MIRACLES: The Naturalist and the Supernaturalist
Pistol
MIRACLES: THE NATURALIST AND THE SUPERNATURALIST
Lewis beins here settling one issue of contention among us - what he
means by miracle - "an interference with nature by supernatural
power". Norice all, that he does not say "interference with nature by
the Christian God". So there still, at this point, is no reason to
limit the discussion to Christian ideas about God, however popular
they may be.
He does however, limit his discussion to the version of
supernaturalism which believes in one God. He justifies it this way:
"...polytheism is not likely to be a live issue for most of my
readers, and ... those who believed in many gods very seldom ...
regarded their gods as creators of the universe and as self-existent."
I agree, and would add that whether there be one god or 100, the
answers to the problems don't change, so having many gods merely
complicates the analysis without adding anything of value. I await
Mary's scathing rebuttal. :)
I have little of a critical nature to say about Lewis' general
description of the differences between naturalism, the belief that
nature is the ultimate fact, and supernaturalism, the belief that God
is the ultimate fact, and nature a byproduct of that. I even wonder
why he went through seemingly inconsequential tangental issues like
analogies to political structures (naturalism-democracy,
supernaturalism-monarchy), or possibly interlocking natures. Perhaps
he was merely trying to leave no stone unturned - no great fault in
that.
When describing opposing sides in a debate, we all have a tendency
to misrepresent, in a negative fashion, the side opposite us. Lewis
(a la Aquinas) does a good job of avoiding this pratfall, and re
presents the Naturalist side of the discussion (forgive my presumption
that he disagrees with it :)) pretty fairly, with one glaring
exception.
On page 14, in describing naturalist views, he writes: "All the things
and events are so completely interlocked that no one of them can claim
the slightest independence from 'the whole show' [what Lewis uses to
refer to nature]. None of them ... 'goes on of its own accord'...",
and then later "Thus no thoroughgoing naturalist believes in free
will: for free will would mean that human beings have the power of
indepedent action,.. of doing something more ... than what was
involved by the total series of events." This, of course, is the
topic that Daryl Gene and I have debated at length - whether a person
can believe in free will, but not a God (of sorts).
Lewis' declaration here presents a bit of a problem, because there are
a large number of people, objectivists, and other who don't identify
themselves that way, who believe that nature is "the whole show" AND
believe in free will. But since Lewis has divided the world into
naturalists and supernaturalists, with (apparently) no other groups,
this would mean that either 1) These people are naturalists, and Lewis
has drawn an erroneous conclusion about naturalism, or 2) These people
are not naturalists, making Lewis' categories incomplete. Perhaps
Lewis considered this viewpoint so patently absurd that it did not
deserve consideration, but that doesn't seem like his style. Further,
whether you agree with my arguments on the subject (along with,
ironically, Burton's) or not, surely the basis and quality of such
arguments makes the position worthy of recognition.
And just backing up, why does believing that nature is "all there is"
imply that all elements in that nature must be interconnected. It
certainly does not apear nonsensical to believe in a nature that is
all that there is, which contains items which move about on their own
within this structure.
What I find especially bizarre is that on page 16 Lewis procedes to
give my exact argument for the validity of being a
free-will-recognizing naturalist: "Naturalism ... could admit to a
certain kind of God ... nature might be such as to produce ... a great
cosmic consciousness ... arising from the whole process as the human
mind arises ... from human organisms ... What naturalism cannot
accept is the idea of a God who stands outside nature and made it."
Well, if it is possible for a naturalist to accept a "great cosmic
consciousness", which exists within nature (the basic fact),
then why not a very small consciousness? I'm not sure why Lewis even
started talking about a naturalist believing in a god in the first
place, but he seems to blatantly contradict himself here. The only
out I can see is that this "naturalist god" he envisions somehow
doesn't have free will, but to apply the term "god" to such a being
strikes me as patently absurd.
So hopefully Lewis won't try to pin any of his conclusions on Daryl's
favorite ballywick - the supposed contradiction between naturalism and
human volition. Aside from being questionable on its own, it also
appears to contradict his own words.
And just to beat this dead horse a bit more, Lewis closes with "It by
no means follows from supernaturalism that miracles of any sort do in
fact occur. God may never ... interfere with the natural system..."
So, again, we are not yet talking about the Christian God.
I read on.
Danny Pitt Stoller
Pistol (pis...@cyberramp.net) wrote:
: MIRACLES: THE NATURALIST AND THE SUPERNATURALIST
: Lewis begins here settling one issue of contention among us - what he
: means by miracle - "an interference with nature by supernatural
: power". Notice all, that he does not say "interference with nature by
: the Christian God". So there still, at this point, is no reason to
: limit the discussion to Christian ideas about God, however popular
: they may be.
I assume that this comment was directed at me, and I reply that it is
based on a misunderstanding of my point. I was most emphatically NOT
claiming that the Christian conception of the Supernatural is the only
one worth talking about. I was merely claiming that, as long as we're
going to test the consistency of a theological position, we might as well
use a position that somebody is actually willing to defend. You missed
my point because of your refusal to view your own "default position" as a
theological position.
I have no particular desire to pursue this discussion further, however.
I just wanted to respond to your comment and establish, once again, that
I have no inclination to privilege the Christian hypothesis in any
discussions of the Supernatural.
: I have little of a critical nature to say about Lewis' general
: description of the differences between naturalism, the belief that
: nature is the ultimate fact, and supernaturalism, the belief that God
: is the ultimate fact, and nature a byproduct of that. I even wonder
: why he went through seemingly inconsequential tangental issues like
: analogies to political structures (naturalism-democracy,
: supernaturalism-monarchy), or possibly interlocking natures. Perhaps
: he was merely trying to leave no stone unturned - no great fault in
: that.
Well, I have seen people attack traditional religion on the grounds that
it is "primitive" or "medieval" -- that it is derived from people
projecting onto the cosmos the systems by which their own societies were
governed. Lewis was just pointing out, as he pointed out so often, that
our modern age is equally susceptible to such errors. And he mentioned
the possibility of interlocking Natures because this is a subject that
particularly interested him -- just check out the Chronicles of Narnia!
: On page 14, in describing naturalist views, he writes: "All the things
: and events are so completely interlocked that no one of them can claim
: the slightest independence from 'the whole show' [what Lewis uses to
: refer to nature]. None of them ... 'goes on of its own accord'...",
: and then later "Thus no thoroughgoing naturalist believes in free
: will: for free will would mean that human beings have the power of
: indepedent action,.. of doing something more ... than what was
: involved by the total series of events."
Yes, when I first read *Miracles*, I had a problem with this as well.
When I first read the book, I too considered myself a naturalist and a
libertarian (in the metaphysical, not the political sense, where
"libertarian" = "believer in free will"). But at this point I think I
agree with Lewis.
: Lewis' declaration here presents a bit of a problem, because there are
: a large number of people, objectivists, and other who don't identify
: themselves that way, who believe that nature is "the whole show" AND
: believe in free will.
Well, that doesn't necessarily present a problem. If there are people
who believe that "nature is the whole show" and also believe in free will
CONSISTENTLY, then there is a problem. If they believe in these two
things inconsistently, then there may be a problem, but it isn't C.S.
Lewis's problem.
: But since Lewis has divided the world into
: naturalists and supernaturalists, with (apparently) no other groups,
: this would mean that either 1) These people are naturalists, and Lewis
: has drawn an erroneous conclusion about naturalism, or 2) These people
: are not naturalists, making Lewis' categories incomplete.
Or 3) these people are themselves confused, believing in bits and pieces
of contradictory philosophies. This is why Lewis qualifies "naturalist"
in the context of this statement by saying that no "thoroughgoing
naturalist" believes in free will -- there may be people who believe in
free will and yet identify themselves as "naturalists" but Lewis cannot
be expected to introduce a whole new category to accommodate a position
he considered self-contradictory.
: And just backing up, why does believing that nature is "all there is"
: imply that all elements in that nature must be interconnected. It
: certainly does not apear nonsensical to believe in a nature that is
: all that there is, which contains items which move about on their own
: within this structure.
But think about it: if every "state of affairs" in the cosmos is the
result of the "state of affairs" that preceded it; if all change in the
universe is brought about in accordance with the physical laws that
govern it; then whence the "leeway" for our brains to function in any
way other than that necessitated by the laws of physics and chemistry and
biology?
We might, on a naturalist view, have a subjective experience of free will
-- and many have argued that this is all that really matters. We
certainly do have free will in this sense, on any view. But for us to
have "free will" in the metaphysical sense, by definition, requires that
our minds are somehow able to function in a way that is self-caused and
not necessitated by the laws of nature.
: Well, if it is possible for a naturalist to accept a "great cosmic
: consciousness", which exists within nature (the basic fact),
: then why not a very small consciousness? I'm not sure why Lewis even
: started talking about a naturalist believing in a god in the first
: place, but he seems to blatantly contradict himself here. The only
: out I can see is that this "naturalist god" he envisions somehow
: doesn't have free will, but to apply the term "god" to such a being
: strikes me as patently absurd.
But Lewis is not arguing that naturalism is inconsistent with believing
in consciousness. A naturalist may accept great cosmic consciousnesses,
very small ones, or any other kinds of consciousness that he or she can
imagine. But this has nothing to do with free will. Free will, in the
sense that C.S. Lewis is using it, means a power to cause one's own
behavior -- in other words, to bring about effects in nature that are not
dictated by her laws.
The concept of a great cosmic consciousness within naturalism is not so
irrelevant as you may think, as this is what many people today do in fact
believe. Many New Age types talk about God but really mean a principle
within the universe, not a "transcendent God who stands outside Nature
and made it."
And yes, a "great cosmic consciousness" of this sort could not engage in
behaviors that were not dictated by the character of the whole universe
any more than we could. Such a consciousness could experience the
sensation of choosing, could hold itself responsible and be held
responsible for its actions -- just like us. But all its apparently
freely-chosen decisions would really be the inevitable results of the
laws that govern the cosmos -- just like ours.
C.S. Lewis would certainly agree with your judgment that such a being
would not really be worthy of the name "God." But many people's concept
of the divine is precisely of this sort.
: So hopefully Lewis won't try to pin any of his conclusions on Daryl's
: favorite ballywick - the supposed contradiction between naturalism and
: human volition. Aside from being questionable on its own, it also
: appears to contradict his own words.
No contradiction, as I think I've shown. He doesn't base any of his
later conclusions on this idea about free will, but he does make
arguments based on ideas that you will most probably consider just as
questionable.
--
"Gentlemen of the jury, I am grateful and I am your friend,
but I will obey the god rather than you...."
- Socrates
Danny Pitt Stoller
(215) 417-6691
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~dap
Don A. Smith
Hello,
I wish I had time to really explain this now; perhaps over the weekend,
but I've been re-reading Miracles on the subway to and from work the
last couple days (due to this NG), and since I am a PhD student in physics,
I felt obliged to make a comment before the discussion moves beyond this
chapter. Lewis (on p. 18 in my edition) tries to make the case that
the implications of Quantum Mechanics violate naturalism, but this is
not so. The particles do not simply move anywhichway, by free will,
they follow extremely rigorous laws of probability, as set by the energetics
of the system. Just because it's not rigorously deterministic does not
mean its super-natural. Lewis uses the example of the toss of a coin being
"incalcuable", when in fact if you know the impulse given to the coin,
and the exact amount of time it spent spinning, the result of the toss
is completely determined; absolutely calcuable. Lewis says that if the
particles are moving "on their own" then they do not interlock with
the rest of Nature and therefore must be outside it. But they *do*
interact with the rest of nature; when you observe the position of a
particle, you affect it; you collapse the wave function and affect
the evolution of the system. When you observe a photon, you absorb it
and use its energy to register its presence. (There was a Star Trek
Voyager episode that tried to suggest these people's souls had become
part of an "unusually active" electro-magnetic field around a certain
planet. I wonder they realized every time they observed that field they
were absorbing those people's souls... naaahh.)
Anyway, Lewis assumes a deterministic Nature without argument, and this
is not necessary. Of course, he predates the development of non-linear
dynamics (so-called "Chaos theory"), too, which is non-deterministic,
yet interactive and well-defined behavior. So his claim that Quantum
Mechanics destroys Naturalism is incorrect, although one does have to
lose the Newtonian sense of determinism, which modern physics has. So
Lewis's sense of "interlocking" = "no free parameters" was already 20
years out of date when he wrote the book in 1947, and certainly should
not be compelling now.
Sorry for the brevity; I just discovered a brand-new type of X-ray nova
on tuesday, and we're scrambling to discover what it is and why it's
behaving so oddly before it fades away completely.
Gotta run,
Don Smith The Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer
das...@space.mit.edu http://www.mit.edu/~dasmith/
Wal, a wiser fella than m'self once said, sometimes you eat the bar
and sometimes the bar, wal, he eats you.
- The Stranger
Danny Pitt Stoller
Don A. Smith (das...@space.mit.edu) wrote:
: Lewis (on p. 18 in my edition) tries to make the case that
: the implications of Quantum Mechanics violate naturalism, but this is
: not so. The particles do not simply move anywhichway, by free will,
: they follow extremely rigorous laws of probability, as set by the energetics
: of the system. Just because it's not rigorously deterministic does not
: mean its super-natural.
For those of you who haven't read the book, please note that Lewis does
NOT really count this as a strike against Naturalism. He prefaces his
discussion of quantum mechanics by frankly admitting that he doesn't
fully understand it, and promising that he will "base no argument on
it." He never refers to the movement of these particles as
"supernatural" -- he suggests that, if his understanding of quantum
mechanics is correct, then we might appropriately call them
"subnatural".
: Lewis says that if the
: particles are moving "on their own" then they do not interlock with
: the rest of Nature and therefore must be outside it. But they *do*
: interact with the rest of nature; when you observe the position of a
: particle, you affect it; you collapse the wave function and affect
: the evolution of the system.
But "interlocking" with Nature (in Lewis's sense) is obviously not the
same as "interacting" with Nature, since miracles are certainly not
claimed to be part of Nature but they undoubtedly interact with her (if
they occur at all). For a deeper understanding of what Lewis means by
"interlocking", reread his original description of Nature.
: So his claim that Quantum
: Mechanics destroys Naturalism is incorrect, although one does have to
: lose the Newtonian sense of determinism, which modern physics has.
Again, he makes no such claim.
ma...@sonic.net
In article <6g1f8b$evp$1...@netnews.upenn.edu>,
d...@mail1.sas.upenn.edu (Danny Pitt Stoller) wrote:
>
> Pistol (pis...@cyberramp.net) wrote:
> : MIRACLES: THE NATURALIST AND THE SUPERNATURALIST
>
> : Lewis begins here settling one issue of contention among us - what he
> : means by miracle - "an interference with nature by supernatural
> : power". Notice all, that he does not say "interference with nature by
> : the Christian God". So there still, at this point,
Nor for quite a while longer, if ever, thank you.
> : is no reason to
> : limit the discussion to Christian ideas about God, however popular
> : they may be.
> : I have little of a critical nature to say about Lewis' general
> : description of the differences between naturalism, the belief that
> : nature is the ultimate fact, and supernaturalism, the belief that God
> : is the ultimate fact, and nature a byproduct of that. I even wonder
> : why he went through seemingly inconsequential tangental issues like
> : analogies to political structures (naturalism-democracy,
> : supernaturalism-monarchy), or possibly interlocking natures. Perhaps
> : he was merely trying to leave no stone unturned - no great fault in
> : that.
Yes, a virtuous habit of his. Which gets him in trouble when he does skip a
stone (or the editors do, perhaps).
> Well, I have seen people attack traditional religion on the grounds that
> it is "primitive" or "medieval" -- that it is derived from people
> projecting onto the cosmos the systems by which their own societies were
> governed. Lewis was just pointing out, as he pointed out so often, that
> our modern age is equally susceptible to such errors.
Lewis' political examples strike me as kind of outdated now.
P. 6-7: "...so completely interlocked taht no one of htem can claim teh
sliglhtest independence from "the whole show". ... Spontaneity, originality,
action "on its own", is a privilege reserved for "the whole show", which he
calls /Nature/."
Communism might be a metaphor for this, but it's odd to see democracy lumped
in with it: "...Naturalism gives us a democratic ... picture of reality. ...
sovereignty reisdes in teh whole mass of the people."
Still, Lewis was born in 1898 or thereaabouts, and /Miracles/ was copyrighted
1947. Lewis, like Rand, saw the pre-1914 monarchies go Red, nominally
'democratic'. French REvolution got a bit monolithic too, didn't it? As for
silly people across the ocean ... maybe he didn't expect ex-colonial democracy
to be a live issue for any of his readers.... :-)
> And he mentioned
> the possibility of interlocking Natures because this is a subject that
> particularly interested him -- just check out the Chronicles of Narnia!
Right! According to page 10, all the traffic back and forth from Narnia etc
was 'miraculous'. Jadis in London.... Who says all miracles are Lawful Good,
or even Rational and Volitional! (Um, well, I did, or something like that.
Point for Pistol, who disagreed.)
/snip/
> : But since Lewis has divided the world into
> : naturalists and supernaturalists, with (apparently) no other groups,
> : this would mean that either 1) These people are naturalists, and Lewis
> : has drawn an erroneous conclusion about naturalism, or 2) These people
> : are not naturalists, making Lewis' categories incomplete.
It's the old "Straw Naturalist" thing. Lewis gets criticized a lot on this
point. See Dodsworth's "Problems with Miracles" thread a year or so back.
Even if Nature had plenty of wiggle room, random areas, I don't see that this
would hurt Lewis' overall argument re 'are thoughts valid.' Wouldn't random
thoughts be just as invalid as determined ones?
>
> Or 3) these people are themselves confused, believing in bits and pieces
> of contradictory philosophies. This is why Lewis qualifies "naturalist"
> in the context of this statement by saying that no "thoroughgoing
> naturalist" believes in free will -- there may be people who believe in
> free will and yet identify themselves as "naturalists" but Lewis cannot
> be expected to introduce a whole new category to accommodate a position
> he considered self-contradictory.
Makes sense ... I guess.... (Maybe I'm just being overly-paranoid about
question-begging at the moment. :-)
> : And just backing up, why does believing that nature is "all there is"
> : imply that all elements in that nature must be interconnected. It
> : certainly does not apear nonsensical to believe in a nature that is
> : all that there is, which contains items which move about on their own
> : within this structure.
Seems possible to me. But maybe I'm just falling for the illusion, or
something. Misled by analogy? "...items which move about on their own within
this structure"? Lewis might say this was just a metaphor. :-)
Will save Danny's comments on this for closer reading.
BD
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Joshua W. Burton
das...@space.mit.edu (Don A. Smith) wrote:
> I wish I had time to really explain this now; perhaps over the
> weekend, but I've been re-reading Miracles on the subway to and
> from work the last couple days (due to this NG), and since I am
> a PhD student in physics, I felt obliged to make a comment before
> the discussion moves beyond this chapter.
> ...
> So Lewis's sense of "interlocking" = "no free parameters" was
> already 20 years out of date when he wrote the book in 1947, and
> certainly should not be compelling now.
This particular point led to a very interesting thread on this forum
about a year ago, which touched on Everett's sum-over-histories, the
relation of local Noether currents to global conservation laws, and
a number of other heady matters. It looks as though we are gearing
up to attack it again, and you might enjoy looking over some of the
previous round before diving in. I'll be happy to email you a pile
of old postings, if you're so inclined.
A word of caution only: we've had bad experiences from time to time
with academic credentials in this group, both from those who use them
to intimidate and from those who too readily perceive them so. (In
a recent case, we even had one humorist attempt to assert authority
by claiming a degree _anonymously_!) As it happens, two of our most
cogent and erudite commentators on quantum mechanics and causality
have been a self-described layman and a pulpit minister, and I think
it is important to make sure all voices are welcome. I mention
this only to warn you that it is a potentially sensitive subject;
but if you have a paper of your own to cite in support of a point,
or anything like that, please don't be shy!
> Sorry for the brevity; I just discovered a brand-new type of
> X-ray nova on tuesday, and we're scrambling to discover what it
> is and why it's behaving so oddly before it fades away completely.
>
> Gotta run,
Sounds fascinating. Have you time to tell us a bit more?
`Keep Reality out of reach of children. +-----------------------+
Reality may tend to move during sex. | Joshua W Burton |
Take out Reality and examine it closely. | (847)677-3902 |
Don't tear Reality.' | jbu...@nwu.edu |
-- from leaflet for Reality (a female condom) +-----------------------+
Joshua W. Burton
BD <ma...@sonic.net> writes:
> It's the old "Straw Naturalist" thing. Lewis gets criticized a lot on
> this point. See Dodsworth's "Problems with Miracles" thread a year or
> so back.
>
> Even if Nature had plenty of wiggle room, random areas, I don't see
> that this would hurt Lewis' overall argument re 'are thoughts valid.'
> Wouldn't random thoughts be just as invalid as determined ones?
The really interesting category is the one that Mr. Lewis and everyone
here is neglecting: events freely chosen by you within a completely
deterministic Nature. ("Random" events, insofar as the word means
anything at all, are events freely chosen by not-you; these would also
be interesting in a completely deterministic Nature, of course.) The
classical universe is not big enough for such oddities, but it happens
that the quantum universe _is_: this is the key point that I've been
so frustrated in my best efforts so far to convey.
So I'm about to try a radically new tack, sacrificing technical accuracy
for evocative imagery in a way that I have been fearfully avoiding in
past incarnations of this thread. Many people have encountered (mostly
in fiction by scientifically semiliterate authors) an incorrect picture
of QM that goes by the name of "many-worlds". There is also a genuine
interpretation of QM called "Everett's-sum-over-histories", or often
"Everett's-many-worlds", or even (alas!) "many-worlds". When I say that
the latter is an "interpretation", I mean simply that it is a story that
physicists tell other physicists about a theory they all agree on. There
are four or five such stories about QM floating around (Bohm's-pilot-
waves, Feynman's-path-integrals, the "Schroedinger", "Heisenberg", and
"interaction" pictures of the wave equation), and all of them have been
rigorously proven to be identical at the level of actual equations and
experimental predictions therefrom. They differ profoundly, however, in
the imagery and intuitions they conjure up---some problems are much less
confusing in one story than in another. Once we are satisfied that they
are in fact all formally identical, we _love_ to keep several different
stories around at once, never knowing which will lead to a new and
useful insight. (We also like to keep multiple _theories_ around, when
we really don't know what is going on, but QM at laboratory and atomic
scales is _not_ such a case.)
