. reductive materialistic, causes, is compatible with quantum non-locality how exactly?
As to:
And those two simple points were:
The first point is addressed here:
At the 16:34 minute mark of the following video, the reason why detector interference does not explain quantum wave collapse in the double slit is explained (i.e. observation changes the fundamental nature of what we are observing not just the activity of what we are observing):
The second question of, “Why doesn’t God’s observation of reality cause the wave function to collapse?” is addressed at the 16:00 minute mark of the following video:
as to:
As stated previously, I reject this materialistic premise,
The reason I reject that materialistic premise is that your materialistic premise is similar to Einstein’s ‘looking at the moon’ materialistic premise which was refuted:
Dr. Torley, now I agree that consciousness is associated with my brain/body, but to limit it solely to my brain/body as you are trying to argue, is simply a bridge too far as far as Christian Theism is concerned IMHO. i.e. your mind is a ‘mouse in a cage’ in your brain in your view!
I suggest that you find some common ground with Dr. Egnor so that you might have a more realistic model of mind.
As to Dr Egnor believing perception is a ‘wholly material thing’, although I do not know the context of that quote, I disagree with that statement as it is written.
As to: ‘information overload’ ,, 44 links,,, I work,,, – VJT
Sorry for that. Quantum mechanics is a fairly large field to cover and I felt that the argument for God from consciousness is best supported as a ‘cumulative case’ in which each piece builds on the other.
As to my “Quantum state may be a real thing” (July 2, 2014)’ link, contrary to your dismissal, it is relevant for showing that the trend in evidence has been consistently growing against those who prefer a materialistic view of reality. Thus it is very relevant to set the tone for the evidence that was to follow in my post.
As to Wigner changing his beliefs later in life, in your quote, you left out the driving philosophical reason for him changing his view:
First off, I know of no ‘amendment of the Schrödinger equation’ that has been adopted that has solved the measurement problem. Perhaps it was tried and rejected since it did not work. I have no idea why the ‘amendment’ is never discussed since the measurement problem is still very much alive and well:
Secondly, Wigner’s solipsism objection, which was the driving force for him to philosophically reject a ‘consciousness’ view of quantum mechanics and search, (unsuccessfully), for another solution was touched upon by Richard Conn Henry when the Leggett’s results came in.
Apparently, that leaves only Theism seeing as solipsism was rightly rejected as being unreasonable by Wigner.
As to teleportation: First off teleportation is achieved by ‘non-local’ quantum entanglement, which falsifies materialism in its own right. Secondly, a photon is ‘destroyed’ in teleportation experiments which violates conservation of matter-energy principles in classical mechanics, but verifies conservation of information theorems in Quantum mechanics.
Finding information to be fundamental, and matter-energy to be derivative from quantum information, is indeed a major falsification of materialism.
As to your claim from your 201i cite that Barr, von Neumann, and Peierls, are refuted.
Actually the key comment that you cited to supposedly refute Barr, von Neumann, and Peierls has now itself been refuted in 2012:
Your cite’s claim:
and yet we find:
Perhaps you want to drop your 2011 cite Dr. Torley? or get your cite to update?
As to testing consciousness in other animals, I find that to be disingenuous threshold for you to make right now since you have refused to honestly address Radin’s real time evidence about human consciousness having an effect on the double slit in the first place, which I have referenced several times now:
bornagain,
Sincerely, charitably, the problem you face, and keep linking past, is the irrefutable and irreconcilable differences between the mental images produced by:
– “perception at a distance”, which would be high resolution, present-time imagery due to having been perceived at the time and location of their emission, versus,
– “perception in the body”, which resolution is constrained by human eyeball optics and which images are aged by the amount of time required for light to travel from the emission source.
We would instantaneously always have at least two images to mentally reconcile, the one presented by “perception at a distance” and the one presented by human optics – and they wouldn’t match because they are two different images, perceived at different times from different vantage points.
If “perception at a distance” really worked the way you argue:
– we wouldn’t need microscopes, binoculars and telescopes, or even reading glasses.
– we would see a nebula when we look at the center “star” in Orion’s sword instead of just one star.
– we wouldn’t see supernovas because at their source, light is no longer emitted.
But we do need microscopes, binoculars, telescopes, and reading glasses; we don’t see nebula’s unaided, we do see the earler appearance of stars that have long-since gone supernova.
In fact, we are always looking back in time everywhere we gaze: looking back millions of years when we gaze at stars, 8 minutes when we look at the sun, and about 1 second when we look at the moon. The appearance of the moon doesn’t change much in 1 second, or the sun in 8 minutes, but aging stars and supernovas change beyond recognition between when ‘perception at a distance’ would view their photons as emitted and when those same photons arrive (if they arrive at all) at the human eye.
And our eyes do need mechanical aids to bring objects into visual focus; we don’t see things as they actually exist at their emission surfaces; our mental images are impaired by all kinds of obstruction and attenuation between our eyes and those objects. Obstructions that wouldn’t matter if “perception at a distance” really worked the way you argue.
This isn’t about consciousness or quantum mechanics. This is about ‘perception in the body’ images that wouldn’t match ‘perception at a distance’ images.
I have no doubt you grasp the inconsistencies about those images, they expose the crux of your argument, and until you intellectually engage with those specific inconsistencies, your arguments (and any links) are not going to gain any traction.
Charles, I don’t even read your posts as I am solely focused on Torley’s responses. As I said yesterday, no offence, but you are a needless distraction to my main focus. (and people, mainly Darwinists, tell me all the time that they don’t read my posts)
bornagain @ 73
lol – [silence], he explained.
And that would be turning UD into a link farm?
“What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.” Thomas Hewitt Key.
Mapou, your argument got a brief mention in Egnor’s response to Dr. Torley (you have to go to ENV to read it in full)
as to:
To get a little better grasp on this ‘relativistic constraint’ and ‘Perception is always of now’ idea, it may, (or may not), be useful to reflect on special relativity.
In special relativity since time, as we understand it, does not pass at the speed of light then, from the photon’s point of view of time and distance, the photon travelled from the supernova to earth instantly. In other words, it is always ‘now’ for a photon at the speed of light no matter how far it has travelled in the universe.
Egnor is simply digging himself into a deeper hole. His desperate appeal to “relativistic constraint” is just smoke and mirrors coming from a desperate con man caught in the act. He has no argument. Egnor has built a crackpot’s castle in the air. It’s still time for him to do the right thing and admit he was wrong. If he does, I will take back all the bad things I said about him. Otherwise, the powers that be at the Discovery Institute should do the right thing and ask him politely, if possible, to leave.
This is my last comment in this thread. Have fun.
Vy,
If you claim that the Bible makes it abundantly clear that God is omniscient
How do you explain these verses?
Gen 3:8
“And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the coolc of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. 9But the LORD God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?”d 10And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.” 11He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” 12The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.” 13Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
If God is omniscient, why was He asking where Adam was hiding. He didn’t know or…?
God obviously didn’t know that Adam ate from the forbidden tree (that somehow made him aware that he was naked) and thought that someone actually told him that he was naked.
How do you explain all that?
Hi everyone,
I’d like to make a few brief remarks on Professor Egnor’s latest reply to my post.
Professor Egnor objects to my proposal that in perception, the object “reaches out” to the subject on the grounds that it is “difficult to understand in an inanimate object.” However, as I explained in my post, the notion of a physical field associated with the object goes a long way towards dispelling this problem. I also discussed how objects can propagate their influences across space-time, so that “objects can … exercise their powers in remote locations, even when they are no more,” as I put it. An object cannot be spatially or temporally disconnected from its own actions, but it can be temporally disconnected from the effects of its actions, which may outlive it.
Egnor also objects to my account on the grounds that “[i]f perception still takes place at the sensory organ, one has no claim to knowledge about the external object, whether it reaches out or otherwise.” I addressed this objection in my post, where I explained how I can have veridical knowledge of a star that I see in the sky:
Egnor also asks: “How can one distinguish France from Atlantis, if perception is merely of things inside our skin?” That’s easy. First, Atlantis isn’t doing anything to my skin. The only evidence I have for its existence is an old tale told to Plato by an Egyptian priest named Solon.
Second, even when I view France from afar (either directly, as I might do if I were an astronaut in an orbiting space station, or indirectly, when I watch a television program on France), the picture of France which I’m getting is a coherent and consistent one, which involves the exercise of the perceived object’s characteristic powers. For instance, the country’s having a consistent shape when viewed from space is due to the power of the land of France to reflect different wavelengths of light from the sea surrounding it, enabling us to distinguish its outline, which does not change over time (at least, not appreciably).
Finally, I might point out that Egnor’s own account of knowledge is self-contradictory. When discussing our perception of a star that’s not there anymore (e.g. a supernova), he distinguishes between perception and intellection (or understanding), on the grounds that “perception is knowing that an object is; intellection is knowing what an object is.” But the problem is that in the case of the supernova, the star is no longer there. Indeed, Egnor himself admits that “we can’t know the star is not there by perception, because such information cannot be transmitted faster than light.”
So what’s his solution? He writes: “By perception, the star does exist. By intellection, the star does not exist… We perceive things inside time, in the present. We intellect things outside of time.”
I’m afraid that proposal simply won’t work. Professor Egnor has steadfastly maintained in his posts that when we perceive an object, we reach out to it. We encounter it. We make immediate contact with it. By definition, we cannot reach out to, or encounter, or make immediate contact with that which does not exist.
Professor Egnor also asserts that “perception is constrained by time but not distance.” One might legitimately ask: why?
There is, however, one point which Egnor makes in his response, with which I wholeheartedly concur. He writes: “Einstein showed that intellectual knowledge of reality was different knowledge than perceptual knowledge of reality.” That is true. If I can perceive an object which my intellect understands to no longer exist, then perceiving and understanding cannot be the same thing. Of course, Aristotle demonstrated the same point in his De Anima when he argued that since my perception of the Sun is of a ball less than a foot across, while my intellect tells me that the Sun is bigger than the Earth, it must follow that perceiving and understanding are two different activities. Still, the case of the supernova is an even more striking illustration, and Einstein’s theory of relativity further heightens the difference between the two ways of knowing.
Bornagain,
What are you trying to prove with your quantum mechanics and consciousness claims? That quantum mechanics; specifically quantum entanglement, prove the existence of an immaterial consciousness or rather immaterial soul?
BTW: There is not need for conscious observer in the experiments you’ve referred to. The act of measurement or an unconscious observer is enough.
Hi bornagain,
Thank you for your comments, and for your apology in comment #64.
Once again, I’d like to reiterate my point about posting only a few links to support your case. I can’t tell you how many times (it must be hundreds) I’ve thought about replying to your posts, but decided not to do so, simply because you gave me too much to read. I don’t have that amount of time. What’s more, there’s no need for you to post so many links, when two or three good ones are enough to make your point.
I decided to have a look at the 4-part Youtube talk by Bernard Haisch, “SSE Talks – Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness,” which you referenced.
In part 3 of the talk at 1:10, Haisch makes the startling admission that he does not understand a diagram in New Scientist magazine which explains the Leggett inequality. That hardly engenders confidence. Despite this uncertainty, Haisch is breezily confident that the observer has to be a conscious observer, and not just a measuring instrument – although the argument he gives to support his assertion is an old one put forward by von Neumann in 1932, which I have already refuted in my comments above.
Haisch also appears ill-at-ease when answering a question from a member of the audience about what happens on a lifeless planet. If it’s a planet which we never discover, then his interpretation would entail that nothing happens on that planet. That’s absurd.
Or take a lifeless planet closer to home: the planet Venus, which Mariner II discovered in 1962 to have a surface temperature of over 800 degrees Fahrenheit, despite the fact that many scientists believed previously that it was much cooler and capable of supporting life. On Haisch’s account, Mariner II’s observations, when relayed to Earth and picked up by conscious NASA staff, actually created the back-history for Venus, turning it into an inhospitable planet, whose surface would be hot enough to melt lead. Did we choose to make this measurement of Venus? That’s absurd. The only person I know of who predicted a very hot Venus was Velikovsky – and he got a lot of other things wrong about Venus (e.g. he thought its atmosphere was rich in petroleum).
I checked out what Wikipedia had to say on the Leggett inequality, and it made a telling point:
Here’s the link to the last paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.5133
In the conclusion, the authors write:
I conclude that so far, quantum mechanics has failed to put a significant dent in realism, at the macroscopic scale. And I might add that prior to the 20th century, no Christian (with the possible exception of Bishop Berkeley) would have predicted these bizarre, counterintuitive results. Prior to that date, all Christians were realists about the external world: they believed it was there, regardless of whether we were looking at it or not. Remember Samuel Johnson’s remark about kicking a stone being enough to refute Berkeley? Johnson was a Christian.
“although the argument he gives to support his assertion is an old one put forward by von Neumann in 1932, which I have already refuted in my comments above.”
your refutation was refuted. It does not reflect well on you to repeat something that was refuted empirically.
as to your comment about the length of my posts.
http://idioms.thefreedictionar.....hould+talk!
Hi bornagain,
Finally, I’d like to address the paper by Dean Radin which you cite. I’d refer you to the following response by Massimiliano Sassoli de Bianchi: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1207.0804v1.pdf . It’s titled, “Quantum measurements are physical processes. Comment on ‘Consciousness and the double-slit interference pattern: Six experiments,’ By Dean Radin et al. [Physics Essays 25, 2 (2012)].”
De Bianchi is quite open-minded about psi, but in his abstract, he writes: “It is emphasized [in this paper – VJT] that quantum mechanics doesn’t need any psychophysical ingredient to explain the measurement processes, and therefore parapsychologists shouldn’t resort to the latter to support the possibility of psychokinesis, but search for more convincing explanations.”
In his conclusion, he states:
Here’s a paper by Aerts which you might like to read: http://www.vub.ac.be/CLEA/aert.....odPhys.pdf .
In conclusion: at the present time, science has not established that conscious observers are needed to make measurements of quantum systems that will collapse wave functions in a state of superposition. And even if this were true at the sub-microscopic level, it need not hold true for all or most systems at the macroscopic level.
Finally, I might point out that the conscious observer won’t help explain our perception of an exploding supernova, for two reasons. First, the Leggett-Garg inequality applies to systems which are quantum-entangled. However, I am certainly not entangled with any distant supernova, so that argument doesn’t apply here. Second, even if the first person to observe the supernova were capable of reaching out in space to collapse its wave-function, what about the second, third and subsequent observers? They don’t reach out in space, because the wave-function has already collapsed. Consequently, their observations must be due to the object reaching out to them, rather than the other way round as Professor Egnor suggests in his articles.
Well, it’s 4:30, and I shall stop here, or my brains will fry from lack of sleep.
The measurement problem is very much alive and well
The Measurement Problem in quantum mechanics – (Inspiring Philosophy) – 2014 video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB7d5V71vUE
“Your refutation was refuted” – where and by whom?
vjtorley, Dr. Egnor’s claim that we perceive to an object instead of in our head, is born out semi-empirically.
As already mentioned in post 77, from the photon’s point of view, the photon is emitted from the star’s surface and, due to special relativity, is instantly perceived by the retina of an observer’s eye.
i.e. due to special relativity, from the photons point of view there is ZERO time delay between emission from the stars surface and perception by a retina.
