On Mon, 22 Dec 2008 14:24:09 -0600, Shay <sha### [at] nonenone> wrote:

>
>A lot of very smart people believed the Earth was flat.

Are you sure about that?
-- 

Regards
     Stephen

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Stephen wrote:
> On Mon, 22 Dec 2008 14:24:09 -0600, Shay <sha### [at] nonenone> wrote:
> 
>> A lot of very smart people believed the Earth was flat.
> 
> Are you sure about that?

Not at all, really. AFAIK people used to believe the world was flat. I'm 
assuming some of those people were very smart. I could be wrong on 
either end of that.

  -Shay

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Darren New wrote:
> Yes. And recently, they've used a variant of the Bell Inequality to 
> disprove that it's due to non-local interactions.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kochen-Specker_theorem

I had forgotten about this theorem, thanks for the reminder!
> 
> http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR08/Event/76135
> disagrees.
> 
> http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v446/n7138/abs/nature05677.html
> may be what I remember reading about, but I don't know where the popular 
> reference to it is.  I can't seem to find the article about someone 
> actually doing the experiment that the math implies and finding it 
> worked, but it was pretty clear that they eliminated non-local 
> interactions thereby.

Interesting, I wish I had enough time at the moment to read and digest 
this.  I'll attempt to queue it somewhere in my head for later.

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On Mon, 22 Dec 2008 14:36:59 -0600, Shay <sha### [at] nonenone> wrote:

>Stephen wrote:
>> On Mon, 22 Dec 2008 14:24:09 -0600, Shay <sha### [at] nonenone> wrote:
>> 
>>> A lot of very smart people believed the Earth was flat.
>> 
>> Are you sure about that?
>
>Not at all, really. AFAIK people used to believe the world was flat. I'm 
>assuming some of those people were very smart. I could be wrong on 
>either end of that.
>

Well the Greeks knew the Earth was round in the 4th Cent BC. The "flat Earth"
fallacy became more common in the 19th century with the Religion Vs Science
debate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_mythology

-- 

Regards
     Stephen

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Shay wrote:
> 1. The universe is made of particles which behave in predictable ways.

Errr, no. The particles behave in ways that are only statistically predictable.

> 2. A tiny group of people with very expensive tools have seen what 
> looked like particles behaving in unpredictable ways.

They're very predictable en masse. Best predicted theory in history.

Sort of like how you can't predict where an individual wasp will go, but if 
you kick the hive, you can be pretty sure you'll be unhappy about it.

> What I wonder is: if chaos can be accepted as a natural force, why can't 
> consciousness? 

Consciousness is an emergent property of natural substances, so I'm not sure 
what your question even means.

> Is there a logical argument against consciousness 
> affecting our particles towards non-deterministic behavior?

Define "consciousness".

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
   see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.

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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Shay [mailto:sha### [at] nonenone]
> A lot of very smart people believed the Earth was flat.

This is a common misconception.  Smart people always knew the Earth was
round (the Greeks {or maybe Egyptians, I don't remember} even knew the
diameter).

Only the ignorant masses ever thought it was flat.

...Ben Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

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Darren New wrote:
> The existence of "free will" negates the argument that God must have 
> created the universe as a "first cause".
> 
> The "first cause" argument is that every effect has a cause, and hence 
> for the universe to exist, something before the universe must have 
> caused it, and hence God exists.[1]
> 
> On the other hand, either our decisions are caused by what's in the 
> environment, or some aspect of our decisions are not subject to prior 
> causes. In the first case, it would be unjust to blame someone for not 
> believing in your religion if such disbelief is entirely the fault of 
> external circumstances. In the latter case, many decisions have effects 
> without precedent cause, and hence the requirement for God to have 
> created the universe disappears.
> 
Umm. Actually the problem with first cause arguments is that they are 
perpetual. I.e., once you start claiming everything "must" have a cause, 
therefore something had to make the universe, you inevitably have to ask 
what caused that thing to exist. This is also the Occam's Razor issue: 
"Why presume that something without a cause 'made' the universe, when it 
only adds the complication of something else popping into existence 
first, instead of just the universe happening that way anyway?"

Or, if you prefer a quantum effect, what "causes" a thing doesn't always 
have to "come before it", and for that matter, the cause may not be 
something identifiable, so claiming you "know" what caused it can be 
very very wrong, especially if its based on one of several thousand 
claims that some entirely too human anthropomorphized super being did 
it, without any real basis on which it determine which one. Oh, and 
arguing that they are all the same, doesn't work either, since many are 
quite apposed to each other, which leaves you with millions of 
philosophies of what such a god "really wants", none more provable than 
any others, many of them superior in aspects to the more "common" one 
used as the "creator of everything", and none of which have the 
attribute of being the sort of god that would "have to" exist, if you 
had one create a universe, but who was too stupid, lazy, or 
disinterested, to either a) get a lot of it put together in a way that 
would make sense to an engineer, or b) actually manage to convey the 
truth of their existence in a way that isn't vague, inspecific, often 
self contradictory, or just plain obviously made up by people that 
thought the universe was made of earth, air, fire and water, and that 
one of a variety of various gods or spirits either lived in, rode on, or 
dragged across the sky, the sun.

> [1] ("God created the universe" -> "Jesus died for your sins" is left as 
> an exercise for the reader.)
> 
Its an easy exercise. Its nonsense, and not just because of the basic 
contradiction that there is "absolutely" no point to the whole sin BS in 
Genesis, if some time later God was going to make some emotional, but in 
reality entirely pointless, gesture, which did away with the whole 
eating the apple thing anyway. Oh, and what do I mean by pointless? I 
mean that while it may have, if it even happened, which is debatable 
itself, had an emotional impact, what exactly was given up, sacrificed, 
etc.? I mean, if Jesus was just the "son of God", then he still didn't 
lose a whole lot by "joining" dad in the after life, and if he "was" 
God, then... Well, unless God died for real, which would make continuing 
to believe in him as totally pointless as waiting for your dead uncle to 
get home before starting dinner, he can hardly claim to have given 
anything up at all. Its like if I donated every bit of my money to 
something called, "Kagehi's retirement fund." Its only a sacrifice of 
you ***don't have it anymore***.

