Something From Nothing?

Well, I have actually done that on a number of occasions. But it would be, I think, off topic for this thread since it is a cosmology thread.I strive to keep the number of axioms (or those things which I just believe ) to a reasonable minium.

As crashfrog pointed out, an experiment must be repeatable by any individual. The scientific method attempts to remove human biases and other factors that can cloud judgment. As such, an experiment cannot be limited to certain individuals of certain beliefs. An experiment must be something that anyone can perform and get results that the next person doing the test will agree on. This rules out your so called experiment listed above.Falling back on the intellectual copout that "one wasn't truely listening" when the test fails to get results, does not make things any better. Science avoids such copouts.

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at least not with that attitude you won't, you'd be better off creating a super computer called "deep thought", just be careful what you ask it though cos you might not even understand the answer...

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It's got nothing to do with attitude, because the God hypothesis is untestable in principle. That is, the idea that God created the world in which we experience things. The only way the hypothesis would be testable in principle, is if God directly interacts with his creation.In such a case, I have explained what it means for a hypothesis to be testable. If it can make previously unknown predictions about our experimence we can observe, then at least in principle it can be tested. Given that, do you suppose God is an idea that is testable or not?

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clever fellow this God chap, knows how to cover his tracks. Do you reckon we'll ever get to be as clever ???

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Maybe God just likes to play hide and seek.

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Given that, do you suppose God is an idea that is testable or not?

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yes, but not just yet maybe once we evolve to the next level...In the meantime i suggest asking a prophet, they're the ones making testable predictions based on divine revelation...I hear there's sum in salt lake city or nation of islamI do think though that hide and seek is exactly what God's game and that we are looking in the right spot though the limitations we place on ourselves may preclude us from finding it......I'm like the little train that could one day i'm gonna reach the top of the hill and probably die before telling anyone what i saw

ThingsChange! I like your numerical analogy! Analogies are not necessarily proofs so much as they are attempts at communicating similar ideas. Here is another one.
1) In the Beginning, There is One Reality. 1 The universe was of the size, shape, and character of this realities definition.
2) This reality created His angels. (1+angels)=1
3) The Angels were given free thought/realization apart from the reality. They could thus have a choice of viewing reality as it was or how they perceived it. Once Lucifer chose his own reality, the problem became like this: (1+angels), (Lucifer)..or 2. All of the Angels were given the right to choose realities. The thing was, once a reality was chosen, it could not be denied. Angels by definition can not change their reality. Thus, the problem became like this:
(1+2/3 Angels), and (2+1/3 Angels).....Both subsets can still be expressed like this: 1 or 2. Please understand that this is not a dualistic concept. The very reality of God is as Creator. The other reality, by definition, was merely a choice, not a cloning.
when man entered the picture, we became seperated from God by choosing the other reality,expressed as the "knowledge of 1 or 2"
On a number line, how many possible points exist between 1 and 2? Is it possible to get to 2 without the value of the sum of those points?
Jesus, by "becoming the value of man yet submitting to the value of God bridged the gap for us.

I like meeting people. Occasionally, we touch on interesting topics. Sometimes the topic turns to salt. A very few times the other person tells me that salt has no flavor. The first time, my jaw dropped but I am no longer shocked. During one of those converstions the other person insisted that if I would build an instrument that could tell him what salt tasted like then he would be interested.Point one: not all things are testable by instruments.
Point two: when one has tasted salt one can not deny having tasted it.Best regards,
Bob, Alice, and Eve

Salinity can be tested and verified by lab instuments, but can not be described in terms of taste by a machine. (yet)Orgins of the Universe can be postulated but not substantiated.Point 1. Machines will never be able to assign true content in data as a human does.
Point 2. humans will never come to agreement on matters of faith verses science. Hence EvC forum !

