The universe exists because we are here?

Wow, EvilSnack, that is quite a satire of unguided evolution. Or is it an ode to guided evolution? Both I guess. Thanks for link:) ppolish

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tNLvNOu9Mw EvilSnack

In regards to the 'instrumentalist approach' in quantum mechanics where,,,

"humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level"

And in regards to Weinberg's objection to the 'instrumentalist approach' because,

the instrumentalist approach turns its back on a vision that became possible after Darwin, of a world governed by impersonal physical laws that control human behavior along with everything else.

In regards to all that, it is interesting to note that there is no known law of nature corresponding to Darwinian evolution itself. In other words, there is no known ‘law of evolution’, such as there is a ‘law of gravity’, within the physical universe.

The Evolution of Ernst: Interview with Ernst Mayr – 2004 Excerpt: biology (Darwinian Evolution) differs from the physical sciences in that in the physical sciences, all theories, I don’t know exceptions so I think it’s probably a safe statement, all theories are based somehow or other on natural laws. In biology, as several other people have shown, and I totally agree with them, there are no natural laws in biology corresponding to the natural laws of the physical sciences. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-evolution-of-ernst-in/ WHAT SCIENTIFIC IDEA IS READY FOR RETIREMENT? Evolution is True – Roger Highfield – January 2014 Excerpt:,,, Whatever the case, those universal truths—’laws’—that physicists and chemists all rely upon appear relatively absent from biology. Little seems to have changed from a decade ago when the late and great John Maynard Smith wrote a chapter on evolutionary game theory for a book on the most powerful equations of science: his contribution did not include a single equation. http://www.edge.org/response-detail/25468 “It is our contention that if ‘random’ is given a serious and crucial interpretation from a probabilistic point of view, the randomness postulate is highly implausible and that an adequate scientific theory of evolution must await the discovery and elucidation of new natural laws—physical, physico-chemical, and biological.” Murray Eden, “Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory,” Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution, editors Paul S. Moorhead and Martin M. Kaplan, June 1967, p. 109.

Whilst all the equations that accurately describe the universe are based on universal constants or natural laws of some sort, the math of Darwinian evolution is not based on any universal constant or natural law of any sort. Without a universal constant or natural law to base its math on, Darwinian evolution is not testable, (i.e. potentially falsifiable by direct experiment),

“On the other hand, I disagree that Darwin’s theory is as `solid as any explanation in science.; Disagree? I regard the claim as preposterous. Quantum electrodynamics is accurate to thirteen or so decimal places; so, too, general relativity. A leaf trembling in the wrong way would suffice to shatter either theory. What can Darwinian theory offer in comparison?” – Berlinski, D., “A Scientific Scandal?: David Berlinski & Critics,” Commentary, July 8, 2003

And since Darwinian evolution is not falsifiable be direct experiment then Darwinian evolution does not qualify as a hard science in the first place but is more realistically classified as a unfalsifiable pseudoscience:

Deeper into the Royal Society Evolution Paradigm Shift Meeting – 02/08/2016 Suzan Mazur: Peter Saunders in his interview comments to me said that neo-Darwinism is not a theory, it’s a paradigm and the reason it’s not a theory is that it’s not falsifiable. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.....84812.html Peter Saunders is Co-Director, Institute of Science in Society, London; Emeritus professor of Applied Mathematics, King’s College London. Peter Saunders has been applying mathematics in biology for over 40 years, in microbiology and physiology as well as in development and evolution. He has been a critic of neo-Darwinism for almost as long. “In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.” Karl Popper – The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge (2014 edition), Routledge

Thus whilst Weinberg may object that,,

"humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level",,, the instrumentalist approach turns its back on a vision that became possible after Darwin, of a world governed by impersonal physical laws that control human behavior along with everything else.

,, whilst Weinberg may object to humans being brought 'into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level' , the fact of the matter is that Darwin, nor anyone else, has been able to find the 'impersonal physical laws' of Darwinian evolution itself. It seems rather futile to want to describe humans solely as the result of impersonal physical laws when no one has a clue what those impersonal physical laws might actually be. bornagain77

News, This is very interesting indeed:

The brain isn’t the seat of consciousness but acts more like a radio receiver, and perhaps emitter, translating conscious activity into physical correlates. (The radio receiver metaphor describes the feedback loop between mind and brain, which are actually not separate but part of the same complementary activity in consciousness.) To understand our true participation in the universe, we must learn much more about awareness and how it turns mind into matter and vice versa.

Blend that with Eng and researcher Derek Smith's two-tier controller cybernetic view and we may be getting somewhere after all. In any case, we here see that there is an implicit recognition that the sort of materialistic determinism of mind that J B S Haldane highlighted and corrected at the turn of the 1930's is clearly in retreat:

"It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. In order to escape from this necessity of sawing away the branch on which I am sitting, so to speak, I am compelled to believe that mind is not wholly conditioned by matter.” ["When I am dead," in Possible Worlds: And Other Essays [1927], Chatto and Windus: London, 1932, reprint, p.209. Cf. here on (and esp here) on the self-refutation by self-falsifying self referential incoherence and on linked amorality.]