Mind, it is entirely consistent with a God that is quite happy to give 
Moses a commandment to not kill anyone, then a bit later, suggest that 
his "chosen people" kill every man and child of some other tribe. Its 
meaningful because he "says so", until and unless its not anymore, at 
which point we are all supposed to nod and go, "Ah, good. Nice of you to 
give the chosen ones an heads up on the arbitrary rule changes. All 
praise Ahriman (who seems to fit the bill for this sort of chaotic 
gibberish and random evil a lot more than the Ahura-Mazda clone Yhwh, 
which, depending on which centuries texts you are reading is either one 
of three sons of the true creator of the universe, and a war monger, or 
the "the one true God (tm)"). lol

-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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3D Content, and 3D Software at DAZ3D!</A>

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Shay wrote:
> What I wonder is: if chaos can be accepted as a natural force, why can't 
> consciousness? Is there a logical argument against consciousness 
> affecting our particles towards non-deterministic behavior?
> 
Well, for one, as someone else already said, first define 
"consciousness" as something more tangible than "some word we made up to 
describe how some things do other things, based on how they react to the 
world around them." That definition doesn't allow for any "interaction" 
that doesn't involve say.. pushing the cup off the edge of the table. 
However, the more silly definition is, "some thing we insist exists 
separate from the body (Already a problem here. How the hell do you know 
its separate, since the only "observation" of its comes from seeing what 
someone's body does?) and which can spookily effect the world somehow 
(Second problem. The only 'evidence' of this seems to be mentally ill 
people thinking they can do things with their minds, studies that 
inevitably turn out to be faked, done wrong, or actually prove it 
doesn't work, and some people's insistence that purely statistically 
plausible, but intellectually unbelievable things, like both people 
trying to call each other at the same time, "prove" that something like 
a separate "consciousness" exists. In other words, this definition isn't 
supported by "any" evidence.)"

The logical argument against such interaction is:

1. There is no evidence that the spooky version of consciousness exists.
2. No evidence exists that indicates the things attributed to it are 
anything but statistical inevitabilities, and human hubris that odd 
things mean more than that you just got lucky.
3. Most people get the "observation" part of quantum mechanics dead 
wrong. When someone says that an "observer" has effected the experiment 
in a way that collapses the state, what they mean is that some other 
physical object, which "has" a stable state, as interfered with the 
unstable particle, in such a manner that "its" state reverts to a stable 
one as well, like a small drop of water which hits something very cold. 
Large masses of particles create "stability" within their own structure, 
allowing them to all... I don't know, I suppose "resonate" the same, so 
that they all retain the same "stable" state. Individual particles, 
separated enough from the surrounding matter, are in an unstable state 
because their is no interactions with other particles. The moment you 
cause an interaction (i.e., make an observation), the state becomes 
"fixed". Well, that isn't precisely right. Its been theorized that you 
could, if you acted quickly enough, reverse the state transition and 
restore the particle to its unstable condition. There where two thoughts 
on this, either a) it happened instantly, so this wasn't possible, or b) 
it would take some measurable time for this to take place, so that a 
particle in "transition" could be made to revert. I read something about 
a month ago where someone tested the later possibility and as actually 
able to reverse the state change, by altering the interaction as the 
transition was in progress, thus "undoing" the interaction that was 
making the particle shift into a known state.

Now, in the world outside the lab, you just don't see this stuff 
happening at all. Why? Because any place mater exists, all particles, 
unless in vacuum, are interacted with "mater", thus remain as mater. In 
places where dark mater is instead., the everything there would be 
interacting with the same, so "its" state would be forced by constant 
interactions into a "dark mater" state. It takes very specific 
conditions to "force" a particle loose from this arrangement, or 
otherwise make it change states, when its inclination is to retain the 
same state as everything else around it. Or, at least that is the sense 
I get. The point being.. Consciousness would have to have some rather 
obvious, clearly identifiable, and undeniable, properties, if it existed 
as something that could tangibly effect the universe *by itself*, and 
the only argument "for" this sort of "consciousness as a force" argument 
  is based entirely on a complete and total misunderstanding of how the 
term "observer" is used in quantum mechanics, and what exactly it means.

-- 
void main () {

     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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3D Content, and 3D Software at DAZ3D!</A>

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>> Why does the first case rule out the possibility of God having created 
>> the universe?
>
> It doesn't.

I don't understand what you mean by this then:

"The existence of "free will" negates the argument that God must have 
created
the universe as a "first cause"."

Why can't there be free will and a God that created the universe?  Why can't 
God have created free will at the same time as the Universe?

> It just makes God responsible for all the sins and evil in the world.

Maybe he can't change what he had created?  Also, "all the sins and evil in 
the world" is just referring to the actions of a minority of a population of 
one particular species of animal on one particular planet in the whole 
universe.  I'm sure he has more to worry about than us lot blowing each 
other up occasionally and arguing about DRM :-)  Or, for all we know, maybe 
every other planet with living populations is performing vastly better than 
our Earth, so overall God deems this universe a great success?

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Darren New wrote:
> 
> Define "consciousness".
> 

Not the "spooky" version Patrick Elliott mentioned.

By "consciousness" I mean that I *seem* to have decided to type this 
post, yet many insist that I can't have decided that because my mind is 
made of particles which are bound to a complex but predictable pattern.

  -Shay

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