The Nature of Scientific Inquiry - Contrasted with Creation "Science"

JT,What I mean by consciousness fundamental to the universe is something like this. At present physics as I understand it has energy/matter and space/time as the fundamental qualities of the universe. With those 4 elements everyting else derives. Physicists, as you and I, are conscious and look at the fundamentals and study them. At more complex levels chemists, biologists etc do the same. Consciousness is present as they study but barely present in what they study. It seems to me that something very important is not being included. I understand why, but this seems a profound limitation to science's discription of the universe at present. Until we can account for consciousness our discription is seriously lacking. I can explain the supernatural in natural terms using science but not consciousness.At this point science has little to say on what consciousness is. Crick and Damasio have some hypothesis that consciousness is an emergent quality of brain organization. It may prove to be the case.
The other posiblity is that consciousness is an irreducible fundamental of the universe like energy. It could be an as yet undiscovered property of energy/matter or even space/time though I don't see how at this point.I am interested in the eastern nondual notion that consciousness is the primordial principle of the universe. I've come across a few references to quantum mechanics that suggests some "consciousness" in quantum interactions. I think that is speculative. I think western science and western religions both tend to take consciousness for granted in their thinking about the universe. I don't know if Godel's thereom about having at least one undefined term means consciousness can't ever be defined without the system becoming self contradictiory can be applied here. If creation science is willing to let the term "designer" be undefined could it avoid self contradiction? I don't know.Western Washington state, well, I'm in western Oregon and love rain and trees having grown up in eastern Oregon with the cold cold winters, which I do not like.lfen

Then look up "parsimony" and we'll discuss it. But the world outside the lake is not fundamentally inaccssable to the them. After building a "dry-suit", they might easily discover a race of fishermen preying on their most gullible. And God brings the most baggage of all, by definition.

I will when I open one up, which will probably be within a couple weeks.

Very true.

I sort of agree. My belief is that reality is basically composed of God, and a fundamental part of God is his conciousness. However, I don't believe consciousness is a fundamental part of physical reality.Anyway, what all entities do you think are concious? West of the Cascades and north of California is definitely an awesome place to live.

M-w defines parsimony as: "economy of explanation in conformity with Occam's razor."Occam's razor is that "one must not needlessly multiply entities." "Entities" being a part of an explanation for something. Do you agree with that definition of it? The analogy has problems, but it was only intended as a general explanation. You are pointing at a problem deeper than my analogy, however, so I'll answer it, but over in the "What is supernatural" thread. By which definition of what?This message has been edited by JT, 08-18-2004 04:30 PM

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"People who think they know everything annoy those of that do" - t-shirt

Yes, perfectly.God, being an essentially infinite entity, is the largest possible violation of that principle of parsimony.When you bring in God, which you never have to do, you've needlessly multiplied entites by infinity. By definition of God. Any time you're bringing in an infinite entity to solve a finite problem, you've violated parsimony to the greatest degree possible.

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Anyway, what all entities do you think are concious?

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I don't know. I could quote different traditions or authorities but I'm not sure. I'm trying to work this out myself, like learning math or something, I want to be able to do it myself and only then will I really understand it. Consciousness though is for me at this time the crucial mystery, the core problem that engages me.The advaita position of Ramana Maharshi is that it's all conscious, which is to say God except for our egos. Kind of like saying God's imagination is What IS, it's real and the only thing that isn't real is what humans imagine, and what we think we are is only something we have imagined and so that is the only unreal thing.I think though this is a third approach to knowledge. It's not by revelation, nor objective scientific experimentation etc, but by directly investigating our self-experience until we know what this consciousness that is us is. This was the approach used and taught by the Buddha and some of those influenced by him down to this day.I do think the work started by Crick or Damasio is important. It's important to push to see if consciousness can be accounted for as an emergent property of complex organisms, or some sort of self referring information system. I think such work may help define consciousness perhaps more in a negative sense of eliminating what it can't be but perhaps shed light on what it is. The physicist Erwin Schrdinger said, "Consciousness is a singular for which there is no plural". Someday quantum mechanics may shed some more light on how consciousness functions.lfenlfen

Yippeee! I understand what you are saying now; I was thinking of God simply as a single entity, not as a single, infinite entity.But multiplying entities is only a mistake if it is done needlessly, but bringing God into the picture, from my vantage point, is not needless. I believe that there is no naturalistic explanation, so I need a supernatural explanation and am not violating occam's razor to use one.

