My mind's in a knot... (Re: Who/what created God?)

Rahvin, are you at least partly aware that according to the brightest physicists of our time, we are still Civilisation type 0 out of Civilisations 0, 1, 2 and 3? It means our development is a type 0, our knowledge is type zero and all we know about reality, existence and our world is very likely no more than a fraction of a percent of all there is to know.Your belief and jumping to premature conclusions that there is no god makes as much sense as the belief in the talking snake or the god that took a day off after working for 6 days to create the universe.I am willing to believe that in our collective experience of this consensual reality, no one has probably seen god, but in the 19 century no one had seen Pluto. Does this mean that Pluto does not exist? Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

But you are strongly implying that our animal logic that has saved us from preditors and has supplied us with food and shelter, can be extended all the way to the ultimate reality and be applied there.While there is a certain chance that this might be correct, your certainty is currently very unwarranted by all measures of science.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

Hi onifre, And so does the "laws of physics". If they are here, some other set of laws must have created them. Then what set of laws created the laws that created ours and so on? You get the infinite regression, there is no way around it. The way to avoid this is not to quarrel who's right, but to find the answer why we reach infinities and what is wrong with our reasoning. I'd rather not push my primitive human logic that far. Besides, i am not merely saying that complex things require a creator. I meant everything, the whole universe requires a creator(that is - if human logic is right and not rigged by some evil creator). If take a look at the Delayed choice expriment, you'll see what i mean. I don't trust those 5 senses, they are good up to a point. They are worthless when talking about god and the fundamental reality. And I am afraid we might also need a new level of logic if we wish to attain anything in that direction.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

Kardashev scale This reminds me of the principle "Everything that can happen will happen". I am not the biggest fan of Decoherence/MWI but if you adopt that school of thought, yes, anything can happen(although in a different universe). No, here no. But my understandiing of the world is now close to that of John Wheeler(scholar of Einstein and teacher of Richard Feynmann) - i used to naively believe matter was made of stuff, then of energy, now i am fairly confident everything in what we call universe is information. While this doesn't say anything about the mathematical object - Spaghetti Monster, it would be foolish to rule out anything that lies out of our experience.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

Inherently part of the universe is as good an explanation as waking up and finding a live dinosaur in your bed and saying it was an inherent part of your bed. Unless we were talking about god. But weren't we discussing just that? You've just proven that the infinite regress of god is wrong, since god is not a subject to time. Cheers! I believe in modern theoretical physics - not everything, but most of it. That's what you believe. There is a discipline that deals with this sort of thing - physics. And when logic fails us what do we do? Pretend a problem does not exist?Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

Yes, that's right, that's why in post 51 I said: I wasn't kidding when i said that in reply to you. I do consider such a possibility real, that's why i haven't been pushing the god notion as assertively as of lately. It does make more sense that this rather organised sensation/experience was caused by a causal agent, but there is a certain chance that it isn't so. And it stems directly from the fact that our human logic may be rigged by an evil creator and steered into the wrong direction. This isn't exactly intuitive, but those laws need a medium and a creator. Since you are an atheist, you might believe those laws were created in another medium by another set of laws, but this also leads to infinite regression. If you want to discard human logic altogether and throw it out the window, you could say that their origin would not make sense to a human being, but you seem to have a strong belief in human logic, so i see no need for you to do that.BTW I am not alone expressing great doubt in human logic. In 2002 Stephen Hawking changed his mind and based on Goedel's incompleteness theorem said a complete and final mathematical dsecription of a Theory of Everything was impossible.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

No it's completely rational. It's irrational to treat what you don't know as something that doesn't need an explanation. Even if you bury your head in the sand, the problem is still there - these laws didn't create themselves. It's a religious belief that the laws of physics somehow created themselves at the big bang. And it's also pretty absurd. What are you talking about? What are you talking about?? Is this the first time in your entire life that you hear that modern physicists are talking about god? May I ask in which world are you living? Because your certainty that there is no god is unwarranted. Maybe there is maybe there is not. But your total certainty conveys a religious dogma that has settled in your mind. This shows that you don't know what you are talking about.Scientists have been using equipment and technology to bypass the limits of our 5 senses for more than a century. And believe me, when someone uses an inferometer, that's not metaphysics. I merely said a new type of logic. If you insist on using crystals, be my guest. Yep, stick to your senses, they are all you need to understand the world. Altough they once convinced people that the Earth was flat. If you were at least partly interested in science and in physics in particular, you'd know that the expression "supernatural existence" is pretty undefined and meaningless per our current standard of knowledge.

You meant the Special Theory of Relativity, I hope.