Moreover, quantum mechanics tells us that the ‘path taken by the photon is not an element of reality‘.
Thus, Dr. Egnor’s claim that we are directly perceiving at the surface of the star is not refuted by either special relativity or Quantum Mechanics but, IMHO, finds fairly strong support from both those disciplines.
i.e. As far as the photon itself is concerned, it arrived instantly. As far as quantum mechanics is concerned, it is impossible to say exactly what the photon was doing between to the time it was emitted and was observed.
i.e. There is no empirical contradiction to Dr. Egnor’s claim!
Dr. Torley as to this claim of yours:
When you say the star ‘projects its own powers’ you are illegitimately endowing agent causality, which properly belongs to Theism, to a star.
This illegitimate endowment of agent causality to things which do possess agency is rampant throughout physics and even more rampant in biology. As to the illegitimate ‘borrowing’ of agent causality from theists, CS Lewis joked:
Here is a bit more in depth look at Lewis’s argument:
As mentioned, in biology the illegitimate ‘borrowing’ from theists is much worse:
Back to the star ‘projecting its own powers’. It is interesting to learn how a photon is emitted from a atom.
i.e. whenever a photon is absorbed or emitted from an atom, its absorption or emission is accompanied by a mysterious, ‘instantaneous’, quantum leap, (not to be confused with the 1980s TV show 🙂 ).
There is no materialistic explanation as to why the quantum leap is instantaneous.
All this brings us back to you improperly invoking agent causality to a star.
The reason why a star emits photons, (or for why any other action takes place in this universe), is not because things have some sort of agent causality within themselves to ‘project their powers’, as is illegitimately assumed, but is because God causes the star to emit the photon.
It is amazing to see just how well Aquinas’ First Way describes the basics of quantum wave collapse:
Verse:
“Giant squid, with their large, powerful eyes, must have seen it, too.”
There is no reason to believe there is any perception of ANYTHING vis a vis squids eyes exposed to photons from supernovae. To assert otherwise is to assert something unfalsifiable.
To assume dogs can perceive, with their superior hearing, music as anything resembling intentional construction, is to assume another unfalsifiable position. And I’m familiar with one video of a dog pounding piano keys and howling simultaneously.
Egnor’s thinking is correct in at least one regard, although I don’t know if he explicitly stated it. The principle put forth of perception occurring in brain tissue is unfalsifiable.
Dr. Egnor argues:
1) We only know of supernova whose light & radiation of their explosion/collapse have reached us. Every star we see could already have gone supernova and we won’t know (we won’t perceive, nor can we “intellect” their demise – well, aside from perceptions of where the star is on its Hertzprung-Russell sequence) until the light and radiation of its explosion/collapse reach us. Our own sun could have gone supernova as I write this, and we won’t know (won’t perceive) for another 8 minutes. In the interim, all is “perceived” as it was, and we have no additional information upon which to “intellect” any change of state in any stellar object.
2) Intellection, being a thought process, is based on past or current perception and knowledge. We can not “intellect” what we don’t perceive (willful ignorance and fiction aside). Intellection necessarily follows perception. Intellection is not the same as guessing. We can guess any particular star has already gone supernove in contradiction to the steady light we continue to perceive from it, but a “guess” is not knowing, a guess is not a confirmed fact. Aside from imagination or writing fiction, intellection follows perception.
3) The only way we can know a star is not there or no longer there is when the light and radiation of its demise reaches us. Guessing aside, neither can we “intellect” or understand the star’s demise in absence of any light and radiation evidence to the contrary.
4) Yes, astrophysics and past perceptions of stars that go supernova inform us they cease to exist in a shorter time than it takes for the star’s light to reach us. That is why point 1) above is true. Every supernova occurs before its light reaches us. But that is not special. Eveything external occurs before its light reaches us. Events occur in time and the light from those events travels at a finite speed. The variable is how far away was the event and thus how long before its light reaches us: Millions of years for a supernova in Andromeda, 8 minutes for our own sun, or 1 second for our Moon to be struck.
Perception is not bounded by relativistic contraints. Relativistic contraints begin to apply when two or more observers are in motion relative to each other at a few percent of the speed of light or more. There is no relativistic constraint on the perception of pilots flying two airplanes in formation, or two cars travelling in parallel on the highway, or even two clocks travelling on the same spaceship regardless of velocity. Where the motion of a stellar object is moving relative to an earth observer, we can see it blueshifted or redshifted depending on direction and the degree of shift informs us of the rate of approach or recession.
We perceive the star (even if it has already exploded) because its light prior to explosion continues to reach us.
Again, relativity has nothing to do with perceiving distant stars or not. Perception of any stellar object is limited by the intensity of its light and the distance it must travel to us. No light, no perception, even if it is 1 mile away. At the edge of the presently “perceptible” universe, we can’t perceive single stars (they aren’t bright enough), even the most distant supernova we can see with the Hubble took 10B years for its light to reach us, and light from the most distant galaxies has taken 13B years to reach us.
By perception, those objects exist, even out to 13B lightyears, and by “intellection” those objects haven’t changed. Intellection can not inform us of objects that no longer exist until after we perceive evidence of their demise. No evidence of their demise, nothing on which intellection can base a change of status. Intellection can “predict” when a star might go supernova, but such predictions are based again on past perceptions (observations and astrophysics) of where the star is on the Hertzsprung-Russell sequence.
We can only intellect what we have perceived. There was no “Big Bang” to intellect about until 1963 when Penzias & Wilson accidently (they weren’t intellecting for it) discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation. Their discovery was an accident of perception. They and their instrument were receiving radiation they didn’t expect. Subsequent to their perception we now “intellect” the Big Bang.
Neither can we intellect the future. If we could, we’d aready know where to point our telescopes to catch the next supernova, and we’d all be winners in Vegas. Oh, we can predict or guess (or even gamble), but as noted earlier, that intellection is based on past perception. And as any trader will tell you, past perception is no guarantee of future intellection.
It is also worth noting that Dr. Egnor seems to have abandoned his phrase “perception at a distance”, and left us to presume his current terminology abides by standard definitions.
Dr. Torley, of related note to post 88 and the “First Mover” argument:
vjtorley, for you to believe that realism is true you must believe that there is a world ‘out there’ that carries on regardless of how we choose to consciously observe it.
Indeed, in your present disagreement with Dr. Egnor, you adamantly hold that we are merely helpless, passive, conscious observers, trapped, as it were, inside the cage of our skulls.
Contextuality falsifies your belief that we are merely passive observers.
VJT you state:
Haisch did not perform the experiment. Zeilinger and company did. Zeilinger certainly does not support your belief in naive realism and he certainly understands the chart(s) perfectly well!
You go on to state
Here is the quote you cited from your imagined 2011 refutation of von Neumann and company,
Yet, here is the 2012 empirical refutation of your imagined 2011 refutation of von Neumann and company:
i.e. your imagined refutation of quantum mechanics is empirically refuted!
Don’t feel bad, Quantum Mechanics has a habit of crushing people’s cherished materialistic preconceptions about reality.
You then go on to make some rather bizarre claims about Haisch saying that Venus was not hot until we sent a space craft and loaded a back history (or something to that effect). Seeing as you offered no direct quotes that I could tell, I don’t know if you are putting words in Haisch’s mouth, and if your are just setting up a strawmen to knock down or what.
Regardless of whether it was strawman of your own making or not, your criticism sounds very similar to the earlier one you had where you asked:
That question is addressed at the 16:00 minute mark of the following video:
You then go on to basically concede that Leggett’s inequality does prove that reality does not exist when we look at it, but you then try to save your materialistic view of the world by saying that those quantum effects only apply at the micro scale and do not apply at the macro scale.
Yet, despite whatever comfort for your materialistic beliefs you may have had by appealing to the macro scale, the fact of the matter is that every macroscopic object in the universe is composed of these microscopic particles that strictly obey quantum principles and tell us that reality does not exist if we are not looking at it.
In you trying to save naive realism for the macro scale whilst completely forgetting you must build on a micro scale foundation in the first place before you even have a macro scale to refer to, you are much like the coyote in the road runner cartoons who finds out far too late that he has both feet planted firmly in mid air.
VJT, you then go on to state:
That is a telling confession. You admit that the results are ‘bizarre, counterintuitive’, (for your materialistic view of reality I might add), right after you had just tried to say that the findings from quantum mechanics presented no problem for you.
As to your comment that all Christians were ‘realist’, actually Christians, if they were and currently are serious in the beliefs, believe not only that God created this universe but that God also sustains the universe in its continual existence.
For you to now be arguing that God does not in fact sustain this universe in its continual existence, as you are in fact currently trying to argue against, is to in fact be arguing for a Deistic point of view instead of a Theistic point of view.
As to your comment about kicking a rock proving that realism is true, can you please tell me exactly what the most solid ‘thing’ is in the rock?
To save you time, it is not the mass or energy that are the most solid things in the rock, or some imagined billiard ball type particle, but the most solid thing in the rock (and in atoms) are the universal laws that govern the mass and energy of the rock.
Those laws in the rock have not varied one iota since God created them at the beginning of the universe.
At the 28:09 minute mark of the following video, Dr Hugh Ross speaks of the 7 places in the bible that speak of unchanging universal constants.
I, for one, am seriously enjoying the exchange.
I can appreciate how the world has changed since Descartes. I love the delving into the history of ideas.
What I find intriguing about the Thomist/Aristotelian position is the response of “problem, what problem”?
It challenges the underlying assumptions/premises of the modern philosophy.
And that’s a good thing.
Hats off to VJT and ME.
VJT: Well, it’s 4:30, and I shall stop here, or my brains will fry from lack of sleep.
The perception of a frying brain is located at the object of your perception.
Sorry, but brains do not fry from lack of sleep.
How many brains do you have?
😉
VJT, you go on to state:
First off, I note that in your quotes that you have cited that they have not claimed the psychophysical effects that Radin and company consistently found in his double slit experiments were not real. But they only claimed (falsely) that the measurement problem is solved by “hidden-measurement” (which sounds eerily similar to Einstein’s now refuted “hidden variables” conjecture.)
Yet, regardless of whether they imagine that they have solved the measurement problem or not (which, IMHO, they certainly have not), I note that ANY psychophysical effects found for the consciousness of humans outside of their material bodies falsifies your specific claim against Dr. Egnor that we are merely passive observers and that our minds are not able to ‘perceive at a object’. i.e. In order to have an active effect outside the body, as Radin found, it is first necessary that a mind must first be able to ‘perceive’ outside the body. i.e. The psychophysical effect assumes that perception outside the body is real.
So to re-cite Radin’s experiments that falsify YOUR specific claim against Dr. Egnor:
Of related note:
Hi bornagain,
Thank you for your comments. I’d like to bring our exchange of views to a civilized close, so this will be my last series of posts on this thread.
I’d like to begin with the objection I raised earlier: if God is observing the physical world, then why doesn’t His act of observation cause the wave function to collapse?
You respond by referring me to the following video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=4C5pq7W5yRM#t=959 . (It would have been nice if you had transcribed it.) The author states (16:24):
This is rank heresy. There is no other name for it.
The Bible does not teach that matter is an illusion; that’s Hindu nonsense, which the philosopher Shankara espoused, with his teaching that the changeable world is maya or illusion. The Bible teaches us, on the contrary, that the world is quite real: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth” (Genesis 1:1). On the first day, God formed light; on the second day, a firmament; on the third day, dry land and vegetation; on the fourth day, the sun, moon and stars; on the fifth, fish and sea monsters to populate the sea and birds to populate the air; and on the sixth day, beasts of the field, cattle, and things that creep and crawl on the earth, and finally man. Notice that all these things existed before the first man observed them. These things were created not by our observation of them, but by God’s decree.
The author of the video you cite declares that “apart from our experience, there is nothing that needs to be observed” and that God “doesn’t need to see an independent experience of the physical world.” Wrong. If God’s experience of the physical world were limited to what He sees through our eyes, then His knowledge would be likewise limited. Scripture, however, declares otherwise. It portrays God as present in every part of the universe, and as seeing everything. Psalm 139:7-8 declares: “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.” In Job 39:1-2, God asks Job: “Do you know when the mountain goats give birth? Do you watch when the doe bears her fawn? Do you count the months till they bear? Do you know the time they give birth?” God knows all these things which humans in the time of Job had never observed.
In the book of Genesis, God creates things (not uncollapsed wave functions), including animals and plants. They do not come to be when man observes them, but when God decrees them. The view that reality does not exist independently of our observation of it flatly contradicts Scripture. It is not an argument for the Judeo-Christian God; at best, it is an argument for idealism, and for a God Whose knowledge of the world is limited to what we know of it.
More to come…
Hi bornagain,
I’d like to say a little more about realism. You write:
Your remarks here betray a fundamental misunderstanding on your part. By “realism,” I simply mean the doctrine that things continue to exist regardless of whether we [i.e. human beings] are perceiving them or not. This definition says nothing whatsoever about God, so it is quite compatible with the teaching of Hebrews 1:3, that God sustains all things by His Word. Realism is certainly not a deistic view. In saying that the early Christians were realists, I mean that they believed God had made things that existed independently of our awareness of them. That much is indisputable, as anyone familiar with the early Church Fathers will attest.
I’d also like to add that my own views are not so very far from your own. I have frequently declared that we are characters in a storybook written by God – although I now think that a better metaphor for the world is an interactive video game rather than a storybook, as some of the characters in the game (namely humans) are capable of interacting with the game Creator (God). What’s more, humans have libertarian free will, which means that even from a God’s-eye point of view, their responses are unpredictable: hence I maintain that God needs to be (timelessly) informed of their choices, like a watcher on a high hill. Since humans often act upon inanimate objects as well as interacting with each other, this means that things must be capable of making an impression on God’s consciousness, so that God can know what happens to them. Along with Origen and (possibly) Boethius as well, I believe that God is capable of timelessly perceiving the world, by virtue of powers that things exercise, by which they can make Him aware of what befalls them. God has deliberately built these powers into things, so there is no loss of Divine Sovereignty.
So I would say that things are indeed real, but totally dependent on the Mind of God. They do not, however, depend in any way on the human mind.
More to come…
Hi bornagain,
I’d now like to address the measurement problem. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say in its article, Von Neumann–Wigner interpretation:
Just 6%. Hardly a consensus view. Now you may argue that the consensus is wrong, but before you do, ask yourself this: what do the privileged 6% know, that the other 94% don’t?
This isn’t like the biological case for Intelligent Design, where the case for design rests on long-standing problems (e.g. protein-folding; origin of the first replication-translation system; Cambrian explosion) whose difficulty is admitted by materialists and ID proponents alike, and where there is a lack of an adequate cause, apart from intelligence. Here, the scientists didn’t think there was much of a problem. If you have a look at the survey by Schlosshauer et al., you’ll see that in question 5, the respondents (who were 33 participants of a conference on the foundations of quantum mechanics) were polled on the measurement problem, and here’s what they stated:
The measurement problem is:
a. a pseudo-problem: 27%
b. solved by decoherence: 15%
c. solved/will be solved in another way: 39%
d. a severe difficulty threatening quantum mechanics: 24%
e. none of the above: 27%.
