Patrick Elliott wrote:
> This is just a naturalist version of the supernatural. Its no more 
> useful, profound, or meaningful than the theist version, and makes just 
> as much sense to propose, which is "none". 

I think he was just defining what "supernatural" could possibly mean. It's 
not meaningless to talk about the supernatural, even if it doesn't exist. 
Just like it's less meaningless to talk about unicorns than about flimbrusters.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Serving Suggestion:
     "Don't serve this any more. It's awful."

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>> Sadly, this is not uncommon. However, many, including myself, have argued 
>> that you cannot have such a drastic error in thinking, and not have it 
>> spill over into your own discipline,
>
> Huh. Odd. Some of the smartest people I know doing computers are devoutly 
> religious. I can't imagine why you'd think that belief that Jesus 
> sacrificed himself to save you would interfere with your ability to design 
> computer software, for example.

Ditto here, I know several of the Engineers I work with are very religious, 
and it doesn't affect their work at all, why would it?

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On 10/20/2010 9:37 AM, Warp wrote:
>
>    A "superuniverse" hypothesis is most probably not testable for the
> very reason that we are completely bound to the laws and geometry of
> our own Universe. We have no way to reach the "outside" (because there
> is no "outside" as far as this Universe is concerned, because we are
> bound to its internal geometry, which knows no "outside").
>
>    However, if there is a "superuniverse", and our "sub-universe" (if we
> can call it like that) popped into existence inside it, that
> "superuniverse" would be, by definition, supernatural.
>

Interesting thought. Almost brings about the whole simulation 
hypothesis. Wherein we're actually living within a simulation of some 
sort. We can only observe what is within the bounds of our simulation. 
Beyond that, nothing is observable. By that /something/ has to be 
running the simulation. It explains a lot of unexplainable stuff, but 
its also unprovable. We can't prove there is something outside our own 
universe because it's beyond what we can observe about our own universe.

It's just a hypothesis, though. For all we know matter and the universe 
as we know it is totally concrete and is not simply a construct of some 
very complicated model. We'll never know. Speculation on what we are and 
what we live in is fun. That hypothesis probably belongs on the Periodic 
Table of Utter Nonsense somewhere... ;)

-- 
~Mike

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> >   (It's also possible that if such a superuniverse exists, it's so different
> > from our "sub-universe" that humans have no way of comprehending it nor
> > expressing the laws that govern it. Maybe by its nature its very existence
> > is completely equivalent to a paradox or impossibility to us. Maybe the
> > laws of our universe are not a "subset" at all, but a set of completely
> > different and random physical laws which formed inside this "bubble" that
> > is our universe, and which are completely separate and independent from
> > the superuniverse where this "bubble" appeared.)


> Agreed.  That's also possible, but much less interesting to speculate about. :-)

  I think it's an interesting possibility in one aspect: The Big Question
has always been: Where did everything come from?

  If the physical laws of the hypothetical superuniverse are drastically
different from ours, that question might actually not make any sense there.
Maybe there is no time there, and hence no beginning to anything. Maybe the
whole concept of time and things having to have a "beginning" is completely
nonsensical in the superuniverse. Maybe the concept of time exists only
inside this bubble that forms our Universe, but not outside. Maybe the
closest concept that we can come up with to explain the superuniverse is
that "it has always existed" (even though "always" implies some kind of
timeline which, as said, might be a completely nonsensical notion in the
superuniverse). Maybe what we consider the "big bang" and the "expanding
universe" from inside here, is something completely different from the
outside.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
> Maybe what we consider the "big bang" and the "expanding
> universe" from inside here, is something completely different from the
> outside.

Fun!  Probably more fun for a physicist than a computer scientist, but fun! :-)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Serving Suggestion:
     "Don't serve this any more. It's awful."

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Mike Raiford wrote:
> We can't prove there is something outside our own 
> universe because it's beyond what we can observe about our own universe.

There's a fair amount of sci-fi that does just this sort of thing. I 
wouldn't say it's logically impossible to prove there's something outside 
our own universe.