Human-derived or not, they refer to something that is compatible with human logic and that introduces order. You are evading the question multiple times so i'll re-state it:Where did the laws of physics come from at T=10^-43 sec? At that time there was NO universe, there was only the total energy of the future universe plus the laws of physics. If you understand the question, let me know what you think. Where did those laws that shaped the universe and let it unfold to its current state 14 billion years later come from? That's a newtonian worldview that is outdated and wrong. Your materialist perspective comes from those 5 senses and beyond what they are telling you, you'll be hard pressed to present even a single shred of evidence that supports those notions(and not only about matter, but also about spatial and temporal differentiation). These are distinctions that nature does not make, they correspond to nothing in the real world and exist only in our heads. I would not agree about the science part - applying the cause and effect principle doesn't mean a non-scientific approach. It simply conveys a certainty in the applicability of human logic past certain limits. I am hesitant about the validity of this approach, so my position is that god is a good explanation only and if human logic and the cause and effect principle hold beyond the level of what we experience. Yes, your 5 senses don't sense anything "supernatural", that's normal and not out of the way. Probably not, but we can detect that what those 5 senses are feeding is wrong. I have to go now, but this a very very important and broad topic concerning the future theory of everything that will theoretically explain everything. I have something in mind, and if i don't get lost in my thoughts i may produce something that makes sense.

I am very short on time right now, but since this seems like an important topic and i am on my computer, i'll give it ago, and maybe someone will pick from there.The problems that plague our understanding of the world, as i have been asserting multiple times here, are very often related to infinities. I do feel that if we want to make sense of the world beyond pure speculation, circular reasoning and religious notions of gods, we'll have to find a way to make sense of infinities.One of the inherent problems of this is the reasoning we are using. I sometimes feel like crying out loud in hopelessness as we simply cannot test the laws of logic. If we want to test them, we have to use our inherent and derived logic. This is a circular reasoning that leads to infinite regression. We seem stuck with whatever we are provided by the ultimate reality(god/nature). It's painful and regardless if you are Einstein or Ed Witten, we cannot know anything with certainty about our logic which generally leads to "how do we know with certainty anything about anything"?It does seem like our reasoning is well suited to the classic world, and it falls apart beyond that. The quantum world and generally all bounderies of our existence all defy our reasoning and even abstract mathematics falls apart. The plank scale and below doesn't make sense, the beggining of the universe doesn't make sense, the size of the universe and it existence in non-existence don't make sense, objects travelling at the speed of light from their frame of reference defy our logic, etc. etc. Even Zeno's paradox defies human logic. IMO, all our theories break down at the fundamental borders of the world/reality for a reason.Either something or we ourselves are fooling ourselves about the nature of the world we live in. This is known to the brightest physicists of our time and is probably the most hardcore problem ever encountered by mankind. Quantum theory, correctly interpreted, is information theory. And when we've come to find that the quantum level is the fundamental level of our reality, then there is something very wrong with our long-cherished notions of reality.As Anton Zeilinger points out:
"We've now been working on the unification of gravitation and quantum physics for almost eighty years - there must be something wrong with our concepts. I'm convinced we can only succeed with an entirely new philosophical approach."There is a joke circulating the physics circles - that we can, after all, call our universe unique. Why? Because it is the only one that string theory cannot describe.From what i've been reading lately, the String Theory is in a sorry state and there is a growing discontent among physicists about the possibility that it may turn out to be the theory of everything.David Gross thinks we are missing something fundamental. We need a leap in understanding, though where it will come from is not clear.

I was in a hurry and didn't mean that maths couldn't describe the evolution of a wavefunction or the Feynman path integral or some other mathematical description of the quantum world. I meant that the quantum world defies not only my common sense, but the commonsense of everyone. I agree with Feynman that "If you think you understand quantum mechanics - you are wrong". From the POV of our daily experience, QM is not a proper description of reality. Isn't that what Feynman meant? Is there a definite final interpretation that physicists agree upon and that has no significant shortcomings? True, i never said hard work is futile. Yet, most physicists do miss the physics "revolution" of the beginning of the 20th century. It's not only my opinion that physics has slowed down considerably in the last 60 years. Let's not talk about me, I do sometimes feel like i've chosen the wrong path education-wise and i didn't mean a complete theory of everything was impossible, that was the view of Stephen Hawking. I just said a new level of logic might be needed(this in my mind is similar to when Einstein tore down the old Newtonian worldviews of space and time). BTW I didn't mean to imply that I understand physics on the level of a professioanlly trained physicist(LOL sorry if i came across like that). I am merely guided by my sheer curiousity and influenced to a great extent by the books of the greatest physicists of our time and their worldviews. And frankly I'd choose their opinions and findings over the input of my 5 senses or any religion i've seen so far. And realistically, even if i read all the books in physics, i'd still be a layman, but more often than not, in my posts you could see a reflection of the views of some of the greatest physicists(whenever i happen to agree and comprehend what's been laid out in written form in front of me). It is not. Maybe we are the doorstep of a new new "revolution" of physics, just like the physics at the beginning of the 20th century. Or maybe it's not near.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