Anyway, it's not Everett's interpretation that I mean to talk about, but
instead the naive cartoon "many-worlds" of _Sliders_ and innumerable SF
books. (Lewis even plays with this idea in Dark_Tower, in a world where
he wrote Dark_Tower.) I emphasize here and as often as I can below that
*no one believes this naive theory*, and that Occam's razor would slice
you to ribbons if you tried to believe it. But if I set out to explain
how a sum over histories (Everett's story) gives you all the fun of many-
worlds, and parsimony too, we'd be tied up in wavefunctions and unitary
projection operators and density of states in no time, and I've been to
that well once too often. So let's suspend the why-should-there-be-
many-universes? objections until my game plan is clear. Please?
So...imagine for a moment that the laws of Nature do not uniquely
specify the behavior of objects, but leave some "wiggle room" per
Mary's suggestion. When an ambiguous situation arises, however, the
universe does _not_ pick A or B arbitrarily. Instead, the whole of
Nature bifurcates into two copies, identical except that one of them
went with A and the other with B. (Keep repeating to yourself: no
one believes this...he's just making a point...no one believes this....)
An Observer who sees such a cosmos *as a whole* would see nothing at
all indeterminate or random about it---the places where bifurcations
occur are determined by the laws of Nature, and all choices that arise
are allowed to unfold on an equal footing. When an electron comes to
a place where the laws say it might be spin-up or spin-down, we get
a whole universe for each. And in each universe, the electron has
freely chosen to have the spin it has---the proof that no determinism
constrains it, and that it could have chosen otherwise, is that it
_did_ choose otherwise, on the other branch!
Now, in such a universe there might exist certain configurations of
matter (hnau brains, maybe animal or computer or eldil brains) that
are complex enough, and complex in the right way, to model themselves
and give some account of their past actions, to other configurations
similarly equipped. We can argue about what survival value this
sort of memory and introspection may have---in any case, we know it
when we see it, at least in some of its forms. A mechanism of this
sort (call him Joshua) might be faced with a choice (say, to write
a long Usenet post or start cleaning for Pesah). Imagine that he
does in fact have free choice---the laws of Nature are consistent
with either outcome. He now chooses (both ways, of course, one in
each of two branch universes). The choice was just as free as the
electron's, as far as physical law was concerned, but Joshua, unlike
the electron, remembers how it felt. And Joshua-who-scrubbed-the-
oven can tell your opposite numbers in universe A why he chose to
do that, just as I am telling you in universe B why I chose to leave
myself an all-nighter later in the week. Each of us was Joshua-who-
had-not-yet-decided an hour ago, and each of us was (in _fact_, not
just in appearance) unconstrained by physical law in making a choice.
For each of us, the consequences (logical, ethical, moral....) of our
actions await. And what is an omniscient Observer to say to Joshua-
who-has-not-yet-decided about the future? It's not that He knows
too little; it's that He knows too much. Both futures are real
within the omniverse, and the laws of the omniverse are entirely
deterministic. With lots of room for free choice.
An elegant distinction now becomes clear, for which I think the words
"choice" and "will" are clearest. "Choice" is an objective aspect of
the laws of Nature: either the universe bifurcates or it doesn't, in
accordance with physical law. Everything that sits at the cusp of such
a bifurcation has the power of choice. People have it, dice have it,
raindrops and electrons have it, and no one can gainsay them---for
the reasons above, not even the Author can give a one-way-or-t'other
answer about what they are going to do. Will, on the other hand, is
the ability to build a mental model of oneself, use that model as
input into a free choice, and have the model available at a later
time (on both branches!) to justify why that choice (or the other!)
was made. Will is presumably a matter of degree, and we can make
statements about cockroaches having _less_ of it than mice, but more
than bacteria, and so forth. This, to my way of thinking, is a major
advantage, as it strains my credulity completely to say that a higher
animal (or a retarded human!) is doing something that differs _in kind_
from what I do when I choose.
Anyway, that's an existence proof for a model that fully accommodates
free will (not the illusion of it; you really get to choose!) and yet,
seen as a whole, is completely deterministic. The model I am actually
pushing as a reasonable candidate for the universe (the ONLY reasonable
candidate I've seen so far, in fact) shares this essential attribute,
without forcing you to accept the infinitely uneconomical picture of
a cosmos that duplicates itself every time you flip a coin. (In a
very, very loose sense, the real model is not "both north and west",
but "northwest, and here are some projection rules if you insist on
seeing it along your own axes".)
Did anyone get this far?
The labour we delight in |==================================================
physics pain. | Joshua W Burton (847)677-3902 jbu...@nwu.edu
-- Macbeth, II.iii. |==================================================
Pistol
On Sat, 04 Apr 1998 18:58:15 -0600, ma...@sonic.net wrote:
SUPER
[snips]
>According to page 10, all the traffic back and forth from Narnia etc
>was 'miraculous'. Jadis in London.... Who says all miracles are Lawful Good,
>or even Rational and Volitional! (Um, well, I did, or something like that.
>Point for Pistol, who disagreed.)
Bestill my heart. :)
>/snip/
>
>> : But since Lewis has divided the world into
>> : naturalists and supernaturalists, with (apparently) no other groups,
>> : this would mean that either 1) These people are naturalists, and Lewis
>> : has drawn an erroneous conclusion about naturalism, or 2) These people
>> : are not naturalists, making Lewis' categories incomplete.
>It's the old "Straw Naturalist" thing. Lewis gets criticized a lot on this
>point.
And for good reason.
>Even if Nature had plenty of wiggle room, random areas, I don't see that this
>would hurt Lewis' overall argument re 'are thoughts valid.' Wouldn't random
>thoughts be just as invalid as determined ones?
But that is just another false dichotomy. Another alternative
is volitionally controlled thoughts, which people on Lewis'
side of the aisle are loath to grant, and for good reason - it
spells doom for their theories.
>> : And just backing up, why does believing that nature is "all there is"
>> : imply that all elements in that nature must be interconnected. It
>> : certainly does not apear nonsensical to believe in a nature that is
>> : all that there is, which contains items which move about on their own
>> : within this structure.
>Seems possible to me. But maybe I'm just falling for the illusion, or
>something. Misled by analogy? "...items which move about on their own within
>this structure"? Lewis might say this was just a metaphor. :-)
He can say that all he wants, but it isn't. Saying "nature is
all there is" means that these objects we perceive and their
attributes are all there is, with no "other realm". Well,
adding a component of independent movement amomng these objects
doesn't change anything. This nature could still be "all there
is", and it would just so happen that certain entities within
this framework have the power of volition. Big deal!
Matthew Collett
In article <6gc8op$h...@news.acns.nwu.edu>, jbu...@nwu.edu (Joshua W.
Burton) wrote:
[snip]
>
>So...imagine for a moment that the laws of Nature do not uniquely
>specify the behavior of objects, but leave some "wiggle room" per
>Mary's suggestion. When an ambiguous situation arises, however, the
>universe does _not_ pick A or B arbitrarily. Instead, the whole of
>Nature bifurcates into two copies, identical except that one of them
>went with A and the other with B. (Keep repeating to yourself: no
>one believes this...he's just making a point...no one believes this....)
>An Observer who sees such a cosmos *as a whole* would see nothing at
>all indeterminate or random about it---the places where bifurcations
>occur are determined by the laws of Nature, and all choices that arise
>are allowed to unfold on an equal footing. When an electron comes to
>a place where the laws say it might be spin-up or spin-down, we get
>a whole universe for each. And in each universe, the electron has
>freely chosen to have the spin it has---the proof that no determinism
>constrains it, and that it could have chosen otherwise, is that it
>_did_ choose otherwise, on the other branch!
>
Well, I've been lurking on a.b.csl for quite a while now (select an
interval from the uniform distribution of your choice), and this is the
first time I recall that I find myself in significant disagreement with
something that Joshua has written. He has made a heroic and impressive
attempt at a very difficult topic, but ...
While Leibnitz or Teilhard de Chardin would probably have been very happy
with the idea that human free will is just a large-scale version of "free
choices" by electrons, it doesn't work for me. Either you take the 'many
worlds' seriously, in which case the whole process is fully deterministic
and leaves no room for free choices; or you apply Occam's razor and
discard all except one, in which case you indeed have indeterminacy, but
the indeterminacy of randomness rather than that of freedom. (I almost
said 'of simple randomness', but of course that would be wrong, since we
are talking QM here.)
[snip]
>Anyway, that's an existence proof for a model that fully accommodates
>free will (not the illusion of it; you really get to choose!) and yet,
>seen as a whole, is completely deterministic. The model I am actually
>pushing as a reasonable candidate for the universe (the ONLY reasonable
>candidate I've seen so far, in fact) shares this essential attribute,
>without forcing you to accept the infinitely uneconomical picture of
>a cosmos that duplicates itself every time you flip a coin. (In a
>very, very loose sense, the real model is not "both north and west",
>but "northwest, and here are some projection rules if you insist on
>seeing it along your own axes".)
Hmm. This sounds very like Everett's original 'relative state' model.
Much saner than his later stuff, and I think a physically consistent
position (though not my own preference). It corresponds to the first
choice in the "either/or" in my previous paragraph. No indeterminacy and
therefore no free will (in the sense that I would understand the term).
>Did anyone get this far?
Here's one that did. Keep it up!
Matthew Collett
--
The word "reality" is generally used with the intention
of evoking sentiment. -- Arthur Eddington
Danny Pitt Stoller
Joshua W. Burton (jbu...@nwu.edu) wrote:
: Did anyone get this far?
I read the post too, and while I followed it, I don't know enough about
quantum mechanics to answer it on its own terms. (I, like C.S. Lewis,
have had a philosophical rather than a scientific education -- though, of
course, compared with C.S. Lewis I suppose I haven't really had anything
close to an education at all.) I intuitively feel that there must be a
problem, because it seems to me that the problem of free will could never
be explained by any new scientific discovery or theory because it's just
not that kind of problem. But I can't pick apart the argument well
enough to point to the problem.
Dan Drake
On Wed, 8 Apr 1998 06:27:18, d...@mail1.sas.upenn.edu (Danny Pitt Stoller)
wrote:
> Joshua W. Burton (jbu...@nwu.edu) wrote:
> : Did anyone get this far?
Add one more to the list.
>
> ... I intuitively feel that there must be a
> problem, because it seems to me that the problem of free will could never
> be explained by any new scientific discovery or theory because it's just
> not that kind of problem....
I think that what's going on here is not _explaining_ free will by any
scientific argument, but finding a way in which it can be allowed to exist
in what is, at some level, a deterministic world. To exist, that is,
without being a continuous miracle in the sense of continuously violating
the known workings of nature.
Does anybody but me understand that? Do I understand that?
I mean, here's a straw-man theory. I think its dualism bears some
resemblance to that of Descartes, or maybe Leibnitz. but it is NOT based
on those guys, and any attempt to attach their other ideas to it is
engaging in a logical fallacy that I don't know the name for. (And I hope
Mary includes it in her list -- it's universally used.) Assume a
parallel world, which we can call the world of the Spirit, or the Mind if
you prefer. This is not one of Burton's virtual parallel worlds, but one
truly different from the normally observable one. Whatever the laws of
that world, it encompasses free will (by hypothesis). The only link
between our world and that one is that decisions made in that one can
break through into this world and yank a brain into a state in which it
does things inconsistent with the result you get from applying physical
laws to the brain's prior state. Hence, the brain's owner commits acts of
free will. Before worrying about violations of conservation laws involved
in such a picture, and proposing that we could observe those violations,
think about the fantastically small amounts of energy involved in changes
that could produce gigantic physical effects in this world; wire
Schroedinger's cat to an H-bomb.
Yuck! No one who loves science is going to be happy with this picture.
(Which doesn't make it false BTW. I think Daryl Gene hinted at something
of the sort. And if anyone wants an example of John Landrum's point that
a miracle that goes on for 10,000 years would be seen as just part of
nature...!)
To the point, then: I think that the point of stories like Burton's
carefully hedged interpretation of quantum mechanics is to show that this
kind of unlimite-duration miracle is not required in order for free will
to be real. This is useful without being an explanation of free will
itself in scientific terms.
--
Dan Drake
d...@dandrake.com
http://www.dandrake.com/index.html
Many things are not seen in their true nature and as they really are,
unless they are seen as beautiful. Behavior is not intelligible, does
not account for itself to the mind, and show the reason for its
existing, unless it is beautiful.
--Matthew Arnold
Pistol
On 8 Apr 1998 06:27:18 GMT, d...@mail1.sas.upenn.edu (Danny Pitt
Stoller) wrote:
[snips]
> I intuitively feel ...
[more snips]
Let me anticipate Josh here. About the only field I know where
intuition is more worthles than it is in statistics is QM. You simply
must discard it.
b...@dragontree.com
>
> I read the post too, and while I followed it, I don't know enough about
> quantum mechanics to answer it on its own terms. (I, like C.S. Lewis,
> have had a philosophical rather than a scientific education
Could you tell us more? What major etc? You seem to know more about structured
logical debate than the rest of us. May we ask your religious background?
> -- though, of
> course, compared with C.S. Lewis I suppose I haven't really had anything
> close to an education at all.)
Nor has anyone since 1914, I sometimes suspect. :-( Well, maybe in India or
somewhere....
> I intuitively feel that there must be a
> problem, because it seems to me that the problem of free will could never
> be explained by any new scientific discovery
But but huh? If we're still talking about /Miracles/ ... then the 'problem' would
be 'how do we act freely if Dr. Straw Scientist's theory is right about physical
laws controlling the atoms in our brains'. OSLT. I mean, would 'free will' BE a
problem, if Dr. SS hadn't made his theory? So if a Dr. Non-Straw's throws out Dr.
SS's....
> or theory because it's just
> not that kind of problem.
Must be some other problem of free will. Excuse the ring.
BD
PS. All this talk of free will, volition, etc.... I don't remember Lewis talking
so much about it in /Miracles/. I thought he kept citing things like "Reason" and
"Moral Judgements" etc. Questions of knowledge, not of "will".
Not sure it matters ... it's a convenient :-) phrase ... not sure it doesn't
fit.... But I wonder if Lewis might have had some good reason for not using it,
and if we might not be misrepresenting his argument?
The Index* gives no listing for Volition, Will, or Free Will. Freedom has 3
listings, only one of which is anti-naturalist (p. 7). Listings for Reason cite
approx. 15 pages before page 40, not counting fenceposts.
"Moral Judgments, implications of" has one listing: 34-38. This is Chapter V,
which explains some of the /MC/ argument in more detail, and says in the
penultimate paragraph, "If, like me, you hold that moral judgment is a kind of
Reasoning...."
BD
b...@dragontree.com
Pistol wrote:
>
> On 8 Apr 1998 06:27:18 GMT, d...@mail1.sas.upenn.edu (Danny Pitt
> Stoller) wrote:
>
> [snips]
>
> > I intuitively feel ...
>
> [more snips]
>
> Let me anticipate Josh here. About the only field I know where
> intuition is more worthles than it is in statistics is QM. You simply
> must discard it.
< scenting the battle afar, she shouts "Whoopee!"
and hastens out of the line of fire >
BD
Matthew Collett
In article
<vhIsdqY67dTD-p...@dynamic58.pm02.san-rafael.best.com>,
d...@dandrake.com (Dan Drake) wrote:
>On Wed, 8 Apr 1998 06:27:18, d...@mail1.sas.upenn.edu (Danny Pitt Stoller)
>wrote:
>
>> Joshua W. Burton (jbu...@nwu.edu) wrote:
>> : Did anyone get this far?
>
>Add one more to the list.
>
>>
>> ... I intuitively feel that there must be a
>> problem, because it seems to me that the problem of free will could never
>> be explained by any new scientific discovery or theory because it's just
>> not that kind of problem....
>
>I think that what's going on here is not _explaining_ free will by any
>scientific argument, but finding a way in which it can be allowed to exist
>in what is, at some level, a deterministic world. To exist, that is,
>without being a continuous miracle in the sense of continuously violating
>the known workings of nature.
>
>Does anybody but me understand that? Do I understand that?
>
It makes excellent sense to me. I had read Joshua as attempting to
'explain' free will, and disagreed with it (for I think in essence the
same reasons as Danny). If he is just arguing for compatibility, I have
no serious objections. However, in that case I don't see that quantum
mechanics is necessary: classical chaos does at least as good a job of
producing an apparently undetermined result from deterministic underlying
physics.
Meanwhile, in article <352C23...@dragontree.com>, on a parallel branch
of the same thread (but still in the same universe), "b...@dragontree.com"
<b...@dragontree.com> wrote:
>PS. All this talk of free will, volition, etc.... I don't remember Lewis
talking
>so much about it in /Miracles/. I thought he kept citing things like
"Reason" and
>"Moral Judgements" etc. Questions of knowledge, not of "will".
Yes, you're right, but the two problems are, if not necessarily connected,
at least similar. Someone who agrees with Lewis that reason essentially
involves something 'outside of Nature' will a fortiori believe the same
about free will. _If_ they believe in free will at all. However, while
just about everybody believes in the existence and effectiveness of
reason, many people do maintain that free will is an illusion. There are
therefore good apologetic reasons for Lewis to confine himself to the
former. Those reasons may or may not apply to this discussion, depending
on the starting points of the participants.
Danny Pitt Stoller
b...@dragontree.com (b...@dragontree.com) wrote:
: May we ask your religious background?
Certainly. I am, ethnically, Jewish -- that is, I am descended from the
tribes of Judea. But neither of my parents practice Judaism: my
mother's side of the family basically takes the Marxist view of religion,
and my father's side of the family mostly takes a freethinking agnostic
view. So I was raised entirely secular. Throughout most of my life, I
considered myself an atheist. While I considered myself an atheist, I
was already very interested in things "spiritual" in the sense that I
never considered material success to be the ultimate goal of life -- I
have always believed that only a process of self-discovery, which for
most of my life has taken place through the arts, can lead to true
fulfillment.
When I was an atheist, I believed firmly in Naturalism. I am
very familiar with the debate about free will vs. determinism within
Naturalism, because my father and I debated it for years: we were
both Naturalists; he believed in volition and I believed in
determinism. When I first became interested in philosophy, and I started
seriously thinking about things, I realized that if there is only one
sort of "stuff" that everything is made of, it doesn't matter whether you
call that "stuff" matter or god. As long as you subscribe to a monist
philosophy, whether you want to call it materialism or pantheism is
really a matter of temperament. So, still wholeheartedly rejecting the
concept of a capital-G "God", I passed from atheism to a New Age-y brand
of pseudo-Eastern pantheistic stuff.
When I first started getting deeply into C.S. Lewis and other Christian
authors, I was mostly drawn in just by the emotional power of their
work. (Yes, my first exposure to Lewis was through the Chronicles; then
the Space Trilogy; then *Till We Have Faces*. I avoided the nonfiction for
as long as I could, and then I just had to keep going just because it was
so good!) The feelings of Joy, of deep spiritual longing for
fulfillment, and the other aspects of the human condition that Lewis
writes about so honestly and so passionately and so beautifully -- these
I recognized in Lewis as things that I felt also in my own heart. And so
I realized that, whatever religious language Lewis used to describe his
relationship with the divine, what he believed was somehow "true" (at
least in the sense of being a mythological description of some very
profound truths).
At this point, when I read Lewis (or other theistic authors), whenever I
came up against the word "God" I would just substitute my own conception
of "the divine". And this worked very well for me. Sooner or later, I
got to the point where the word "God", which had once seemed to me an
abominable word, no longer had to be "translated" and was itself a more
or less suitable word to describe the spiritual being that I believed
in. I began using the word God in my own life, and before I knew it the
statement "I believe in God" no longer seemed like an impossible thing
for me to say.
This is a very rough and sketchy account, since I am really trying to do
two things at once: I am trying to describe the personal emotional
journey that I went through as well as the philosophical process I went
through from one metaphysical view to the next. It is too big a task for
me to try to do very comprehensibly here. Since all you asked about was
my background, I will stop here and perhaps I will have a chance to talk
some more about my own process some other time.
ma...@sonic.net
In article <vhIsdqY67dTD-p...@dynamic58.pm02.san-rafael.best.com>,
d...@dandrake.com (Dan Drake) wrote:
>On Wed, 8 Apr 1998 06:27:18, d...@mail1.sas.upenn.edu (Danny Pitt Stoller)
>wrote:
>
>> Joshua W. Burton (jbu...@nwu.edu) wrote:
>> : Did anyone get this far?
>
>Add one more to the list.
>
>>
>> ... I intuitively feel that there must be a
>> problem, because it seems to me that the problem of free will could never
>> be explained by any new scientific discovery or theory because it's just
>> not that kind of problem....
>
>I think that what's going on here is not _explaining_ free will by any
>scientific argument, but finding a way in which it can be allowed to exist
>in what is, at some level, a deterministic world. To exist, that is,
>without being a continuous miracle
I had never read it as one continuous miracle, but as each separate thought or
movment was a separate miracle. :-) Somehow to me that doesn't sound as bad.
Not such a strain on God, having to hold that door open all the time. Rather,
having given us "sparks" of the stuff to carry around on our own.
>in the sense of continuously violating
>the known workings of nature.
Er -- who wants it not to be a miracle? If it is one, it's a big point for the
theist side (and the side of Acquinas et al).
>
>Does anybody but me understand that? Do I understand that?
