How to Ignore Reality: with (Atheist) Sean Carroll & Joe Rogan
Trinity Radio: Theoretical physicist, Sean Carroll gives his thoughts on free will, moral responsibility, design, meaning, and death. In all cases his advice seems to be, ignore what is really really really obvious, and affirm naturalism.
Joe Rogan figures in the mix here.
But doesn’t a multiverse cosmologist like Sean Carroll get to pick and choose the reality he prefers from an infinite variety? Who says there is only one reality, the one he doesn’t like?
Sean Carroll is the author of Something Deeply Hidden.
See also: Sean Carroll: “Nowadays, When A More Scientific Worldview Has Triumphed And Everyone Knows That God Doesn’t Exist . . . ” — Really?
and
Sean Carroll: A multiverse is the price we pay for unifying physics
Hat tip: Philip Cunningham
as to:
Thus, by default, the definition of Atheistic Naturalism must be; “Making up your own reality as you go along.”
A definition which happens to goes hand in hand with the word ‘delusion’:
the greater the claim, the greater the burden of proof. (if we are talking science)
SPIRAL cosmological redshift and hypothesis is the most parsimonious design, thus the lesser claim. no dark energy, dark matter, fudge required, no multiverse. the entire universe approximates the visible universe, no deep-time dependent claims that fight entropy, basic science only. it all adds up, study, fairly consider, and disseminate to replace the far weaker science (SPIRAL even predicts the prevalent CR of distant starlight and the overall increase of that CR w/ distance, rather than have to react to it, as does the current SCM .. using just ordinary matter.) , and far greater claim, that is SCM-LCDM, for the new standard cosmological model.
http://www.academia.edu/360138.....l_snapshot
Bornagain77 @ 1
Which is pretty much what you are arguing happens at the quantum level. The outcome of an observation is dependent on the observer.
And if there is a multiverse, it seems unlikely we get to choose which one we are born into, any more than we can choose which time and which place we get born into this one.
Sev states:
Au Contraire! The fact that the reality of free will is “really really really obvious” to normal people and yet Atheistic Naturalists deny the “really really really obvious” reality of free will,,
,,, and yet Atheistic Naturalists deny the “really really really obvious” reality of free will,,, and that denial in and of itself is what conflicts with life as it is really lived by everyone, (including atheists) and their denial is also what conflicts with what quantum mechanics is revealing to us about the fundamental nature of reality.
For instance, as to how everybody, including atheists, live their everyday lives,,,,, People freely choose where they want to go and live, For instance, many people are currently choosing to leave California and live in other states because of oppressive Democratic policies.
You ask anyone leaving California if they freely chose to leave California to live in another state and they will tell you “Of course I am freely choosing to leave California to live in another state”, Yet atheistic naturalists deny that they are freely choosing to leave California to live in another state. They claim that they are merely deterministic ‘meat robots’ who are under the illusion that they freely chose to leave California to live in another state.
According to Atheistic Naturalists, they had no more say in leaving California than a leaf blowing in the wind had a say in what path it may take.
This is completely insane!
Moreover, besides that claim from atheists being completely insane, that claim also disagrees with what quantum mechanics reveals to us about the fundamental nature of reality.
Just as we can, on the macro level, choose what reality is presented us, say the state of California or some other state, on the micro level of quantum mechanics we find that we also have a say in what type of reality gets presented to us.
As Anton Zeilinger states in the following video, “what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure. Which is a very, very, deep message about the nature of reality and our part in the whole universe. We are not just passive observers.”
Thus, the findings of quantum mechanics are perfectly consistent with life as it is actually lived by everyone in their everyday lives on the macro level, in that we get to choose what type of reality we want to live in, be it California or some other state, and in quantum mechanics or decisions influence what type of reality gets presented to us.
Again, that is perfectly consistent!
What is not consistent with either quantum mechanics, or with life as it is lived by everyone in their everyday lives, is the Atheistic Naturalists claim that free will is an illusion.
Shoot, even Sean Carroll himself admitted in the video that he must live his life as if he had free will (even though he supposedly knows better than everyone else that it is an illusion).
In fact, I hold that it is impossible for atheists to live their lives consistently as if Atheistic Naturalism were actually true and as if they truly had no free will.