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"People who think they know everything annoy those of that do" - t-shirt

It must be, however. Even if we grant for a moment that natural phenomenon cannot account for whatever you're expecting God to account for, why can't it be accounted for by additional natural laws? Or supernatural laws? Or even a lesser divine being? Or even the supreme God of another religion?There's nothing in the least needful about the Judeo-Christian God. That's considerably surplus to requirements. Well, for one thing, simply because there is no naturalistic explanation that you know of doesn't mean that a supernatural explanation is required. If you believe that no naturalistic explanation can ever explain it, that's a proof I'd like to see.But, more importantly, there's perhaps an infinite number of simpler supernatural explanations as well. For instance, supernatural physics.

Are you agreeing that under some circumstances the inclusion of a supernatural entity in an explanation is not in violation of occam's razor? I am going to change (or better articulate/understand) my position - I now understand how unsupportable the statement "there can be no naturalistic explanation" is.Out of all the explanations I have heard, all of them fall down except for one supernatural one, which I therefore tentatively hold.[added in edit - forgot about this]What exactly is supernatural physics?This message has been edited by JT, 08-18-2004 05:58 PM

I'm not convinced that things can happen in the universe that couldn't be described by natural models.I don't know that that's the case, however. So, potentially, the circumstances could exist, maybe. (Let's just say I'm "tentative." ) Well, I think you're betting on the wrong horse. Even if all our current naturalistic models are insufficient or inaccurate (and I'm not at all granting this to be the case, because I'm convinced that evolution is as accurate a model as the evidence allows), the historical odds suggest that the accurate explanation is going to be the naturalistic model. It always has been, so far.So betting that a supernatural explanation is going to turn out to be right isn't a good bet. So far nobody who's made that bet has won. Laws operating in a higher or superior order to the natural universe.

Ahh, wise man. If supernatural explanations can (maybe) be allowed to pass occam's razor, then they could be compared with each other. The vast majority of the "infinite amount of simpler" explanations are completely speculative; we have absolutely no evidence relating to them. Cutting these explanations, and going with more complex ones, is not violating occam's razor because we need to disregard them.We are left with others, including the Judeo-Christian God. We can examine these different ideas and discard those which are necessary to disregard, so as to not break occam's razor. In the end, I believe the Judeo-Christian God is the only idea which remains. By definition noone can win that bet. If something actually is supernatural, it is impossible to prove it is supernatural, so nobody wins that bet. If something isn't supernatural, that will be shown sooner or later, and the "supernaturalist" loses. I do agree, though, that many things formerly thought of as supernatural have been shown to be natural.

Well, that's hardly my problem. I'm not one of the ones going around stating that the supernatural exists and is the only way to explain certain things.And here's the more important question - if a natural model is accurate and predictive, and we can never know if it's right or not (not being able to know if reality is "real" being a fundamental limitation of knowledge about the universe), does it matter?In other words does it matter if the supernatural explanation is the "right" one if we can never know which is right, and the natural (but "wrong") explanation is just as predictive and useful, if not more so?

If the supernatural explanation wasn't offering salvation/damnation it wouldn't matter.[added in edit]In terms of how it would affect life, it wouldn't matter, although I would prefer the less-useful truth. The other explanation could be used to make predictions and stuff, but not believed.This message has been edited by JT, 08-18-2004 07:02 PM