< g >
Well, I think I understand Lewis' overall point. I put up the relevant quotes
at
http://www.sonic.net/mary/DejaLew-dir/rants/lq-re-miracle-def.htm
Tho I have reservations about pinnning it on free will -- instead of on Reason
and Moral Judgments as Lewis did. (See my post about his Index entries etc.)
>I mean, here's a straw-man theory. I think its dualism bears some
>resemblance to that of Descartes, or maybe Leibnitz. but it is NOT based
>on those guys, and any attempt to attach their other ideas to it
Who attempted this, Lewis or the Straw Naturalists?
is
>engaging in a logical fallacy that I don't know the name for. (And I hope
>Mary includes it in her list -- it's universally used.)
More detail, when you have time?
>Assume a
>parallel world, which we can call the world of the Spirit, or the Mind if
>you prefer. This is not one of Burton's virtual parallel worlds, but one
>truly different from the normally observable one.
Any kin to world of Forms?
>Whatever the laws of
>that world, it encompasses free will (by hypothesis). The only link
>between our world and that one is that decisions made in that one can
>break through into this world and yank a brain into a state in which it
>does things
Very good descripton so far!
>inconsistent with the result you get from applying physical
>laws to the brain's prior state. Hence, the brain's owner commits acts of
>free will. Before worrying about violations of conservation laws involved
>in such a picture, and proposing that we could observe those violations,
>think about the fantastically small amounts of energy involved in changes
>that could produce gigantic physical effects in this world; wire
>Schroedinger's cat to an H-bomb.
Right! I'd always put together this idea with Lewis' thing about 'the
subnatural'.
Happily being encumbered by neither a scientific nor a philosophical
education, I always saw this 'subnature' as dust motes drifting around in
Brownian motion, thus easy to be nudged one way or another by fantastically
small amounts of energy ... but somehow on the other end affecting which
neurons fired. (Just for a metaphorical example, a lot of very small fairies
could nudge those dust motes into a pattern that cast a shadow that changed
the termperatue of a surface below it....)
(Don't suppose it would help if the motes were themselves alive, their random
behavior most of the time averaging out "like the behavior of very large
masses of men [ p. 56]" -- but on divine command suddenly snapping to
attention and all marching in the same direction. Because that just moves the
question down to, how do they each control their own motes, all the time. ...
I'm really trying to apply Bateson's information vs energy thing, I think.)
>Yuck! No one who loves science is going to be happy with this picture.
So far, such 'leveredging' of 'small change makes big change' seems a common
principle. Switches, thermostats, power brakes.... The small energy doesn't
really get magnified (lever is misnomer), it just changes some small thing to
release some big energy that was already stored elsewhere. Bateson again.
>(Which doesn't make it false BTW. I think Daryl Gene hinted at something
>of the sort. And if anyone wants an example of John Landrum's point that
>a miracle that goes on for 10,000 years would be seen as just part of
>nature...!)
>
>To the point, then: I think that the point of stories like Burton's
>carefully hedged interpretation of quantum mechanics is to show that this
>kind of unlimite-duration miracle is not required in order for free will
>to be real.
Maybe it is worth thumping /Miracles/ a minute. Lewis didn't talk about 'free
will' in this connection except on page 7. Most of the time he talked about
Reason. (See my post re his Index.)
IMO there's a chance that if Lewis read Burton's posts about free will of
electrons, he'd say, "Fine. But are the electrons using Reason to guide their
free will?"
Joshua W. Burton
m.co...@auckland.ac.nz (Matthew Collett) wrote:
> It makes excellent sense to me. I had read Joshua as attempting
> to 'explain' free will, and disagreed with it (for I think in
> essence the same reasons as Danny). If he is just arguing for
> compatibility, I have no serious objections. However, in that
> case I don't see that quantum mechanics is necessary: classical
> chaos does at least as good a job of producing an apparently
> undetermined result from deterministic underlying physics.
"Apparently undetermined," sure. And for a rough-and-ready empiricist
that might be good enough. Lewis's attack on naturalist epistemology,
though, shreds this pretty badly: if our future actions are uniquely
determined by the dynamics (even if the exact dynamics are incalculable
to _us_, for want of perfect knowledge of the initial conditions, and
infinite computing power), then we can no longer make any assumptions
about experiments we didn't happen to do---for all we know, life could
be a kind of stage set, where the script just never calls for us to
look in the direction where there's a camera dolly instead of a wall.
In short, our grounds for believing in the validity of the empirical
method itself (and thereby in classical dynamics!) are greatly weakened
if our futures are only _apparently_ undetermined.
(One could imagine a universe in which we are just automata, but there
are _other_ creatures who have free will, and _their_ testimony is what
holds _our_ metaphysics together. Interacting with such a creature,
assuming It was smart enough to calculate your future, would really
be profoundly depressing. It could, for example, offer you box A or
box B, where B contains $1000 more than A, only if you are destined
to pick A then A=$2000, B=$3000, while if you are destined to pick B
then A=$0, B=$1000. What would you "choose"?)
No, Lewis is right that we need _real_ free will to trust our own
reasoning powers (beyond bare shrug-at-theory empiricism, anyway).
And the only way I know for my worldline to have real free will, in
a universe whose dynamics are deterministic, is for my worldline to
be only part of the dynamics...which nonlinear dynamics can't buy me,
but good old linear QM offers me for free. A truly omniscient Observer
might keep track of all the butterflies stamping in China, but even He
can't tell me "the" life expectancy of Schroedinger's cat.
Holiday cleaning's about 1/3 done. I really am signing off this time.
This is only a test. Had this |==============================================
been an actual life you would | Joshua Burton (847)677-3902 jbu...@nwu.edu
have received instructions... |==============================================
Dan Drake
On Thu, 9 Apr 1998 08:12:55, ma...@sonic.net wrote:
>...
>
> >in the sense of continuously violating
> >the known workings of nature.
>
> Er -- who wants it not to be a miracle? If it is one, it's a big point for the
> theist side (and the side of Acquinas et al).
>
Let's see now..... if it's a big point for the theist side, can we
possibly think of somebody, right in this newsgroup, who would _want_ it
not to be a miracle? I can think of more than one without working up a
sweat.
But it's not a matter of particular non-believers. I think that most
scientists who are Christians, as well as observant sons of Abraham who
are cleaning their ovens instead of reading this, would greatly prefer not
to have miracles continually intruding into the observable reality that
they do so well at observing. That's all I meant.
>
>...
>
> >I mean, here's a straw-man theory. I think its dualism bears some
> >resemblance to that of Descartes, or maybe Leibnitz. but it is NOT based
> >on those guys, and any attempt to attach their other ideas to it
>
> Who attempted this, Lewis or the Straw Naturalists?
Gee, I was hoping that my disclaimer of Descartes and Leibnitz would
indicate that it was neither. I was just trying to illustrate the
position that a believer in physical science and in free will seems to be
forced into and won't like at all. The QM argument allows (I think) a way
out of this uncomfortable position.
>
>
> is
> >engaging in a logical fallacy that I don't know the name for. (And I hope
> >Mary includes it in her list -- it's universally used.)
>
> More detail, when you have time?
I mean this: We see from what G said that he is a Platonist, or rather a
neo-Platonist. Therefore, he believed propositions P and Q, which Plato
firmly believed. But I can refute P and Q, and R as well; it's easy,
since I can just copy from A who did it a long time ago. In fact, maybe
G's hostility to A results from A's dismissal of P! Aren't I clever?
I've explained G away without actually answering his arguments.
Which, of course, shares something with Bulverism, another fallacy that
Aristotle left off his list. But it's not the same thing. The key step is
assigning a person or an idea to a School and then rebutting the school
instead of what was actually said.
(You may be shocked to learn that there are concrete values for variables
G and A, and philosopher P can take the value Pythagoras as well. Then
again, since you're reading Merlewis, maybe you won't be.)
>
>
>
> >Assume a
> >parallel world, which we can call the world of the Spirit, or the Mind if
> >you prefer. This is not one of Burton's virtual parallel worlds, but one
> >truly different from the normally observable one.
>
> Any kin to world of Forms?
I have no need of that hypothesis.
>
>... [notes on amplification etc snipped]
>
> (Don't suppose it would help if the motes were themselves alive, their random
> behavior most of the time averaging out "like the behavior of very large
> masses of men [ p. 56]" -- but on divine command suddenly snapping to
> attention and all marching in the same direction.
This is very close to a half-baked idea of mine that I decline to
elaborate on.
>...
>
> So far, such 'leveredging' of 'small change makes big change' seems a common
> principle. Switches, thermostats, power brakes.... The small energy doesn't
> really get magnified (lever is misnomer), it just changes some small thing to
> release some big energy that was already stored elsewhere. Bateson again.
Right. I could be faulted for mentioning something so obvious :-) But I
see signs among skeptics of a wish to exaggerate the application of
conservation laws. E.g., I know an actual physicist who entertains doubts
about the way evolution goes against the 2ns law of thermodynamics; this
is really unworthy of someone who has been exposed to the concept of free
energy, but there you are, people are human.
>...
>
> IMO there's a chance that if Lewis read Burton's posts about free will of
> electrons, he'd say, "Fine. But are the electrons using Reason to guide their
> free will?"
>
Good. That's really the sticking point in free-will discussions. Some
people may think it indicates how hard it is to understand just what it is
we're talking about in the first place. I do, anyway.
Daryl Gene
> jbu...@nwu.edu (Joshua W. Burton) wrote:
>"Everett's-sum-over-histories", or often
>"Everett's-many-worlds", or even (alas!) "many-worlds". When I say that
>the latter is an "interpretation", I mean simply that it is a story that
>physicists tell other physicists about a theory they all agree on.
But this is one of the interpretations David Lindley says "has never found
great support among physicists" because either the different worlds cannot
interact making validation impossible or they would violate QM principles by
allowing two different sorts of measurement of the same particle (in the
disparate worlds). Has something changed?
-snip-
>it strains my credulity completely to say that a higher
>animal (or a retarded human!) is doing something that differs _in kind_
>from what I do when I choose.
What about the ability to form a concept? (ie: abstracting from reality and
generalizing from that abstraction) would you accept that as a difference in
kind from other mental activity in animals?
OK , you get lots of freely made choices in infinite worlds but this isn't
really my (nor Lewis') problem. The problem is to get from a caused choice to
one that is the consequent of grounds. Suppose I could create a computer
program that when it reached a certain point could select from among seventeen
different views of reality freely but omitted a single force,say gravity, from
all of them. The fact that any path was freely chosen would be irrelevent and
could never lead to a correct model of reality .
If we are only justifying choices afterwards, all choices being equal and
necessary please try to see what happens when you apply the same idea to your
model. You hold it not because it is true or valid or even sensable but
because in this particular expression of reality it is the one you hold
perforce. In some expressions of reality (of equal stature and validity) you
have chosen to be an unwashed outcast of Heaven's Gate begging for pennies and
smoking dope and would reject your own thesis. Ergo, if you are arguing with
yourself, who are we to get involved?
Daryl
"At the summit of every noble endeavor
You will find a steeple pointing toward God (Mack Stokes)
Daryl Gene
>"b...@dragontree.com" <b...@dragontree.com>(or Mary I guess) wrote:
--snip--
>PS. All this talk of free will, volition, etc.... I don't remember Lewis
>talking
>so much about it in /Miracles/. I thought he kept citing things like "Reason"
>and
>"Moral Judgements" etc. Questions of knowledge, not of "will".
I guess this all got involved because Pistol and I were talking about
volitional consciousness in the Rand thread. Rand gives this a specific
meaning which inteprets much the same way reason does in Lewis and she supplies
reasons for believing that it is necessary for reason itself to exist. Since
we were proceeding from a common background and common terminology I felt it
would make more sense to examine the same sort of idea on those terms. Rand
and Lewis would reject determinism/naturalism for much the same reasons but
Rand had to do strange things to keep her naturalism volitional Pistol dosen't
get into the same trap but changes Rand's volitional consciousness enough so
that it isn't really volitional anymore. It isn't therefore Lewis' idea that I
was using, but his argument, plug in the objectivist terminology for reason
and it's the same thing.
Pistol
I have to disagree vehemently (shocker!). I don't think I've changed
Rand's volitional consciousness in the slightest (and I have no reason
, per se, to resist doing so), and my concept of it is CERTAINLY
volitional. Did I miss a post here?
Joshua W. Burton
> >or even (alas!) "many-worlds". When I say that the latter is
> >an "interpretation", I mean simply that it is a story that
> >physicists tell other physicists about a theory they all agree on.
>
> never found great support among physicists" because either the
> different worlds cannot interact making validation impossible or
> they would violate QM principles by allowing two different sorts
> of measurement of the same particle (in the disparate worlds).
> Has something changed?
I can't speak for Lindley because I haven't read his book. At the
level of hard equations, it is easy to prove that Everett's picture
is formally equivalent to standard QM, so there is no substantive
controversy here. There is a definite cultural bias in cosmology
and particle theory toward Everett-esque word-pictures, because it
makes life so much simpler not to have to talk about observers at
all. (The dynamics evolve smoothly, whereas our _knowledge_ about
them undergoes discontinuous shifts when we make observations, and
if we are talking about the universe *as a whole* as quantum
cosmologists are wont to do, there is no need to tangle ourselves
up keeping track of the latter.) For the complementary reason,
atomic and solid-state physicists have a bias toward the Copenhagen
interpretation, because they are primarily interested in discrete
atomic transitions and the like, and it makes them uneasy to treat
these phenomena as perceptual constructs. Quantum computers, if and
when, will make Everett fans of us all, because they are extremely
confusing to even think about in any picture where wavefunction
collapse is treated as an objective phenomenon, instead of a change
in the state of our knowledge. Alain Aspect's experiments on Bell's
inequality and EPR entanglement are similarly so much easier to
follow in a sum-over-histories picture that it is a real liability
these days to be too strongly wedded to vanilla Copenhagen.
So if he means by "has never found great support" only that most
areas of physics don't benefit from this flavor of conceptual
machinery (analogy: complex analysis "has never found great
support" in medical schools, not because anyone disbelieves it,
but because most doctors don't have to deal with functions of a
complex variable very often), then I agree. But the two reasons
you give make me a bit uneasy about whether he knows what he's about
(or how to explain it without misleading). Two different "worlds",
as we have agreed to sloppily put it, become mutually unobservable
for all practical purposes as soon as the quantum superposition is
smeared over a lot of different states, but there is never a sharp
line where you can say that validation through interaction is
impossible. *In the laboratory* about two years ago, they took
a single beryllium atom in a laser trap, moved it several centimeters
left in one "world" and several centimeters right in another, did
an interference measurement to prove it was in both places in
superposition, and then successfully recombined the wavefunction
and observed a single atom in the middle again. A beryllium atom
is quite a complex system, with over a dozen constituents. Doing
the same thing to Schroedinger's cat differs only in degree, until
someone gives me a good reason to believe otherwise.
As for the business about making noncommuting measurements in two
different "worlds", this is simply wrong. The superposition of
any two measurements is just another measurement, and the fact
that QM is a linear theory guarantees that the superposition will
not violate Heisenberg's principle if the component experiments don't.
I don't want to say without seeing the book that the author has let
his words lead him away from the equations he is actually talking
about, but that would be a possible interpretation.
> >it strains my credulity completely to say that a higher animal
> >(or a retarded human!) is doing something that differs _in kind_
> >from what I do when I choose.
>
> What about the ability to form a concept? (ie: abstracting from
> reality and generalizing from that abstraction) would you accept
> that as a difference in kind from other mental activity in animals?
No, I'd actually regard that as not merely speculative but strongly
disproven, by both common experience and higher primate studies.
To take a particularly blatant case, Jane Goodall's project managed
to document deliberate deception, premeditated kidnapping, and what
in humans we would call first-degree murder among chimps, which
involves not merely abstracting from the environment but from the
inferred mental states of other individuals. Based on what was
reported, I feel it's even an interesting _moral_ question whether
one should permit chimps to commit such acts under benign observation.
Certainly there have been human kidnappings committed much more
clumsily and with less foresight than the infant chimp case I have
in mind. Sorry, no documentation ready to hand here, but if anyone
is aware that I'm overstating the facts I'd be relieved to hear it.
More generally, I would like to caution you that this whole line of
thought is in imminent danger of being hoist on the petard of its
own subjective/objective distinction. If we consider the _interior_
phenomenon of consciousness (NOT how recognizing tigers helps me
survive, nor how brain neurophysiology helps me recognize tigers,
nor how seeing a tiger triggers a cortisone response...but *how it
feels to see a tiger*) as a spark that comes from entirely outside
the natural world---as Mr. Lewis wants us to---and that is distinct
from the objective, measurable correlates that accompany it, what
then? Why, then we have _completely_ lost the right to assert that
mice and lice and even dice experience the same interior phenomenon
_without_ similar objective correlates. The only thing you _know_
about my consciousness, if you want to consider it apart from my
brain physiology, is that it makes me do things that (1) you don't
control, and (2) the deterministic laws of motion don't allow you
to reliably predict. Well, the same is true of raindrops and atoms.
Their `consciousness' and `volition' may not be the same as yours;
certainly you can't ask them questions about how it feels. But if,
as you have seconded Lewis in maintaining here, human acts of choice
represent genuine incursions of the supernatural, then it seems odd
that we even bother talking about what their merely incidental
objective correlates look and act like. At some point, you have
to make up your mind: do you believe I have a soul because my brain
works like yours, or because I make choices? If the former, you
have to grapple with the fact that a chimp's brain works a great
deal like yours as well, and a sleeping or comatose or psychotic
or drugged or severely retarded person's somewhat less so. If the
latter, then you have lost any basis for not taking the choices made
by raindrops on the same footing.
> OK , you get lots of freely made choices in infinite worlds but
> this isn't really my (nor Lewis') problem. The problem is to
> get from a caused choice to one that is the consequent of grounds.
If `strong logic' of the Aristotelian/Euclidean sort that Mr. Lewis
is after were available at all, this would worry me a bit more. In
particular, is the sentence
<Burton is unable to consistently believe this sentence.>
a consequent of right reason and the relevant definitions of words?
It certainly seems to be (though it took Goedel, Church, et aliae to
figure out how one would construct such a statement rigorously in any
logic system strong enough to contain number theory). And...yet...
somehow, I find it very difficult to believe this sentence, at least
with any consistency. I'm sure the rest of you have no trouble
believing it, which ought to make me feel pretty stupid, except that
there might be sentences that give each of you just as much trouble.
My point is that none of us believes in ground/consequent in quite
the strong sense any more---even God has a Goedel sentence, if He
is smart enough to practice first-order logic. Lewis tries, with
more rhetorical than logical force, to sell us on the idea that the
whole edifice of Naturalist philosophy will come crashing down on
our heads the moment we try to get by with `weak reason', which I
define as cause/effect honed by evolution to track, in a rough and
ready way, what appears to us to be something like ground/consequent.
As a scientist who knows from experience that science is a net, not
a chain, and hence much stronger than its weakest link, I don't think
we need panic quite so easily.
> If we are only justifying choices afterwards, all choices being
> equal and necessary please try to see what happens when you apply
> the same idea to your model. You hold it not because it is true
> or valid or even sensable but because in this particular expression
> of reality it is the one you hold perforce.
No, I thought it out, and I have a chain of argument leading to it
that I find logically compelling. (So, too, my opposite number who
thinks otherwise!) The point is that, if my logic is _bad_ logic,
in the sense that the universe ruthlessly enforces, I wind up losing
my comfy job, or being eaten by a tiger, or missing a meal if I happen
to _be_ a tiger. A few billion years of this, with a genetic code to
help me remember the really good lessons, and more recently a brain
that is so good at modeling the world around me that it models _me_
in its spare time...and my `weak reason' is remarkably consistent with
the kind the universe likes.
And why should I believe that what the universe enforces is `true',
as opposed to an elaborate sham, self-inconsistent at the core, which
I have been bred by that very universe not to perceive? Well, of
course it may be. Really complicated lies that hold together are
harder to come by than truths, in my experience---but then the fact
that my experience is limited is at the very center of this question.
The supposition that the foundations of reality are solid, not in
some axiomatic sense that 20c mathematics has forbidden us, but in
the _empirical_ sense that my idea of ground/consequent is not about
to betray me, is the statement of FAITH that underlies both your
worldview and mine. The only real disagreement is whether it can
be treated as atomic and unexamined, as I am inclined to do, or
whether theological constructs can be usefully built upon it, in the
very place of all metaphysics where our construct-building machinery
can least be trusted to work to spec.
By the way, as I have said before, the physical universe is by no means
the most stringent test that `weak reason' is asked to pass. Higher
math is _full_ of things for which the observable universe simply has
no room, and they all seem to hold together when you push on them, too.
That my hunter-gatherer brain can bootstrap its way up to Cantor sets
and far beyond without exposing any irreconcilable fallacies is very
powerful evidence that the universe is telling an awesomely clever and
self-consistent lie, or else...all the truth we can handle.
Be nice to your kids. |====================================================
Someday they'll choose | Joshua W. Burton (847)677-3902 jbu...@nwu.edu
your nursing home. |====================================================
b...@dragontree.com
Joshua W. Burton wrote:
> The point is that, if my logic is _bad_ logic,
> in the sense that the universe ruthlessly enforces, I wind up losing
> my comfy job, or being eaten by a tiger, or missing a meal if I happen
> to _be_ a tiger. A few billion years of this, with a genetic code to
> help me remember the really good lessons, and more recently a brain
> that is so good at modeling the world around me that it models _me_
> in its spare time...and my `weak reason' is remarkably consistent with
> the kind the universe likes.
Well, kind of likes, some of the time. I'll be glad when we get to where the
universe cares about us, too.
BD
Daryl Gene
> jbu...@nwu.edu (Joshua W. Burton)wrote:
-snip-
>For the complementary reason,
>atomic and solid-state physicists have a bias toward the Copenhagen
>interpretation,
Lindley seema to favor Copenhagen but I guess he is the exceptional case
being formerly a theoretical astrophysicist at Cambridge in England.