Out of curiosity, why do you think this is so?For that matter, how sure are you that humans are assigning true content in data? Every human I know, when they parse words and concepts, do so by recourse to other words. It's arguable whether our symbolic consciousness is ever really able to get at the "real" content of an utterance.If I constructed a machine that was essentially a sufficiently sophisticated look-up table, and given utterances, returned other utterances to such accuracy that it appeared to actually understand the content of the utterances, how would you tell the difference between that and a human level of "understanding"?[This message has been edited by crashfrog, 02-24-2004]

Crash, I am confident this is so becuase there are three things on my list that would need to change if it was not and I do not see any progress in any o fthem.Newton's X in the brain would have to be a 10 dimensional database of snail trails.Haptics would have to exist for human assisted computation to exponetially shift control from left to right across such chiasma.Physiological time would have to be a consensus other than DNA replication in a cell cycle.These three things could be true even if duplicty is not. I dont know. Comptuers would still come in second because the prepostion of a poet or prophet could trump any conjunciton distribution not via the phone. Machines will only divide this should all three exist and then it would be the human in the middle not the metal in the alternative conductor/insulator for the twirl or twixt. That is not meant to be cute but available for the comptuers acutally ""reading this stuff.

A machine/computer assigns 0's 1's
A human infers all that has been perceived/learned/expirenced/taught/ from the subject matter.
I see your point Crash but I was simply meaning that when you see a tree your 'human' experiance assigns content within the parameters of what you know. A machine simply sees data.
And yes I realize we could bat this back and forth. As it all boils down to what we agree is data. I was just speculating that content in a sense that when you say tree to me it means something, a tree in my yard, a tree I got laid under. lol.... let me see a computer add that kind of content.

Yes and the best we got "XML" requires a root. Baraminology indicates otherwise.ONLY OnE R-

And a human neuron simply adds up to a threshold value and then fires. You're simply contrasting two entirely different levels of representation. I guess I'm not really impressed. That they're not good at it now is not evidence that they'll never be good at it.I guess I find it jumping the gun a little to claim that we'll never have machine intelligence when we don't even understand what human intelligence is.

Hi Crashfrog, I do not feel I am adequately able to express what I mean by this to you. I know that 0's and 1's can be akin to neurons firing and activity in the brain akin to a CPU. I am aware of those analogies. What I was trying to impress upon you was that humans are emotional beings. And as such Crash we impart our individual meanings and "content" on to our subject matter. So when you see a tree, or someone says tree, or you read the word tree. It contains memorys, images, emotion. A computer is a Turing device. It writes a 1 and erases a 0. This data is not the same "content" as what a human understands is a tree. Thats the best I can explain my position.

Drop it into the "Human Intellgence" topic, if you want. I think that you need to establish that a human brain isn't a Turing machine, and that the kind of content that you're referring to can't be represented as digital data. I realize that. But emotions stem from inherently physical responses - glands, etc. - and therefore I contend that they could be simulated.

Suppose there exists some algorithm that underlies the entirety of the human propensity to acquire mathematical beliefs on the basis of proof. That is, suppose the entire notion of proof has been formalized into a single definite and specified algorithm. This algorithm would be such that when given a selection of mathematical formulas that code arithmatical propositions, it will output a 1 (for humanly believable on the basis of proof), or a 0 (not humanly believable) in a finite time. Call this algorithm A.Since this algorithm must be able to model elementary arithmetic, we know that we can construct a Gdel proposition for which A will not return an output value at all in a finite time as long as A is consistent. Since we as humans can know the Gdel statement to be true, yet since algorithm A cannot return an output in a finite time for that statement, we can conclude from this contradiction that A does NOT in fact entirely underlie human mathematical reasoning, and that no such algorithm can.That is a brief synopsis of J.R. Lucas' (and more recently, Roger Penrose's) argument against the computability of human reasoning. It rides upon 3 assumptions that cannot all be simultaneously true. Namely:

Pick at least one of these to be false, because at least one of them must be.This post is largely excerpted from bits and pieces of Yesterdays Algorithm by William Seager, and I highly recommend it. In that paper the author covers the vulnerabilities of this argument a bit more thoroughly. Basically, the argument doesn't show that human A.I. is strictly impossible, but that it is impossible to know if it has ever been truly acheived. In other words, we could try and try to build an artificial human intelligence -- and we might even succeed -- but we would never really know if we had actually accomplished it.