Another way to use our minds, Richard Rohr on Unknowing and Christianity

Evolution knows what it’s doing.

That skirts too close to the naturalistic fallacy for me.

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So it should!

[I’m using the figures of speech of personification, its pathetic fallacy subset, metaphor and prosopopoeia: Speaking of an abstract concept as if it were a person capable of speech or thought. As in history will judge us.]

Tribalism is obviously naturally selected due to the advantages it confers. Along with our other that’ll do biases.

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Sure seems odd to me.

I can’t tell if @T_aquaticus is the one who suggested the law of the excluded middle isn’t actually a law, but I somewhat agree. I think that and the appeal to Occam’s razor are sorts of justification often reached for when one is running on rationality alone. They’re often but far from always true.

My main point is that if reality violates some law then it isn’t reality that is wrong. We didn’t throw out the observations of the precession in Mercury’s orbit because they violated Newton’s Laws of Gravitation.

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I quoted what he wrote to Vinnie and identified the thread he made the statement in. So no law in the universe is always true?

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Or to go for a more sociological view - tribalism in and of itself may be a bit of a neutral concept, or even a good thing if compared with rampant individualism. If my only concerns are for myself or just my own immediate family, then to look beyond that to the concerns of a wider tribe would actually be a moral improvement! It’s when tribalism runs amok and becomes a limiter to our concerns rather than helping us broaden our scope of care.

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Sure provisionally at least until we know more.

When a particle is in superposition within a quantum computer it represents both true and false at the same time. It is both.

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You were incorrect elsewhere when you said that, you’re incorrect here. [@Vinnie ] You’re now making the same category error:

A qubit in superposition isn’t ‘true and false.’ It’s neither. Superposition is a quantum state that contains amplitudes for both classical outcomes, but logical truth values don’t apply until measurement. Quantum mechanics doesn’t violate the Law of Non-Contradiction.

Erwin Schrödinger proposed the “cat in a box” thought experiment precisely to highlight what he saw as the absurdity of applying quantum mechanics’ principles, specifically the Copenhagen interpretation of superposition, to macroscopic (everyday) objects. He was not endorsing the idea but using it as a critique.

His goal was to use a reductio ad absurdum argument to challenge scientists who suggested a system could be in multiple contradictory states (e.g., both decayed and not decayed) until observed. By linking a subatomic event to the life or death of a cat, he aimed to show how counterintuitive and illogical that interpretation became when applied to a visible, real-world object that is clearly either alive or dead, not both simultaneously.

In his 1935 paper, he essentially intended the thought experiment as a form of satire to provoke critical thought about the completeness of quantum theory and the nature of reality and measurement. The fact that it has become an iconic, though often misunderstood, symbol of quantum strangeness is a historical irony.”

Just a general reflection regarding this specific talk / transcript of Rohrs …

Rohr’s greatest strength is in the questions pertaining to humanities / relationships / religion - philosophy. You can tell he appreciates the sciences and their contribution into all this - apparently the subject of the conference he was at for this talk - but one can tell just by listening to him that science isn’t his strength, and he can’t stray too far in that direction without beginning to sound more like some of our occasional bible-numerology enthusiasts here rather than somebody who knows what he’s talking about. But his insights into humanity - and especially our religious proclivities are so acute and spot-on that it’s easy for me to forgive him any scientific gaffes (none of which seem all that glaring to me in any case. - He knows it’s not his strong spot.)

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@MarkD Still think the cat in the box can be alive and dead somewhere? :rofl:

Going back to the double slit experiment, the electron or photon passes through both slits at the same time and produces the interference pattern.

That’s just an argument from incredulity.

That just seems like a red herring to me.

No one thinks that since the cat is big enough that decoherence takes over. The cat was supposed to be a stand in for particles capable of achieving superposition for a meaningful amount of time.

We don’t know – any one of them might turn out to be a special case of something more subtle.

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Why else would the Cheshire Cat be just a grin?

Spooky laws at a distance, eh?

I once read a novel where one character asks that, and another responds, “Only if distance is real”.

[Now, that’s spooky.]

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