-snip-
>about two years ago, they took
>a single beryllium atom in a laser trap, moved it several centimeters
>left in one "world" and several centimeters right in another, did
>an interference measurement to prove it was in both places in
>superposition, and then successfully recombined the wavefunction
>and observed a single atom in the middle again. A beryllium atom
>is quite a complex system, with over a dozen constituents.
The copyright on the book is 1996, perhaps this was after that. I'm having
a problem visualising this experiment , how could you take mesurments in two
worlds and communicate the results? If it was really in two worlds why not try
to measure position in one and interference in the other? Do you mean they got
an interference pattern as from two atoms in regular type measurments, each
several centemeters apart, using only one atom? What did they use to acomplish
the shift?
-snip-
>I don't want to say without seeing the book that the author has let
>his words lead him away from the equations he is actually talking
>about, but that would be a possible interpretation.
It is also possible (if not likely) that I did not convey his position
well. He also balks at the proliferation of worlds necessary when you have an
event with a multitude of possible outcomes. He cites Compton scattering here
where the number of possible angles along which the photon's path are infinate
necessitating an infinate number of worlds.
>> What about the ability to form a concept? (ie: abstracting from
>> reality and generalizing from that abstraction) would you accept
>> that as a difference in kind from other mental activity in animals?
>No, I'd actually regard that as not merely speculative but strongly
>disproven, by both common experience and higher primate studies.
>To take a particularly blatant case, Jane Goodall's project managed
>to document deliberate deception, premeditated kidnapping, and what
>in humans we would call first-degree murder among chimps, which
>involves not merely abstracting from the environment but from the
>inferred mental states of other individuals. Based on what was
>reported, I feel it's even an interesting _moral_ question whether
>one should permit chimps to commit such acts under benign observation.
>
>Certainly there have been human kidnappings committed much more
>clumsily and with less foresight than the infant chimp case I have
>in mind. Sorry, no documentation ready to hand here, but if anyone
>is aware that I'm overstating the facts I'd be relieved to hear it.
>
What you say may, in fact, be true, but the information you cite here is not
the proof. All of these behaviors have refrents several layers of mentality
below the chimps. I have owned dogs who were especially good at reading my
moods for example, a great asset to a pack animal. The lack of a conceptual
language seems to be an enormous hurdle to overcome when attributing human
motivation to the chimp. Signing Gorrilas notwithstanding (certainly no
uninamity about what is going on there) if they can form concepts they can form
language, why are they reluctant to do so? As an aside I doubt it would take
Johnny Cochran to get an aquittal for the perps in this case.
-snip-
> do you believe I have a soul because my brain
>works like yours, or because I make choices?
I believe you have a soul sir because you can reason. Reasoning involves
making choices, not by default, but as a directed act of consciousness. I am
not yet convinced that QM provides the sort of liberty necessary for the
existance of reason. I am pretty certain that what an elementary particle does
when measured is not a choice in the same ontological catagory with that made
by the human will if it is a choice at all and not what simply what happens
when we disturb its normal state (sum-over wavefunction if you will) by one of
our measuring devices.
-snip-
> In
>particular, is the sentence
>
> <Burton is unable to consistently believe this sentence.>
>
>a consequent of right reason and the relevant definitions of words?
No it is the consequent of a little semantic game we can play with the uses of
language. The simpler version of this little game is seen in the statement
<This sentence is false> which is what you get when you ask the simple question
of the above Q: What is Mr. Burton unable to consistently believe A: That
this sentence is true.
The apparent difficulty is easily resolved when you realise that nothing
falsifiable has been said about anything. Ie: "this sentence" has no refrent to
which belief or truth and falsity can apply. You might as well say <Burton is
unable to consistantly believe this pryxqigal>. The words "this sentence"
with no verifiable refrent are useless in this context.
-snip-
>My point is that none of us believes in ground/consequent in quite
>the strong sense any more---
Oh?
> Lewis tries, with
>more rhetorical than logical force, to sell us on the idea that the
>whole edifice of Naturalist philosophy will come crashing down on
>our heads the moment we try to get by with `weak reason', which I
>define as cause/effect honed by evolution to track, in a rough and
>ready way, what appears to us to be something like ground/consequent.
>As a scientist who knows from experience that science is a net, not
>a chain, and hence much stronger than its weakest link, I don't think
>we need panic quite so easily.
Cut the net loose from the ship of reason and it drifts aimlessly with the
waves, a clear and present danger to the innocent souls caught in its webbing.
Ultimately turning to foul the ships rudder and damn the crew as well. (to
borrow a metaphor)
-snip-
>The point is that, if my logic is _bad_ logic,
>in the sense that the universe ruthlessly enforces,
Actually the universe (as well as God) is remarkably tolerant of our folly
and corrects us only in the most extreme cases. She seems to prefer the swift
and the strong to the rational, not to mention the prolific which seems an
especial favorite of hers. Were I to wager on which class of animals would
still exist say, 1m, years hence I would bet on the insects. So much for
rationality by natural selection.
>And why should I believe that what the universe enforces is `true',
>as opposed to an elaborate sham, self-inconsistent at the core,
QUITE! Why would we dream up the illusion of choices (c/g not c/e) where
there were none and act as if they were real? Why would we be aware of our
awareness, what possible function could that serve if it had no basis in
reality? Why should we be able to concieve of ourselves apart from out bodies.
All this profligate foolishness should have been weeded out long ago n'est pas?
-snip-
> in the
>very place of all metaphysics where our construct-building machinery
>can least be trusted to work to spec.
Or where it works at its very best IMHO
>That my hunter-gatherer brain can bootstrap its way up to Cantor sets
>and far beyond without exposing any irreconcilable fallacies is very
>powerful evidence that the universe is telling an awesomely clever and
>self-consistent lie, or else...all the truth we can handle.
Or n dimentional matrises. Beautiful! Or Dylan Thomas, Or Motzart, amazing
, Or Lewis, or the Psalms, beyond the universe even.............
Joshua W. Burton
dary...@aol.com (Daryl Gene) wrote:
> The copyright on the book is 1996, perhaps this was after that.
> I'm having a problem visualising this experiment , how could
> you take mesurments in two worlds and communicate the results?
I've started to write this twice tonight, and it came out long both
times, so I'm giving up (as I warned you I might). The short
version is that you observe an atom that's in two places at once
with a photon that's in two places at once. Run the photon along
two paths that recombine with suitable relative phase, and you can
either irreversibly observe where the atom is, or see whether the
two projections of the atom are oscillating in unison or zigzag.
In the latter case, the "which-universe" information has been
erased from the photon, and is still locked up in the atom, so
you can coax the two projections back to the middle of the trap,
and proceed as a single universe.
The "dark-state" technique for laser cooling of atoms depends
on that trick: you put the atoms into a superposition of two
states, so that the photons each atom absorbs in one "world" are
out of phase with the photons it absorbs in the other. The two
cancel, and the atom absorbs no photons as long as you don't
check which world it is in. Cohen-Tannoudji and Chu won the
Nobel Prize for this recently; the QM of it was not a surprise
to anyone, but the technique is awesomely ingenious.
> If it was really in two worlds why not try to measure position
> in one and interference in the other?
As soon as you start to talk about doing different measurements
"in the two worlds", you are assuming that many, many quantum states
(cameras, data recorders, brains...) know which state is which. At
that point, each world is effectively on its own, because the
interference terms become vanishingly small when they involve a
large number of incoherent particles. You _could_ take this one
beryllium atom, which is in two macroscopically separated locations
at once, and perform a _single_ measurement on it that would have
the effect of telling you its position if it is at A, and its
momentum if it is at B. Since only one of the two results applies
once we actually do decide which world we are in, no violation of
Heisenberg is involved here. If we recombine the two worlds before
measuring which one we're in, we will be left with a single,
ambiguous measurement that _might_ have been a position measurement
and _might_ have been a momentum measurement...but we don't know
which it was. Again, no violation of the uncertainty principle.
> Do you mean they got an interference pattern as from two atoms
> in regular type measurments, each several centemeters apart,
> using only one atom? What did they use to acomplish the shift?
That's just what I mean. They put the single atom into some
superposition of two different spin states, and then hit it with
a magnetic field that pulled the two states in opposite directions.
The main trick was getting it cold and dark enough to do this
without some random photon scattering off it, showing where it
is (or, if you prefer, which world we are in) and destroying the
whole coherent interference between the two.
> He also balks at the proliferation of worlds necessary when you
> have an event with a multitude of possible outcomes. He cites
> Compton scattering here where the number of possible angles along
> which the photon's path are infinate necessitating an infinate
> number of worlds.
That's only an objection if you think they really are "worlds", per
my naive-Everett straw theory. There's only one world, and the
size of the wavefunction remains constant ("unitary") as it evolves.
It's only your _conditional_ wavefunction ("given what _I_ know now,
what is likely to happen next?") that bifurcates and has to be
continually resized. When your horse comes in on the nose in
race #1 and #2, _your_ probability of winning the perfecta has just
gone way up. But the number of people in the whole stadium who are
likely to win it hasn't changed; you've just renormalized yourself
out of the shoes of all the early losers. You certainly wouldn't
say that likely winners are "proliferating" as you approach race #3.
> The lack of a conceptual language seems to be an enormous hurdle
> to overcome when attributing human motivation to the chimp.
> Signing Gorrilas notwithstanding (certainly no uninamity about
> what is going on there) if they can form concepts they can form
> language, why are they reluctant to do so?
Read Oliver Sacks. Language centers are dangerously fragile and
divisible things to be enthroned as the seat of reason. If you have
to draw a line that includes me and excludes the chimp, I'd rather
you claimed it was our hairless skin that proves we are in the Image.
At least when I go bald I'm pretty sure I'll stay bald, whereas I
have no idea whether my ability to verbalize concepts will last as
long as my ability to form them. Too much machinery to go sour, alas.
> As an aside I doubt it would take Johnny Cochran to get an aquittal
> for the perps in this case.
Dismissed for lack of jurisdiction before it ever went to trial.
Neither our Constitution nor the relevant African ones recognize
Genesis 1:28 as grounds for a criminal action.
> I am pretty certain that what an elementary particle does when
> measured is not a choice in the same ontological catagory with that
> made by the human will if it is a choice at all and not what simply
> what happens when we disturb its normal state (sum-over wavefunction
> if you will) by one of our measuring devices.
...
> I cannot concieve of some facility of elementary particles
> which would make choice possible, what would carry the force to
> do so, another layer of particles? Granted, the ends of measurment
> are unpredictable and the state prior to measurment indeterminate,
> but choice seems a rather anthropromorphic way to discribe what
> the particle does when measured.
Oops. You just slipped into that nasty pothole I was warning you
about a couple of days ago. Remember, what we are talking about
here is what you yourself described last month as a "rend in the
fabric of the universe" which "by definition had no cause in the
physical world at all but eminated from the aforementioned will as
if another dimention had been added to the host being." And now
you're trying to tell me that an elementary particle doesn't have
the Right Stuff to be a locus for this emanation, because it lacks
internal _physical_ structure! Sheer mechanistic brainpan prejudice.
Again, what sort of Right Stuff are we looking for? If you are
merely defining reason as "what happens in mammalian brains" then
I agree that particles and supercomputers and Denebians don't do
that. If you're defining it as "what looks comprehensible to
Mr. Gene", then physics PhD's and Frenchmen don't do it either.
(It's n'est-CE pas, not n'est pas.) If you're willing to accept
the notion that it comes in from "outside", however, it could be
coming in _anywhere_. Redwoods and waterfalls may be deeper poets
and subtler vessels of reason than we are, _if_ reason is not tied
to its objective correlates (such as having neural ganglia, or
speaking English). What does the fact that they don't talk to
_you_ prove about their relationship with the hypothetical Source?
If, however, as you had it at the beginning of this thread, reason
is a transcendent spacetime event, where the laws of nature bow
out and make way for Will, Choice, and all those other Reified Nouns,
then single "pure" events (like the choices made by electrons) are
exactly where you should look first. The laws of nature don't
predict them, and you don't control them---ergo, they are neither
part of the deterministic background nor of your subjective foreground.
That makes them Creatures, as long as we're capitalizing.
> Correct me if there is evidence to the contrary but wouldn't it
> make as much sense to say the particle "acquires" the value when
> measured (again unless there is evidence that it has the value
> prior to measurement) and perhaps even acquires it from the
> measuring device?
As an operational rule, that (Copenhagen) makes reasonable sense
for all cases where you know which interactions are "measurements".
The problem arises when quantum states interact with quantum states,
instead of with big measuring devices that can be treated classically.
You can still talk Copenhagen in a world of quantum erasers, but you
get a sore neck from all the cartwheels---in particular, you get to
decide *after the fact*, depending on how you treat a photon, whether
a measurement occurred when that photon interacted with your atom.
You could store the photon in two mirror-boxes for a year, then open
them both, recombine the photon, and the beryllium atom has suddenly
_not_ had its position determined, even though for a year you thought
it had. And now you can do interference experiments to prove the
beryllium atom is retroactively, and still, in both places. If you
had done a different photon measurement, the beryllium atom would
have been in a definite place for all of the last year.
Does this sound like "objective" wavefunction collapse during
measurement is a useful concept, or mightn't it be easier to just
admit that only the wavefunction is real, and that all that happens
in a measurement is a change in the state of our knowledge?
> >In particular, is the sentence
> >
> > <Burton is unable to consistently believe this sentence.>
> >
> >a consequent of right reason and the relevant definitions of
> >words?
>
> No it is the consequent of a little semantic game we can play
> with the uses of language. The simpler version of this little
> game is seen in the statement <This sentence is false> which is
> what you get when you ask the simple question of the above Q:
> What is Mr. Burton unable to consistently believe A: That this
> sentence is true. The apparent difficulty is easily resolved
> when you realise that nothing falsifiable has been said about
> anything. Ie: "this sentence" has no refrent to which belief or
> truth and falsity can apply. You might as well say <Burton is
> unable to consistantly believe this pryxqigal>. The words "this
> sentence" with no verifiable refrent are useless in this context.
Well, that _might_ have been true, but Goedel proved otherwise. In
fact, this particular "semantic game" can be played at much higher
stakes, because ANY formal system that is strong enough to reason
about mathematics in turns out to have a way to talk about its own
predicates, giving rigorous meaning to "this sentence" in the Liar
Paradox. The actual form of the sentence I can't consistently
believe is something like
<"Is a phrase that, when preceded by its own words in quotation marks,
forms a sentence in whose truth Burton is unable to believe" is a
phrase that, when preceded by its own words in quotation marks, forms
a sentence in whose truth Burton is unable to believe.>
This sentence doesn't talk about itself, it talks about a particular
arrangement of words (the ones in quotes, with themselves in quotes
prepended) which just happens to be identical to itself. I can go
on making the construction more and more precise until you agree that
the problem is deep and ineradicable, if you like. Goedel himself
expressed it in what amounts to a LISP program (long before LISP was
dreamt of, of course), by constructing a series of purely arithmetical
statements, of which roughly the twentieth was isomorphic to the gem
above. It's one of the sublime creations of the human mind, and you
sneer at even the cartoon version ill-advisedly.
> >Lewis tries, with more rhetorical than logical force, to sell
> >us on the idea that the whole edifice of Naturalist philosophy
> >will come crashing down on our heads the moment we try to get
> >by with `weak reason', which I define as cause/effect honed by
> >evolution to track, in a rough and ready way, what appears to
> >us to be something like ground/consequent. As a scientist who
> >knows from experience that science is a net, not a chain, and
> >hence much stronger than its weakest link, I don't think we need
> >panic quite so easily.
>
> Cut the net loose from the ship of reason and it drifts aimlessly
> with the waves, a clear and present danger to the innocent souls
> caught in its webbing. Ultimately turning to foul the ships
> rudder and damn the crew as well.
Cutting a net loose is not all that easy. It catches on any pointy
facts that happen to be sticking up above deck level. Helps keep
you from slipping on the smooth places where the deck lacks such
adornments, too. You could slide right overboard without it.
> Were I to wager on which class of animals would still exist say,
> 1m, years hence I would bet on the insects. So much for rationality
> by natural selection.
Most people I know play dominoes. So much for improving my chess game
by studying chess books and going to chess tournaments.
> Why would we be aware of our awareness, what possible function
> could that serve if it had no basis in reality? Why should we be
> able to concieve of ourselves apart from out bodies. All this
> profligate foolishness should have been weeded out long ago n'est
> pas?
I'll defer this to the biologists. Mr. Schwarz had a persuasive
conjecture here some time ago about how the game theory of pack
hunting and other collective action selects for machinery that is
very good at modeling other creatures like you...such as...well,
you, for instance.
> > The only real disagreement is whether [the supposition that the
> > foundations of reality are solid] can be treated as atomic and
> > unexamined, as I am inclined to do, or whether theological
> > constructs can be usefully built upon it, in the very place of
> > all metaphysics where our construct-building machinery can least
> > be trusted to work to spec.
>
> Or where it works at its very best IMHO
What was it Beaumarchais said about men, quite powerless to create a
grasshopper, who believe they can create gods?
``No, I have a counter- |===================================================
example.'' ``That's OK; | Joshua W Burton (847)677-3902 jbu...@nwu.edu
I have TWO proofs....'' |===================================================
b...@dragontree.com
Just skimming through for pictures and conversation. :-)
Joshua W. Burton wrote:
>
> dary...@aol.com (Daryl Gene) wrote:
>
> > The copyright on the book is 1996,
/very long snip/
> (or, if you prefer, which world we are in) and destroying the
> whole coherent interference between the two.
Hadn't you better change the thread title? Someone is liable to think you're talking
about miracles. :-)
/snip/
> > The lack of a conceptual language seems to be an enormous hurdle
> > to overcome when attributing human motivation to the chimp.
> > Signing Gorrilas notwithstanding (certainly no uninamity about
> > what is going on there) if they can form concepts they can form
> > language, why are they reluctant to do so?
Perhaps they have not yet discovered any other lifeforms worth conversing with?
> Read Oliver Sacks. Language centers are dangerously fragile and
> divisible things to be enthroned as the seat of reason. If you have
> to draw a line that includes me and excludes the chimp, I'd rather
> you claimed it was our hairless skin that proves we are in the Image.
> At least when I go bald I'm pretty sure I'll stay bald, whereas I
> have no idea whether my ability to verbalize concepts will last as
> long as my ability to form them. Too much machinery to go sour, alas.
//// insert Sanscrit //////
> > As an aside I doubt it would take Johnny Cochran to get an aquittal
> > for the perps in this case.
>
> Dismissed for lack of jurisdiction before it ever went to trial.
> Neither our Constitution nor the relevant African ones recognize
> Genesis 1:28 as grounds for a criminal action.
And if the result were to get the whole species into the courtroom and off the
dissecting table.... What was that old sf story about "only intelligent animals put
other animals in cages"?
> > I am pretty certain that what an elementary particle does when
> > measured is not a choice in the same ontological catagory with that
> > made by the human will if it is a choice at all and not what simply
> > what happens when we disturb its normal state (sum-over wavefunction
> > if you will) by one of our measuring devices.
> ...
> > I cannot concieve of some facility of elementary particles
> > which would make choice possible, what would carry the force to
> > do so, another layer of particles? Granted, the ends of measurment
> > are unpredictable and the state prior to measurment indeterminate,
> > but choice seems a rather anthropromorphic way to discribe what
> > the particle does when measured.
I am trying /so/ hard to refrain from speculating about possible correlations between
lack of degrees, and insistence on "all humans are special ... will rule the angels",
etc.
/short snip/
> And now
> you're trying to tell me that an elementary particle doesn't have
> the Right Stuff to be a locus for this emanation, because it lacks
> internal _physical_ structure! Sheer mechanistic brainpan prejudice.
>
> Again, what sort of Right Stuff are we looking for? If you are
> merely defining reason as "what happens in mammalian brains" then
> I agree that particles and supercomputers and Denebians don't do
> that. If you're defining it as "what looks comprehensible to
> Mr. Gene", then physics PhD's and Frenchmen don't do it either.
> (It's n'est-CE pas, not n'est pas.) If you're willing to accept
> the notion that it comes in from "outside", however, it could be
> coming in _anywhere_. Redwoods and waterfalls may be deeper poets
> and subtler vessels of reason than we are, _if_ reason is not tied
> to its objective correlates (such as having neural ganglia, or
> speaking English).
I have read this three times, and still can't stop thinking of Coleridge's waterfall.
> What does the fact that they don't talk to
> _you_ prove about their relationship with the hypothetical Source?
Well, not prove, but does perhaps support a closer connection with It? (Assuming they're
not busily trying to teach us their language by the Berlitz method.)
> If, however, as you had it at the beginning of this thread, reason
> is a transcendent spacetime event, where the laws of nature bow
> out and make way for Will, Choice, and all those other Reified Nouns,
> then single "pure" events (like the choices made by electrons) are
> exactly where you should look first. The laws of nature don't
> predict them, and you don't control them---ergo, they are neither
> part of the deterministic background nor of your subjective foreground.
> That makes them Creatures, as long as we're capitalizing.
So sorry to bring in the un-sublime. But is my thing about fairies nudging the Brownian
dustmotes anything like in the right ballpark -- strictly as a metaphor, I mean (not
necessarily a sacrament per "Transpositon"?) And, sorry, but Lewis' 'sub-natural'
backdoor?
/medium snip/
> > >Lewis tries, with more rhetorical than logical force, to sell
> > >us on the idea that the whole edifice of Naturalist philosophy
> > >will come crashing down on our heads the moment we try to get
> > >by with `weak reason', which I define as cause/effect honed by
> > >evolution to track, in a rough and ready way, what appears to
> > >us to be something like ground/consequent. As a scientist who
> > >knows from experience that science is a net, not a chain, and
> > >hence much stronger than its weakest link, I don't think we need
> > >panic quite so easily.
> >
> > Cut the net loose from the ship of reason and it drifts aimlessly
> > with the waves, a clear and present danger to the innocent souls
> > caught in its webbing. Ultimately turning to foul the ships
> > rudder and damn the crew as well.