See, for example, Greg Egan's "Permutation City", or Robert Sawyer's 
"Calculating God".  And of course if something from outside simply modified 
the simulation to tell us of its existence...

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Serving Suggestion:
     "Don't serve this any more. It's awful."

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Mike Raiford wrote:
> > We can't prove there is something outside our own
> > universe because it's beyond what we can observe about our own universe.
>
> There's a fair amount of sci-fi that does just this sort of thing. I
> wouldn't say it's logically impossible to prove there's something outside
> our own universe.
>
> See, for example, Greg Egan's "Permutation City", or Robert Sawyer's
> "Calculating God".  And of course if something from outside simply modified
> the simulation to tell us of its existence...

Exactly the footnote to Carl Sagan's "Contact" - the novel, at least.

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On 10/20/2010 11:04 PM, Darren New wrote:
> Patrick Elliott wrote:
>> On 10/20/2010 8:58 AM, Darren New wrote:
>>>> Sadly, this is not uncommon. However, many, including myself, have
>>>> argued that you cannot have such a drastic error in thinking, and not
>>>> have it spill over into your own discipline,
>>>
>>> Huh. Odd. Some of the smartest people I know doing computers are
>>> devoutly religious. I can't imagine why you'd think that belief that
>>> Jesus sacrificed himself to save you would interfere with your ability
>>> to design computer software, for example.
>>>
>> Right.. Because there isn't, for example, a very weird association
>> between either engineers *or* computer science, and the tendency of
>> both to think ID makes more sense than Evolution. Its invariably one
>> or the other, which ends up being the discipline someone belongs to,
>> when they claim to advocate ID.
>
> You know, I don't know where you grew up or anything, but I have the
> hardest time in the world understanding WTF you're going on about. That
> entire sentence makes no sense. It's like a written version of the G-Man
> speaking.
>

Its not about where I grew up. I read several blobs that deal with 
science, and invariably, every time the question of evolution comes up, 
you get *two* types of people claiming it doesn't work. 1. People that 
have no degrees **at all**, or understanding of anything related to it, 
and are religious. 2. People claiming that their vast experience in 
computers or engineering has "proven to them" that it can't work, oh, 
and.. also happen to be religious.

That is the point I am making. In my experience, even being *very good* 
at your discipline, seemingly, doesn't mean that your belief in certain 
religious concepts won't "bleed over" into that discipline, and 
undermine your ability to do you job. Like the religious guy I 
mentioned, who claimed to be a) religious, b) a programmer, and c) 
working on projects that use genetic algorithms, yet also d) they are 
useless and the whole theory behind them is wrong. That doesn't happen 
**unless** your gibberish from religion is informing your conclusions.

At best, the only argument that *is* valid, with regard to the idea that 
it may not have an effect, would be, "Depending on whether or not the 
goofy shit you believe directly addresses some subject you are studying, 
you may escape having your thinking muddled *in* your studies." The 
question then becomes, "How sure are you that what ever those goofy 
things are, you will *never* run across something that contradicts it, 
in your field?"

A lot of fields already have issues with failing to, for example, 
account for fluid dynamics, in biology, because the person is an expert 
in some specialty of biology, which doesn't require knowing fluid 
dynamics, at least until they ran into something that depended on it to 
work out what was going on. We like to think that ever discipline is so 
specialized that there is no overlaps. This is wrong. There are lots of 
overlaps, though they happen in the fringes of the discipline. The more 
specialized you get, the less you deal with those fringes, but the more 
likely you are to run into some case where you **need** one of those 
cross overs to explain something. Its one thing to be unaware of the 
answer, and have to, if you know who to ask, garner outside information 
from someone that *does* know. But, what happens when you a) don't know 
it, and b) don't believe you need to ask, because your "belief" about 
the subject implies that the answer lies in a church, instead of someone 
else's lab?