Some respondents gave more than one answer; that’s why the percentages don’t add up to 100%.
The authors of the paper comment:
Re von Neumann’s formulation, here is the quote you cited from your imagined 2011 refutation of von Neumann and company,
In response, you point to a “2012 empirical refutation” of my “imagined 2011 refutation of von Neumann and company” and you cite two papers. You focus on the last sentence in the above quote, which refers to the recording taking place by a time irreversible process, and you quote physicist Anton Zeilinger as saying: “Within a naïve classical world view, quantum mechanics can even mimic an influence of future actions on past events.” Sorry, but that quote in no way undermines my point that the act of recording takes place by a time irreversible process.
You also cite a physicist named Asher Peres, writing in 2000, as declaring: “If we attempt to attribute an objective meaning to the quantum state of a single system, curious paradoxes appear: quantum effects mimic not only instantaneous action-at-a-distance but also, as seen here, influence of future actions on past events, even after these events have been irrevocably recorded.” (Emphasis mine – VJT.)
But Brukner, Aspelmeyer and Zeilinger refute this very quote by Peres (which they cite) in the conclusion of their 2005 paper, Complementarity and Information in “Delayed-choice for Entanglement Swapping” (Foundations of Physics, Vol. 35, No. 11, November 2005, pp. 1909-1919):
In short: your attempt to show that von Neumann’s measurement still stands is less than convincing. I’m not positively saying that it’s wrong; but it certainly wouldn’t convince even an open-minded atheist.
More to come…
Hi bornagain,
Finally, I’d like to discuss Radin’s 2012 paper. You write:
First, let me note that Professor Egnor would not agree with you. In his latest article, he writes that “I can’t perceive an object without some kind of physical encounter with it.” He also writes: “If perception is not of real objects, how can we know anything outside of our skin?” Finally, he declares: “We perceive the star (we see that it is by our sense organs).” (Bold emphases are mine – VJT.) So his realistic philosophy of matter and his view that perception takes place by means of sense organs stands in stark contrast with your belief in PSI.
Regarding psi, I personally have an open mind. But here’s my point: even if perception outside the body is real, the fact remains that normal perception is by means of the sense organs. Egnor is not arguing for psi, or for non-realism, as you suppose: instead, he is claiming that in the normal act of seeing a star, my eye reaches out to the star itself. That’s the claim that I’m objecting to. It seems obvious (for reasons I discussed in my post) that when I view a star, it is the star which is reaching out to me (by means of the photons it emits), and not I to it. My normal, sensory act of perception takes place in my eye, nervous system and brain, and not at the surface of the star. If it did take place at the surface of the star, then why am I unable to answer other questions about the star that an observer located right next to it would be able to answer (e.g. how many planets does it have?)
Lastly, I’d like to respond to your assertion that I am imputing “agent causality” to mere things. You write:
Bornagain, you need to do some reading about secondary causality. Almost every Christian thinker who has ever lived acknowledges that creatures, including stars, are capable of causally interacting with other things. Stars gravitationally attract the planets that orbit them, for instance, and they also heat those planets. In so doing, they are exercising their causal powers over those planets. These powers are God-given powers, and stars would be utterly unable to attract or heat anything if they were not maintained in existence by God, but only an occasionalist would assert that stars have no causal powers at all, and that it is really God (and only God) Who is gravitationally attracting and heating those planets, and that the star does nothing.
I might add that I am well aware that laws don’t “do” anything. What I maintain is that natural objects can do things, acting in accordance with laws, by virtue of their God-given causal powers.
Why do things obey these laws? Because the laws define the warp-and-woof of their causal powers, which God endows them with, and which they could not exercise even for a moment without God, since the laws of Nature are not descriptive (as commonly thought) but prescriptive: they are Nature’s “dos and don’ts,” which define the way in which things ought to behave – and a prescription requires the existence of a Prescriber.
And on that note, I will close this exchange. You might like to read these two articles, too: here (a very lucid explanation of secondary causation by A. Freddoso) and here (more in-depth). If you have any comments to add, you are welcome to do so.
VJT, hoping for a civilized close then almost immediately leveling an accusation a ‘rank heresy’ is certainly NOT trying to bring things to a ‘civilized close’.
Regardless of that inflammatory accusation, let’s try to calmly deconstruct what you stated in regards to heresy:
you state:
I, like you, am troubled by the word ‘illusion’ as is it is often carelessly tossed about by Quantum Physicists whenever they refer to naive materialistic concepts.
I personally feel that a much more appropriate description would be to say that matter-energy, space-time, are a secondary reality that is dependent on, and derivative from, the primary reality of God’s Mind for their continued existence.
As pointed out before in the ‘First Mover’ argument, Aquinas certainly argues as such. Indeed the bible itself is replete with verses testifying to the fact that God’s reality is the primary reality and that material reality is secondary to, and dependent on, Him for its continued existence.
Off the top of my head, here are a few verses testifying to that fact.
Thus, contrary to your accusation of ‘rank heresy’, the fact of the matter is that it is you yourself who is in great error by insisting that God is not necessary for material reality to continually exist. In fact, much like your argument that mind of man is severely limited to a cage inside the skull, I find your argument for basically a Deistic view of the universe, where God created the universe and then walked away, to be, regardless of whether you consider yourself to be a ‘good Catholic or not, the view that reeks of ‘rank heresy’ as far as Christian Theism is concerned.
Moreover, for something to even be considered ‘real’, not ‘illusory’, by us in the first place, it is first necessary for us to be conscious of it. i.e. Without consciousness there is no reality for us to consider period. i.e. Consciousness is primary and matter must be, of logical necessity, derivative from consciousness for such a concept as ‘reality’ to even be able to be reflected on by us in the first place.
In fact, you yourself once wrote an article on how several Nobel laureates rejected Darwinian evolution precisely because the materialistic premises of Darwinian evolution could not possibly explain consciousness.
Here are a couple comments in that regards.
Of related interest to my contention that Mind of God is the primary reality and that material reality is dependent on Him for its continued existence, and that consciousness is a prerequisite for us to even consider what is real in the first place, it is very interesting to note the following study
In the following study, researchers who had a bias against Near Death Experiences being real, set out to prove that NDEs were merely hallucinations by setting up a clever questionnaire that could differentiate which memories a person had were real and which memories a person had were merely imaginary.
To put it mildly, they did not expect the results they got:
Dr. Torley, exactly has is it possible for something become ‘more real than real’ for a person unless what we think of as primary reality (i.e. this material world) is not really the primary reality?
Yet, this result from Near Death Experiences is exactly what we would expect if the Mind of God is indeed the source of all reality. i.e. the primary reality!
That’s enough for now. I will slowly deconstruct the rest of your reply(s) piece by piece as time permits
Hi bornagain,
For the record: I did indeed describe the contents of a video you recommended as “rank heresy,” but I was very careful not to accuse you of that. If you want to reject the video’s claim that matter is an illusion and that God only observes through us, then you are orthodox. But then you are left with the question of why God’s observations of reality do not cause the wave function to collapse.
You write: “the fact of the matter is that it is you yourself who is in great error by insisting that God is not necessary for material reality to continually exist.” The fact of the matter, as I have repeatedly stated, is that God is necessary for material reality to continually exist. Please read my posts. What I do not believe is that man is necessary for material reality to continually exist. Things would still exist even if there were no humans around, and the universe would still exist, even if God had decided not to populate it with human beings or any other kinds of sentient or sapient beings. Christians have always believed that.
That’s all I wanted to say. Please continue.
VJT, okie dokie to continue on a bit more.
I see you commented further. Well to first clear up that additional misunderstanding before I proceed.
You now state:
Are you kidding me? God, in His highest heaven and infinite power, is the One Who is collapsing the infinite dimension/infinite information wave function for our benefit in the first place so that we may be able to see the light that he has created for us. (See Gonzalez and Robin Collins for fine tuning of light for humans).
For you to claim that there is an irresolvable problem since God’s observation does not always collapse the wave function, and yet our finite observation does, is to imply that God is somehow not in total control of His creation.
Dr. Egnor is right, the philosophical quagmire of modern science runs deep.
But all hope is not gone. I see in your second paragraph that we actually have some agreement on an issue.
You state
Good so far, I holding you to that.
But you then state this.
Actually, since the purpose of this creation/universe was for God to deal with evil once and for all through Jesus, and since God Himself became a human in Jesus in that endeavour, then therefore, according to Christian theology, there would be no purpose for this universe if humans did not exist. Therefore, according to Christian Theology, this universe would not exist.
You may argue that God may have created this universe minus humans for some other purpose, perhaps just because he wanted to, but, contrary to what you are claiming, Christians have certainly not always believed that this universe was created without humans foremost in God’s mind when he set about constructing it in his infinite power.
In fact, it is almost downright completely contrary to Christian Theology to believe that this particular universe would exist without humans.
verse:
Back to the original track,
after the charge of heresy, for saying material reality was an ‘illusion’, (ironically, an atheistic materialist would probably also consider it heresy to consider material particles an illusion since material particles are basically the atheistic materialist’s god) 🙂
after that charge you state, after listing a short list of the progression of God’s creation:
Exactly! I agree 100%! Who ever claimed otherwise?
I am not claiming that there was absolutely no history before man ever observed it. Not at all. Not in the least!
I’m simply saying that material reality, as we understand it according to our best evidence from quantum mechanics, ‘might as well not have existed 10^-43 seconds ago’.
Scott Arronson humorously puts it like this:
For me personally, as a Christian Theist, I absolutely love this development.
I am shocked that you are not equally delighted.
If ANYTHING ever cried out for Almighty God as a rational explanation even more than the Big Bang itself cries out for God as a rational explanation, this finding from quantum mechanics is certainly it.
You apparently want material particles to continually exist in their finite material particle state without ever being in their infinite dimension/infinite information quantum wave state.
But let me ask you, exactly who are we to tell God how to run His creation?
Perhaps it is easier for God, (as if anything is too hard for God), in his running of this universe to have material things exist in a infinite information/infinite dimension state until it is absolutely necessary that they exist in their finite material state?
After all, it is He who must collapse the quantum wave state anyway!
And indeed, I looked over the rest of your first post, and it seems your confusions stems primarily from the fact that you seem to believe their can be no history apart from there being a continual existence of material particles in their finite state.
So again I ask, who are we to tell God how to run His universe?
I am enjoying the exchange from Born and Mr Torley, an intelligent exchange.
VJT as to your second post. You start off by stating:
Hopefully post 106 cleared this misunderstanding up. i.e. to repeat, “Who are we to tell God how to run his universe?”
You then state:
Hopeful start
You then go on:
I like the ‘story book’ metaphor, not so much the video game metaphor.
You then go on to state
If you believe that God does not know the future exactly, then this is one place where we sharply disagree. I hold God is Omniscient period. In fact, I hold that He is as infinitely present in the future just as He is infinitely present in the now and even in the past. There is no place in time hidden from God. In fact, there can be no future without God since time itself is dependent on God for its being. There is no corner of creation, past, present, or future that He does not have full infinite knowledge of. It is impossible for God to not know the future. Any lesser being would not be God.
And to answer to your next question, NO it does not take away our free will.
Just because God knows the future exactly that does not negate our free will. Nor does it remove our moral responsibility for the free will choices we make in this life.
The following video is very good for explaining how it is possible for God’s sovereignty and our free will to mesh:
You go on to state:
God knew every detail of every day of my life, down to the exact position of every atom in my body every day of my life, before He even formed me in my mother’s womb:
You then state:
How nice of inanimate objects to let God know that they are still around (sarcasm).
Far from merely ‘making an impression on God’s consciousness’, without God’s consciousness inanimate objects would not even exist. Not only is God aware of where every inanimate object is, He is the one who put it there and, by His will, they, an we, continue in their, and our, existence.
The universe is not self originating, nor is it self sustaining, but the universe and everything in it is in fact dependent on God for its continual existence
You then state:
IMHO, ever so subtly, you have tried to fool yourself into believing in a lesser god than God almighty.
You then state:
Things always existing as material particles and never as infinite information/infinite dimension quantum waves is not the definition of ‘real’. i.e. Materialism does not hold trademark rights for the word ‘real’, nor for the word ‘reality’!
I agree everything is dependent on the infinite Mind of God. And I never said that material objects are dependent on the mind of man for their existence. And, unlike you, instead of holding that God endowed objects so that they ever so graciously make their presence known to God as He watches from afar on a hill, I hold that Almighty God specifically endowed man, his children, with a mind that is able to make its presence known to inanimate objects. I hold the untapped potential of the human mind to reach out and touch inanimate objects to be very extraordinary
vjtorley, in your 3rd post you reference the Zeilinger survey using wikipedia as a source:
You state:
Yet, on page 7 on question 10 of the (small) survey, we see that 55% of the physicists say the observer plays a fundamental role in the application of the formalism but plays no distinguished physical role.
But then, right below that, as you emphasized Dr. Torley, we see that only 6% say of the physicists say that the observer plays a distinguished physical role.
My response to that is, “so what ?”,
I never said that human consciousness, i.e. that the ‘observer’, in and of himself was collapsing the wave function.
In fact, I’ve consistently maintained that since the quantum wave function is mathematically defined as being in a infinite dimensional/infinite information state, then only God is capable of collapsing that infinite information wave function.
i.e. I merely claimed, like 55% of the physicists did, that “the observer plays a fundamental role in the application of the formalism”
Yet, their definition of ‘application of the formalism’ may differ from mine. Perhaps they are stating that the observer is only setting the boundary conditions of the Schrödinger equation when they set up the measuring devise?
I don’t know exactly what they meant specifically as to “the observer plays a fundamental role in the application of the formalism”.
But I do know what I mean by “the observer plays a fundamental role in the application of the formalism”.
What I mean by “the observer plays a fundamental role in the application of the formalism” is that not only is the observer free to choose the boundary conditions of the Schrödinger equation in his experimental set up, but that the observer is also necessary to make an ‘observation’ at the end of the experiment so that the Schroedinger equation will formally ‘jump’.
Moreover, on page 9 of the survey that you referenced VJT, we find this interesting tidbit
This following video at 8:18 mark goes over how ‘metaphysical prejudice’ drastically alters what physicists are willing to say they believe about quantum mechanics.
You then go to the measurement problem and state:
Again Dr. Torley so what? I never thought the measurement problem was ‘a severe difficulty threatening quantum mechanics’.
In fact, the only ‘severe difficulty’ that the measurement problem presents that I can see is for people who are hopelessly wedded to their materialistic philosophy. In that case I can see why some people said it was a severe difficulty ‘threatening quantum mechanics’.
Perhaps, if the survey were a bit more detailed, we would have found that the Many World proponents (18%) were the ones who were most threatened by the measurement problem.
As it is, I don’t know why you think this is relevant.
Quantum Mechanics will continue on just fine in spite of the measurement problem. And will continue, as it has always done since its inception early last century, to falsify materialistic beliefs that try to challenge it!
VJT, you then go on to try to claim that your imagined refutation of von Neumann was not refuted. In a bizarre twist, you cite the following as your supposed refutation of my empirical refutation of your imagined refutation.
Now you quoted a part of it, so I dug out the entire conclusion:
Excuse me Dr. Torley, Zeilinger is not saying there is not a paradox if we try to attribute an objective meaning to the quantum state of a single system. (Which is what a materialist would try to do to a quantum state).