>
> Cutting a net loose is not all that easy. It catches on any pointy
> facts that happen to be sticking up above deck level. Helps keep
> you from slipping on the smooth places where the deck lacks such
> adornments, too. You could slide right overboard without it.
>
> > Were I to wager on which class of animals would still exist say,
> > 1m, years hence I would bet on the insects. So much for rationality
> > by natural selection.
Sigh. I heard somewhere some little theory about the bees and the flowers. That flowers
are shapes that attract bees. Sort of like billboards: "Stop here for pollen."
Comparing teh billboards that humans respond to, with teh billboards that bees respond
to ... and adding in the old defintions of RAtionality ... something to do with
approparite action toward Beauty....
Must add. MC p. 84-86. Lewis is talking about moral 'choices'=actions, but IMO this
would apply to the larger question of RAtionality as well.
p. 84
<<<<<<
When a man makes a moral choice tow things are involved. One is the act of choosing. The
other is the various feelings, impulses and so on which his psychological outfit
presents him with, and which are the raw material of his choice.
>>>>>>>
p. 85
<<<<<
However much you improve the man's raw materail, you have still got something else: the
real, free choice of hte man, on the matierail presented to him....
>>>>>>
p. 86
<<<<<
We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw material.
>>>>>
Put this together with Erich's soul looking at the shadows his neurons cast on the wall
of the dark cave.... Euclid can be just as rational measuring dim shadows as techicolor
ones, so we shouldn't feel too bad about our corneas being less adapted to beauty than
the bees' are.
/short snip/
> > > The only real disagreement is whether [the supposition that the
> > > foundations of reality are solid] can be treated as atomic and
> > > unexamined, as I am inclined to do, or whether theological
> > > constructs can be usefully built upon it, in the very place of
> > > all metaphysics where our construct-building machinery can least
> > > be trusted to work to spec.
> >
> > Or where it works at its very best IMHO
>
> What was it Beaumarchais said about men, quite powerless to create a
> grasshopper, who believe they can create gods?
>
> ``No, I have a counter- |===================================================
> example.'' ``That's OK; | Joshua W Burton (847)677-3902 jbu...@nwu.edu
> I have TWO proofs....'' |===================================================
Vive polytheorism?
Mary
--
* If all non-angels are demonized, all non-demons will be called 'angels'. *
Action Default: "Common sense and the 813"
Theory Default: "We don't know till we find out."
Joshua W. Burton
"b...@dragontree.com" <b...@dragontree.com> wrote:
> So sorry to bring in the un-sublime. But is my thing about fairies
> nudging the Brownian dustmotes anything like in the right ballpark
> -- strictly as a metaphor, I mean (not necessarily a sacrament
> per "Transpositon"?) And, sorry, but Lewis' 'sub-natural' backdoor?
Strictly as metaphor, surely! When a question steps up and asks
politely to be served on its own terms, far be it from me to bar
the door and enforce a dress code. Plenty of fish for all.
I don't think it's the right ballpark, however. Your dustmotes are
made out of "regular stuff", and know exactly where they are and
what they are about, even when we're not watching. The fairies may
be invisible, but you can learn a lot about them by their nudging.
In your picture, I'd feel that I could get to know each fairy by
_name_, if I were only superhumanly patient in watching their coy
little diversions.
Better picture: we're playing pocket billiards in total darkness.
The cue ball gives a satisfying <thunk> as we hit it, and the balls
fall into the holes (when they do) with a decisive <plop>. But
everything that happens in between is unaccountably foggy. There
seem to be about three other balls (or maybe more, or less) out
there on the table, and by tapping one of them with repeated gentle
shots we feel we're beginning to learn the angles. Then suddenly
there's another ball in our way where there wasn't before, and our
cushion shots acquire unpredictable English, and that THIRD ball
(is it really out there, or not?) seems to move into and out of our
way without our even hitting it. Little fairy feet can just be
heard pattering around the baize, stepping nimbly out of the way
of our clumsy cue ball, defying us to probe what they're up to.
We hear two balls drop simultaneously, in opposite corner pockets,
and reach eagerly into the tray to find out what we've got. Just
the cue ball---it appears we scratched...in two places at once?
High-pitched giggles can be heard from somewhere down on the other
end of the table. We rack them up again by hand, fire the cue ball
right up the middle, somehow miss, and break them on the rebound.
Several more shots in quick succession, but now the table appears
to be empty. Suddenly a moving ball, never hit, strikes our cue
ball, and we scratch again.
We turn on the light, and the whole billiard table goes away.
Wavefunctions are |=======================================================
the dreams stuff is | Joshua W. Burton (847)677-3902 jbu...@nwu.edu
made of. |=======================================================
Daryl Gene
>jbu...@nwu.edu (Joshua W. Burton)wrote:
>dary...@aol.com (Daryl Gene) wrote:
>I've started to write this twice tonight, and it came out long both
>times, so I'm giving up (as I warned you I might). The short
>version is that you observe an atom that's in two places at once
>with a photon that's in two places at once.
-snip-
I must commend your ability to communicate these phenomona. I have encountered
few people who could communicate such things as clearly.
>> Do you mean they got an interference pattern as from two atoms
>> in regular type measurments, each several centemeters apart,
>> using only one atom? What did they use to acomplish the shift?
>
>That's just what I mean. They put the single atom into some
>superposition of two different spin states, and then hit it with
>a magnetic field that pulled the two states in opposite directions.
>The main trick was getting it cold and dark enough to do this
>without some random photon scattering off it, showing where it
>is (or, if you prefer, which world we are in) and destroying the
>whole coherent interference between the two.
This must really put the Bohm type theories in a bad place then. If you can
put two expressions of the wavefunction in two places it would really end any
idea of an "underlying reality".
-snip-
>That's only an objection if you think they really are "worlds", per
>my naive-Everett straw theory.
This was just the impression I got from Lindley. He does seem to be very
Copenhagen but things are moving so rapidly in your field I doubt any
Weltanschauung could hold for long.
-snip-
>
> The lack of a conceptual language seems to be an enormous hurdle
>> to overcome when attributing human motivation to the chimp.
>> Signing Gorrilas notwithstanding (certainly no uninamity about
>> what is going on there) if they can form concepts they can form
>> language, why are they reluctant to do so?
>
>Read Oliver Sacks. Language centers are dangerously fragile and
>divisible things to be enthroned as the seat of reason. If you have
>to draw a line that includes me and excludes the chimp, I'd rather
>you claimed it was our hairless skin that proves we are in the Image.
>At least when I go bald I'm pretty sure I'll stay bald, whereas I
>have no idea whether my ability to verbalize concepts will last as
>long as my ability to form them. Too much machinery to go sour, alas.
Again I would here defer to Mortimer Adler en.re. "The Difference of Man
and the Difference It Makes". It is fairly easy to see there are substantive
diffrence between Man and Great Ape the questions being :A. Where do they
reside and B. Are they differences in "degree" or in "kind". The fragility of
Language Centers is something I have personal experience with, my wife had a
medium sized stroke, but regardless, there is a difference that must be
addressed.
-snip->> I cannot concieve of some facility of elementary particles
>> which would make choice possible, what would carry the force to
>> do so, another layer of particles? Granted, the ends of measurment
>> are unpredictable and the state prior to measurment indeterminate,
>> but choice seems a rather anthropromorphic way to discribe what
>> the particle does when measured.
>
>Oops. You just slipped into that nasty pothole I was warning you
>about a couple of days ago. Remember, what we are talking about
>here is what you yourself described last month as a "rend in the
>fabric of the universe" which "by definition had no cause in the
>physical world at all but eminated from the aforementioned will as
>if another dimention had been added to the host being." And now
>you're trying to tell me that an elementary particle doesn't have
>the Right Stuff to be a locus for this emanation, because it lacks
>internal _physical_ structure! Sheer mechanistic brainpan prejudice.
>
>Again, what sort of Right Stuff are we looking for? If you are
>merely defining reason as "what happens in mammalian brains" then
>I agree that particles and supercomputers and Denebians don't do
>that. If you're defining it as "what looks comprehensible to
>Mr. Gene", then physics PhD's and Frenchmen don't do it either.
>(It's n'est-CE pas, not n'est pas.)
EGad! Don't tell my high school French teacher I did such a thing (and again
later too).
My concern here is not for the entry of the supernatural into the natural,
as you point out quite well here, any point would suffice. What concerns me is
what becomes of the reason we used to arrive at this entire set of constructs.
I cannot see that arbitrary choices serve to create the necessary preconditions
for its existance. Only if we have some control over the choices made (chosen
ergo not compelled) does it seem that we can assert that we are being
reasonable. What I was saying then, was that this kind of choice seems
unlikely in the particles we are discussing, not that, in a certain sense,
they do not select which way a wavefunction will collapse.
>> >In particular, is the sentence
>> >
>> > <Burton is unable to consistently believe this sentence.>
>> >
>> >a consequent of right reason and the relevant definitions of
>> >words?
>> No it is the consequent of a little semantic game we can play
>> with the uses of language.
>Well, that _might_ have been true, but Goedel proved otherwise. In
>fact, this particular "semantic game" can be played at much higher
>stakes, because ANY formal system that is strong enough to reason
>about mathematics in turns out to have a way to talk about its own
>predicates, giving rigorous meaning to "this sentence" in the Liar
>Paradox. The actual form of the sentence I can't consistently
>believe is something like
>
><"Is a phrase that, when preceded by its own words in quotation marks,
>forms a sentence in whose truth Burton is unable to believe" is a
>phrase that, when preceded by its own words in quotation marks,
>forms
>a sentence in whose truth Burton is unable to believe.>
>This sentence doesn't talk about itself, it talks about a particular
>arrangement of words (the ones in quotes, with themselves in quotes
>prepended) which just happens to be identical to itself. I can go
>on making the construction more and more precise until you agree that
>the problem is deep and ineradicable, if you like.
Alas, there is no truth for Mr. Burton to believe in or deny. If you are
saying that the existance of the sentence is what you question then we can make
some sense of it, but otherwise (despite the comments about words enclosed in
quotes) there is STILL nothing false or true about the thing.
-snip-
> Goedel himself ....
Nor will an appeal to an authority change the reality.
>> Were I to wager on which class of animals would still exist say,
>> 1m, years hence I would bet on the insects. So much for rationality
>> by natural selection.
>
>Most people I know play dominoes. So much for improving my chess game
>by studying chess books and going to chess tournaments.
My point being only that Nature has no prejudice to the rationality of man ,
selecting those who correspond closest to reality.
Joshua W. Burton
> have encountered few people who could communicate such things as
> clearly.
Well, it's what I do, after all. Thanks for the nod, and for your
real courage in getting past all that Usenet Attitude nonsense and
opening your ears to what little I actually have to say.
> >> Do you mean they got an interference pattern as from two atoms
> >> in regular type measurments, each several centemeters apart,
> >> using only one atom? What did they use to acomplish the shift?
> >
> >That's just what I mean. They put the single atom....
>
> This must really put the Bohm type theories in a bad place then.
> If you can put two expressions of the wavefunction in two places
> it would really end any idea of an "underlying reality".
No, Bohmian QM is still alive and well. That's the point (not in
physics, but in hermeneutics!) that I feel I'm failing to make clear:
all of these word-pictures describe very different "stuff", but the
things they are saying about the stuff are *formally equivalent* in
the sense that all experimental predictions are identical. At _most_
an experiment can be so confusing in the Bohmian or path-integral or
relative-state picture that everyone realizes that's not a fruitful
way to study that kind of problem. But all the different pictures
are _right_, and an out-of-favor one may someday turn out to be just
the thing to give fresh insight into a problem we haven't even looked
at yet. To take an extreme case, we all "know" that thermodynamics
is nonsense---statistical mechanics is a much more powerful picture
which explains all the postulates of thermodynamics in terms of more
fundamental physics and basic statistical arguments. Yet I can
think of half a dozen research papers I've encountered in the last
five years that have relied on a thermodynamic picture of various
processes, to get a handle on what approximations are likely to be
reliable when approaching their respective problems.
The Bohmian picture of what is going on in the split-atom experiment
is that the atom is really in one place or the other (no telling
which, until you look), whereas the wavefunction---which in Bohm's
picture takes on a spookily objective reality independent of the
particle that generated it---is split between both places, like two
identical clouds of which only one has a nugget of reality inside.
If we recombine the two clouds, they interact with each other in a
way that affects the trajectory of the particle (for a Bohmian, the
wavefunction is a real physical entity, insofar as its density has
a measurable effect on the dynamics). If we instead look to see
where the atom is, one of the wavefunction clouds collapses into
the localized atom, while the other one evaporates silently (for a
Bohmian, the wavefunction is just a fiction, insofar as a measurement
can make it vanish instantly, without any worries about things like
local mass-energy conservation or relativistic speed-limits). The
juxtaposition of mental constructs required to be a Bohmian strikes
me as vaguely psychotic, but _any_ picture of QM is going to be very
weird _somewhere_, and some people would rather have crazy physics
about real humans measuring real stuff, instead of sensible physics
about weird superpositions of humans measuring weird superpositions
of stuff. You pays your money, and you takes your choice---as I
keep saying, the _physics_ is the same in any case.
> >That's only an objection if you think they really are "worlds",
> >per my naive-Everett straw theory.
>
> This was just the impression I got from Lindley. He does seem
> to be very Copenhagen but things are moving so rapidly in your
> field I doubt any Weltanschauung could hold for long.
Chuckle. My advisor used to remark that we particle theorists are
the most theologically promiscuous people on the planet. Anyway,
I suspect Lindley of either being insufficiently clear on the
distinction between real-Everett and straw-Everett, or else of
choosing to attack the latter because it's an easier rhetorical
target. About eighteen months ago, we did this whole discussion
at greater length and depth here, and I managed to get through the
whole thing without uttering the dread words "many-worlds" even
once, simply because this conflation is so devastating in front
of a lay audience.
By the way, one technical point that I didn't get a chance to
address in an earlier post. Lindley incorrectly asserts that a
Compton-scattered photon (or a radioactive decay) has an infinite
number of angular `choices', so there might be some concern about
divergent calculations when we try to take a conditional history.
(If every outcome has 0% probability, how do we add them up?) It
turns out that this infinity is fictitious in the quantum case,
though it would be a problem for a classical many-worlds picture.
The point is that, given some finite period of time we care to
allot to observe the experiment, QM will only let us measure the
angle of the outgoing state to some finite precision, so there are
only a finite number of observable outcomes to consider as `worlds'.
This discreteness in phase space (the space of possible outcomes)
is what makes it possible to do statistical mechanics in a quantum
universe; Boltzmann went crazy and committed suicide trying to make
sense of stat mech in the late 19c, because in classical dynamics
these paradoxes can't be resolved. If it seems that I was hammering
needlessly hard on the dealing-with-infinity problem of that silly
uniform-miracles thread, it was because care in these matters
touches closely on my professional life, not because it was the
easiest or even the most devastating way to cut through the fog.
One nice characteristic of nonsense is that it tends to be nonsense
for a lot of different reasons at once---mine was sufficient, but
hardly necessary.
> Again I would here defer to Mortimer Adler en.re. "The Difference
> of Man and the Difference It Makes". It is fairly easy to see
> there are substantive diffrence between Man and Great Ape the
> questions being :A. Where do they reside and B. Are they
> differences in "degree" or in "kind". The fragility of Language
> Centers is something I have personal experience with, my wife
> had a medium sized stroke, but regardless, there is a difference
> that must be addressed.
I don't pretend to firm answers. Indeed, I think I can construct
a fairly convincing argument that none of us really know what we are
talking about on this subject, along the following lines. In all
the introspective attempts to find out what human consciousness was
like, over two millennia and more, it never occurred to _anyone_
that there are *two of them* in each skull, until we started looking
at epileptics with the corpus callosum surgically severed. If we
could be wrong about something that basic, I think humility and a
resolve to wait a century or two for the neurophysiologists and
the parallel-computer wizards to report back is the most rational
response. Were I a bit character in a Shakespeare play, I might
try to sell you on the notion that this humility should lead us to
a `default' supposition that the basis of consciousness is mechanical.
Being a mere scientist, I have no such intention. Pick a prior that
works for you, and let's see what new evidence does to it, one year
at a time.
> My concern here is not for the entry of the supernatural into
> the natural, as you point out quite well here, any point would
> suffice. What concerns me is what becomes of the reason we used
> to arrive at this entire set of constructs. I cannot see that
> arbitrary choices serve to create the necessary preconditions
> for its existance. Only if we have some control over the choices
> made (chosen ergo not compelled) does it seem that we can assert
> that we are being reasonable. What I was saying then, was that
> this kind of choice seems unlikely in the particles we are
> discussing, not that, in a certain sense, they do not select
> which way a wavefunction will collapse.
And I'm reiterating that your only grounds for thinking it unlikely
are that only certain choices (especially, those made by humans) are
able to justify themselves to you after the fact. But the _explanation_
is not part of the intrusion of volition into the system: once the
choice is made, its consistency with the reasoning behind it is part
of the law-abiding naturalistic world, or else you wouldn't accept
the reasoning as sane at all. Perhaps this will help:
Case 1: electron is in superposition of states, and in accordance
with deterministic natural law, is `observed' by a macroscopic
object, coupling its wavefunction to the world at large.
Result A: For some part of our quantum amplitude, we see the
electron as spin-up. We don't know why it decided to do that.
Result B: For another part of our quantum amplitude, we (this
is another `we', of course!) see the electron as spin-down.
Again, we don't know why it decided to do that.
Case 2: Burton is in a quandary, and in accordance with deterministic
natural law, comes to a decision, coupling the wavefunction of
some region of his brain to the world at large.
Result A: For some part of his quantum amplitude, the world sees
him step on the gas. The brain cells that remember making the
decision, the brain cells that sent the message to his feet, and
the brain cells that can explain to us that the light was barely
yellow and he was in a hurry, are all connected to each other by
complicated physics, but we can stipulate for simplicity that all
of these connections might be deterministic and verifiable to some
future neuroscience. There still remains the decision itself,
and, given only the state of his brain before the cusp, we don't
know, in purely physical terms, why he decided to do that.
Result B: For another part of his quantum amplitude, we see him
step on the brake. Again, he's got a ready explanation, and again
his words fit the accessible physical facts, except for the `and
then, after considering all that, I decided to...' part, which is
not uniquely explained by the physics.
Case 3: Fred the Eldil, or Mac the Highly Advanced Quantum Computer,
or Yogi the Very Rocklike Martian, is in a quandary, and in
accordance with deterministic natural law comes to a decision,
coupling some internal quantum state to the world at large.
Result A: For some part of our quantum amplitude, we see this
entity do one possible thing. There is a lot of complicated
other stuff that deterministically goes one way and not the
other as a result of this choice, but none of it is connected
to us by any language we are smart enough to decipher, and so
we can't assert _or_ refute that memory, introspection, and the
rest may be going on. All we can say is that we don't know why
it decided to do that.
Result B: For another part of our quantum amplitude, we see the
entity do something else, along with some quite different and
equally complicated change of internal state. If we watch a lot of
these, we may begin to connect its `why' to our `why', which in
the end will amount to learning its language...meanwhile, all we
can say is that we don't know why it decided to do that.
We could, of course, take the position that cases 1 and 3 are roughly
identical, and that the only reasoning creatures are the ones that
can explain themselves in English. Or we could take the position
that case 3 is (for at least some alien entities---eldila, maybe
chimps, probably not waterfalls) something like case 2, but that
case 1 is `just choice, not will or reason or volition'. However,
once we say this we are _committed_ to the view that reason resides
in the objective correlates, not in the choice. I'm happy with that,
because all I'm asking of reason is that it not get me eaten by tigers.
If you want more than that---if you want to get Platonic right reason
out of this system---you are left with only two choices: build it
into natural law from the Beginning, so that it leaks naturally into
those objective correlates, or slip it in from outside through the
cracks, in which case it belongs to the choice part, which cases 1,
2, and 3 all share identically.
> >> No it is the consequent of a little semantic game we can play
> >> with the uses of language.
>
> >Well, that _might_ have been true, but Goedel proved otherwise.
> >In fact, this particular "semantic game" can be played at much
> >higher stakes, because ANY formal system that is strong enough
> >to reason about mathematics in turns out to have a way to talk
> >about its own predicates, giving rigorous meaning to "this
> >sentence" in the Liar Paradox. The actual form of the sentence
> >I can't consistently believe is something like
> >
> > <"Is a phrase that, when preceded by its own words in quotation
> > marks, forms a sentence in whose truth Burton is unable to
> > believe" is a phrase that, when preceded by its own words in
> > quotation marks, forms a sentence in whose truth Burton is
> > unable to believe.>
> >
> >This sentence doesn't talk about itself, it talks about a
> >particular arrangement of words (the ones in quotes, with
> >themselves in quotes prepended) which just happens to be identical
> >to itself. I can go on making the construction more and more
> >precise until you agree that the problem is deep and ineradicable,
> >if you like.
>
> Alas, there is no truth for Mr. Burton to believe in or deny.
> If you are saying that the existance of the sentence is what you
> question then we can make some sense of it,
No, that's not what I'm saying.
> but otherwise (despite the comments about words enclosed in
> quotes) there is STILL nothing false or true about the thing.
You're wrong, and there are several levels at which I can try to
explain exactly how you're wrong. This may not be the right one.
We are in the habit of using sentences like `An isosceles triangle
has two equal angles' and saying that they are true or false. Since
English is not an axiomatic formalism, that is strictly nonsense, but
life is too short to be pedantic about the point at every turn. What
we ultimately mean by such a sentence is that a certain necessary
relationship exists between certain derived concepts that ultimately
come out of axioms of Euclidean geometry, and it is the existence of
this relationship that is really true or false. Well, even _that_
might not quite be good enough: we have words like `isosceles' and
`triangle', and we can run them back to words like `point' and `line',
but Euclid's rules of inference still involve English (well, Greek)
words, and words are tricky things. Can we go deeper in?