Hi onifre, I would agree with your post only and if you acknowledge the findings of modern physics that all elementary particles and their wavefunctions are purely mathematical objects. Then we can shake hands and conclude that our consciousness is the single most powerful tool in the universe, that creates everything, inlcuding the laws of physics. Then under this scenario i would agree that the laws of physics are entirely a human creation. But if you are entertaining a relativistic outlook on reality, I will strongly disagree. There is no way in hell that the laws that "taught" us how to use cause-effect logic, could have been created by human consciousness in, hypothetically speaking, a material and physical universe, that allegedly has existed before our arrival to bring about those laws that you are suggesting are our creation. Because a relativistic view on the world would tell us that there was a world with laws of physics before we appeared(in whatever form).BTW the concept of God is not an enemy of science, it is only an enemy of atheism. When a physicist ventures to risk his career and talk about god, he's usually flirting with the idea of "knowing the mind of God", which is neither unscientific, nor supernatural. Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

Well i do encourage everyone to participate in our debate, but at the same time it's mandatory that you at least learn the ABC of quantum theory. If you have some disagreement with QM and you want to prove protons and neutrons as elementary, indivisible particles, write a paper, submit it to some of the science journals and have it peer reviewed. It's OK to prove all the physicists in the world wrong but until then, conform to what's already accepted as a valid and tested theory. When you say this, are you aware that it directly flies in the face of Werner Heisenberg, among other top physicists who i believe understand quantum mechanics around 10^43 times better than you? Have you heard of Heisenberg? He spent a lot of time pondering about nature and reality and wrote few interesting books--Philosophical Problems of Quantum Physics
-Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern ScienceAnd you know what? I think when he says:"I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language."... I think he's right and you are wrong. Maybe he happens to know what an elementary particle is, what do you think? Maybe he has an idea where the energy/mass of the atoms come from and you don't. Yes, the 10 min. googling has yielded something meaningful. LOL. I thougth this kind of atheistic drivel was the reserved domain of young earth creationists. So you are basically presenting as a scientific explanation that the reason I am hungry is because i am hungry and if I wasn't hungry, we wouldn't be able to talk about me being hungry.Is this really all you could come up with? And who slipped you the BS that laws of physics are always inherent part of energy? I don't describe anything, i am merely trying to stay away from dogma, while at the same time, I don't consider what is unknown "supernatural". So yes, i kind of share your views. I am not jumping to conclusions, I am merely pointing out why both atheism and religions are dogma. And quite frankly, it seems i am the only one here who expresses concern if human logic is the proper tool for knowing the ultimate reality(if we ever find it). Cavediver thinks human logic is unbounded and there is no limit to our knowledge(I don't fully share this view), but then you have to wonder why the universe is comprehensible in the first place. Einstein couldn't figure it out, past his conviction that God is the creator of everything. And whatever you will ever find, will be a product of our inherent logic. There is simply no way of testing our own logic, so we have to believe it is right. If we are the creation of something, we are fighting a lost cause. Either accept what we've come to understand through scientific experiments(though there is no way to test if this hasn't been rigged by the creator) or wait a few decades and greet the Unknown, which is probably the only way to find out. I think i'll meet most of you fellas in hell, then we'll have this issue settled and laugh. I will, if you acknowledge that atheism is as much of a belief as thesim.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