In fact, Zeilinger states this earlier in the paper:
For the materialist this is indeed an extreme paradox.
In the conclusion, Dr. Zeilinger is instead saying that the paradox disappears when, instead of treating the quantum state of a single system as if it had objective meaning, as a materialist would do, we instead treat the system as “no more than a representative of our information”.
Dr. Zeilinger is basically arguing for a new information theoretic interpretation of quantum mechanics so that the ‘materialistic paradox’ disappears. i.e. he is basically saying There is no paradox IF WE VIEW THE PARADOX in such and such way.
What I would like to know exactly is what did Dr. Zeilinger mean exactly when he said “no more than a representative of our information”?
Whose information is he referring to exactly? It would not surprise me if he was referring to the information that ‘the observer’ in the experiment had access to.
In your final statement you state:
Nor can I apparently convince a Theist who is determined to read things into conclusions that are not even there. Such as reading that ‘extreme’ materialistic paradoxes are resolved when in fact they are not resolved (unless you drop a materialistic interpretation of a quantum state and adopt a ‘information’ interpretation).
Dr. Torley, After thinking it over for a while, In my previous post I am not comfortable with my deconstruction of your 6% cite.
There is simply no getting around the fact that only 6% of the physicists say that the observer plays a distinguished physical role.
This has to mean, as much as I tried to play around with the observer choosing which formalism to employ (55%), that they still believe the observer is not essentially necessary in order for the wave form to ultimately collapse.
This is all the more puzzling since the survey did not specifically have any clear solutions as to exactly what was ultimately causing the waveform to collapse. I believe only around 18% or so said decoherence solved it. Then various other percentages of people said it was solved or would be solved in the future, but strangely no specific solution to the measurement problem was ever mentioned.
At this point, all I can do is point out that it was an informal survey as they themselves admitted, and also point out that they also admitted in the survey to ‘a lot’ of metaphysical prejudice in their interpretations. (a surprising admission on a survey).
But as questionable as the survey may be, (by their own admission), I must now appeal directly to the empirical evidence itself since evidence is what ultimately has the final say in science.
So once again, here is Zeilinger’s falsification of realism
Thus, while they did not explicitly say that the observer was absolutely necessary to collapse the waveform, this experiment is, none-the-less, very disconcerting for your base materialistic presuppositions Dr. Torley.
In other words Dr. Torley, it is not enough for you to point to opinions on a survey in order to overturn an experiment that refuted materialism in particular.
After all, it was not ‘observers’ themselves that were being tested in the experiment. It was the predictions of materialism that were being tested for their validity.
Materialism failed the test. Big time! 120 standard deviations
To defend your materialistic presuppositions Dr Torley, you must now actually cite another experiment that shows the preceding experiment to be wrong in its conclusion.
At 120 standard deviations of verification, Good luck in your attempted refutation of the experiment. You will definitely need it!
You cannot merely point to opinions on a survey against observers being important to defend such a shattering experiment against your materialistic premises. i.e.
Torley: “Observers aren’t important according to this survey”
bornagain: So what, materialism is dead according to empirical science!
Moreover, much like Mark Twain’s death, I think the demise of ‘the observer’ in quantum mechanics is greatly exaggerated.
Thus following experiment tested realism from another angle besides Leggett’s Inequality. The following experiment falsified realism using the ‘delayed choice’ experiment. Moreover, the lead researcher and physicist of this particular falsification of realism had no qualms whatsoever telling, for all the world to hear, that reality doesn’t exist until we measure it
Thus Dr. Torley, your preferred materialistic view of reality is falsified from two different angles in empirical science, while ‘the observer’ still seems to be a viable option at least in some circles of empirical science.
Hi bornagain,
Thank you for your response. Just to be clear: I do not believe that God does not know the future. When I said that our libertarian freedom makes our choices unpredictable, I meant that although God knows our future choices (by timelessly viewing the past, present and future in a single glance), He cannot know them by deducing them from His knowledge of the past and present. He can only know them by timelessly observing them. In other words, His knowledge of our choices is a posteriori, not a priori.
When I wrote that “the universe would still exist, even if God had decided not to populate it with human beings or any other kinds of sentient or sapient beings,” I was simply asserting that human (or animal) consciousness doesn’t bring plants and inanimate objects into existence. Actually, I’d agree with you that there would have been no point in God making this universe without populating it with people. But assuming that He did (purely for argument’s sake), then the plants and inanimate objects in the universe would be no less real than they are now.
You maintain that only God is capable of collapsing the infinite-dimensional wave function, and you add that you “never said that material objects are dependent on the mind of man for their existence.” (But my question is: do they depend on the mind of man for their specific properties – e.g. their size, shape and location?) You also hold that God “specifically endowed man… with a mind that is able to make its presence known to inanimate objects.” None of this answers my original question: either (i) God is observing the physical world, in which case His act of observation must cause the wave function to collapse, which means that realism is true after all, and unknown stars exist, even if humans never observe them, or (ii) God isn’t observing the physical world after all, which means that the wave function doesn’t collapse, which means that objects aren’t real till man observes them. You deny (ii) but at the same time deny realism. I’m afraid I can’t make head nor tail of your position. That’s all I wanted to say. If you’d like to clarify your position, then you are welcome to do so.
Vjtorley, in your 4th and final post you say:
In which I had commented
To which you commented:
Dr. Torley, are you just throwing anything up on the wall that you can to see if it will stick?,, and not honestly addressing this issue with an open mind? It sure seems that way to me!
Did you even glance over Radin’s six experiments that you said you wanted to discuss? In the viewings of the double-slit in Radin’s first 2 experiments, out of the 6 experiments, the participants are seated 2 meters away from the double slit and are thus not even what would be considered remote viewings.
In fact, here is the actual experimental protocol that Radin used in his first experiment.
Thus Dr. Torley, the viewings of the double-slit in this first experiment of Radin’s are not even remote as you had apparently assumed without reading the paper.
In fact in the first experiment, the participant is placed in a ‘electromagnetically sealed chamber’ with the precisely calibrated double-slit experiment itself to eliminate any possible outside ‘noise’ from interfering with the experimental outcome.
i.e. The ‘physical encounter’ of the observer with the double-slit experiment is, how shall we say it, ‘enhanced’ for maximum effect in this first experiment of Radin’s in 2012.
The third experiment checked for possible noise from human body heat. The 4th experiment tested the enigmatic retro-causality inherent to QM and is actually in line with Dr. Egnor’s overall claim of mind reaching out to perceive ‘at a star’ and inconsistent with your naive materialistic belief that mind is for the most part purely passive to solely ‘materialistic’ input.
Here is experiment 4
In the 5th experiment “An electrocortical marker of attention was recorded” so as to provide corroborating evidential support, And the 6th experiment “investigated relationships between participants’ personalities and beliefs and their performance on the double-slit task.”
Thus Dr. Torley, none of the experiments out of Radin’s 6 experiments directly challenges Egnor’s claim that ““I can’t perceive an object without some kind of physical encounter with it.”
Indeed, even if you try to exclude experiment 4 because of your materialistic bias, it still does not refute the obvious fact that ‘some kind of physical encounter’ occurred in experiment 4.
Nor do any of Radin’s 6 experiments run contrary to any of Egnor’s other claims that you highlighted:
i.e. You further stated:
First off I note, that the ‘sense organs’ were involved in all 6 of Radin’s double slit experiments, and not once in any of the experiments was someone asked to collapse a wave function without at least having ‘some kind’ of direct contact with the double slit experiment.
Secondly, for you to imply that Egnor has a ‘realistic philosophy of matter’ is just plain disingenuous. Dr. Egnor has stated a few times now, that I am aware of, that he believes in “collapse of the quantum waveform” which just so happens to be the central thing in quantum mechanics that refutes your materialistic understanding of the world (and which also just so happens to lend exceptional credence to Egnor’s overall claims)
Thus Dr. Torley, I am rather disappointed in your poor treatment of Radin’s 2012 paper, since it clearly did not support your contention that it did not support Egnor’s claim. In fact, contrary to what you ‘threw on the wall to see if it would stick’, I hold that Egnor’s claims find rather stunning support in Radin’s 2012 paper.
again, here is the abstract of Radin’s first paper that gives an overview of the results:
the introduction in Radin’s first paper is also very informative to the present issue we are discussing on the measurement problem, since it gives a brief, but very informative, overview of the different attempts to address the Quantum Measurement Problem.
Dr. Torley, there is only one point that I disagree with Dr. Radin on in that introduction. That point of disagreement is in point (b) on his assumption of panpsychism. i.e. “the doctrine or belief that everything material, however small, has an element of individual consciousness.”
I think the assumption of panpychism is unwarranted, empirically, in order to explain the results that he gets in his experiments. Nor is the assumption necessary to defend Dr. Egnor’s specific claim of “I can’t perceive an object without ‘some kind’ of physical encounter with it.”
At this point, before I move on to the rest of Dr. Torley’s final post, I think it is good to reiterate what is actually going on physically:
In special relativity since time, as we understand it, does not pass at the speed of light then, from the photon’s point of view of time and distance, the photon traveled from the supernova to earth instantly. In other words, it is always ‘now’ for a photon at the speed of light no matter how far it has traveled in the universe.
To grasp the whole ‘time coming to a complete stop at the speed of light’ concept a little more easily, imagine moving away from the face of a clock at the speed of light. Would not the hands on the clock stay stationary as you moved away from the face of the clock at the speed of light?
Moving away from the face of a clock at the speed of light happens to be the same ‘thought experiment’ that gave Einstein his breakthrough insight into e=mc2.
In other words, from the photon’s point of view, the photon is emitted from the star’s surface and, due to special relativity, is instantly perceived by the retina of an observer’s eye.
i.e. due to special relativity, from the photons point of view there is ZERO time delay between emission from the star’s surface and perception by a retina.
Moreover, directly contrary to Dr. Torley’s belief in materialism, quantum mechanics tells us that the ‘path taken by the photon is not an element of reality‘.
Thus, Dr. Egnor’s contention that we are somehow directly perceiving ‘at the star’ is not refuted by either special relativity or Quantum Mechanics but, IMHO, finds fairly strong empirical support from both those disciplines.
i.e. As far as the photon itself is concerned, it arrived instantly. As far as quantum mechanics is concerned, it is impossible for us to say exactly what the photon was doing between to the time it was emitted from the star and was observed by us.
Or related note:
Some things are like an itch that must be scratched.
vjtorley:
Criticising Egnor’s outrageous crackpottery does not give one a free pass to create more outrageous crackpottery. A being that knows the future cannot have regrets. The Judeo-Christian God can certainly have regrets. It says so in the book of Genesis. Do Catholics and fundamentalist Christians ignore certain passages in the scriptures that do not support their doctrines?
http://biblehub.com/genesis/6-6.htm
So either the Hebrew/Christian God can have regrets. and therefore limited knowledge of the future. Or else Genesis is fiction. Take your pick.
And of course, there are curious bits like this, which indicates a limited knowledge even of the present:
Genesis 18:20-21 – Then the LORD said, “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. If not, I will know.””
Okie Dokie Dr. Torley, in the final part of your last post to me at 101 you state:
Dr. Torley you state I need to ‘do some reading about secondary causality’. Might I suggest in return that you need to do some thinking about the same and not just blindly accept what you were told about secondary causality? Dr. Egnor, I think, would agree very much with me on that suggestion.
I hold that the most profound confusion in modern physics today is the fallacious belief that blind (secondary) causality of atheists is superior to the primary agent causality of Theists in terms of explanatory power.
Professor Budziszewski puts the ‘profound confusion in physics’ between blind causality and agent causality like this
In other words, because agent causality was thrown out of mathematical descriptions of the universe then agent causality is deemed ‘unscientific’ in terms of describing ourselves. This denial of agent causality for ourselves leads to epistemological failure since it undermines our ability to be rational agents instead of mindless automatons (See Pearcey: Darwin’s Robots).
As well, as stated before C. S. Lewis has noted that the mathematical laws of the universe have never really ever ’caused’ anything in and of themselves. Lewis, in his usual crisp manner, clearly demonstrates that mathematical laws do not have causal adequacy within themselves in the following excerpt from one of his books:
C.S. Lewis also noted that agent causality is illegitimately imparted to material objects as a result of the denial of the agent causality (i.e. God) behind math
It is actually quite shocking to learn how deeply the Theistic ‘language of agency’ is imparted to inanimate objects. The practice is rampant in all of science, especially in biology (Talbott).
Some of the greatest Christian founders of modern science rightly understood the distinction between a mathematical description of a law and the agent causality required to be behind the law quite well.
And when one rightly allows God back into mathematics so as to bring ‘completeness’ to mathematics (Godel), and so as to ‘breathe fire into the equations’(Hawking), i.e. so as to rightly bring agent causality back into math (Newton, Maxwell, Planck), and so as to rightly bring agent causality back to humans themselves (Pearcey), then a solution to the most profound enigma in modern physics readily pops out for us.
Namely, the resurrection of Christ from death provides a empirically backed reconciliation of Quantum Mechanics/Special Relativity, (Quantum Electrodynamics), and General Relativity into the much sought after ‘theory of everything’:
Verse:
J-Mac @ 79
I explain it the same way I’d explain a parent asking a kid with chocolate smeared all over his/her mouth if he or she ate the chocolate cookies: He was giving them a choice to lie or tell the truth.
bornagain @ 113
Ok, so if the photon thinks it has arrived at your eye instantaneously from where it was emitted, why does your eye not see the same image as when the photon was emitted?
Why do the photons emitted from a new sunspot, thinking they have arrived instaneously at your retina, not show your retina the sunspot until 8 minutes later? Why does it take your retina 8 minutes to see what the photons left behind? Why aren’t your retina’s viewpoint and the photons’ viewpoint identical, instantaneously?
Why exactly did you conjure up such an absurd false dichotomy?
I don’t know which is worse, Darwinist crackpots or Christian crackpots.
It’s the people who tag everything that they disagree with with the “crackpot” label essentially making the term useless and yet hoping it has any meaning. Sound familiar?
Those are the worst.
Another question for Mike @115, why did you ignore all the commentaries on the verse you cited?
In fact, why did you conjure up such an absurd false dichotomy in light of the fact that maybe your understanding of such verses is “limited”?
Vy,
I very well know why you avoid to answer my, and others questions directly. I also know that it is pointless to quote more scriptures that indicate that God didn’t know everything and therefore can’t be omniscient.
Since you are so convinced that God is omniscient, it follows that He also had known that Adam and Eve would sin, and was aware of all the consequences that their sin would bring; suffering, death, wars etc.
So, did God know that Adam and Eve would sin?
Yes or no?
Knowing well the kind of people like you, you won’t have the guts to answer “Yes” even thought it is exactly what you believe no matter what your beliefs imply.
So “I explain it the same way I’d explain a parent asking a kid with chocolate smeared all over his/her mouth if he or she ate the chocolate cookies: He was giving them a choice to lie or tell the truth“ isn’t direct enough for you?
That’s quite interesting especially considering the fact that Bible is replete with anthropomorphism and anthropopathism.
And what exactly do you hope to accomplish by your “I very well know blah blah blah” posturing?