In a monumental work of the early years of this century, Russell and
Whitehead established a framework in which the propositional calculus
(Boolean logic, reduced to typographic rules) plus the Peano axioms
(basic number theory, reduced to typographic rules) suffice to build
*all the conceptual structures of human mathematics*, from geometry
to analysis to abstract algebra. And so, what we really mean by the
assertion that `An isosceles triangle has two right angles' is true
is that there is some very convoluted and ugly formal string of letters
and symbols that translates into Euclidean geometry, and from there
into English, as the above sentence...and that *that string* can be
derived from the string A=A by Boolean and Peano rules, seen as a
blind exercise in typography! This may seem like a soulless way to do
mathematics, but it is a profoundly exciting idea: rather than forever
quibbling over what we really, really, _really_ mean by our words, we
can put (at least mathematical!) truth on an utterly sound foundation
of purely mechanical rules of inference. A sentence that is `true'
in Russell's and Whitehead's sense is more true than anything you
could conceivably say in a more ambiguous language, and insofar as
our informal geometrical or English sentences about triangles are true,
it is because they map into formal sentences that are TRUE.
> > Goedel himself ....
>
> Nor will an appeal to an authority change the reality.
See, that's the classic scientist/humanist communications glitch. No
one would appeal to Goedel's _name_ for authority, the way one might
appeal to Augustine or Hillel. What I was doing was _alluding_, not
appealing, to a famous result proven sixty-seven years ago by Goedel.
If you don't like the man's authority, who cares? If you don't like
the proof, go pick it apart. Saving verbiage by referring back to a
proven result is _not_ the same thing as conjuring by the name of a
Dead White Guy---though if I fail to fill in the details of the proof
when you demand them, then my allusion was just bluff and bluster, and
you are right to consider it an appeal to authority.
Having falsely accused me of bluff and bluster once already with regard
to QM, I must say that it seems less than gentlemanly of you to do so
again at the first opportunity. Ask by all means, but if you think I
am playing the expert in bad faith, I certainly have better things to
do than continue to type at you.
Anyway, what exactly _did_ Goedel prove? As you have noticed, there
are self-referential sentences in English, and it would be nice to be
able to say that they don't really mean anything (as you have been
trying to do, without proof). One approach you might try, if you
were as bright as Russell or if you stood upon his giant shoulders, is
to break sentences into _categories_, and impose some rule that forbids
mixing categories, just as you are forbidden to throw a cake recipe in
the bowl along with the eggs and flour and butter. So you might make
a category of sentences that talk about number theory, and a whole
different category of sentences that talk *about sentences* about number
theory, and so on, and just keep the rungs of this infinite ladder from
messing with each other's heads. This would be enough to lend rigor to
your original objection:
<Burton is unable to believe this sentence.>
is a sentence of category N, so it can only talk about sentences of
category N-1, and therefore even if it seems to be talking about itself
it really isn't doing so in any way we have to take seriously. The
hoped-for conclusion is that we can't build sentences like that out
of R&W's typographical number theory, so they aren't TRUE or FALSE
(derivable from A=A or from ~(A=A) by mechanical rules) in the R&W sense.
Unfortunately, number theory can prove certain properties about numbers,
such as whether or not they are prime and so on, as long as its axioms
are powerful enough to be of any use at all. And since you can write
any string of symbols as a string of numbers (in ASCII, for example),
the _typographical_ rules of inference can actually be seen as rules
for manipulating numbers. We can write a purely number-theoretic
statement, "Number X has complicated property Y," that can be proved
to be true if and only if the _typographical_ statement "String X is
formally derivable from the literal string 'A=A'" is true! Now the
first sentence, which is in category zero (it is just minding its own
business, stating a complicated fact about number theory) is *also*,
in its spare time, stating a fact about the string of symbols X. This
means that we can never hope to quarantine off the sentences that talk
about sentences from the ones that just talk about mathematics, and the
category-mixing rule that you are hoping to kill off my self-referential
sentence with is doomed.
In fact, Goedel went farther than this. He actually constructed a
sentence that talked, not simply about another sentence, but about a
sentence that happened to be itself. The trick he used was of course
more formal and typographical than my word-cartoon of it, but, if you
translated it into English, he constructed a number N which, read off
as the numeric code for a sentence, said:
<"Is not derivable from A=A within the formal system of Russell
and Whitehead, when preceded by its quotation" is not derivable
from A=A within the formal system of Russell and Whitehead, when
preceded by its quotation.>
or, more colloquially,
<The sentence whose number is N is not true.>
The construction of this wonderful sentence involved nothing more than
the translation of the rules of inference and number theory into rules
for manipulating symbols, which in circular turn could be expressed as
rules of number theory. The immediate victim was R&W's formal system,
but the hope that ANY system so conceived and so dedicated can long
endure is a barren one. As long as your definition of logical "truth"
is powerful enough that you can talk about the truth or falsity of
statements in number theory (as expressed in your logical system) you
are _forced_ to confront a Liar's Paradox sentence within your logical
system. You can have a logic that is too feeble to do basic math in,
or a logic that includes contradictions, or a logic that is incomplete
in the sense that there are statements that are unprovable within your
logic, even though they are obviously true to someone standing outside.
Such a sentence is the one I suggested at the beginning of this mess.
My formulation of it was merely in English, but the problem goes all
the way down to the roots of axiomatic set theory.
> >> Were I to wager on which class of animals would still exist
> >> say, 1m, years hence I would bet on the insects. So much for
> >> rationality by natural selection.
> >
> >Most people I know play dominoes. So much for improving my
> >chess game by studying chess books and going to chess tournaments.
>
> My point being only that Nature has no prejudice to the rationality
> of man, selecting those who correspond closest to reality.
And mine being that there are lots of niches where a domino player can
succeed in a world that includes chess. Once you start playing chess,
though, there is no room to succeed except by playing it well. Nature
has nothing against beetles, but she seems pretty harsh on people who
don't figure out about penicillin quickly enough.
Organized religion is like Noah's +------------------------------------+
Ark: if it weren't for the storm on | Joshua W. Burton (847)677-3902 |
the outside, we wouldn't put up with | jbu...@nwu.edu |
the stink on the inside. +------------------------------------+
Daryl Gene
>pis...@cyberramp.net (Pistol)wrote:
> I don't think I've changed
>Rand's volitional consciousness in the slightest (and I have no reason
>, per se, to resist doing so), and my concept of it is CERTAINLY
>volitional. Did I miss a post here?
Of course, I should have added IMO, but a volition that proceeds from
physical causes, in any sense, was not acceptable to her ergo. the mental
causation angle. Upon reflection, I guess that is a good attempt as any to
.try to keep volition in the natural world, it just seems awkward to me. I
still don't understand your caused volition , uncaused choices approach , and
I don't think it can really supply what is necessary for rational thought.
Daryl Gene
>physics, but in hermeneutics!) that I feel I'm failing to make clear:
>all of these word-pictures describe very different "stuff", but the
>things they are saying about the stuff are *formally equivalent* in
>the sense that all experimental predictions are identical.
It appears then that if the math works everything stays in the ballgame? But
don't we reach a point (like picking the center of the earth as a fixed point)
where the calculations become so complex they aren't really useful?
-snip-
> To take an extreme case, we all "know" that thermodynamics
>is nonsense---statistical mechanics is a much more powerful picture
>which explains all the postulates of thermodynamics in terms of more
>fundamental physics and basic statistical arguments.
oops! you're over presuming here. I am not sure I have ever even heard of
statistical mechanics. Hawking talked about thermodynamics in "Brief
History..." and I have a picture of some of its "laws" in my mind . If you
don't want to continue posting something you have evidently been through before
(and other then the two of us dosen't seem to be getting much play) e-mail
would be OK with me. I really am trying to understand what you are saying and
I find it very helpful.
-snip-
> I managed to get through the
>whole thing without uttering the dread words "many-worlds" even
>once, simply because this conflation is so devastating in front
>of a lay audience.
If you get a chance (and can find a copy) pick up "Tiger by the Tail" by
Aurthur C. Clark (if memory serves me) it's fun if not technically correct. I
was thus exposed to many- worlds concepts as a teenager so I harbor no
prejudice against it personally.
-snip-
>Perhaps this will help:
Perhaps, but it dosen't make it "feel" any better
-snip-
> build it
>into natural law from the Beginning, so that it leaks naturally into
>those objective correlates, or slip it in from outside through the
>cracks, in which case it belongs to the choice part, which cases 1,
>2, and 3 all share identically.
In fact it makes it hurt worse. All these things are predicated on the
assumption that the inquires and tests we are performing make sense in more
than a casual sort of way. Niether of these alternatives really look very
appealing when you consider what they imply for our understanding of reality
(including mental events) I would tend toward option #2 but I really wish you
could amend it a bit, I don't think either of us would like where it leads in
the end.
-snip-
>Having falsely accused me of bluff and bluster once already with regard
>to QM, I must say that it seems less than gentlemanly of you to do so
>again at the first opportunity.
LOL. Sometimes I think you are a devine agent come to teach me humility.
It is not an easy lesson, you know, please forbear untill I learn it better.
-snip-
>This
>means that we can never hope to quarantine off the sentences that talk
>about sentences from the ones that just talk about mathematics, and the
>category-mixing rule that you are hoping to kill off my self-referential
>sentence with is doomed.
Still am not sure I get this at all but will try. Any sentence we construct
contains language that if analized closely enough, ie, through seperating its
constructs etc. reduces to symbols. Those symbols are manupliated by certain
rules to generate what we call truth and/or falsity, therefore a thing can be
true or false without external referent because ultimately even those things we
think require such a referent don't have one?
My objection would be that we don't do this sort of thing in "normal"
conversation and your statement does not still fall into the category of things
which are falsifable in the sense we use the term. What conclusion could we
draw if it were a bald-faced lie other than the one we would draw if it were
true?
-snip-
> Nature
>has nothing against beetles, but she seems pretty harsh on people who
>don't figure out about penicillin quickly enough.
Nature seems to care little so long as we reach the age of fertility. Even
the Great Plague didn't do us in ( survival seems more related to blood type
here than IQ). The Great Apes were in survival trouble even before we messed
up the habitat because of a poor reproductive strategy. The fact that they are
more intellegent than other speicies didn't seem to help. Cannot vouch for the
accuracy of the quote but I remember reading that Cro-Magnon men were likely
more intellegent than modern man. "If it were true, it were a grievous fault,
and grievously hath Caesar answered it." We best perfect our Dominoes first we
seem to be on our own with Chess.
C Barrans
Daryl Gene wrote:
<much snipped>
>If you
> don't want to continue posting something you have evidently been through before
> (and other then the two of us dosen't seem to be getting much play) e-mail
> would be OK with me. I really am trying to understand what you are saying and
> I find it very helpful.
Even if no one else posts on this thread, that doesn't mean we're not
interested. (I haven't posted much on this *group*, but that doesn't
mean I'm not reading it!)
-- CB
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Science is not the way to find answers to all our questions.
Science is a way to find better questions.
Joshua W. Burton
>
> It appears then that if the math works everything stays in the
> ballgame? But don't we reach a point (like picking the center
> of the earth as a fixed point) where the calculations become so
> complex they aren't really useful?
You do realize that (conservatively!) more than 80% of the people
in the world who do calculations of Newtonian dynamics for a living
_are_ picking the center of the earth as a fixed point? Everyone
building, launching, tracking, or communicating with a satellite
or a ballistic missile works in geocentric coordinates. The sun
and moon are just tidal corrections.
That was a substantive point, not a quibble. The calculations
become complex when you use the wrong model *for the problem*, not
specifically when you use an old or outdated or unfashionable
model. In fact, Einstein teaches us that it's perfectly honest
and respectable to make the earth not even _rotate_, and have
the cosmos circle it once a day. Those are the coordinates that
architects and civil engineers use, and they seem to work fine.
Coordinates in which _both_ the earth and sun are stationary, and
the curvature of space causes the sun's light to spiral around
and look like it's coming from different sides of the earth at
different times of day, are also perfectly acceptable from the
point of view of general relativity. But _those_ are probably
too complex to be useful, except as a pedagogical illustration.
> >To take an extreme case, we all "know" that thermodynamics is
> >nonsense---statistical mechanics is a much more powerful picture
> >which explains all the postulates of thermodynamics in terms of
> >more fundamental physics and basic statistical arguments.
>
> oops! you're over presuming here. I am not sure I have ever
> even heard of statistical mechanics. Hawking talked about
> thermodynamics in "Brief History..." and I have a picture of
> some of its "laws" in my mind . If you don't want to continue
> posting something you have evidently been through before (and
> other then the two of us dosen't seem to be getting much play)
> e-mail would be OK with me. I really am trying to understand
> what you are saying and I find it very helpful.
Thermodynamics assumes the notion of temperature as a postulate,
and explains the efficiency of engines and refrigerators and
heat pumps and so on in terms of macroscopic variables like
entropy and free energy, which are derived from measurements
of work and temperature, but not really explained in terms of
the motion of atoms. Stat mech assumes that there are discrete
states in which a system's microscopic variables can be---where
each atom is and how fast it is moving, for example---and then,
purely by doing statistics, derives all the results of thermo as
large-number approximations of reality. It turns out that the
microscopic states have to be counted in a distinctly QM way;
for instance, if we swap two identical particles, we don't get
to count that as a distinct state, because they really truly are
"the same". (Imagine if a white billiard ball were only half as
likely to collide with another white billiard ball as it was with
a red billiard ball, because counting the white ones as different
balls is double-counting!) Once you get past this hurdle, which
as I say brought the greatest 19c thermodynamicist to frustration
and suicide, it's all plain sailing. So much so, in fact, that
most people who know the word "entropy" at all associate it with
the loose stat mech concept of randomness, instead of with the
loose thermo concept of irreversibility. Statistical mechanics is
an unbelievably powerful tool for understanding the world around
us, considering how little conceptual input is involved. When
you pull on a rubber band, it's just statistics that are pulling
back: the rubber molecules actually "prefer" to be stretched out,
from the point of view of energy, but there are so many more ways
for them to be folded than straight that statistics wins over physics!
And _that_ is all I have time to say about stat mech tonight.
> If you get a chance (and can find a copy) pick up "Tiger by the
> Tail" by Aurthur C. Clark (if memory serves me) it's fun if not
> technically correct. I was thus exposed to many- worlds concepts
> as a teenager so I harbor no prejudice against it personally.
Can't be Clarke---I know all his work. If you figure out who wrote
it, please let me know.
> Perhaps, but it dosen't make it "feel" any better
>
> > ...build it
> >into natural law from the Beginning, so that it leaks naturally
> >into those objective correlates, or slip it in from outside
> >through the cracks, in which case it belongs to the choice part,
> >which cases 1, 2, and 3 all share identically.
>
> In fact it makes it hurt worse. All these things are predicated
> on the assumption that the inquires and tests we are performing
> make sense in more than a casual sort of way. Niether of these
> alternatives really look very appealing when you consider what they
> imply for our understanding of reality (including mental events)
> I would tend toward option #2 but I really wish you could amend it
> a bit, I don't think either of us would like where it leads in
> the end.
I don't see the obstacle to option #1. Accepting as a postulate
that the logical foundations of reality are solid (and that therefore
our evolved cognitive centers model something like logic, as our
evolved visual centers model something like sight) can't be any
_harder_ than accepting my own reason as a postulate. And option
#1 explains, as #2 does not, what the rest of you are doing out there.
A rational universe can hold up any number of flawed reasoning brains,
but not the other way around.
A rational Creator, of course, can hold up anything She likes---except,
perhaps, Herself (pace Goedel). But I think that can be construed as
an argument for either option, with roughly equal facility.
> >Having falsely accused me of bluff and bluster once already with
> >regard to QM, I must say that it seems less than gentlemanly of
> >you to do so again at the first opportunity.
>
> LOL. Sometimes I think you are a devine agent come to teach me
> humility. It is not an easy lesson, you know, please forbear
> untill I learn it better.
I've learned a fair amount myself from the exchange, mostly in the
patience department. Somebody in the Front Office was clearly being
thrifty when the agent jobs were being passed out. (Of course, to
some it may appear that we are _both_ agents, come to teach handgun
safety.)
> >This means that we can never hope to quarantine off the sentences
> >that talk about sentences from the ones that just talk about
> >mathematics, and the category-mixing rule that you are hoping
> >to kill off my self-referential sentence with is doomed.
>
> Still am not sure I get this at all but will try. Any sentence
> we construct contains language that if analized closely enough,
> ie, through seperating its constructs etc. reduces to symbols.
> Those symbols are manupliated by certain rules to generate what
> we call truth and/or falsity, therefore a thing can be true or
> false without external referent because ultimately even those
> things we think require such a referent don't have one?
It's probably worth distinguishing empirical truth from formal truth,
not because we _know_ there's a difference, but because we have no
handle on deriving one from the other. "Copper conducts electricity"
and "squares have right angles" seem, at least to our finite
understanding of the universe, to draw their truth from different
wells entirely, even if there may be a common hidden Source. (One
might suggest that "sunrises delight me", or "my cup runneth over",
are yet other kinds of truth, as the route from there to either of
the earlier sorts is not yet very well mapped out. But that is for
another day.) Until we have some _formal_ system for talking about
what we now consider to be empirical or personal or spiritual truths
(and by "formal" I mean that you can write a grammar by which an
automaton could verify them), Goedel has little to say about them.
In the realm of formal truth (squares and triangles and Cantor sets),
we can say that things are true without observing _anything_ in the
perceptual world---in fact, we are inclined to believe that a square
would still have right angles in Euclidean space even if there _were_
no perceptual world for the Euclidean space to live in. Formal truth
seems logically prior to the physical universe, and indeed spends a
lot of its time (as with some of my research) in dimensions where
the physical universe does not reach. And yet, formal truth is also
something we rely on heavily in the real world: if someone said he
saw a round square up in a tree, you wouldn't need to look to refute
him. If you told him that was false, and he agreed with you but
said that false things are usually true, it would be time to tune
out the whole argument, on formal grounds that have nothing to do
with empirical observation. Where then does formal truth come from?
The claim here is that formal truth (at _least_; maybe other truths
too, supposing a Final Theory of physics) is symbol manipulation:
if you can get from your postulates to X by valid mechanical rules
of inference, then X is TRUE in the formal system of your postulates.
The paradox is that, for any postulates that include number theory,
there are statements about *what manipulations of symbols lead to
TRUE statements*, and _those_ statements can be derived by manipulating
symbols. And some of them lie.
> My objection would be that we don't do this sort of thing in
> "normal" conversation and your statement does not still fall into
> the category of things which are falsifable in the sense we use
> the term. What conclusion could we draw if it were a bald-faced
> lie other than the one we would draw if it were true?
The conclusion I would draw if Goedel's sentence were TRUE is that
there are at least some facts about number theory that are true but
have no valid proofs. The conclusion I would draw if it were FALSE
is that there are at least some facts that are false but do have valid
proofs. In the former case, formal truth is incomplete; in the latter
case, inconsistent. (Note that patching things by making the Goedel
sentence a postulate doesn't help us---that creates a new formal
system, math-plus-Goedel's-sentence, which has its _own_ Goedel
sentence, and so on.)
Any Goedel sentence about _me_ would then be saying: whatever it
is that Burton calls "reasoning" can be Goedelized, once he breaks it
down and explains the rules in utterly formal detail (such that one
could take his rules, and by using them decide mechanically whether he
will accept any given argument as valid). You can, if you like,
build a list of all possible sentences, and see which ones I believe.
The list might look like this:
#1: "Burton likes aardvarks."
(Let's check the rules. Yep, it says right here on page 519, "Burton
likes insectivores." is a postulate. And on page 2498, it says that
"aardvark" is a member of the general class "insectivore". And on
page 12, it says Burton accepts the rule of inference that substitutes
a member into a sentence about a general class....)
#2: "Burton likes bees."
(Check the rules again. No, nothing here about social insects, so
Burton's rules give us no grounds to call this one true.)
#3: "Squares have four corners."
(Hm. That one's going to be hard to prove. Oh, look---on page 20,
Burton accepts all the postulates of Euclidean geometry, and the
usual rules of inference that go with them. So if we can make a
regular high-school geometry proof, Burton will believe it.)
#4: "Ants swim yellow bicycles."
(No, that one breaks the grammar rules on page 4. "Swim" never takes
a direct object. Burton certainly won't believe _that_.)
...
#1357948: "There is no argument that will ever convince Burton of the truth
of sentence #1357948."
(There it stands. It's a real sentence. It's made of words. On page
398 through 401, Burton tells how to put all the sentences in the whole
English language into an ordered list. When we do that, we find that
his sentence #1357948 is...oh, _this_ one. I wonder if there's any
argument that will convince him of the truth of it.)
The conclusion you can draw if sentence #1357948 is "a bald-faced lie" is
that I can be convinced of the truth of at least one bald-faced lie.
The conclusion you can draw if it's true is that there is a formal truth
(a pretty obvious one, actually) of whose truth I cannot be convinced
so long as my rules of inference remain the ones in the book I gave you.
Either way, my rules don't seem to be encompassing right reason in the
strong sense Lewis demands. If I change the book, there will always be a
sentence #1359202 or something to trip up my revised book.
``Being domesticated primates, they could |=================================
not conceive of anything as complicated as | Joshua W. Burton (847)677-3902
the universe running without an Alpha Male | jbu...@nwu.edu
in charge of it.'' -- Robert Anton Wilson |=================================
tmo...@hotmail.com
In article <6hjhn0$n...@news.acns.nwu.edu>,
> > If you get a chance (and can find a copy) pick up "Tiger by the
> > Tail" by Aurthur C. Clark (if memory serves me) it's fun if not
> > technically correct. I was thus exposed to many- worlds concepts
> > as a teenager so I harbor no prejudice against it personally.
>
> Can't be Clarke---I know all his work. If you figure out who wrote
> it, please let me know.
>
IIRC, this was Alan E. Nourse.
t
Daryl Gene
>: jbu...@nwu.edu (Joshua W. Burton) wrote:
>And _that_ is all I have time to say about stat mech tonight.