I already quoted you. I said "elementary particles are mathematical obejects" to which you replied with "protons, neutrons, etc being mathematical objects". I am not putting words into your mouth as everyone can easily see. Yes, that's wrong, I never implied anything of the sort about the quantum realm. I have on several accounts explicitly referred to life and reality as a collective experience of a consensual reality, so that should give you a hint that i meant that reality is purely in our heads. So you are saying Heisenberg says Plato was correct and at the same time he means there is an objective physical reality?Consider it this way - all elementary particles don't have a size, they don't have dimensions and they look particle-like only under certain circumstances. We say they "exist" because by looking at them with our macro bodies, we impose our classical way of thinking and describeing them(we couldn't currently use any other logic), so "electrons exist" when viewed outside our classical way of looking and thinking about them, is a misleading and incomplete picture. And when you say a wavefunction is a mathematical object, you are saying the electron is a mathematical object, because the electron is both a wave and particle at the same time. If you say the electron is a mathematical object some of the time and then say at the double slit when it is observed, it becomes a particle, then yes, i agree. That's how it appears to be. The mathematical object called wavefunction of an electron is spread out throughout the universe with different probabilities of being in a certain places, until the act of measurement where and when it becomes a particle-like zero-dimensional point(electron). This is radical to the untrained mind, but you see a monitor in front of you, only because the collective probabilities of all the particles that comprise your monitor of being at that spot(where your monitor is) is greater than say 80%. That doesn't mean that some of the electrons in your monitor are not at some point of time on Mars or in my house or anywhere else in the universe. It's only because the collective statistical value of most of the wavefunctions point to where your monitor is, that you find it there. This is the same with your brain. Although you cannot feel this, some of the electrons in your brain are "jumping"(or rather located) on nearby galaxies at this very moment. But because most are statistically where your brain is that you retain the capabily to use your brain for its designed() purpose.The physical "particle" electron is a statistical ensemble. Sure, take a positively charged particle(positron, quark) and a negatively charged particle. Do they carry the known laws of physics? Is F=m.a inscribed within their charge? Are you really saying this? This is too radical even for my beaten to death concept of reality. And even if this were true, how do we test if the the zero dimensional electron carries so much information? It goes on to infinity only if you apply our human logic to it, the cause-effect principle. If you want to apply human logic to god, you have to conclude that god is subect to laws that we can understand, that probably god eats, sleeps, drinks water, picks up chicks, goes to the toilet, has mood swings and gets angry, etc. Not that it matters to anyone but my convictions would put me closer to deist bordering on agnostic, as per your classification.

This is a possibility and although i did get trouble from the mods here for suggesting this, it is considered a plausible explanation for reality by a number of physicists. Michio Kaku dedicates a few pages on this hypothesis in his latest book Parallel Universes but dismisses it at the end on the account that the computer needed would be too big!?(I guess he's being gentle and considertae and doesn't want terrorise the public with this notion). I'll refer you to a paper by Max Tegmark where this is also regarded as a possibility. And though solipsism is also consistent with quantum theory, I don't want anyone to go crazy over this as i did, there are other more friendly approaches to handling the findings of QM. If we are a in a simulation - we might be in a simulation run by god. There is one way around the non-locality posited by Bell's theorem(and keeping realism) - giving up the counterfactual definiteness but this is bordering on giving up all free will. Sure, but we should excercise caution and probably keep minors away from it. This isn't really a problem of Heisenberg, Niels Bohr or some other physicists. We either have to prove QM wrong(which is the most tested field of physics) or well, face the music and accept what it says about reality. I am also not an expert in this area and it seems i am hitting a wall with my curioity, a wall probably imposed by the mathematical formalism of string theory. I cannot grasp, for the life of me, how a 1-dimensional vibrating string converts to a 0-dimensional point particle?I also have great trouble understanding how a string of energy can have a size. String theorists claim that a string is one Planck length long, the smallest length tolerated in mathematical physics. For the purposes of physics, energy is not a physical object but an abstract mathematical concept. You cannot draw a picture of this alleged physical object. And you know what - the 1-dimensional string is said to vibrate. If it wasn't proposed by some of the brightest minds of our time, i'd probably be asking - are you serious? How can a 1-dimensional string vibrate without employing a 2nd dimension? But let's just say that i am too retarded to accept their counter-intuitive concepts(maybe that's why i don't have that much faith in human logic, because in personal plan, there is a lot of stuff in physics that i fail to comprehend).
I will very tentatively say, that i suppose the Holographic universe pops out of String Theory because of the vibrations of the 1-dimensional strings. I cannot reference any evidence for this, it may only make sense to me and no one else. This isn't consistent with Bell's theorem. It says we are all One, whether in a projection in a Holographic Universe, a simulation, etc., where the spatial differentiation between objects is an illusion of the mind. In that sense only, and well this is going to sound quite radical, unless someone proves Bell's theorem non-locality wrong, we have to logically conclude the if God exists, we are one wholeness with him. There is simply no reality separated from consciousness, much less different layers of physical realities to speak of.In my personal opinion, the least one should do is remain agnostic.Here is paper that you might find enlightening by physicist Max Tegmark:http://arxiv.org/abs/0704.0646v2
The Mathematical Universe
Authors: Max TegmarkEdited by Agobot, : No reason given.