Even Richard Dawkins himself reluctantly conceded that it would be ‘intolerable’ for him to live his life as if atheistic naturalism were actually true:
In what should be needless to say, if it is impossible for you to live as if your worldview were actually true then your worldview cannot possibly reflect reality as it really is but your worldview must instead be based on a delusion.
All I can do Seversky is hope that you will choose reality over your delusion of Atheism. In other words, all I can do is hope that you will chose God over your imaginations:
Reality is not nearly as bad as you seem to think Seversky! 🙂
@4 Bornagain77
As if he had free will?
WHEN did he see “real” free will so now he can COMPARE them both, the “real” and the “illusory”?
Because if there is not “real” free will:
The COMPARISON “real” / “illusory”
DOES NOT MAKE SENSE
Bornagain77 @ 4
It was “really really really obvious” for a long time that the Sun went around the Earth because that’s what it looked like. Now, we know it doesn’t.
This depends on what degrees of freedom we are talking about.
People are free to leave California if they choose because there are no laws or regulations to prevent them.
They also appear to be free to choose to leave or stay and I also feel I have the same freedom. But, given what we now know about how much mental processing goes on outside the boundaries of the conscious mind, to what extent is that true?
For example, I am heterosexual but that was not – and is not – a free choice. I did not sit down one day and ask myself, “Hmmm, do I want to be straight or gay or something in between? Yup, I think I’ll be straight!” That’s not what happened. What happened was that I began to notice and react to girls in a way that I hadn’t before and I didn’t react to boys in the same way. And I can’t make myself find males attractive by an effort of will in that way at all. There was no free will involved and I suspect that is true for the majority of other human beings, including you. And if we don’t have free will in that context, in what other situations is it limited or not there at all? Which is why I ask about the extent to which we may have free will.
Quantum mechanics tells us about what happens at the quantum level of reality and that does not necessarily have any bearing in what happens at our macroscopic level of reality.
What Zeilinger appears to be saying is that the outcome of any measurement will be delimited by what we choose to measure and how we choose to make our measurement. The specific outcome of the measurement will be one of a range of probabilities which can be represented as a wave-form but which we cannot know in advance.
This is some way from claiming that we, in some way, create reality by our act of observation because it runs into the obvious objection of what were we observing before reality came into existence?
I don’t claim, as an a/mat, that free will is an illusion but I note that the Biblical story of Peter’s triple denial of Jesus, even though he had been warned in advance that it would happen, is anecdotal evidence against the existence of free will.
But I believe that I have chosen reality over the comforting delusion of the Christian God. Of course, being just an ordinary human being, I might be wrong but, so far, I haven’t seen anything to change my mind.
Like so many judgements, that depends on context. If you are a wealthy individual living in California, one of the richest states in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, life is probably pretty good. If you were one of the wretched millions herded into gas chambers in World War II, probably not so much.
WHAT is the “illusion” of free will, please?
How can I have the “illusion” I have chosen to write this comment?
How can I have the “illusion” I have chosen to write this comment?
Same way you fink fings what can be retro-engineered were designed, when they only seem to have been designed !
Seversky states,
How do we know that? As Stephen Hawking himself explained, ‘our observations of the heavens can be explained by assuming either the earth or the sun to be at rest.,,, the real advantage of the Copernican system is simply that the equations of motion are much simpler in the frame of reference in which the sun is at rest.’
There simply is no empirical reason to prefer the heliocentric model over the earth centered model. As Einstein himself noted,,,
In fact, according to ‘anomalies’ in the CMBR,, a earth centered model of the universe is to be favored over other models:
Seversky you go on to ask me a logical question as to if I thought you had the free will to not be a heterosexual, or if people tempted by homosexuality have the free will necessary to not act on those homosexual desires, yet you failed to realize that if I had no free will, as atheists believe, I could not answer that question in a logical manner
In other words, logic and rationality itself is undermined in the atheist’s denial of free will.
Sev then states
That’s the standard reply from atheists, yet, “the fact that quantum mechanics applies on all scales forces us to confront the theory’s deepest mysteries. We cannot simply write them off as mere details that matter only on the very smallest scales.”
Sev then states,
So what? I did not claim that we ‘create reality”. I claimed that we get to choose what type of reality gets presented to us and that ability to choose what type of reality gets presented to us is perfectly consistent with what we experience on the macro level of how we live our everyday lives.
Sev then states,
Then you are not being consistent within your atheistic materialism. You have heard of the law of non-contradiction have you not?
Atheistic materialism, and/or methodological naturalism, itself is what claims that we are merely ‘meat robots’ that have no free will. Your ‘chosen’ atheistic philosophy could care less what you personally want to believe to the contrary.
As Steven Weinberg, an atheist himself, pointed out, the ‘trouble’ with quantum mechanics is that it “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.,,, Unlike the case of classical physics, a choice must be made,,,”
You keep repeating Peter’s denial of Christ as if that supports you position, yet in the very same passage where Peter denied Christ, Christ Himself tells us exactly why Peter was unable to do what he wanted to do:, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”
Sev claims that,
Yet the truth of the matter is that you, in your rejection of God, have chosen to believe in a world of illusions rather than in reality:
It would be hard to fathom a worldview more antagonistic to modern science, indeed more antagonistic to reality itself, than Atheistic materialism and/or methodological naturalism have turned out to be.
Sev then states,
And yet, as pointed out above, people are leaving California because of the oppressive policies of Democrats, and moreover, the ‘wretched millions’ were herded into gas chambers in World War II precisely because Darwinian Ideology had gained a stranglehold on Germany’s government, i.e. the Nazi’s!
In other words Sev. the very examples you yourself cited for reality supposedly being ‘bad’ were brought about because of your very own secular atheistic ideology.
How you can consistently make such statements that directly undermine the arguments that you are trying to make, I have no idea. I know that you are not that dumb. You owe a big time apology to your very own intellect for constantly insulting it like you do with your self-defeating arguments.
If I contract an engineer, am I really contracting an “illusionist”?
1. Engineers design things.
2. According to some loons, “design” is an “illusion “.
Conclusion: I am contracting someone to perform me an “illusion”!
Hahaha.
If free will is an illusion, then you only have the illusion that you chose to write the comment: the reality would be that you could not have done anything different.
seversky:
In your very limited mind, anyway.
Seversky
It is really really really obvious to a high school student that this is actually not the right answer. The right answer is that all motion is relative. The Sun is moving relative to the Earth, i.e. in a reference frame whose origin coincides with the Earth’s center of mass.
@Bob O’H:
Is it?
We first need a definition of that “free will”.
Seversky
Jesus was able to accurately see and report on a future event. He did this several times.
He said that he would be killed and then rise from the dead.
If the one case with Peter’s denial is evidence against free will, the prophecies of Jesus are evidence of his divine nature and that God exists.
TruthFreedom: We first need a definition of that “free will”.
This is were the rub is. How could humans come to possess the very idea of free will, if it doesn’t exist? What is this thing that is an “illusion” that we have an idea about, and yet do not possess ourselves? If what the deniers say is true, “free will” really isn’t an illusion, it is rather a meaningless term. Yet, we know it isn’t meaningless. We can define it. The essence of it is the ability to create a chain of cause/effect that isn’t determined by a previous cause. How could determined automatons come to be able to possess such an idea as this? We may not know how it works, but this is not a meaningless definition. And so, again, how could humans possess the idea, in a universe where it doesn’t exist? We couldn’t. Just like we would never invent the terms “sight” and “blind” in a universe without eyes, to borrow an analogy from C.S. Lewis.
@Mike1962
Exactly. This is the crux of the problem.
How can an automaton get to choose if he/she accepts to label him/herself as such?
I am an “automaton” but I do not label myself as such.
How can that be possible?
Where does that degree of freedom come from?
@Seversky
You could “will” to fund a scientific experiment to find some drug to make you find males attractive.
An “indirect” will if you choose. Using your intellect.
Truthfreedom
Well, they claim that it is the molecules in your cortex that fool your consciousness (or whatever). That is their story. I am amazed at how this cheap stuff can sell as science today.
Mind you, the scientific standards have degraded due to the solipsism of the evolution paradigm. You see things with your own eyes, and yet they say you should not believe your senses and even reasoning. And it is precisely this directive that undermines science long term.
A spectacular example of this pseudo-dogmatism is up the thread where Seversky claims that the Sun does not go round the Earth. I can think of mechanical scenarios where it would actually be easier or more convenient to describe motion of matter in the terrestrial reference frame than using the solar. After all, this sort of pictures are NOT an illusion.
@19 EugeneS
Me too! 🙂
Naturalism’s Epistemological Nightmare:
https://strangenotions.com/naturalisms-epistemological-nightmare/