Waiting for more. Does "heat" then translate pretty closely as randomness?
Refering to swaping particles here, are we talking about energy transfer as
with quarks or electrons moving in a metal ? Must be dealing with some really
big numbers to make predictions, how do we get them right?
>I don't see the obstacle to option #1. Accepting as a postulate
>that the logical foundations of reality are solid (and that therefore
>our evolved cognitive centers model something like logic, as our
>evolved visual centers model something like sight) can't be any
>_harder_ than accepting my own reason as a postulate. And option
>#1 explains, as #2 does not, what the rest of you are doing out there.
I suppose I should not be so uncomfortable with #1 being a Presbyterian sort
of guy but actually don't feel at ease with either. Let me illustrate.
====== 2003 -- Timothy Mcvey retrial-- QM jurors ========
Judge: You, sir, are an evil creature and deserve whatever punishment the law
permits.
Tim: Hey, that was just the way my wavefunctions collapsed. A few more up
spins and I would have been as good a soldier as Ollie North. In other words
judge I had no choice but to do what I did.
Judge: But look at Mr. Burton and Mother Teresa their wavefunctions were as
broad as yours but they didn't kill people.
Tim: Justification after the fact judgie, my boy, Good Tim and Evil Tim were in
superposition until they took my measure at Waco.
And since Mother Teresa has such a strong positive spin I'll bet her (straw)
Everett counterpart is bad to the bone.
Judge: This is ridiculous. How could you perform such an evil act and expect
us to ignore it?
Tim: Who knows? Anything I say now is simply an attempt to explain predestined
events with rationalization. Besides I've been measured a dozen times since
then and I'm not the same person any more.
==== The jurors did reach a verdict in the case but never announced what it
was. Someone mistakenly put it in quotes and they found themselves unable to
consistantly believe that they had indeed reached that verdict, especially
since it refered to law #1359202 =======================================
>A rational universe can hold up any number of flawed reasoning brains,
>but not the other way around.
>
>A rational Creator, of course, can hold up anything She likes---except,
>perhaps, Herself (pace Goedel). But I think that can be construed as
>an argument for either option, with roughly equal facility.
Daryl
ma...@sonic.net
In article <6hjhn0$n...@news.acns.nwu.edu>#1/4,
> > >To take an extreme case, we all "know" that thermodynamics is
> > >nonsense---statistical mechanics is a much more powerful picture
> > >which explains all the postulates of thermodynamics in terms of
> > >more fundamental physics and basic statistical arguments.
> >
> > /snip/ If you don't want to continue
> > posting something you have evidently been through before (and
> > other then the two of us dosen't seem to be getting much play)
If you'll consider exercising a few more virtues by giving out some reality
checks on "Statistics Has Proved", please put me on the list.
> > e-mail would be OK with me.
I'd vote for online, under a new thread title. If it goes offline, pls cc me.
/snip/
> Stat mech assumes that there are discrete
> states in which a system's microscopic variables can be---where
> each atom is and how fast it is moving, for example---and then,
> purely by doing statistics, derives all the results of thermo as
> large-number approximations of reality. It turns out that the
> microscopic states have to be counted in a distinctly QM way;
> for instance, if we swap two identical particles, we don't get
> to count that as a distinct state, because they really truly are
> "the same". (Imagine if a white billiard ball were only half as
> likely to collide with another white billiard ball as it was with
> a red billiard ball, because counting the white ones as different
> balls is double-counting!) Once you get past this hurdle, which
> as I say brought the greatest 19c thermodynamicist to frustration
> and suicide, it's all plain sailing. So much so, in fact, that
> most people who know the word "entropy" at all
I vaguely remember it from information theory long ago.
> associate it with
> the loose stat mech concept of randomness,
Think that was how the i. t. people were using it.
> instead of with the
> loose thermo concept of irreversibility.
As in 'second law of thermodynamics'? I couldn't see why the information
theory people were using the term.
> Statistical mechanics is
> an unbelievably powerful tool for understanding the world around
> us, considering how little conceptual input is involved. When
> you pull on a rubber band, it's just statistics that are pulling
> back: the rubber molecules actually "prefer" to be stretched out,
> from the point of view of energy, but there are so many more ways
> for them to be folded than straight that statistics wins over physics!
Now, this is beginning to sound like some things we're hearing on other
threads.... :-)
> And _that_ is all I have time to say about stat mech tonight.
As I said, if you're taking votes for tomorrow's topic.... :-)
/snip/
> > LOL. Sometimes I think you are a devine agent come to teach me
> > humility. /snip/
>
> I've learned a fair amount myself from the exchange, mostly in the
> patience department. Somebody in the Front Office was clearly being
> thrifty when the agent jobs were being passed out. (Of course, to
> some it may appear that we are _both_ agents, come to teach handgun
> safety.)
Providential reality checks, well above uniform distribution. :-)
/snip/
> It's probably worth distinguishing empirical truth from formal truth,
> not because we _know_ there's a difference, but because we have no
> handle on deriving one from the other. "Copper conducts electricity"
> and "squares have right angles" seem, at least to our finite
> understanding of the universe, to draw their truth from different
> wells entirely, even if there may be a common hidden Source. (One
> might suggest that "sunrises delight me", or "my cup runneth over",
> are yet other kinds of truth, as the route from there to either of
> the earlier sorts is not yet very well mapped out. But that is for
> another day.)
In our lifetime, please?
/snip/
> And yet, formal truth is also
> something we rely on heavily in the real world: if someone said he
> saw a round square up in a tree, you wouldn't need to look to refute
> him. If you told him that was false, and he agreed with you but
> said that false things are usually true, it would be time to tune
> out the whole argument,
Yes.
> on formal grounds
Mmm...
> that have nothing to do with empirical observation.
My empirical observation indicates that people who talk formal nonsense out
loud in mixed company, usually turn out not to be seeing the same tree a wise
man sees anyway. Unless they rhyme and scan, of course.
Mary
ma...@sonic.net
On 23 Apr 1998 06:07:09 GMT,
dary...@aol.com (Daryl Gene) wrote:
>>: jbu...@nwu.edu (Joshua W. Burton) wrote:
>
>
>
>>And _that_ is all I have time to say about stat mech tonight.
>
>Waiting for more.
Me too.
/snip/
>
> I suppose I should not be so uncomfortable with #1 being a Presbyterian sort
>of guy but actually don't feel at ease with either.
Feelings are fine ... McAndrew had them
too, doubtless.
But ... feelings about what? About "what
would happen if the masses took up this
idea"? Kant applied his thing to
Imperative, do we have to apply it to
Indicative?
Why do I feel I said the same thing to
Pistol a few posts ago, about his
"dangers of religion"? "Disbelieve this,
not because it is false, but because it
would be dangerous if everyone took it
up...."
> Let me illustrate.
>
> ====== 2003 -- Timothy Mcvey retrial-- QM jurors ========
>
>Judge: You, sir, are an evil creature and deserve whatever punishment the law
>permits.
/snip excellent stuff while ROTFL /
>==== The jurors did reach a verdict in the case but never announced what it
>was. Someone mistakenly put it in quotes and they found themselves unable to
>consistantly believe that they had indeed reached that verdict, especially
>since it refered to law #1359202 =======================================
It was Guilty in this branch, Innocent
in the other.
Mary
Joshua W. Burton
dary...@aol.com (Daryl Gene) wrote:
> Waiting for more. Does "heat" then translate pretty closely as
> randomness? Refering to swaping particles here, are we talking
> about energy transfer as with quarks or electrons moving in a
> metal ? Must be dealing with some really big numbers to make
> predictions, how do we get them right?
...and ma...@sonic.net wrote:
> > associate it with the loose stat mech concept of randomness,
>
> Think that was how the i. t. people were using it.
>
>
> > instead of with the loose thermo concept of irreversibility.
>
> As in 'second law of thermodynamics'? I couldn't see why the
> information theory people were using the term.
Typing in haste late of a sunny Friday afternoon....
The information theory people, leveraging a brilliant 1940s insight
due to Shannon, are using entropy in the quite literal stat mech
sense---the logarithm of the number of states that a system _might_
be in microscopically, given what we know about it macroscopically.
Applied to atoms careening randomly around a room, this gives us a
handle to rederive, from deep principles, everything that the 19c
thermodynamicists knew about pistons and heat engines and so on.
Applied to bits of signal and background noise, it gives us some
equally profound insights into the theoretical limits of data storage
and transmission. Some of the consequences of taking the analogy
literally are startling: for example, statistical mechanics puts
a limit on what computations a computer can conceivably do with a
finite amount of available free energy...but the part that turns out
to increase entropy, and hence becomes the limiting factor, is not
the computation itself, but the throwing away of unwanted answers!
To Mr. Gene's questions: the funny rules about identical particles
apply to _any_ particles that interact, and it turns out that they
depend (for _deep_ deep geometrical reasons that I will only attempt
to explain in nontechnical language with props handy, an attentive
in-person audience, and enough beer to go around) on whether the
particles in question have integer or non-integer spin. As for the
reliability of statistical arguments for large numbers of particles,
remember that it is the number of _permutations_ of the particles
that is involved. Thus, 10^24 hydrogen atoms is a large number,
but 2^(10^24) ways to put those hydrogen atoms on two sides of a
partition is an _inconceivably_ large number, more than big enough
to make statistical arguments as solid as fundamental law. To
believe that all the atoms in the room won't suddenly choose to
move into one corner requires you to believe in statistics. But
to believe that the unlikelihood of them doing so provides a real,
calculable pressure that can be exploited to do work requires you
to verify the probabilities yourself!
Finally, heat (tersely!) is a change in microscopic energy; work
is a change in macroscopic energy. Total energy is a well-defined
quantity, but total heat or total work are not---you can put work
into a dull pencil sharpener and get out heat all day long, so it
clearly makes no sense to ask "how much heat was in there" to start
with. Entropy is randomness, which usually increases when you add
heat. Temperature is a measure of how _much_ heat it takes to
increase the randomness: a cold object is one that can become
a great deal more random (microscopically) with a tiny heat input,
whereas a hot object is one that is already so random that it will
take a lot of heat to randomize it further. Heat flowing from a
hot object to a cool one increases the randomness of the latter
more than it decreases that of the former, so the definition of
temperature guarantees that heat will always flow into cooler
objects from hotter ones, as long as randomness increases.
> I suppose I should not be so uncomfortable with #1 being a
> Presbyterian sort of guy but actually don't feel at ease with
> either. Let me illustrate.
>
> ====== 2003 -- Timothy Mcvey retrial-- QM jurors ========
>
> Judge: You, sir, are an evil creature and deserve whatever
> punishment the law permits.
> Tim: Hey, that was just the way my wavefunctions collapsed. A
> few more up spins and I would have been as good a soldier as
> Ollie North. In other words judge I had no choice but to do what
> I did.
Poor Tim missed the point. He _did_ have a choice, and he took it.
He could have chosen the other way, and in another branch of the
world's amplitude he did. The wavefunction didn't "collapse" at
all---we just lost track of the Tim who chose the other way. It
would be wrong to punish Tim _before_ he chose, of course, because
he was destined to choose both ways. _After_ he chooses, we have
only the scoundrel on our branch, and we quite rightly punish him
for what he, with perfect freedom, _decided_ to do. This isn't a
bit unfair to the Tim who decided the other way, because it doesn't
happen to him.
My old clock used to tell the time, +---------------------------------+
And subdivide diurnity. | Joshua W Burton (847)677-3902 |
But now it's lost both hands and chime | jbu...@nwu.edu |
And only tells eternity. -- Piet Hein +---------------------------------+
Dan Drake
On Fri, 24 Apr 1998 23:44:46, jbu...@nwu.edu (Joshua W. Burton) wrote:
>... the funny rules about identical particles
> apply to _any_ particles that interact, and it turns out that they
> depend (for _deep_ deep geometrical reasons that I will only attempt
> to explain in nontechnical language with props handy, an attentive
> in-person audience, and enough beer to go around)
Hey, if you're ever around here, I'll provide the props and the beer! Not
sure, though, about the attentive audience large enough to be worth the
effort. Oh, well.
> on whether the
> particles in question have integer or non-integer spin.
Sounds to me like the problem that Feynman decided he couldn't explain
clearly to a freshman physics class, indicating that it really wasn't well
understood. Has somebody been standing on his shoulders, or have I just
got the wrong anecdote?
Pistol
On 20 Apr 1998 02:50:02 GMT, dary...@aol.com (Daryl Gene) wrote:
SUPER
>>pis...@cyberramp.net (Pistol)wrote:
>> I don't think I've changed
>>Rand's volitional consciousness in the slightest (and I have no reason,
>> per se, to resist doing so), and my concept of it is CERTAINLY
>>volitional. Did I miss a post here?
>
> Of course, I should have added IMO, but a volition that proceeds from
>physical causes, in any sense, was not acceptable to her ergo. the mental
>causation angle.
Huh? She didn't reference any otherworldly cause for volition
(unless you've read an obscure work that I have not). AFACT
she saw volition exactly as I did - as an as yet unexplained
trait of the human brain, defined as a brain with a
particular PHYSICAL structure.
>Upon reflection, I guess that is a good attempt as any to
>.try to keep volition in the natural world, it just seems awkward to me. I
>still don't understand your caused volition , uncaused choices approach , and
>I don't think it can really supply what is necessary for rational thought.
Well we've done so many laos on it, why not some more? I still
don't see what's so tough about it - physical causality chain
produces an object which is able to make choices. How? There
is no "how". That would imply a cause. There is no cause. It
simply does. Awkward, perhaps. But then, is that any more
awkward than QM?
Daryl Gene
> jbu...@nwu.edu (Joshua W. Burton)
>dary...@aol.com (Daryl Gene) wrote:
>To Mr. Gene's questions:
Gene is my middle name. Stewart is my surname-- couldn't get it for a codename
though.
>> ====== 2003 -- Timothy Mcvey retrial-- QM jurors ========
>>
>> Judge: You, sir, are an evil creature and deserve whatever
>> punishment the law permits.
>> Tim: Hey, that was just the way my wavefunctions collapsed. A
>> few more up spins and I would have been as good a soldier as
>> Ollie North. In other words judge I had no choice but to do what
>> I did.
>
>Poor Tim missed the point. He _did_ have a choice, and he took it.
>He could have chosen the other way, and in another branch of the
>world's amplitude he did. The wavefunction didn't "collapse" at
>all---we just lost track of the Tim who chose the other way. It
>would be wrong to punish Tim _before_ he chose, of course, because
>he was destined to choose both ways. _After_ he chooses, we have
>only the scoundrel on our branch, and we quite rightly punish him
>for what he, with perfect freedom, _decided_ to do. This isn't a
>bit unfair to the Tim who decided the other way, because it doesn't
>happen to him.
Mr. Johnny might reply.......
My client had to exist in one world or another. It was quite beyond his
control (FTSOA I am assuming only one choice was involved, although that is
undoubtably false). It only appears he had a choice when we look back at the
point of division. If we were objective observers we would see that both
paths were necessarily compelled. Could you punish an electron for having an
up spin when you wanted a down spin? Timmy here has only committed the crime
of existing in the wrong world as he must exist somewhere must he not? This
event was inherent in the universe from its' beginning. If you want to punish,
punish the cosmos.
Somehow I get the feeling that I am missing something about your point of
view. I am persuing this angle to see if you can see why I am uncomfortable
with the proposition of a universe determined from the outset, even if it
offers multiple tracks to travel.
Daryl
"Settle yourself in solitude.
and you will come upon God in yourself"
Teresa of Avila
Daryl Gene
d...@dandrake.com (Dan Drake)
>jbu...@nwu.edu (Joshua W. Burton) wrote:
>and it turns out that they
>> depend (for _deep_ deep geometrical reasons that I will only attempt
>> to explain in nontechnical language with props handy, an attentive
>> in-person audience, and enough beer to go around)
Would have to have a beer for that one. I suspect this is at least solid
geometry (n dimentional hulls anyone) and I confess I could never mentally
model three dimentional objects from two dimentional drawings. Trying to
picture strings gives me fits!
>Hey, if you're ever around here, I'll provide the props and the beer! Not
>sure, though, about the attentive audience large enough to be worth the
>effort. Oh, well.
Would love to be in that audience as well. Whar props do we need?
Joshua W. Burton
> > apply to _any_ particles that interact, and it turns out that
> > they depend (for _deep_ deep geometrical reasons that I will
> > only attempt to explain in nontechnical language with props
> > handy, an attentive in-person audience, and enough beer to go
> > around)
>
> beer! Not sure, though, about the attentive audience large enough
> to be worth the effort. Oh, well.
>
> > spin.
>
> explain clearly to a freshman physics class, indicating that it
> really wasn't well understood. Has somebody been standing on
> his shoulders, or have I just got the wrong anecdote?
Right anecdote, and it was Feynman himself who wound up standing
on his own shoulders, an acrobatic feat of which he of the bongos
was ever capable. Feynman was so annoyed about not having a clear
nontechnical explanation for the spin/statistics theorem that he
kept worrying at it, and twenty years later he succeeded, in a
little monograph that hasn't achieved wide circulation. I _did_
write this up once, as a lecture for my students, and I still have
that version online. It may not be pitched at quite the right
level for this audience, but I will post it unedited for whatever
it's worth. Two beer steins will do nicely for the needed props....
-----
> [why do half-integer spin particles obey Fermi statistics?
> Feynman (in Lectures, 4-3) laments that there appears to be no
> elementary answer in terms accessible to purely physical intuition.]
Interestingly, it was Feynman who finally bettered Feynman, with a
marvelous argument that appears in a Dirac festschrift by him and
Weinberg, but nowhere else in print, so far as I know.
I don't have the patience to do the argument justice, but here is
the outline; go find two half-full coffee cups, and in ten minutes
you should be able to convince yourself that the following is right.
First, note that there is something rum about 360 degree rotations,
namely that in situations where we have to keep track of the
`orientation-entanglement', or the topological relationship
between the object being rotated and the walls at infinity, we
find that 360 degrees is not the same as the identity, but that
720 degrees _is_ the identity. Imagine a coffee cup tied to all
the walls of the room with rubber bands. When you twist the
cup through 360 degrees about its vertical axis, the rubber bands
get all twisted, and no amount of fiddling with them will untwist
them while the coffee cup remains in its 360 degree rotated state.
BUT, spin the cup ANOTHER 360 degrees in the same direction.
Now the rubber bands are twice as twisted, but it turns out that
you can pass them over the cup and then under it, and they
magically come untwisted again. It happens that your arm is
properly jointed to demonstrate this (though this is a trivial
fact about human anatomy, more than a deep fact about covering
groups of simple Lie algebras!). It's the Balinese candle-dance
trick, and if you don't know it, go find someone who can show you
how to do it. You hold the coffee cup with your right hand
underneath it, straight out in front of you. Now bring it left,
under your underarm, awkwardly around front with your elbow
straight up in the air. That's 360 degrees, and you're a
pretzel. Keep going around counterclockwise, this time swinging
your arm around over your head. At 720 degrees the coffee cup
is back where it started, unspilt, and your arm is straight
once more. Keep going round and round until you believe it.
OK, what does this have to do with spin-statistics? Well, I will
take as given concepts (1) that 1/2-integer spin wavefunctions
change sign under 360 degree rotations, and (2) that particles
odd under interchange obey the Pauli exclusion principle. So
the logical progression is
1/2 integer <-> odd under 360 <-> odd under swap <-> exclusion,
and I'm only concerned with the middle arrow. For the left
arrow, look at any good QM book, and see how the sigma matrices
work as a representation of the 3D rotation group. In a way
it's an unexpected miracle that complex 2-component spinors
can rotate like real 3-component vectors at all, and it turns
out that they do so in a way that forces us to keep track of
the orientation entanglement, or coffee-cup effect. For the
right arrow, note that the amplitude to find two Fermi-statistics
particles in the same place must be its own negative, hence zero.
All that remains is to bridge that middle arrow.
Now take TWO coffee cups, one in each hand. Swap the two
particles by crossing your arms. Uh-oh, you only swapped the
particles, not their orientation-entanglements (your shoulders).
Better fix that: while holding the coffee cups motionless in
space, walk around behind them so that you are facing the other
wall, and your arms are uncrossed. Oh, dear, one of your arms
is twisted 360 degrees now! (Which one depends on which way
you walked around.) So it looks like when you transposed the
two coffee cups, you really put one of them through a 360 degree
rotation with respect to the other. When you take the twisted
arm through 360 degrees to get clean with the universe again,
the two-fermion wavefunction will change sign, if the coffee
cups happen to be spin-1/2 particles that care about 360 rotations.
So odd under 360 <-> odd under swaps. QED.
A few more thoughts about orientation-entanglement. First, here
is a nice way (which I have never seen in print) to see that 720
really has to be the same as zero. If you take a fixed vector
and parallel-transport it around the earth at a given latitude,
it changes orientation by a natural angle equal to the solid angle
enclosed. This is Berry's phase, well known from Foucault's
pendulum and elsewhere. At 90 degrees north, we can send the
thing around the earth on a parallel of latitude without moving
an inch, so no solid angle is subtended by our path, and the
vector stays put. At 48.6 degrees north, we go around a circle
that encloses pi/2 steradians, and sure enough our pendulum swings
through pi/2 in the course of a day. At 30 degrees north, our circle
subtends pi radians, and our pendulum goes through a half-circle.
At the equator, the solid angle subtended is a whole 2 pi hemisphere,
so the vector describes a full circle in space as it goes once around
the earth. This is very different physically from what the vector
at the north pole does, namely nothing! But what happens at the
SOUTH pole? Our vector subtends a solid angle of 4 pi to the north,
the entire earth...or is it an angle of zero to the south? If the
two are going to be equivalent in all ways, then the behavior of a
physical object under 4 pi rotations must in ALL respects, including
orientation-entanglement, be the same as the identity. The equator
(360 degrees subtended) is different from the poles, but the poles
(0, or 720, degrees subtended) are just like each other.