That is what I see happening with some of these people. If you want an 
example, just look at William Dembski. By all grounds, he seemed to be 
an adequate, at the least, mathematician, yet, the moment his 
creationism became an issue, he suddenly, and inexplicably, started 
doing math that would make almost anyone else embarrassed. Nothing he 
has done on the subject is more than superficially believable, and it 
contains so many errors, one has a hard time understanding how he 
managed to get his original degree. The only thing that explains this is 
that, the moment he had to deal with a situation where the math went 
against belief, he **had to** mangle the math, to support the belief, 
and, worse, actually can't understand why the result is invalid, 
defective, and mathematically unsound.

I have seen too many of these things to simply *accept* the assertion 
that someone isn't being influenced in their work, by things they, and 
others, claim our "outside of it", and therefor never effect it. It can 
and does happen. And, my basic argument is, unless you only stick to 
things that never come into conflict (which may, itself, mean you are 
not exploring the full range of possibilities in the discipline), you 
will **inevitably** run into a situation where one or the other needs to 
give. Which one does depends on both professional integrity, and how 
invested you are in what ever is in conflict. But, the conflict *will* 
happen.

-- 
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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On 10/21/2010 12:38 AM, scott wrote:
>>> Sadly, this is not uncommon. However, many, including myself, have
>>> argued that you cannot have such a drastic error in thinking, and not
>>> have it spill over into your own discipline,
>>
>> Huh. Odd. Some of the smartest people I know doing computers are
>> devoutly religious. I can't imagine why you'd think that belief that
>> Jesus sacrificed himself to save you would interfere with your ability
>> to design computer software, for example.
>
> Ditto here, I know several of the Engineers I work with are very
> religious, and it doesn't affect their work at all, why would it?
>
>
Just to be clear, it doesn't always, necessarily effect their own 
discipline, but it may undermine understanding of others. And, as I said 
in the other post I just made, it **highly** depends on whether or not 
you ever run into a situation where a conflict "does" appear. Given 
enough time, some sort of conflict will. Its just that, for the most 
part, people don't live long enough for it to be a statistical certainty.

But, just for the sake of argument. Would someone asking them to build 
something that conflicts with their belief be considered "having an 
effect on their work"? Or is refusing to work (or the category I named 
previously, which is "refusing to look at things that conflict"), 
somehow not the same thing? I think they are. Though, the nature of that 
problem is **far** more obvious when you consider the sort of, 
"conscientious objector refuses to give X person Y medicine, even though 
they are the only pharmacy for 200 miles that carries it."

Engineers are less likely to run into such situations, admittedly, but 
they instead have a very bad habit of showing up in someone "else's" 
work shop, to tell them that their expertise as an engineer **backs** 
their religion, which in turn undermines the other guys entire 
discipline. A problem that wouldn't be so annoying, except that, as I 
stated in the other post, sometimes you can't *make* progress in other 
disciplines without referencing things in others, and.. well.. What 
happens when you consult an engineer on something in biology, and the 
engineer does 100% perfect work in engineering, but rejects the 
underlying principles *of* the biology they are being asked to lend 
their own expertise on?

-- 
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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On 10/20/2010 11:15 PM, Darren New wrote:
> Patrick Elliott wrote:
>> This is just a naturalist version of the supernatural. Its no more
>> useful, profound, or meaningful than the theist version, and makes
>> just as much sense to propose, which is "none".
>
> I think he was just defining what "supernatural" could possibly mean.
> It's not meaningless to talk about the supernatural, even if it doesn't
> exist. Just like it's less meaningless to talk about unicorns than about
> flimbrusters.
>
Depends on your definition of "meaningful". When applied to sciences, 
some concepts involve much stricter limits, on what is being implied. 
Its perfectly meaningful to talk about such things in the context of 
pure imagination. Its utterly useless, if your intent is to understand 
things that have tangible realities (and, no I don't mean you get to 
stretch that definition to include, "But, people draw them, so they are 
"tangible"). 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();
}

<A HREF='http://www.daz3d.com/index.php?refid=16130551'>Get 3D Models, 
3D Content, and 3D Software at DAZ3D!</A>

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