Yes.
What a pathetic attempt at reverse psychology.
Stop imagining things.
Mapou,
“I don’t know which is worse, Darwinist crackpots or Christian crackpots.”
They are both the same. I should add that instead of Christian I would use the word religious
with Darwinian belonging to the Religious Crackpot.
All beliefs based on preconceptions, rather than evidence, belong to the same crackpot notions.
If you ask a Darwinist how life originated, he/she will probably answer-on its own. But if you ask him/her for one piece of evidence that convinced him/her that life originated on its own, you will get none.
If you ask most Christians about their belief in the teaching of the immortal soul that survives death that is taught widely among Christian religions, most will answer that they believe that teaching. But if you ask them about evidence, some may site some scriptures that might seem to support such a teaching.
But what happens when you site scriptures that contradict that teaching? What if you provide clear historical evidence that the teaching of the immortal soul is not a christian teaching but rather it originated among the ancient Greek philosophers like Plato and were just absorbed into Christianity in 2 century CE? They will most likely ignore such evidence or provide vague, indirect answers same as Vy’s.
When you’re driving down a highway, do you believe based on “evidence” that you won’t get hit by some drunk driver or believe it based on some preconception?
So the absence of material evidence for something that is wholly immaterial is somehow evidence that it is crackpottery?
Really? That’s your best you can do?
Carry on then.
Vy, “So, did God know that Adam and Eve would sin?”
Vy answers: Yes.
Congratulation Vy! I didn’t know your beliefs were as blinded as they actually are.
Maybe UD can do an entire post on this issue, so that both religious and others can comment on as to what your crackpot belief implies?
What a baseless claim.
Before you post anymore rants, would you be willing to point out what your absolutely proven non-crackpot beliefs are?
What my crackpot belief implies? You seem to think baseless assertions about what my beliefs are hold any weight.
Vy,
“He was giving them a choice to lie or tell the truth“ isn’t direct enough for you?
I beg your pardon? What choice are you talking about? You seem to have forgotten that you said that God had already known in advance that Adam and Eve would sin but for some reason he didn’t know whether they are going to tell the truth or lie?
You also seem to have forgotten that according to your belief God was just staging a rerun of what he had already known in advance. The scripts had already been written and read, which God had already known.
So, what choice could Adam and Eve have possibly had? Could they have changed what God had already known what they were going to say?
I’m sure that your numerous contradictions are carrying a lot of weight.
One more thing I would like to further reflect on Dr. Torley. In post 113, I stated
I then gave a brief overview of what was actually going on physically as far as special relativity and Quantum Mechanics were concerned:
So far, so good. But, Dr. Torley now, since you are literally soaking in materialistic premises, you might be inclined to think that once the photon hits the retina there would still be a time delay before we, i.e. our conscious mind, could perceive it. In other words, you might be inclined to think you still have a materialistic defeater for Egnor’s argument.
In response to that potential defeater, I would first like to point out that we do have evidence that the mind does indeed have causal power not only within the brain, as you would hold Dr. Torley, but also within body.
First off, ‘Brain Plasticity’ to a person’s focused intention has now been established by Jeffrey Schwartz’s work, as well as among other researchers.
Also of related note to the mind having causal power in the brain:
Of course, for those of us not wedded to the materialistic philosophy, and who believe that we have a mind that is not reducible to materialistic explanations, this type of instantaneous ‘non-local’ activity is expected to be found in the brain
But Dr. Torley, in a finding that would directly challenge the materialistic belief that human consciousness is limited solely to the brain in its effects, (a point that you are currently defending), it is also now found, completely contrary to materialistic thought, that mind also has the power to reach all the way down to the molecular level of our bodies and have pronounced effects on the gene expression of our bodies:
This finding, besides challenging the belief, that you are defending Dr. Torley, that mind is strictly limited to the brain in its effects, also certainly challenges the materialistic belief that we are merely helpless victims of our genes.
But to continue on, Dr. Egnor accompanied his first post with this following surprising fact that I was not aware of:
Dr. Torley, I think you may have touched briefly on this experiment by Libet in your first response to Dr. Egnor but, regardless of whether you accepted the result or not, (if I remember correctly, I believe you tried to refute it), the fact that I want to now point out is that, as far as empirical evidence itself is concerned, Dr. Egnor’s contention, and Libet’s results, actually do have a plausible ‘mechanism’ to explain instantaneous perception.
Although the following meta-study is not directly related to the current issue we are talking about, since it strongly implies some level of extra-sensory perception, I would, none-the-less, like to highlight one quote in particular from the following meta-study:
And just as “explanations related to recent quantum biological findings could potentially make sense” of the preceding meta-study on ‘sensing the future’, so too could “explanations related to recent quantum biological findings could potentially make sense” of why, as Libet found, the ‘subject perceives a sensory stimulus on the skin at the moment the skin is touched, before the stimulus reaches the brain and before full deliberative consciousness occurs.’
Specifically, non-local, beyond space and time, quantum entanglement/information is now found in every protein and DNA molecule of our body:
Dr. Torley, finding non-local, beyond space and time quantum entanglement in every protein and DNA molecule in our body certainly provides an adequate mechanism for explaining how Libet’s ‘instantaneous perception’ results, which Dr. Egnor referenced, are possible.
It’s called freewill, ever heard of it?
False. I said He gave them a choice.
The fact that He gave them the choice doesn’t change the fact that He knew they were going to deflect.
That’s absolute crap. God did NOT cause anyone to do anything. He knew it, yes. He didn’t cause it.
Just because I know what exactly what will happen when Jay is done drinking those bottle of Vodkas, enters the Lamborghini and drives off doesn’t mean I made him do anything or that I staged it, especially when I warned him.
Could they have? Yes.
Did they? No.
Did God know they wouldn’t? Yes.
Yet another baseless assertion. Show me evidence of just ONE contradiction.
Your post amounts to nothing more than a confused blob of assertions. You somehow think that because God knows something will happen means that He either causes it or that we’ve been programmed to do exactly that.
Here’s a good analogy from CMI:
According to what you’re saying, that would be a “YES”
@115 “So either the Hebrew/Christian God can have regrets. and therefore limited knowledge of the future. Or else Genesis is fiction. Take your pick.”
Having the ability to access the future and always using the ability is not the same thing.
Hi Mapou, mike1962, J-Mac, Vy and Jack Jones,
I’d like to answer Mapou’s question: “How can God be called omniscient, if He has regrets?” It’s a reasonable question. Genesis 6:6 states that God has regrets, as mike1962 points out. In a similar vein, J-Mac asks: “So, did God know that Adam and Eve would sin?” Vy answers “Yes,” and argues that there is no contradiction between God’s knowing what I will do and my doing it freely: God foreknows but does not foreordain my choices. Jack Jones advances the interesting theory that God has the ability to access the future, but does not always exercise this ability; hence, He is capable of being surprised.
I’d like to offer my own take on the subject. First, there are numerous Bible verses, in the Old Testament as well as the New, which affirm that God is omniscient, and that He knows things before they take place. Accordingly, many Christians tend to downplay the significance of Genesis 6:6, arguing that the Holy Spirit was speaking in simple, anthropomorphic language to a rude and simple people – in other words, God was talking down to Moses and the Israelites. These Christians also contend that the intention of the author of Genesis 6:6 was not to teach us about the limits of God’s knowledge; rather, it was to teach us about the enormity of human wickedness, prior to the Deluge. However, I think that this attempt at minimization goes too far, and that there is a sense in which God can be said to have regrets.
I’d like to return to J-Mac’s question: “So, did God know that Adam and Eve would sin?” Vy answers “Yes.” I would answer “No,” even though I maintain that God is omniscient. How can this be?
The short answer is that I hold to a Boethian view of Divine foreknowledge: God is like a watcher on a high hill Who timelessly views the past, present and future. God is a spectator of human events; this means that He does not make them happen, but is made aware that they happen. Because God is outside time and space, there is no temporal “before” and “after” with God: all things are present. But in the order of causality, it is our choices that determine God’s awareness of them, and not the other way round (as predestinationists think). Hence God’s awareness of Adam and Eve’s choice is logically posterior to, and not prior to, the choice itself. Insofar as Adam and Eve’s choice was contrary to God’s wishes, we may speak of God as being disappointed and even as having regrets, regarding their choice. The same goes for any other bad choice that people make. However, it would be wrong to speak of God as being surprised by our choices, because surprise can only occur in time, and there never is any time at which God does not know what we have done, are doing and will do. God timelessly knows the totality of our choices, past, present and future, but His knowledge of these choices is passive. That’s why foreknowledge and freedom don’t conflict.
God’s knowing that Adam and Eve would sin, prior to His decision to make them, would mean that His knowledge is causally prior to their choice – which makes Him responsible for that choice. However, God’s knowing (timelessly) that Adam and Eve did sin, at the dawn of human history, is quite compatible with God’s knowledge of their choice being caused by (and hence, causally posterior to) Adam and Eve’s making the choice they did, which preserves Adam and Eve’s freedom and in no way makes God responsible.
So, to sum up: God doesn’t know what I would do, but He does know everything I have done, am now doing and will do, as a timeless spectator of human events. There are of course times when God actively intervenes in human history, as well. That’s my take on the subject, for what it’s worth.
Hi everyone,
I’d like to address Mapou’s contention that not only perceptions, but also abstract thoughts and choices, take place in the human brain, and not in any immaterial soul. It so happens that I reject this view, but my main grounds for doing so are philosophical, and they relate to the nature of thought itself. I don’t think that free will conflicts with materialism, provided that one believes in a top-down materialism, in which higher-level “macro” processes in the brain (which correspond to our free choices) can bring about lower-level “micro” processes in the brain, as well as initiating bodily movements. This would be a satisfactory solution, provided that the higher-level “macro” processes in the brain are not determined by any lower-level processes occurring at an earlier time. In other words, higher-level brain processes need to be ontologically fundamental: they do not supervene on our lower-level brain states. I discussed this view in a 2011 post titled, Why I think the interaction problem is real (in which I also proposed a solution to the problem).
My main reason for rejecting this solution and positing that thoughts and choices occur in an immaterial soul is that there appear to be several weighty philosophical arguments against materialism. In particular: free choices presuppose a capacity for abstract thinking; but a process taking place at a particular point in space and time is incapable of embodying a universal, abstract concept. Additionally, free choices and the thoughts that accompany them have an inherent meaning in their own right, but bodily processes such as neuronal firings are not inherently meaningful; hence a bodily process is incapable of embodying a free choice. The Thomist philosopher Professor Feser has handily summarized some of the best philosophical arguments against materialism here, here, here, here and here.
Looking at Scripture, I am also aware that a very powerful Biblical case can be made for the view that consciousness ceases at death, and that the dead sleep in the dust of the earth until they are raised again. If I had nothing but the Old Testament to go on, that would be my view, too. However, I believe that there are several New Testament verses that swing the evidence decisively the other way: Luke 23:43 (“Jesus answered him, ‘Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise'”), Philippians 1:23 (“I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far”) and 2 Corinthians 5:8 (“We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord”), especially.
I think that Christian materialists are wrong, but my faith in Christianity would not be shattered were someone to prove to me that a materialist account of human nature is true, so long as such an account left open the possibility of genuine libertarian freedom. For that reason, I think that Mapou and others who think like him should be given a respectful hearing.
Hi bornagain,
I’d just like to make a few brief remarks in response to your posts, before you sum up your case.
1. You invoke relativistic time dilation as a solution to how we can perceive past events, such as supernova explosions. You argue that from the viewpoint of a photon emitted by the dying star, no time elapses between the photon’s emission and the photon’s hitting our retinas, when we perceive the explosion. I’m afraid that won’t help. For what matters here is not the photon’s point of view, but the human percipient’s, and from the percipient’s point of view, time is all too real. I repeat: if (as professor Egnor maintains), perception involves “reaching out” and making immediate contact with what is perceived, then we are faced with an irresoluble problem: we cannot make immediate contact with the past. And from our standpoint, the supernova is past, even if from light’s standpoint (and for that matter, God’s) it is not.
2. You question my assertion that Dean Radin believes that perception can occur even in the absence of a physical encounter with the perceived object, arguing that the six experiments he describes don’t involve any such thing. Never mind those. Have a look at his Webpage, titled, Selected Peer-Reviewed Publications on Psi Research. You’ll see that several links refer to “extra-sensory perception” and “remote viewing.” See also this blog post here. I rest my case.
3. As for Professor Egnor’s views on the subject, it is enough to know that he is a self-described Aristotelian-Thomist. Look. I’ve been reading Aristotle all my adult life, and I know that he wouldn’t have had a bar of Dr. Radin’s “psi”: he describes perception as a bodily process in his De Anima, and for him, the notion of someone’s seeing without using their eyes or of viewing events from a perspective outside their body (as is supposed to happen in remote viewing) would have made no sense at all. St. Thomas Aquinas followed Aristotle’s views on perception. Egnor himself acknowledges: “Perception is a wholly material thing — it does have location.” He also remarks that “a subject perceives a sensory stimulus” – which implies that perception must involve the subject’s body. Additionally, he writes: “There is no question that perceptions occur via the object, the sense organs, and the brain.” Thus I’d be very surprised if Professor Egnor (who is a Thomist) believes in remote viewing.
4. You cite Libet’s finding that “subject perceives a sensory stimulus on the skin at the moment the skin is touched, before the stimulus reaches the brain and before full deliberative consciousness occurs.” However, physicist S. Pockett, who analyzed Libet’s experiments in detail (see here) concluded that “‘subjective back-referral of sensations in time’ to the time of the stimulus does not occur.” You then add that the “mind also has the power to reach all the way down to the molecular level of our bodies and have pronounced effects on the gene expression of our bodies.” Fine, but there’s no evidence that such power is exercised instantaneously. The brain’s ability to influence the body is limited by the speed of transmission of nerve impulses, and there’s no evidence that the mind can bypass this avenue, when controlling the body.
5. I should warn you, by the way, that Dean Radin’s methodology for assessing the credibility of parapsychology claims is very poor. It has been roundly debunked here. I have studied statistics at university, and I know enough to recognize egregious errors in methodology when I see them. Dale DeBakcsy’s debunking is pretty devastating. Commenting on Radin’s recent book, Supernormal, DeBakscy writes:
6. Finally, I don’t know why you think that imputing causal powers to natural objects is at odds with theism. The vast majority of medieval philosophers (and Christian philosophers down to the 18th century) accepted the Aristotelian view that natural objects have causal powers, imparted to them by God. That does not make them intentional agents, as they don’t know what they are doing or why they’re doing it. But they are agents nonetheless. It would be ridiculous to deny that when opposite charges attract, they act on each other; it is not just God Who is doing the acting here. To deny that objects act is tantamount to denying that they are real; for if action is denied to them, what else remains?
In “obeying” the laws of Nature, objects are simply exercising their powers, in accordance with their natures, but because the exercise of these powers is rule-governed, this means that God’s continual and active support is required, in order for them to act at all. Nevertheless, they do act. There’s nothing pagan or un-Christian about this view of secondary causality; I’m amazed that you take exception to it. I repeat: please read Freddoso’s short article on the subject, if you read nothing else.