A slow, bitter, scorched earth retreat, but a retreat. One and a half cheers . . . KF kairosfocus

So does this mean if a tree falls in a forest and there are no observers - it does not make a sound? Apparently so. "If the tree falls on a gopher, does the gopher make a sound?" ppolish

Of note, noted atheist Steven Weinberg has apparently given up trying to understand Quantum Mechanics:

The Trouble with Quantum Mechanics - Steven Weinberg - January 19, 2017 Excerpt: Unfortunately, these ideas about modifications of quantum mechanics are not only speculative but also vague, and we have no idea how big we should expect the corrections to quantum mechanics to be. Regarding not only this issue, but more generally the future of quantum mechanics, I have to echo Viola in Twelfth Night: “O time, thou must untangle this, not I.” http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/01/19/trouble-with-quantum-mechanics/

Weinberg rightly rejects the 'realist approach' to quantum mechanics mainly because of 'many worlds interpretation', but, on the other hand, it is interesting to note the main reason for why he rejects the 'instrumentalist approach' to quantum mechanics:

The Trouble with Quantum Mechanics - Steven Weinberg - January 19, 2017 Excerpt: The instrumentalist approach,, (the) wave function,, is merely an instrument that provides predictions of the probabilities of various outcomes when measurements are made.,, In the instrumentalist approach,,, humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level. According to Eugene Wigner, a pioneer of quantum mechanics, “it was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness.”11 Thus the instrumentalist approach turns its back on a vision that became possible after Darwin, of a world governed by impersonal physical laws that control human behavior along with everything else. It is not that we object to thinking about humans. Rather, we want to understand the relation of humans to nature, not just assuming the character of this relation by incorporating it in what we suppose are nature’s fundamental laws, but rather by deduction from laws that make no explicit reference to humans. We may in the end have to give up this goal,,, Some physicists who adopt an instrumentalist approach argue that the probabilities we infer from the wave function are objective probabilities, independent of whether humans are making a measurement. I don’t find this tenable. In quantum mechanics these probabilities do not exist until people choose what to measure, such as the spin in one or another direction. Unlike the case of classical physics, a choice must be made,,, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/01/19/trouble-with-quantum-mechanics/

Since Weinberg rejects the instrumentalist approach since it undermines Darwin's goal of trying to explain humans as purely the result of the laws of nature, if I had the pleasure, I might ask Weinberg who discovered the standard model? Him or the laws of nature?

Physicist George Ellis on the importance of philosophy and free will - July 27, 2014 Excerpt: And free will?: Horgan: Einstein, in the following quote, seemed to doubt free will: “If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the Earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord…. So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man’s illusion that he was acting according to his own free will.” Do you believe in free will? Ellis: Yes. Einstein is perpetuating the belief that all causation is bottom up. This simply is not the case, as I can demonstrate with many examples from sociology, neuroscience, physiology, epigenetics, engineering, and physics. Furthermore if Einstein did not have free will in some meaningful sense, then he could not have been responsible for the theory of relativity – it would have been a product of lower level processes but not of an intelligent mind choosing between possible options. I find it very hard to believe this to be the case – indeed it does not seem to make any sense. Physicists should pay attention to Aristotle’s four forms of causation – if they have the free will to decide what they are doing. If they don’t, then why waste time talking to them? They are then not responsible for what they say. https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/intelligent-design/physicist-george-ellis-on-the-importance-of-philosophy-and-free-will/

bornagain77

IMHO, they made a major mistake in their presuppositions. 1. They claimed that

That's why in scattered pockets, some physicists are beginning to talk about a conscious universe, where consciousness is a given throughout Nature.

This is basically the same mistake that Stuart Hameroff made. Hameroff holds to a Eastern religious worldview where 'proto-consciousness' is coterminus with spacetime geometry:

Dr. Stuart Hameroff On Quantum Consciousness and Moving Singularity Goal Posts Excerpt: Consciousness could occur at the fundamental level of spacetime geometry when the brain stops being perfused.,,, consciousness is happening it seems to us at the level of spacetime geometry, the most fundamental level of the universe,,,, If you go back to the Buddhist texts,,, The Tibetan monks that the Dalai Lama selected and sent to Davidson’s lab,,,, http://skeptiko.com/stuart-hameroff-on-quantum-consciousness-and-singularity/

Yet, as much as I respect Hameroff and his work on microtubules, Quantum Mechanics (QM), rather than supporting his Pantheistic view of reality, actually, when scrutinizing the mathematical details of QM, supports a Theistic view of reality not his Pantheistic view of reality. A Theistic view of reality in which the omniscient 'infinite consciousness' of the Mind of God precedes space-time altogether. i.e. Conscious is not basically coterminus with the 'fundamental level of space-time geometry' where, as they claimed in their article, "consciousness is a given throughout Nature". Firstly, an ‘uncollapsed’ photon, in its quantum wave state, is mathematically defined as ‘infinite’ information:

Explaining Information Transfer in Quantum Teleportation: Armond Duwell †‡ University of Pittsburgh Excerpt: In contrast to a classical bit, the description of a (quantum) qubit requires an infinite amount of information. The amount of information is infinite because two real numbers are required in the expansion of the state vector of a two state quantum system (Jozsa 1997, 1) http://www.cas.umt.edu/phil/faculty/duwell/DuwellPSA2K.pdf Quantum Computing – Stanford Encyclopedia Excerpt: Theoretically, a single qubit can store an infinite amount of information, yet when measured (and thus collapsing the Quantum Wave state) it yields only the classical result (0 or 1),,, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-quantcomp/#2.1

Secondly, this 'infinite information' quantum qubit is also mathematically defined as being in an 'infinite dimensional' state:

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences – Eugene Wigner – 1960 Excerpt: We now have, in physics, two theories of great power and interest: the theory of quantum phenomena and the theory of relativity.,,, The two theories operate with different mathematical concepts: the four dimensional Riemann space and the infinite dimensional Hilbert space, http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html Wave function Excerpt "wave functions form an abstract vector space",,, This vector space is infinite-dimensional, because there is no finite set of functions which can be added together in various combinations to create every possible function. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_function#Wave_functions_as_an_abstract_vector_space

Thus every time we observe/measure, (i.e. collapse a quantum qubit 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 infinite consciousness that preceded material reality. i.e. information that was known only by the infinite Mind of omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, God!

Double Slit, Quantum-Electrodynamics, and Christian Theism - video https://www.facebook.com/philip.cunningham.73/videos/vb.100000088262100/1127450170601248/?type=2&theater

Verses:

Job 38:19-20 “What is the way to the abode of light? And where does darkness reside? Can you take them to their places? Do you know the paths to their dwellings?” Hebrews 11:3 By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.

As to their claim in the article that we are 'co-creators of the universe', I hold that we, although we a 'made in the image of God, are very much finite creators of the universe. And that we should be very much humble as to our 'finiteness' in QM and therefore in the universe. This is made evident by the fact that we are very much on the finite, single bit, receiving end of the collapse of the infinite information inherent in Quantum wave collapse. We definitely are NOT on the infinite information end of Quantum wave collapse! (Save for a few unnamed individuals who think they know everything) :) Galileo, although he had no knowledge of QM, captures the present situation within QM eloquently in this following quote:

“When I consider what marvelous things men have understood, what he has inquired into and contrived, I know only too clearly that the human mind is a work of God, and one of the most excellent.” Yet the potential of the human mind “… is separated from the Divine knowledge by an infinite interval.” (Poupard, Cardinal Paul. Galileo Galilei. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1983, p. 101.)

Of supplemental note to us being 'co-creators' of the universe as the author held in his article: Our mind's effect on the interference pattern in the double slit, while detectable, is hardly a strong enough effect to inspire confidence that we are 'co-creators' of the universe:

Psychophysical (i.e., mind–matter) interactions with a double-slit interference pattern - Dean Radin, Leena Michel, James Johnston, and Arnaud Delorme - December 2013 Abstract: Previously reported experiments suggested that interference patterns generated by a double-slit optical system were perturbed by a psychophysical (i.e., mind–matter) interaction. Three new experiments were conducted to further investigate this phenomenon. The first study consisted of 50 half-hour test sessions where participants concentrated their attention-toward or -away from a double-slit system located 3 m away. The spectral magnitude and phase associated with the double-slit component of the interference pattern were compared between the two attention conditions, and the combined results provided evidence for an interaction,,,. One hundred control sessions using the same equipment, protocol and analysis, but without participants present, showed no effect,,,. The second experiment used a duplicate double-slit system and similar test protocol, but it was conducted over the Internet by streaming data to participants’ web browsers. Some 685 people from six continents contributed 2089 experimental sessions. Results were similar to those observed in the first experiment, but smaller in magnitude,,,. Data from 2303 control sessions, conducted automatically every 2 h using the same equipment but without observers showed no effect. Distance between participants and the optical system, ranging from 1 km to 18,000 km, showed no correlation with experimental effect size. The third experiment used a newly designed double-slit system, a revised test protocol, and a simpler method of statistical analysis. Twenty sessions contributed by 10 participants successfully replicated the interaction effect observed in the first two studies. http://deanradin.com/evidence/RadinPhysicsEssays2013.pdf

The take home point that I'm trying to make clear is this,,, although our minds have some measurable but negligible effect in QM, we are very much limited and finite in our dealings with the 'creation of reality' in QM. i.e. Humbleness is definitely called for. And, IMHO, our absolute dependence on God for the existence of reality, and our ability to do anything within reality, is to be gratefully acknowledged and accepted! Verse:

John 15:5 "I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.

bornagain77