One more goody, and I'm done. When you do the coffee cup trick,
your hand is describing a 720-degree rotation, but your shoulder is
doing nothing. In other words, there exists a homotopy from the
4 pi rotation to the identity, and your arm is that homotopy: the
rotation can be smoothly contracted to the identity, and each point
on the length of your arm describes one of the intermediate motions
in that smooth contraction. Now, when you donate platelets, they put
a tube in one arm to take the blood out, and one in the other arm to
put it back in. The blood goes through a centrifuge, and comes back
without the platelets, cooled to what feels like room temperature,
and they put an electric blanket on you and it doesn't help and you're
still cold as hell, because you're getting cooled on the INSIDE by
your own damn blood. The problem: the whole assembly has to be
sterile, just for you, and in fact there is a bag inside the
centrifuge that they use for your blood and then throw away, so
nothing else ever touches your blood. One hose goes into that bag,
and one comes out, and they are sealed without joints, and they spin
at several thousand rpm. *How the foxtrot uniform charlie kilo do
the two hoses avoid getting tangled up?*
I asked a nurse about this near the beginning of the two-hour ordeal.
It took me about forty minutes to convince her that there was a
fundamental problem, but it was worth it. She drove her whole
department insane about it for the next few weeks, and when I came
back the next time, they had taken a centrifuge and disassembled it
so they could see what was going on. Sure enough, the two hoses go
into a bracket which passes over, and under, and over, and under, at
exactly half the rotational speed of the centrifuge, because of the
way it is rigidly geared to the rotational motion. A Balinese candle
dance, at 7200 revolutions per minute.
``You can't make an omelette without +--------------------------------+
breaking eggs...but it is amazing how | Joshua W Burton (847)677-3902 |
many eggs you can break without making | jbu...@nwu.edu |
a decent omelette.'' -- C. P. Issawi +--------------------------------+
Joshua W. Burton
>
> for a codename though.
I stand corrected, and beg your pardon, Mr. Stewart.
> My client had to exist in one world or another. It was quite
> beyond his control (FTSOA I am assuming only one choice was
> involved, although that is undoubtably false). It only appears
> he had a choice when we look back at the point of division. If
> we were objective observers we would see that both paths were
> necessarily compelled.
Not at all! There is _nothing_ in the universe of physical law
that compels one path in preference to the other---that, indeed,
is why both paths exist in the deterministic physical universe.
You are *free to choose* either way. Whether you "control" that
choice is a question to which I don't know what answer would even
in principle satisfy you, in QM or in any other worldview. Let's
look at it by elimination: physical law doesn't control your
choice, as we have noted. An outside observer doesn't control
your choice---he observes it, and can be surprised. Even God
doesn't control your choice---He _made_ it for you, but both ways
impartially, leaving the choice up to you. I _think_ that leaves
only a couple of possibilities: either _you_ control your choice,
as your memories after the fact report (and as I suggest), or else
your choice "just happens", somehow. Personally, I find the notion
of truly uncaused events too spooky by half, and when a real human
person is standing there claiming to have chosen, having the sort
of memories that go with having chosen, and facing the irrevocable
physical consequences of the choice, I'm quite prepared to take
him at his word, and apply the moral consequences as well.
> Could you punish an electron for having an up spin when you wanted
> a down spin?
I can answer this on several levels. Pragmatically, there isn't
much point in punishing an electron, because it's not equipped to
learn from the experience. Put another way, an electron is just an
electron---it has state, but no history. Tim, on the other hand,
is a different person, living in a different world, and becoming
more different every second as he interacts with that world, after
he makes a choice. If we punish him for a wrong choice, we may, in
totally objective physical terms, reduce the probability for him to
choose wrongly at some future cusp.
Again, though, you have already abandoned your grounds for griping
about this when you decided that the power of choice is an intrusion
of spirit from outside of nature, independent of the physical events
that correlate with it. If choice "just happens" in this sense, the
question of whether Tim will learn anything from punishment is quite
beside the point: we punish humans, and not electrons, because we
were Told To Do It That Way, and nothing more need be said.
> Timmy here has only committed the crime of existing in the wrong
> world as he must exist somewhere must he not? This event was
> inherent in the universe from its' beginning. If you want to
> punish, punish the cosmos.
Tim must exist somewhere, but it's up to him (or at least, it's not
up to anyone else) where. The universe lays out the choices, and
even assigns probabilities, based on deterministic physical law.
But physical law does _not_ make the choices. For the choices that
other people make, it doesn't _feel_ like I'm controlling them, or
else solipsism would be a lot more popular. For the choices that
I make, it certainly _does_ feel like I'm controlling them, and I
can show that there is no physical entity in the universe that can
raise a conflicting claim. This is a bit like Mr. Lewis's metaphor
of the letters addressed to us, and the inferred letters addressed
to others. By generalizing from his own inner experience to the
assumed inner experiences of others, CSL makes some rather strong
claims (in MC, if I'm not mistaken) about the Moral Law. I am only
claiming a much weaker inference from my own experience (merely that
I choose, not that I have Oughts imposed from Above), and I can show
that there is no conflicting claimant in the universe.
Punishing the cosmos would be just the wrong thing, as would punishing
Tim-before-he-decided. These include both choices in superposition.
Punishing Tim-after-he-chooses-the-Dark-Side may or may not work (in
the case of the electron, it accomplishes nothing), but at least it is
aimed at, and only at, the responsible party. That's all we can ever
hope for from a just punishment, isn't it?
> Somehow I get the feeling that I am missing something about your
> point of view. I am persuing this angle to see if you can see
> why I am uncomfortable with the proposition of a universe determined
> from the outset, even if it offers multiple tracks to travel.
Well, let us speculate, just for the sake of argument, on what the
converse would mean for theology. In my version, we can say at the
end of the day that God created "what happened" and "what could have
happened" equally. Or, earlier on, that He created all the possible
"what will happens" equally. Or, from the timeless perspective that
presumably is God's, that both of these viewpoints are part of the
grand deterministic flowering of the manifold cosmos. But what are
we to say in your version? If God created only "what happened", and
not "what could have happened", was the latter really available to
you? In what sense? And if God created a universe with multiple
potential futures, in what sense can any of them become nonexistent
when they "don't happen", as seen from the timeless perspective? It
seems to me that any universe where choice closes off alternatives
constrains the Creator to either compel the choices or dwell within
time and watch them unfold. On the other hand, a universe that
embraces multiple alternatives on an equal footing is well suited
for temporal free will and timeless determinism to coexist.
Superior beings, when of late they saw +------------------------+
A mortal man unfold all nature's law, | Joshua W. Burton |
Admir'd such wisdom in a human shape, | (847)677-3902 |
And shew'd a NEWTON, as we shew an ape. | jbu...@nwu.edu |
-- Poor Richard's Almanack (1749) +------------------------+
AJA
Or a Creator both disconnected _and_ connected? Not trapped or
constrained but able to interrupt and or even to entertain, in His
timelessness, certain meritorious petitions? For God so loved the
world, kind of thing?
Family members and friends driving back from South Carolina. One
dead, and four others hurt. I'm hoping God interrupts today.
Thank you, really, for this discussion. You never know what will hit
the mark, so to speak.
All the best,
Ann
Danny Pitt Stoller
Just when a smart cookie like Joshua Burton gives a whole scientific
explanation of why free will and determinism are really compatible, an
unscientific common-sense type like me always has to come along and ruin
everything.
Seriously, though -- I think that Burton's explanation is good as far as
it goes, but doesn't really address the philosophical problems underlying
the scientific question. I don't think any scientific explanation could
ever do that.
Joshua W. Burton (jbu...@nwu.edu) wrote:
: Not at all! There is _nothing_ in the universe of physical law
: that compels one path in preference to the other---that, indeed,
: is why both paths exist in the deterministic physical universe.
The question is, what (in actuality, and not by a legal fiction) is
causally responsible for Choice A as opposed to Choice B?
: You are *free to choose* either way. Whether you "control" that
: choice is a question to which I don't know what answer would even
: in principle satisfy you, in QM or in any other worldview.
If that question doesn't have an answer, then perhaps there is something
wrong with our conception of free will. And that may well be the case.
But that doesn't get us one step closer to RECONCILING free will with
determinism. The psychological experience of choice, and the legal
fiction of moral responsibility, may be good enough for practical
purposes -- but they don't give us "real" choice, in the metaphysician's
sense of the word.
: Let's look at it by elimination: physical law doesn't control your
: choice, as we have noted. An outside observer doesn't control
: your choice---he observes it, and can be surprised. Even God
: doesn't control your choice---He _made_ it for you, but both ways
: impartially, leaving the choice up to you. I _think_ that leaves
: only a couple of possibilities: either _you_ control your choice,
: as your memories after the fact report (and as I suggest), or else
: your choice "just happens", somehow.
But what would it involve, on this view, for "you" to control your
choice? First of all, what is this "you" that is making the choice? Is
it the brain? Whatever part of the brain corresponds to the conscious
mind? The whole body? And what is the relationship between "you" and
the choice that is made? If a physical part of you identified with the
self determines the choice, then the choice is just another physical
event, involving no more real volition than a billiard ball moving when
it is struck by another billiard ball. If there is no metaphysical
aspect of the self, then "you" becomes just another link in the causal
chain of determined events, and "chosen" events become indistinguishable
from unchosen events -- the only difference being the psychological
experience of choice.
: Personally, I find the notion
: of truly uncaused events too spooky by half, and when a real human
: person is standing there claiming to have chosen, having the sort
: of memories that go with having chosen, and facing the irrevocable
: physical consequences of the choice, I'm quite prepared to take
: him at his word, and apply the moral consequences as well.
Yes, but that was never the problem. Of course we're going to continue
holding people responsible for their actions, regardless of the
philosophical conclusions we come to. But that doesn't at all affect the
metaphysical truth of the situation.
: Again, though, you have already abandoned your grounds for griping
: about this when you decided that the power of choice is an intrusion
: of spirit from outside of nature, independent of the physical events
: that correlate with it. If choice "just happens" in this sense, the
: question of whether Tim will learn anything from punishment is quite
: beside the point: we punish humans, and not electrons, because we
: were Told To Do It That Way, and nothing more need be said.
I don't see the connection between a miraculous account of volition and
the view that choice "just happens." A choice that is freely chosen (in
the metaphysical sense) doesn't "just happen" -- it is caused, but not
caused physically. The physical events follow as effects; the
metaphysical event is the cause.
And I don't see what being told to do it in one way or another (in
capital letters or otherwise) has anything to do with the question at all.
: Tim must exist somewhere, but it's up to him (or at least, it's not
: up to anyone else) where.
Not good enough. It may not be up to anyone else, but that doesn't mean
it's up to Tim.
--
"Gentlemen of the jury, I am grateful and I am your friend,
but I will obey the god rather than you...."
- Socrates
Danny Pitt Stoller
(215) 417-6691
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~dap
Dan Drake
On Sun, 3 May 1998 04:40:47, jbu...@nwu.edu (Joshua W. Burton) wrote:
>... it was Feynman himself who wound up standing
> on his own shoulders, an acrobatic feat of which he of the bongos
> was ever capable. Feynman was so annoyed about not having a clear
> nontechnical explanation for the spin/statistics theorem that he
> kept worrying at it, and twenty years later he succeeded, in a
> little monograph that hasn't achieved wide circulation. I _did_
> write this up once, as a lecture for my students, and I still have
> that version online. It may not be pitched at quite the right
> level for this audience, but I will post it unedited for whatever
> it's worth. Two beer steins will do nicely for the needed props....
>
>...
Far, if you will pardon the expression, out! Printing now, Printing now,
since understading isn't aided by eyestrain and back curvature. Thank
you.
Joshua W. Burton
d...@mail1.sas.upenn.edu (Danny Pitt Stoller) wrote:
> Just when a smart cookie like Joshua Burton gives a whole scientific
> explanation of why free will and determinism are really compatible, an
> unscientific common-sense type like me always has to come along and ruin
> everything.
And, by casting the objection solely as a shortcoming in the metaphysics,
rather than as skepticism about the parts of it we _do_ understand, has
earned an unconditional capitulation from me. I don't know, and never
claimed to know, the answer to the part that is worrying you---I just
think that physics and ethics can both get along without it. (One of
the great discoveries of early-20c physics is that it's desperately
important to know which questions the time has come to UN-ask.)
> Seriously, though -- I think that Burton's explanation is good as far as
> it goes, but doesn't really address the philosophical problems underlying
> the scientific question. I don't think any scientific explanation could
> ever do that.
Concur entirely. On the other hand, science _can_ give us good evidence
that the mental constructs underlying the philosophical problems (notably,
the singular sense of "self" in a world of quantum superposition) are
so ill-formed that they are very likely the wrong problems to address.
> The question is, what (in actuality, and not by a legal fiction) is
> causally responsible for Choice A as opposed to Choice B?
The supernatural soul, if you like. Nothing whatever. Random chance.
The provincial limitations of our one-branch viewpoint. All of the above.
(Lest you mistake this for a trivial answer, there is another big list that
we have succeeded, _only_ with the help of QM, in decoupling from the
problem. Brain physiology. Heredity and environment. Divine will.
Selfish genes. Peer pressure. Freudian complexes. The self-consistency
of physical law. And so on....)
> : You are *free to choose* either way. Whether you "control" that
> : choice is a question to which I don't know what answer would even
> : in principle satisfy you, in QM or in any other worldview.
>
> If that question doesn't have an answer, then perhaps there is something
> wrong with our conception of free will. And that may well be the case.
Yes! And pretty much all I'm aiming to convince anyone of. But remember
that I'm objecting not to the free will problem itself (clutch it to you
as a Mystery, by all means) but to the notion that an answer to it cannot
coexist with deterministic physical law. I have (I think) succeeded in
moving the moment of choice to a singular place where physical law has
nothing to say about it. Safely decoupled from the physics, metaphysics
can't hurt anybody. Have as much of it as you like, or none.
> But that doesn't get us one step closer to RECONCILING free will with
> determinism. The psychological experience of choice, and the legal
> fiction of moral responsibility, may be good enough for practical
> purposes -- but they don't give us "real" choice, in the metaphysician's
> sense of the word.
Nor do they deny it to us. We do know _where_ and _when_ choice happens,
which is surely something, and we know that physical law can't reach into
that place and take it away from us, which is a good deal more.
> But what would it involve, on this view, for "you" to control your
> choice? First of all, what is this "you" that is making the choice? Is
> it the brain? Whatever part of the brain corresponds to the conscious
> mind? The whole body?
Certainly no to all of the above. Being physical, they go both ways.
> If there is no metaphysical aspect of the self, then "you" becomes
> just another link in the causal chain of determined events, and
> "chosen" events become indistinguishable from unchosen events --
> the only difference being the psychological experience of choice.
Quantum events are _not_ chosen by the physics (though the amplitudes
for the several choices certainly are). I take the attitude that
"unchosen" and "chosen by a metaphysical aspect of the self" may well
be two ways to say the same thing, and, if they are not, can only be
distinguished in a place where my APS membership card isn't honored.
Words like "unchosen" and "random" have all the earmarks of concepts
without referents, but I decline to even assert that much.
> : ....I'm quite prepared to take him at his word, and apply the
> : moral consequences as well.
>
> Yes, but that was never the problem. Of course we're going to
> continue holding people responsible for their actions, regardless
> of the philosophical conclusions we come to. But that doesn't
> at all affect the metaphysical truth of the situation.
If we _can_ treat the pragmatic question as solved, then by all means
let's leave it aside...but it wasn't I who brought it in for rhetorical
effect in the first place. Thank you, Timmy---no further questions at
this time, your Honor.
> I don't see the connection between a miraculous account of volition and
> the view that choice "just happens." A choice that is freely chosen (in
> the metaphysical sense) doesn't "just happen" -- it is caused, but not
> caused physically. The physical events follow as effects; the
> metaphysical event is the cause.
>
> And I don't see what being told to do it in one way or another (in
> capital letters or otherwise) has anything to do with the question at all.
Well, once we set up to accept a metaphysical explanation for a nonphysical
happenstance, we may well be called upon to accept other metaphysical things
that come along for the ride. Such as a Capitalized 8/13, in stone.
> : Tim must exist somewhere, but it's up to him (or at least, it's not
> : up to anyone else) where.
>
> Not good enough. It may not be up to anyone else, but that doesn't mean
> it's up to Tim.
If you like. Tim and I have chosen to turn this one over to you, while we
slip out for that beer I was promised a few threads back.
``Laws providing tax shelters reflect the strong +-----------------------+
philosophical commitment of the Founding Fathers, | Joshua W Burton |
particularly Alexander Hamilton, to the principle | (847)677-3902 |
that the public good would be served if dentists | jbu...@nwu.edu |
owned cattle ranches.'' -- Calvin Trillin +-----------------------+
Daryl Gene
>that compels one path in preference to the other---that, indeed,
>is why both paths exist in the deterministic physical universe.
Again I don't quite get this picture, both paths exist, are not both paths
taken? (dissapointing to Frost if so :-))
>You are *free to choose* either way.
If both paths are taken where does the choice come in? If not, I beg your
indulgence, I'm not seeing your perspective.
>Even God
>doesn't control your choice---He _made_ it for you, but both ways
>impartially, leaving the choice up to you.
Help me a bit here, I'm seeing not A or B, but A and B, metaphysically
aren't I having my cake and eating it too?
-snip-
>person is standing there claiming to have chosen, having the sort
>of memories that go with having chosen, and facing the irrevocable
>physical consequences of the choice, I'm quite prepared to take
>him at his word,
But why then insist on a deterministic overview? Must we have that?
> If we punish him for a wrong choice, we may, in
>totally objective physical terms, reduce the probability for him to
>choose wrongly at some future cusp.
But won't he make all possible choices? The effect of our instructive
punishment will just depend on which world we are viewing from. AAArrrrrggg!!!
I still think I'm not understanding what you are saying. I do better with the
rubber bands.
>Again, though, you have already abandoned your grounds for griping
>about this when you decided that the power of choice is an intrusion
>of spirit from outside of nature, independent of the physical events
>that correlate with it.
> If choice "just happens" in this sense, the
>question of whether Tim will learn anything from punishment is quite
>beside the point: we punish humans, and not electrons, because we
>were Told To Do It That Way, and nothing more need be said.
Fair enough. It's time for me to bare my viewpoint for general criticism
and not hide behind a critique of yours.
At the moment of creation of Man qua Man, God breathed (deposited a spirit)
and tied it to a mortal body. In God's image, but God is spirit and what but
spirit could be that image? We have indeed taken something outside reality
here and brought it inside, but it is a pecuilar something. Sharing the
nature of God it can create, within the limits of its vessel, one of the things
it creates are choices. Not merely selecting amoung those offered by reality
but making new ones from, well, nothing. God is still omnipotent, he still
controls the entire physical world including the human body, but the mind
inhabiting that body having some portion of divinity on its own (a seperate
piece of God perhaps, perhaps a spark of divinity as the Quakers are want to
say) is, by His choice, beyond his control (remember he is holy, apart,
above). This mind/spirit on a smaller scale also effects reality. Maybe this
is nothing more than creating new links in a neural system (as we can observe
occuring as a consequence of thought) but since it is associated with a body
that has the ability to move and speak its influence is immesurably extended.
Choices can still occur by default, since the spirit must focus its will to
actually direct them, and this muddies the picture a good deal add to that the
fact that it can only use the physical resorces at hand ie. the brain of the
body it inhabits, and things get more befuddled. My capacity to perform tasks
with a computer, in a similar way, are much different with my present computer
than with my Commodore 64 even though the mind directing them is pretty much
the same. Each of us does, indeed , control our choices (if we choose to, and
choosing not to is also a choice) ergo, Mr. McVeigh merits punishment for his
choices and Mr. Burton merits praise for his dilligence and effort in training
and discplining his mind so that it makes good use of its potential. Niether
of these men arrive where they are simply because it is a possible alternative
and all alternatives exist, they themselves have made their alternatives exist
and have chosen as they will.
-snip-
>In my version, we can say at the
>end of the day that God created "what happened" and "what could have
>happened" equally.
> Or, earlier on, that He created all the possible
>"what will happens" equally. Or, from the timeless perspective that
>presumably is God's, that both of these viewpoints are part of the
>grand deterministic flowering of the manifold cosmos.
> If God created only "what happened", and
>not "what could have happened", was the latter really available to
>you?
> In what sense? And if God created a universe with multiple
>potential futures, in what sense can any of them become nonexistent
>when they "don't happen", as seen from the timeless perspective? It
>seems to me that any universe where choice closes off alternatives
>constrains the Creator to either compel the choices or dwell within
>time and watch them unfold. On the other hand, a universe that
>embraces multiple alternatives on an equal footing is well suited
>for temporal free will and timeless determinism to coexist.
But if we join with God in creating the ends, He being outside can still
control the dust of the universe (dust thou art and to dust thou will return)
while we control the vector of our own spirit, reap the rewards and suffer the
consequences of a world where we are not non-participative innocents but
co-creators, a weak reed, true but ....
Danny Pitt Stoller
jbu...@nwu.edu (Joshua W. Burton)wrote:
>There is _nothing_ in the universe of physical law
>that compels one path in preference to the other---that, indeed,
>is why both paths exist in the deterministic physical universe.
Are you trying to show that Lewis is wrong, or that he is right?
Because, if anything, the things you've said seem only to support his
views on free will.
Daryl Gene
>: jbu...@nwu.edu (Joshua W. Burton)wrote:
>First, note that there is something rum about 360 degree rotations,
-snip-
This is far more intoxicating than alcohol. I got high just reading it, why
would we need the beers?
>Imagine a coffee cup tied to all
>the walls of the room with rubber bands.
What are the rubber bands, I mean to what do they correspond in the 1/2 spin
particles that makes this work? What is happening differently in the spin 1
and spin 2 particles that they reach their original state sooner? Do we just
not have to worry about the orientation-entanglement effect you explained in
the higher spin particles or does it cancel out so that you don't have the
shift to odd effect?