I await your final summation, and I would urge you to use your own words, and nothing else. We’ve seen enough links to what other writers think; I’d like to know what you think. Over to you, and good luck.
Thanks for your comment @133 Mr Torley, it is something to mull over.
Torley @133,
I have never seen any scripture that claims that Yahweh is omniscient or that Yahweh knows all past present and future. The link you provided is no exception.
First off, since only the present exists, the claim is self-refuting. Second, omniscience and omnipotence assumes that infinity is a logical concept. It is not. It is a cretinous concept. Infinity leads to an infinite regress by definition. Parmenides of Elea proved it: either infinity exists and motion/change does not, or infinity is bogus and we have motion. Take your pick.
Every argument for omni-anything is refuted by the above. Any belief in infinity is not only bogus, it is a sign of a serious mental dysfunction, IMO.
Humans were designed and constructed in the image of the Elohim (lords). We are just like the Gods. We, too, are Gods. The only difference is that we are made of ordinary matter whereas the Gods are made of something else. My view is that Yahweh is an ancient, highly advanced and perfectly united civilization consisting of billions of individuals. They got lonely and decided they needed a companion civilization. So they created humanity. It’s a grand and wonderful experiment.
As always, I tell it like I see it.
Wait, is that the same guy that keeps yapping about “crackpottery”?
Shocka!
I can’t LOOOOOOOO…L enough.
According to your buddy J-Mac, that’s crackpottery.
Welcome to the club!
You might wanna stop making comments like this:
In light of your never observed supposedly “perfect united civilization of billions of aliens” assertion, it holds as much weight as a Darwinist saying “your mind is not open”, NONE.
As you said, “I[‘m] tell[ing] it like I see it.” 😀
LOL!
Oh, by the way. A being that knows all past, present and future is a being that is impotent, i.e., a being that can never change its mind. Think about it.
This whole infinity thing is pure unmitigated, superstitious bogosity. But don’t feel bad. The materialists, too, believe in the same infinity crackpottery. And they, too, are 100% wrong.
Vy,
Man, I ain’t talking to you.
I know. 😀
Still, welcome to CrackpotVille!
Hmm, I’m wondering what J-Mac’s version of reality is.
Hi Mapou,
Thank you for your comments. You write: “I have never seen any scripture that claims that Yahweh is omniscient or that Yahweh knows all past present and future. The link you provided is no exception.”
OK, what about Psalm 139:4? “Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O LORD, you know it altogether.”
Or what about Isaiah 46:9? “I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things not yet done.”
I’d say that’s pretty clear, wouldn’t you?
You add: “A being that knows all past, present and future is a being that is impotent, i.e., a being that can never change its mind.” Such a Being would have no need to change its Mind. Knowing everything makes it omnipotent, rather than impotent, for God’s power derives from what He knows and understands.
You object to the notion of God’s omniscience on two grounds:
“First off, since only the present exists, the claim is self-refuting. Second, omniscience and omnipotence assumes that infinity is a logical concept. It is not. It is a cretinous concept. Infinity leads to an infinite regress by definition. Parmenides of Elea proved it: either infinity exists and motion/change does not, or infinity is bogus and we have motion. Take your pick.”
Parmenides’ mathematical fallacy was to assume that an infinite number of distances cannot be traversed in a finite time. That’s not true. Parmenides’ argument would work, if all of these distances were greater than some number N, which is greater than 0. but they’re not. Putting it very simply: 1+0.5+0.25+0.125+0.0625+….=2.
Your claim that “only the present exists” is question-begging. It invites the obvious response: “Exists when?” The answer is, of course, “Now.” The past did exist, but does not now exist; neither does the future, although it will exist. So your statement really amounts to the trivial claim: “Only what now exists, exists now.” True, but irrelevant. God is a timeless being. There’s no reason why past, present and future events could not all co-exist from a timeless perspective.
vjtorley:
But I am not a Christian materialist. I am a Yin-Yang dualist through and through. I believe that both matter (brain) and spirit are necessary for consciousness. It requires BOTH a knower (spirit) and a known (one or more physical representation in the brain).
First, while I admire Paul and his teachings, I do not worship him or any other Biblical writer as some infallible God. The man was obviously wrong about many things, not the least of which is that he believed that Jesus would return during his lifetime and that many in his day would not experience death.
Second, I disagree with the interpretation of “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.” The original Greek did not have the comma. The verse should have been translated thus: “Truly I tell you today, you will be with me in paradise.” Besides, Jesus did not go to paradise after his death. He was placed in a grave and was dead for 3 days.
Thank you. But, again, I am not a materialist. I am a true-blue dualist.
Dr. Torley, you state:
Hi bornagain,
Brief and Dr. Torley are not two terms I usually use in the same breath. 🙂 But anyways, Your first point is:
Really Dr. Torley??? That is interesting remark for you, a philosopher, to make.
Einstein was once asked (by a philosopher):
Einstein’s answer was categorical, he said:
Quote was taken from the last few minutes of this following video. The meaning of the question can be read in full context in the article following the video:
The statement, ‘the now’ cannot be turned into an object of physical measurement’, was an interesting statement for Einstein to make since ‘the now of the mind’ has, from many recent experiments in quantum mechanics, undermined the space-time of Einstein’s General Relativity as to being the absolute frame of reference for reality. Indeed, I humorously imagine Quantum Mechanics imitating Laplace’s French accent, quipping, “Space-Time? I have no need for that hypothesis!”
i.e. ‘the now of the mind’, contrary to what Einstein thought possible for experimental physics, and according to advances in quantum mechanics, takes precedence over past events in time. Moreover, due to advances in quantum mechanics, it would now be much more appropriate to phrase Einstein’s answer to the philosopher in this way:
You then state Dr. Torely
From our current standpoint of perceptive knowledge (Egnor), and energy’s standpoint of physical knowledge, the supernova is “Now”. And since those points of reference are of a ‘higher dimensional’ value than temporal time is then they take primary priority over the lower dimensional value of temporal time which you are trying to give primary priority to in this debate.
To help get this ‘higher dimension’ point across to you.
Please note, at the 3:22 minute mark of the following video, when the 3-Dimensional world ‘folds and collapses’ into a tunnel shape as a ‘hypothetical’ observer moves towards the ‘higher dimension’ of the speed of light, (Of note: This following video was made by two Australian University Physics Professors with a supercomputer.).
Of related interest, the “Flatland” video, which clearly illustrates this principle of higher dimensions, is on the Vienna Quantum Science Group’s outreach page, (i.e. Anton Zeilinger’s home group):
Thus Dr. Torley, since you are the one arguing that the mind is constrained by time and space, and Dr. Egnor is instead arguing that it is not, then, since mind clearly is not constrained by time and space in our daily subjective experience, then, as far as the empirical evidence itself is concerned, Dr. Egnor literally has the high ground in this debate since light is shown to have this higher dimensional ‘timeless’ property to it that is coterminous with the ‘timeless’ property we also perceive for our mind.
Of related note:
Of related note:
Here’s a recent variation of Wheeler’s Delayed Choice experiment, which highlights the ability of the conscious observer to effect ‘spooky action into the past’, thus further solidifying consciousness’s centrality in reality. Furthermore in the following experiment, the claim that past material states determine future conscious choices (determinism) is directly falsified by the fact that present conscious choices effect past material states:
along that line
Quantum Mechanics imitating Laplace’s French accent, quipping, “Space-Time? I have no need for that hypothesis!”
vjytorley:
Not at all. Yahweh can make things happen in the same way that you and I can make things happen. The difference is that Yahweh is much more powerful. Yahweh has the means to look into our brains and see what we are thinking about before we open our mouths. Heck, even with our limited powers, we, humans, now have machines that can pinpoint certain thoughts in the brain. It’s a primitive form of mind reading. But we’ll get much better at it as we get more knowledgeable. As Paul once wrote, knowledge is power.
This makes no sense, IMO. If God can’t change his mind about anything, he is not only impotent (humans can do something that God cannot do), he is also undeserving of any praise whatsoever. Why? Because he cannot learn anything (here, too, we can do something that God cannot do). I worship a powerful, self-made God who toiled at creation for eons.
The “…” is what kills this false “equation”. It is not an equation unless and until you can write all of it down. That is impossible. Don’t even try a refutation. I will shoot it down.
I’m sorry but this is all nonsense. If time existed, we would have an infinity of changeless moments, i.e., a block universe. This is the reason that Karl Popper compared Einstein’s spacetime to a block universe in which nothing happens. Source: Conjectures and Refutations.
Why is the time dimension nonsense? Simply because it makes change impossible. Why? Because a change in time is self-referential. But I take it that you are comfortable with self-reference. Good luck with that.
Dr. Torley you then state:
You are the one who said that you wanted to talk specifically about Radin’s 2012 paper that I had referenced to refute your point. Not I. You then went on rambling about Radin’s Psi research in which that particular experiment was not even a part of. i.e. The participants in the primary experiments of the 2012 paper were looking directly at the double slit, (which were the exact experiments that had the strongest results by the way).
The results are consistent with Egnor’s contention and dis-confirm your contention.
It is you that has egg on your face for trying to discredit a paper you did not even bother to read and understand. And then, now, trying to point to his other research to try to discredit this 2012 paper by negative association just adds to the disingenuous nature of your response.
Moreover, The empirical evidence of this 2012 paper is above board and stands on its own merit. Despite attempts by atheistic/materialistic sceptics to smear Radin’s other research.
Moreover, even though you try to discredit Radin’s other Psi research, that research, none-the-less, stands up to scrutiny.
Radin is certainly no snake oil salesman, and I find him, unlike Darwinists, to be extremely above board and honest in his inquiry and research.,,, Readily admitting when results fail to live up to expectations and faithfully recording exactly how and when they hold up. I find that Dr. Radin is a man of integrity in his research, whatever atheists/materialists may say about him!
You then go on about remote viewing in point 3, which is not even a point I was defending in the first place. Switching the topic to protect your position from falsifying evidence does not reflect well on you at all Dr. Torley.
I’ll skip to point 5 for now where you try to attack Radin’s other Psi research again. Dean Radin defends the ‘mathematical’ integrity of his work here.
In point 4 Dr. Torley you try to say, (without even batting an eye about the massive ‘non-local’ quantum entanglement found in every protein and DNA molecule that I referenced), that Libet’s research for ‘instantaneous perception’ is merely “‘subjective back-referral of sensations in time’. Egnor acknowledged that Libet tried to rationalize away his findings in such a fashion too. Dr. Egnor, a brain surgeon, as well as I, a layman, reject that pathetic ‘explain away’ hypothesis.
In point 6 you try to defend your imputing causal power, i.e. agent causality, to inanimate objects (i.e. secondary cause). In that regards, I hold you to be part of the problem in modern science, not the solution.
Note what Dr. Stephen Meyer, who has a Ph.D. in the philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge, disparagingly said about these secondary causes that you are so enamoured with
Dr. Torley, I sense you are too deeply wedded to your materialistic philosophy and that we will always be divided on these issues of science and philosophy.
Yet, I am, none-the-less, as a fellow Christian, comforted that we are always united in Christ. Our Lord and Saviour! Amen!
Verse and Music
Fundamentalist Christians and materialists have at least one crackpottery in common: they both believe in the nonsense of infinity. It would be funny if it weren’t so pathetically wrong. It’s an evil doctrine, IMO, the work of the devil. LOL
Mapou,
I like you because you are much more than average an insightful being.
Can you kindly elaborate why “infinity” is a nonsense to you? I’m curious and not attempting to criticize your views….
Dr. Torley,
Thank you very much for your very insightful comments. I very well know that you are truly and sincerely looking for the truth, and promote what you believe is the truth. Your sincerity and tireless effort will be awarded soon… thank you again.
Jack Jones,
Having the ability to access the future and always using the ability is not the same thing.
I can agree with you on this.
The only “issue” I might have is “”why”. Any thoughts?
Dr. Torley,
Coldplay – Yellow (The Stars Shine For you)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH3X-LLY66Y
J-Mac:
Well, thank you. But my insight comes from my being a bona fide nut and not being afraid to say what I believe. It’s not easy. I figured out it’s more about guts than brains.
I also figured out that, after all is said and done, every widespread crackpottery is nonsense for a very simple reason. Infinity is no exception. Here goes.
If infinity existed, any finite quantity would be infinitely smaller than an infinitely large quantity while being finite at the same time. It’s a logical contradiction because a finite quantity cannot be infinitely smaller than anything. Why? Because it cannot be both finite and infinitely small at the same time.
The inverse also applies. If infinity were true, any finite quantity would be infinitely bigger than an infinitely small quantity. Same fallacy.
IOW, we cannot compare any finite number to infinity without being stopped by a contradiction.
semi related to my response to Torley in 144:
Dr. Torley,
Thank you again for your thought provoking posts. I really enjoy them.
I have been thinking about what you’ve written @133 and I have to say, I have my doubts that God can be omniscient and not really know everything beforehand.
Here is your explanation of your views which are quite interesting:
“I’d like to return to J-Mac’s question: “So, did God know that Adam and Eve would sin?” Vy answers “Yes.” I would answer “No,” even though I maintain that God is omniscient. How can this be?
The short answer is that I hold to a Boethian view of Divine foreknowledge: God is like a watcher on a high hill Who timelessly views the past, present and future. God is a spectator of human events; this means that He does not make them happen, but is made aware that they happen. Because God is outside time and space, there is no temporal “before” and “after” with God: all things are present. But in the order of causality, it is our choices that determine God’s awareness of them, and not the other way round (as predestinationists think). Hence God’s awareness of Adam and Eve’s choice is logically posterior to, and not prior to, the choice itself. Insofar as Adam and Eve’s choice was contrary to God’s wishes, we may speak of God as being disappointed and even as having regrets, regarding their choice. The same goes for any other bad choice that people make. However, it would be wrong to speak of God as being surprised by our choices, because surprise can only occur in time, and there never is any time at which God does not know what we have done, are doing and will do. God timelessly knows the totality of our choices, past, present and future, but His knowledge of these choices is passive. That’s why foreknowledge and freedom don’t conflict.”.
Here is why I tend to disagree:
We both believe and know that God must be outside of time and space. This is really easy and I’m not going to get into details so as not to distract you and others from the point I’m trying to make.
My brother who is very well versed in scriptures and this issue is not responding to my emails and text messages, which can only mean one thing; he is somewhere down-under where there is no signal. So, I’m going to try to reconstruct what he had told me more than once.
God is outside of time and space. My brother explained it to me this way, which seems to synchronize with what you have written Dr. Torley. I will be paraphrasing ig since I can’t recall the exact details:
Imagine God creating the universe, time and space but he is the outside spectator. He is not affected by the progression of time and the expansion of the universe.
Example for all those (including myself) to understand it better. I think more in pictures therefore my brother produced something like that:
Imagine that God, just like Dr.Torley suggested, is able to watch a movie with all of the events of that movie at the same time. He is able to watch every second of the movie at the same time.
Now imagine, that the movie God is watching is the movie/history of the universe and all the history of mankind beginning from the first creation of the Earth, Adam and Eve, and all the way to the ends of the universe.
If God can watch this movie with all the bits and pieces at the same time, because he is omniscient, how is that not making Him responsible for Adam and Eve’s sin?
According to this belief God is watching the movie of the history of the universe “past, present and future of his creation at the same time and even before He had even started the creation.
This means that Gad had already known that Adam and Eve would sin, because he was able to watch the “universe expansion movie” in the past, present and future at the same time and be able to know all the details of that movie at an instance the time.
My problem is this; if I were God, Why would I go to all the trouble and create the wonderful universe and all the beauty of it plus mankind if I were already “watching” the outcome of it at the same time?
This reasoning does’t stand the logic and more-God’s high moral principles that He had wanted man to imitate.
Dr. Torley, you hold that since a supernova no longer exists in temporal time, then you believe that Dr. Egnor must obviously be wrong in his claim that perception can be ‘at the star’ and not within our bodies since the star obviously cannot exist ‘now’.
In response, I cited these experiments in post 145.
I would like to draw attention to three quotes in particular from the preceding papers
Dr. Torley, those experiments are simply impossible within your naïve classical world view. In fact, those experiments specifically refute your claim that Dr. Egnor can’t possibly be right because the supernova obviously does not still exist.
Yet Dr. Torley, materialistic presumptions apparently die hard, and you further stated this:
To which I responded in post 144 that the speed of light is a higher dimensional framework of time, (and also referenced the ‘Dr. Quantum in Flatland’ video), and thus that the higher eternal dimension framework of light takes priority over the temporal framework of time that you are currently giving priority to.
In further response, I also referenced the following essay in post 154.
Dr. Torley, in challenging the ‘into the past papers (Zeilinger), ironically, you referenced this particular 2005 paper by Zeilinger to try to refute the ‘into the past’ papers I cited to refute your contention against Dr. Egnor that perception is ‘at the star’
Specifically Dr. Torley, you claimed this sentence from Zeilinger refuted Peres statement (and the ‘into the past’ experiments’
But Zeilinger was not saying that an insoluble paradox does not exist for the “naïve classical world view”, as he terms your materialistic worldview Dr. Torley, Zeilinger was instead saying that the paradox disappears if we think in terms of information.
i.e. Zeilinger is on record in several places calling for an ‘information theoretic’ view of reality (Wheeler) so as to resolve the seemingly impossible paradoxes that come from thinking about reality in materialistic terms as you, Dr. Torley, are currently doing in your debate with Dr. Egnor:
Zeilinger also stated this:
Now Zeilinger, unwittingly or not, even though he thinks he has solved the measurement problem by thinking of the problem only in terms of information, has still, none-the-less, smuggled the ‘observer’ in the back door. Barr puts the situation like this:
But regardless of whether or not Zeilinger made an inadvertent mistake in excluding the observer from the measurement problem, (which I hold that he did), I want to focus on the physical nature of information. Namely, I want to point out that, although information can be represented on a material substrate, information is still transcendent of any conceivable material basis. Meyer and Berliski put the situation like this:
To put this in perspective, as pointed out before, hypothetically travelling at the speed of light in this universe would be instantaneous travel for the person going at the speed of light. This is because time does not pass for them, yet, and this is a very big ‘yet’ to take note of; this ‘timeless’ travel is still not instantaneous and transcendent to our temporal framework of time (as quantum teleportation is), i.e. Speed of light travel, to our temporal frame of reference, is still not completely transcendent of our framework since light appears to take time to travel from our temporal perspective. Yet, in quantum teleportation of information, the ‘time not passing’, i.e. ‘eternal’, framework is not only achieved in the speed of light framework/dimension, but is also ‘instantaneously’ achieved in our temporal framework. That is to say, the instantaneous teleportation/travel of quantum information is instantaneous to both the temporal and speed of light frameworks, not just the speed of light framework. Information entanglement/travel is not limited by time, nor space, in any way, shape or form, in any frame of reference, as light is seemingly limited to us in this temporal framework.
Thus ‘pure transcendent information’ (in quantum teleportaion experiments) is shown to be timeless (eternal) and completely transcendent of all material frameworks. Moreover, concluding from all lines of evidence we now have (many of which I have not specifically listed here); transcendent, eternal, infinite information is indeed real and the framework in which ‘It’ resides is the primary reality (highest dimension) that can exist, (in so far as our limited perception of a primary reality, highest dimension, can be discerned).
Thus Dr. Torley, I think, as far as empirical science in concerned, that the ‘spiritual domain of the soul’; i.e. “the primary domain of the ‘Real’ for medieval thinkers” as Margaret Wertheim put it in her essay, has certainly returned full force to reclaim its rightful place as ‘the primary domain of the ‘Real”. And that the materialistic philosophy, i.e. space-time matter-energy, that you are trying to give precedence in your debate with Dr. Egnor is of secondary or lesser concern.
I also reiterate that, besides reality being ‘information theoretic’ in its foundational basis and taking precedence over past events in time (Zeilinger), that quantum entanglement is also found in biology on a massive scale. Thus, giving Libet’s ‘instantaneous perception’ findings a plausible mechanism all the way into the brain. And thus also providing a continuous ‘instantaneous’ chain to support Dr. Egnor’s claim for ‘perception at the star’ even though on the temporal perspective the star may no longer exist.
Verse and Music:
Dr. Torley, at this point, besides the ‘into the past’ experiments of Zeilinger that were just referenced, I would like to re-reference the quantum zeno effect as well as Radin’s six experiments.
If the simple act of observation is not able to ‘reach back in time’ as you hold, and since it takes a finite amount of temporal time for light to travel even a few inches, (light travels approximately 1 foot in a nano-second), then there should be no effect witnessed if an observer simply observes something.
Yet, the quantum Zeno effect shatters this materialistic myth.
I received a bit of blowback from a few atheists on that quote from Ell, so I looked up ‘interaction-free measurement’ of the quantum Zeno effect. And indeed decay of unstable atoms can be prevented without directly interacting the atoms, but the decay is prevented simply by the knowledge, (i.e. information), we gain by ‘observing’ the system as a whole through time.
We find that Interaction free measurements involve collapsing a wave function simply by the knowledge you gain about a system as you observe it through time.
In fact, interaction free measurements are one of the lines of evidence that falsified decoherence as a rational explanation for wave collapse. Richard Conn Henry, Professor of Physics John Hopkins University, puts it like this:
Here are some of those interaction free measurements:
Thus, the fact that ‘observation’, or what Dr. Egnor termed ‘perception at a distance’, does indeed have an effect on what is being observed is established by the interaction free Quantum Zeno effect I referenced as well as by the ‘interaction free’ experiments that preceded it.
As well Dr. Torley, as much as you may think Radin is not even a ‘real’ scientist, since he studies what role, if any, mind may have on matter, I re-reference the results of Radin’s paper. Specifically, I want to emphasize the fact that it was shown in his experiments that ‘focused-attention’ did indeed have an effect on the double slit experiment to a ‘significant degree’ by an observer sitting two meters away.
As to the metaphysical prejudice of most physicist against consciousness having any role in Quantum Mechanics, Radin makes this comment on page 169 and 170 of the preceding study:
Dr. Torley, I always find it interesting that ‘metaphysical prejudice’ in science almost always seems to pop up whenever the results of science might point to God. I would hope Dr. Torley that you could rise above that ‘metaphysical prejudice’ inherent in much of science and accept the results of the experiments I have cited for what they are. Namely, that consciousness/mind is not as limited as you have presupposed it to be in your debate with Dr. Egnor. And that mind, namely perception of the mind, can indeed have effects outside of our temporal/material body to ‘perceive at an object’ just as Dr. Egnor claimed it could.
Of related note to the Theology of ‘backward in time’ causation by mind being in accordance with Christian Theism.
Also of related note,
Gravity (i.e. space-time itself) was overcome in the resurrection event of Christ:
Moreover, as would be expected if General Relativity (Gravity), and Quantum Mechanics/Special Relativity (QED), were truly unified in the resurrection of Christ from death, the image on the shroud is found to be formed by a quantum process. The image was not formed by a ‘classical’ process:
The only thing I should have added to my post #155 is that God has to have the ability to foreknow the future but He does’t always exercise that ability as it has already been suggested by JJ#132. Otherwise, the act of creation wouldn’t make much sense at all.
BA,
I like you but your soul-quantum mechanics thing is getting out of control. If you believe it, read this!
If you can’t understand it, look it up!
Here we go-The soul teaching is not even a Christian teaching.
Where would the soul of Larry Moran go after death? I hope not to heaven?
According to your belief, the poor Larry’s soul would have to go to the purgatory but they apparently only accept agnostics and revamped atheists.
Where would Larry’s soul go? To hell to be tortured for eternity?
J-Mac, UD has quite the diversity of theistic views. The one thing that unites us all is our defense of ID. Personally, I have no problem with you not believing in a soul. Don’t get me wrong, I believe you are completely wrong, both theologically and empirically in regards to the soul. As I am sure you think I am wrong in my position. But, as I see it, that is between you and God, and is certainly not up to me nor my feeble attempts to correct what I see to be Theological and empirical error. The primary thing is that we are united against atheists and their doctrine of Darwinian evolution.
May you and yours have a very Merry Christmas Season.
Joy Williams – Here With Us with lyrics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgGaQWCCjR0&index=1&list=RDrgGaQWCCjR0
bornagain,
I get it all. I just wished you had not insisted on your side of the story so much. I believe that the Bible, the accurate history of Christianity, the Greek Mythology as well as Quantum Mechanics clearly contradict the existence of immaterial soul.
J-Mac, so you don’t believe you are a soul? How about your mind? Do you deny the existence of your mind to?
Sadducees vs. Pharisees?
Acts 23:8 – 9
For the Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, nor angel, nor spirit, but the Pharisees acknowledge them all. There was a great uproar, and some of the teachers of the law who were Pharisees stood up and argued vigorously. “We find nothing wrong with this man,” they said. “What if a spirit or an angel has spoken to him?”
of note, one commenter argues even the Sadducees believed in an afterlife of sorts:
At this point, I’m prepared to stand by my original claim that the Sadducees in general did indeed believe that at death, the soul continues to exist, and departs to an afterlife (of sorts) in Sheol, despite Pharisaic attempts to portray them as annihilationists, and despite the possibility that individual Sadducees may indeed have absorbed Greek philosophical materialism into their personal religion. I’d discount the latter group, because if you’re going to become a Greek materialist, you’ve got no particular interest in books of laws supposedly dictated by immaterial gods, and therefore you’re not really part of the debate between Jesus and the Sadducees. What we’ve got in Matthew 22 are a bunch of Sadducees who already believed that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were in Sheol,
http://blog.evangelicalrealism.....es-saw-it/
I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I don’t.
As you may or may not know, I don’t have doubts about God’s ABILITY TO KNOW EVERYTHING IN ADVANCE.
I know, He can do it. However, does He want to do it? If yes, why? If not, why not?
J-Mac, let’s be perfectly clear here, which question were you answering?
‘I don’t’ can be taken two different ways.
BA: “so you don’t believe you are a soul?”
JMac: ‘I don’t’
BA: “How about your mind? Do you deny the existence of your mind to?”
JMac: ‘I don’t’
Do you believe that you have a transcendent mind that is not reducible to any material explanations? And yet you do not believe you have a transcendent soul?
Is that your exact position?
Or are you just saying that you believe you have a ‘mind’ but that the ‘mind’ you believe in is really reducible to brain states? i.e. You have a ‘mind’ but your ‘mind’ is really just an illusion produced by your brain?
bornagain,
I’m sorry bornagin but I was very tired yesterday.
I should have been more clear answering your deep questions.
1. I tend to believe that humans are living “souls” as are the animals.
2.I don’t believe us and animals as well have a transcendent mind for many reasons one of them being this:
Ecclesiastes 9:10
“Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the realm of the dead, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom.”
J-Mac – “I don’t believe us and animals as well have a transcendent mind”
Really?
OK, if you have no mind, and consciousness is just an emergent property, i.e. ‘illusion’, of the brain, just who wrote your preceding post denying the reality of your own mind?
And although Dr. Nelson alluded to writing an e-mail, (i.e. creating information), to tie his ‘personal agent’ argument into intelligent design, Dr. Nelson’s ‘personal agent’ argument can easily be amended to any action that ‘you’, as a personal agent, choose to take:
Dr. Craig Hazen, in the following video at the 12:26 minute mark, relates how he performed, for an audience full of academics at a college, a ‘miracle’ simply by raising his arm,,
What should be needless to say, if raising your arm is enough to refute your supposedly ‘scientific’ worldview of atheistic materialism/naturalism, then perhaps it is time for you to seriously consider getting a new scientific worldview?
Moreover, J-Mac, if your consciousness/mind is really just an ‘illusion’, why in blue blazes should I care what you think is true? Illusions by there very nature are false views of reality. i.e. why should I trust a a false view of reality, which you claim is ‘you’, to tell me what is really true about reality?
at 37:51 minute mark of following video, according to the law of identity, Richard Dawkins does not exist as a person: (the unity of Aristotelian Form is also discussed) i.e. to repeat, ironically, in atheists denying that God really exists, they end up denying that they themselves really exist as real persons.
And in the following article Dawkins admits that it is impossible to live as if his atheistic worldview were actually true
And since Dawkins can’t possibly live as if atheistic materialism were actually true, then that makes his worldview a delusion:
I’ve noticed you didn’t address the scripture from Eccl 9:10 the clearly indicates that there is no mind activity after death.
Don’t you think that if there was a transcendent mind, soul or spirit that had existed before our creation and after our bodies’ death, the above scripture would contradict it?
Let’s look at quantum mechanics. For some reason I think you love quantum mechanics. If that’s the case, we share one love 🙂
Do you or don’t you believe that teleportation also known as quantum leap is possible? Please elaborate if your answer is yes or no.
J-Mac, why should I listen to an illusion? ‘You’ yourself, by your own premises of denying the reality of your own mind, are trying to tell me that ‘you’ do not really exist but are a illusion!
I ignore illusions J-Mac!
“You” are in what I term ‘epistemological failure’.
In other words, your theory of knowledge of how we know things to be true is self-defeating in both the logical sense and more importantly in the personal sense of there being no ‘self’ to know anything in the first place.
For ‘you’ to now try to debate scripture and quantum mechanics, whilst ignoring this elephant in the living room problem of there being no ‘you’ to argue in the first place, indicates that you have no clue just how soundly your denial of your own mind defeats any argument that ‘you’ may choose make afterwards.
And much like your denial of your own mind, your claim that scripture tells us that there is no life after death is patently absurd.
Hi mapou,
Thank you for your post. I”d just like to make a few quick comments. You claim that God (Yahweh) is good at mind-reading, but deny that He knows the distant future. Isaiah 46:9 contradicts that when it declares: “I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things not yet done.”
You also hold that a God Who was incapable of learning would merit no praise whatsoever. The reason why I praise Him is simply that I depend on Him for every moment of my existence. I’d say that’s reason enough, regardless of whether God learns or not.
You object to my equation 1+0.5+0.25+0.125+0.0625+…=2, on the grounds that the left hand side isn’t written down in its entirety. But I could have expressed my point equally well by using the sigma sign and writing the equation as the sum of an infinite geometric sequence, where the first term a=1, and where r=0.5. Since |r|<1, we can calculate the infinite sum of the geometric sequence as 2.
Finally, you object that my Boethian view of free will, according to which God sees the past, present and future laid out before Him, is tantamount to an Einsteinian denial of the objective reality of time: all that exists is static "block time." In reply: the fact that God is outside time and views it as a succession of moments does not make time "unreal." From a cosmos-bound perspective, such as our own, time is perfectly real. And even from a Divine standpoint, the order of causality is real: it is the ball that breaks the window, not the window the ball.
Thank you for the exchange.
Hi bornagain,
I’d like to briefly respond to the comments you made above.
First, I should say a little about the nature of philosophy. It is a no-holds-barred sport, in which participants regularly hold their opponents’ feet to the fire, in order to test the consistency and strength of their convictions. They do this by deliberately posing tough questions, challenging thought experiments and acute logical dilemmas. So it simply won’t do for you to dismiss my objections to your position as either disingenuous, or as the product of my being brainwashed for several decades of exposure to materialist propaganda. Even if that were true, it’s totally irrelevant. Regardless of their provenance or motivation, the objections which I raised still need to be answered.
Second, it seems to me that you haven’t really addressed the central questions I raised in my OP. Perception is, according to Professor Egnor’s account, an event in which I reach out to and make immediate epistemic contact with, the object I perceive. (On my account, it’s an event in which the object reaches out to me.) The argument I made was a very simple one: you can’t make immediate contact with that-which-no-longer-exists. You exist and perceive now; that-which-no-longer-exists existed at some time in the past, but not now.
You have tried to evade the force of this objection by invoking relativity and parapsychology. Neither will help you. Time might cease to exist at the speed of light; but when I perceive a star in the night sky, I’m not traveling at the speed of light. In fact, I’m not traveling anywhere; I’m just standing on the ground. Also, if you’re willing to count extra-sensory perception as “seeing,” then you’ve failed to explain why we need a body at all, in order to perceive anything. But if you don’t consider seeing to be a bodily act, then your position is at odds with Egnor’s – and with Aristotle’s. (It might be compatible with Plato’s view, but that is another matter.)
Alternatively, you might want to suggest that when I perceive, I somehow stand outside time. But if that were the case, then why am I unable to perceive events that happened in my vicinity, 10 or 100 years ago? Why can none of us see the Battle of Gettysburg, even if we visit the scene of the battle?
You dismissed my questions about whether animals perceive as facile and disingenuous, but the questions are perfectly valid ones. Does a one-year-old puppy dog perceive the Dog Star (Sirius, 8.6 light years from Earth) when it looks up at the night sky? And if it does, how, when and where does this act of perception take place? Can the dog stand outside time? I doubt it. Can it travel back on time? I doubt that even more.
Finally, you have attacked my own moderate view that objects have causal powers of their own and that they reach out to us when we perceive them, as smacking of materialism and atheism. I have tried to refer you to short, simple explanations of secondary causality on the Internet, but you appear to have learned nothing from them. So I’ll conclude with a simple example from Aquinas: a hand moving a stick, which in turn moves a stone. An object is an agent, but it is a secondary agent: it is like the stick, in Aquinas’ example. Does the stick act upon the stone? Of course it does: it hits the stone, and makes it move. Is the stick an instrument of the agent when it does so? Of course it is: the stick has no mind of its own. Objects have causal powers, but they are not “autonomous”: they could do nothing unless acted on and maintained in existence by God. I cannot make my meaning any clearer than that.
So when a star shines in the sky, it has a genuine power to act upon the retinas of our eyes. It is therefore capable of reaching out to us. The photons that it projects continue traveling in space, even after the star itself ceases to exist. As I explained in my OP, since the action of emitting light is performed during the lifetime of the star (even its effects are only felt by us much later), there is therefore no “temporal divorce” between the entity and its actions, but only between those actions and their effects on us. I think that’s a much more common-sensical view of perception than Egnor’s, and it makes no extravagant claims.
If you wish to respond, you are welcome to do so, but please do me a favor and address my objections, in your own words. If you direct me to other articles, I won’t read them; I want to know what you think. Even if I had the time to read the articles (which I don’t), I probably wouldn’t understand the point you are trying to make, simply because the words are not your own, but somebody else’s, and they were not written in order to addressed to the objection that I was raising, but for some other reason. Hence they are only obliquely relevant, at best. Try to communicate in your own words, in future; it forces you to actually think.
I’d like to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Dr. Torley, your objections were answered. It won’t do for you to claim that they weren’t. Please briefly answer the responses one by one in your own words. Several thousand word salad replies will not be read. And I will respond however way I choose because I don’t care if you personally listen or not.
For you to still claim that past events in time take precedence over how the observer perceives the world, especially given our current state of knowledge about quantum mechanics, reveals that you do not understand quantum mechanics nor do you even really understand mind’s primacy in reality. Neither mind nor quantum mechanics is limited to past events in time nor to your false materialistic premises.
For you to again try to imbue material objects with quasi-agent causality is to reveal once again that you have a severely muddled view of reality.
You accuse me of evasion but I have not moved. You are the one who refuses to address the empirical evidence from quantum mechanics and special relativity head on. The few times you have tried to address it, I had to correct some gross misunderstandings that you had. For instance, you tried to claim Zeilinger supported your severely misinformed materialistic interpretation of quantum mechanics when he was in fact calling for a brand new ‘information theoretic’ view of reality. He even quoted John 1:1 for crying out loud.
You keep trying to give temporal time primacy. Quantum Mechanics has no need for that hypothesis and has been shown to take dominion over past events in time. Thus substantiating Dr. Egnor’s claim. For you to keep making the same claim over again after it has been refuted empirically is something I would expect from a Darwinist. Not from someone who claims to follow the evidence wherever it leads.
You claim that no one can see beyond the constraints of time and see past events in history, yet you also claim to believe in the Bible which tells of many prophets foretelling many future events sometimes hundreds and even thousands of years in advance.
You keep bringing up animals when you haven’t even understood humans yet. Need I say more?
By your own admission, the star can do nothing within itself unless acted upon by God. So why frame the the issue as if the star has acted on its own accordance to reach out to us without God? That is what is so subtly disingenuous in your framing of the issue.
You claim you make no extravagant claims for your materialistic position. That is exactly your problem.
Whenever you are trying to describe how reality is actually structured, and necessarily have to include God in your description of reality, then the description you find will indeed appear to be ‘crazy’ to those who prefer a self existent universe that does not need God to explain its existence (if there can even exist such a simplistic and completely self existent universe outside of the imagination of man)
I don’t blame you for not wanting me to list citations that back up my position. You have shown your ignorance whenever you have tried to address them in the past. Especially with Zeilinger, and your ‘no-read’ of Radin.
I think you owe Egnor and everyone on UD an apology for your post against Egnor.
But I doubt you will ever admit your mistakes.
Merry Christmas to you and yours.
156 – 159 need to be addressed on points
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....ent-592708
Borngain,
I have nothing else to say to you. I’m sorry. Don’t take it as an offence, please. I don’t think there is a need to explain anything on my part.
Dr. Torley,
I’ve noticed you have not responded to my last post @155. I’m just making sure you are ok even if you are not going to respond to it. It was very nice talking to you. You are my favorite philosopher!
J-Mac – you state:
I don’t blame you for wanting to drop out of the discussion. Denying the reality of you own mind/soul, to put it mildly, is not the best place to start a debate.
You see J-Mac, without your mind/soul to refer to, you are essentially saying that ‘you’, as a person, do not really exist and that ‘you’ are an illusion.
That is literally a ‘self’-defeating proposition to be defending in a debate since ‘you’ are in fact denying the reality of ‘self’ to begin with. 🙂
Nancy Pearcey has written an excellent book that covers this subject in one part of her book. Here is an excerpt from her book on this particular subject:
Also of interest to this mind/soul issue J-Mac, the human body is conservatively made up of a billion-trillion protein molecules.
My question J-Mac is this, what unifying principle is holding the approx. billion-trillion protein molecules of a human body together as a single unified whole for precisely a lifetime, and not a moment longer?
Without a soul to refer to, you, since you deny the reality of your own mind/soul J-Mac, have no coherent answer to give to this simple question
I could tell you about conservation of ‘non-local’ quantum information and how it, like energy, cannot be created nor destroyed, and how that conserved information disappears from the human body upon death, but, IMHO, that is to miss this main question of “What power holds off that moment — precisely for a lifetime, and not a moment longer?”
IMHO J-Mac, ‘soul/mind’ is the ONLY coherent answer to that simple question. Reductive materialism is not even in the ballpark of rationality as to answering that simple question.
Verse:
Hi J-Mac,
Sorry for not answering your query (#155) earlier. You write (emphases mine):
The short answer to your question is that causal priority is not the same thing as temporal priority. God views all events – past, present and future – together, in their entirety. These events are never (and were never) absent from God’s all-knowing gaze. However, God does not make them happen; He is made aware of them. He does not determine them; rather, He is (timelessly) determined by them.
If God determined our choices – either by deciding what we shall do (as the author of a book decides what his characters will do), or by deciding to put us in a situation where we would invariably act in a certain way, which is determined by our nature – then He would indeed be fully responsible for those choices. But I hold that God does not in any way determine our choices. He is (timelessly) informed of what we do; hence He is not responsible for our actions.
Does God watch the cosmic movie of our actions “before He had even started the creation”? No. There is no time before the Big Bang; hence we can rule out a temporal “before.” What about a causal “before”? Once again, the answer is no: God’s knowledge is causally subsequent to His decision to create, which means that if God had not (timelessly) chosen to create the world, there would be no movie for Him to watch.
Finally, you ask: why would God go to all the trouble of making a universe if He were already watching the movie of creation? As I explained in the previous paragraph, there would be no movie for God to watch, if God had not decided to create the cosmos. His decision to create the world is causally (but not temporally) prior to the “cosmic movie” that He always views. So while it is true to say that the movie is always being watched by God, it is not true to say that He was already watching the movie when He decided to create the world – as if He would still be watching the movie even if He hadn’t decided to create. Rather, what we should say is that God’s decision to create and God’s knowledge of creation are both timeless, and neither are ever absent from God’s Mind (although they both would be, if God’s choices were other than what they are).
I hope that answers your question.
Hi bornagain,
Here’s a quick response to your request (#174) that I address your posts #156-159. My apologies for not responding earlier.
You seem to be arguing that backwards causation allows future actions to causally influence past events. So here’s my question: are you saying that the supernova wouldn’t have exploded if someone on Earth hadn’t subsequently observed it? Or are you saying that the rays emitted by the exploding supernova would not have traveled to Earth if someone hadn’t subsequently observed them? What exactly are you claiming?
Both claims would appear to be untenable. The first claim implies that there are no supernova explosions in galaxies which we never happen to observe; the second implies that there are explosions, but that no radiation emitted by unobserved supernovas ever reaches Earth.
You also cite Dr. William Dembski’s work on backwards causation in The End of Christianity. However, Dr. Dembski’s argument relates to events (on Earth) which are causally subsequent to, but temporally prior to, the Fall of Adam. The supernova explosion, on the other hand, is causally independent of the Fall of Adam. Hence the parallel does not hold.
Best wishes for a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.
Vj, you might be interested in this critic of Boethius’s views on God’s omniscience.
as to:
“You seem to be arguing that backwards causation allows future actions to causally influence past events. So here’s my question: are you saying that the supernova wouldn’t have exploded if someone on Earth hadn’t subsequently observed it?”
No, and I already answered the question of why God’s observation by itself does not collapse the wave function in post 104 and 106.
Here are a few of my references along that line:
It is interesting to note what Feynman himself says about quantum mechanics. Particularly the double slit:
Anton Zeilinger stated this in regards to the double slit:
Actually, contrary to what Zeilinger stated, and according to Feynman himself who had a lead role in developing Quantum Electrodynamics (QED), not only do we not know what the photon is doing ‘in between’ in the double slit experiment, as it is travelling, we really don’t even know how the photons are emitted and absorbed in the first place.
And although, according to Zeilinger, we cannot say exactly what the photon is doing in the double slit between emission and absorption, we do know that while a photon is doing whatever it is doing in the double slit, that the photon is mathematically defined as being in a infinite dimension state. A infinite dimension state that takes an infinite amount of information to describe.
Some may say, “But hey, whatever the photon is doing in the double slit while it is in its infinite dimension/information state, we at least know that it is travelling at the speed of light!”
Yet, Special Relativity is just about as mysterious as a photon exiting in a infinite dimension/information state.
And all this is before we even get to the profound mysteries surrounding ‘the observer’ in the double slit! 🙂
Moreover, Feynman, in his role in developing QED, played an integral part in unifying special relativity with quantum mechanics:
This unification was accomplished by “brushing infinity under the rug.”
Feynman rightly expresses his unease with “brushing infinity under the rug.” here:
I don’t know about Feynman and others who wish that space itself could be explained without reference to ‘infinite logic’, but as for myself, being a Christian Theist, I find it rather comforting to know that it takes an ‘infinite amount of logic to figure out what one stinky tiny bit of space-time is going to do’:
as to:
“You also cite Dr. William Dembski’s work on backwards causation in The End of Christianity. However, Dr. Dembski’s argument relates to events (on Earth) which are causally subsequent to, but temporally prior to, the Fall of Adam. The supernova explosion, on the other hand, is causally independent of the Fall of Adam. Hence the parallel does not hold.”
So you admit that backward causation in time is theologically sound as far as Christ is concerned, but draw the line at humans? Is that your exact position?
If so, I hold that that backwards in time causation is theologically sound for humans to:
Of note, the second law is intimately connected to death and to the supernova’s explosion.
In his book, Dr. Dembski argues that the effects of the fall reach back in time as well as forward
Oh, i’m sorry. I forgot to include my final statement:
“J-Mac, why should I listen to an illusion? ‘You’ yourself, by your own premises of denying the reality of your own mind, are trying to tell me that ‘you’ do not really exist but are a illusion!
I ignore illusions J-Mac!
“You” are in what I term ‘epistemological failure’.”
Just because you refuse to believe something and insist on believing something else it doesn’t make it true does it?
What makes you so different from Darwinists?
BTW: The mind, the memories, the experiences of life etc. are all there where you think your “soul” is; quantum state of the particles you and I are made of.
Remember, if you are off about the soul and mind thingy, you have nowhere else to go.
“I don’t blame you for wanting to drop out of the discussion. Denying the reality of you own mind/soul, to put it mildly, is not the best place to start a debate.
You see J-Mac, without your mind/soul to refer to, you are essentially saying that ‘you’, as a person, do not really exist and that ‘you’ are an illusion.
That is literally a ‘self’-defeating proposition to be defending in a debate since ‘you’ are in fact denying the reality of ‘self’ to begin with. 🙂
Nancy Pearcey has written an excellent book that covers this subject in one part of her book. Here is an excerpt from her book on this particular subject:
Don’t you even care who reads your stuff? I bet most of them are atheists. I’m 100 % turned of by your attitude and I try to become a Christian. What do you think they are going to do when they read your sermons?
J-Mac, so you consider it a ‘sermon’ to point out the ‘self’-defeating premise of your argument against ‘mind’?
Take it however you want to take it. Being ‘not even wrong’ in your beliefs is what it is.
Some people would be grateful to be corrected.
Of related note to ‘perception at a distance’: