I see your point. I would say that science is right to discard physical determinism, but for a different reason than QC. The primary reason for this is Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which proves that the universe and God are not Absolute.
Well that certainly has some bearing on the believably of theism. It not only opens the door to the possibility of God creating the universe, but is quite a big “I told you so” to the scientists who have been presuming a steady-state universe. But its only contribution to the question of causality is the suggestion that there could and likely is some kind of first cause to the universe as a whole. It does not, however, in any way favor free will or theism over Deism.
Without QM, you are stuck with determinism and Deism, which basically left my father with indifferent agnosticism. For why should we even care if a Deist God exists when He is rather irrelevant to the living of our lives?
Trying to wrap my head around the difference between a metaphysical and an epistemological dualism. I believe we are talking about mind and matter in either case. But the suggestion seems to be that how we form and act on intentions may not be commensurable with how objects act on one another. Thinking about how we explore what we know about those things takes us down different paths. We can’t trace back anything in our experience of intentionality which stems from a physical cause. And when we trace back the determinative forces which result in a physical effect at no point do we find subjective processes. The paths don’t intersect. We have one way to think about our subjective activity and another to think about the interactions of objects, but those paths don’t seem to meet.
Am I in the ballpark?
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As I have said before we need to stop beating the dead horse of dualism and start exploring a triune worldview.
The perception of dualism is intrinsic to the monad of reality. But if course there is no mind-body problem, no battle of good and evil, nothing in the material that requires the non material. And there is nothing in vain philosophy or neo-orthodoxy that can pretend wiggle room otherwise.
God is nothing like the God of our stories, our hymns, our declarations, our empty claims. But one. He’s nothing like the neo-orthodox economic and immanent trinity either. He’s like Jesus. Qualitatively. And not as well. Nothing like. Qualitatively. As well.
How dual.
God is not a liar. This is what you are saying when you say that God, Who you say is a Monad, appears to be dualistic, and otherwise different than God is.
GOD IS WHO GOD IS and there is no evidence that God is Simple, a Monad. It is easy as 1., 2, 3. God is not simply One. God is not a divided Two. God is Three and One.
Whatever you say Roger. Whatever it is. What is it by the way? Is there more than one supreme being actualizing everything? Who said anything about God being a Simple divided Two rather than an undivided Three? And what is a triune worldview?
[As I posted elsewhere, ‘There is no compromise. Only desire can have it both ways: nihilism and God, the greatest duality. There is nothing but blind dishonesty in perverting philosophy to fill the void between them. Faith stands alone. And is nailed up by and to meaningless reality. And transforms it. Dasein gives hope beyond hope.’]
Please read my essay on Academia.edu, Using The One And The Many to Reconcile Theology, Philosophy, and Science.
In some sense we are trying solve the same problem, but come at it from very different perspectives and very different results. You come to Reality from the view of Reason and end up with the Absolute. I come to Reality from the point of view of the Logos and end up with Trinity.
Please read the essay to see why I think my way is better.
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It’s better for you Roger, which is fine. We have very different epistemologies, as you say, I start with sense data and reason and have a parallel track in desire. As they travel across a warped surface they converge, overlap, but only in one miniscule area. I desire what you do. Reason. To exist. Transcendent purpose. The Trinity well may be ontic, immanent as well as economic, noetic. But we need to be honest about what the incarnation was and very few can be.
Every time I look at this thread title I find the three subjects of it nihilistically meaningless, sense-less, like Bertrand Russell’s God. But I still want to believe. Because I don’t want to cease to exist. And the only hope, beyond hope, is Jesus, as testified by the historic Church. I’m wired to believe in my unbelief. Is that God’s gift of faith? I hope so.
Duality is a matter of perception. Only. I do tend to take the mystery of the Trinity as a given. We’re not so far apart.
Bro. @Klax,
No doubt I start from the positive viewpoint that God and God’s Creation are Good.
The three subjects of this thread are free will, the soul, and the problem of evil. My guess is that you find them meaningless and senseless is because there is no place for freedom in your worldview.
If God is all-powerful, then I have no power and can make no choices. If God is One, then I must be One with God. This logic is undeniable, but it is not true.
If God is all-powerful, and God is. If God is One and God is. If God is Good, and God is, then God’s world must be good and it isn’t. God’s world contains evil. These are the questions I raise in my essay God and Freedom on Academia. edu
So what is the answer. 1. Hood is not the absence of evil. It is Love which is a positive force. Love/good overcomes evil, so in that sense it needs evil to exist.
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Finitude is the source of what we regard as evil., but finitude is the source of who we are. We are born so we must die. We are finite, so we are lonely, afraid, etc.
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We have choices as to how to overcome our finitude. Our finitude is not evil, but the ways we choose to overcome it are evil or good, depending upon the situation. .Jesus demonstrated that the only right way to overcome our finitude is through love, Love of God as expressed through love of others and self and the environment.
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God made humans and our world finite in God’s power, wisdom, and love because this is the best type of world possible. If God had made humans infinite, then we would be like God and how many Gods do we need or want?
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In the West we think that truth is found by taking things apart. In Biblical thinking truth is found by bringing things together, by reconciliation.
Duality, or the fact that Reality is Many as well as One, is more than pere4cption. It is a basic aspect of Reality.
If you cannot really believe that the universe is a monad, but must be more than a Simple One, that is God’s gift of faith, that is the mystery of the Trinity that you need to build on.
God bless yao and keep you.
I really do not think so. A universe which is based on relativist or relational boundaries is different from that with absolutist boundaries. Free will is not dependent on the physical, because the physical cannot think. Free will is dependent upon the biological which has been mediated by relational flexible boundaries of the relational. God is able to make a way even when there appears to be no way.
On the contrary with thinking machines which can beat our best at all our thinking games, it is demonstrable that the physical can most certainly think in every way that we can measure. So I am sorry but your claim is demonstrably wrong.
As for free will, this is not about thinking but life and I disagree with this disconnect you make between free will and the physical, since I think free will is why the physical universe was created. How can an omnipotent being create something with free will? That is something which puzzles many people for it seems like a contradiction. I think it is only possible by creating an existence that operates independently according to a set of fixed rules complicated enough to support the phenomenon of self-organization. This enables the existence of life where you have systems that do things entirely for their own reasons. Thus free will apart from God only exists because of the physical universe and that is why God created it. But how can it be free if it operates according to a fixed set of rules? This is because QM shows that this set of fixed rules is not a causally closed system. Some things don’t happen according to these fixed rules. Thus because of the physical we have both freedom and autonomous causality at the same time which is precisely what is required for free will.
Thinking machines can think in a simple way, but they cannot build themselves, they cannot program themselves, they cannot turn themselves on, and they cannot really evaluate the information that they provide. You misunderstand the connection between the rational and the physical, they are related, because they are both relational, but they are not the same. A muscle and a synapse are both physical “in nature,” but in form and function they are rational or thinking. .
Indeed that is a very good question. See above. Please read mu essay, God and Freedom on Academia.edu to understand my point of view.
All incorrect. They most certainly can do all those things. So what can you say about them which is true? Well I don’t think they are conscious or alive. And what is the difference between living things and machines anyway? Machines are tools made for an end – a product of design. Living things are a product of self-organization and are thus an end in themselves, deciding for themselves their own purpose in existence.
Anyway the point here is that this elevation of rationality and thinking as the ultimate human achievement is a mistake. All rationality requires is following a system of rules and this is all physical things do. The universe is in many ways one big giant computer constantly solving a complex system of equations. There is nothing special about thinking or rationality at all. That is not what makes us human or special. In this regard, philosophers have been looking in the wrong place.
You only had to read on to see that I have my own answer to that question.
For a guy who never responded to a the vast number of physicists I quoted saying you were wrong, you seem to continue to ignore the opinions of the likes of Bohr, Wigner, von Neuman, Rodolph Peierls, Tony Roth, Penrose, and on and on.
Even the modern Quantum Bayesian interpretation says quantum describes the state of knowledge of the individual.
“A quantum particle can be in a range of possible states. When an observer makes a measurement, she instantaneously "collapses"the wave function into one possible state. QBism argues that this collapse isn’t mysterious. It just reflects the updated knowledge of the observer. She didn’t know where the particle was before the measurement. Now she does.” Katherine Taylor, “A Private View of Quantum Reality,” Quantum Magazine, https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-bayesianism-explained-by-its-founder-20150604/
It takes a consciousness to have knowledge. Rocks don’t have knowledge. lol
And this has nothing whatsoever to do with what I said.
Incorrect. People acquire knowledge from rocks, and stars, and books. Thus all of these things have knowledge for us even though they have no consciousness whatsoever.
I was just pointing out something new, that has arisen in the last few years. Thought you might want to learn something new. Guess I was wrong.
Lol, Really?? I must confess this gets more bizarre. If we can acquire knowledge from rocks, then let’s set a rock at the front of a class room and let the kiddies acquire knowledge from it!!!
You are conflating knowledge with information. When one conflates these two concepts they get twisted like you are about knowledge coming from rocks. Information is a mathematical formula–Shannon’s entropy -Sum(P(i)log(P(i)), where P(I) are the probabilities of the character set. Shannon called the surprisals. Information does not even have to have semantical meaning. It can be gibberish.
Shannon said as much in his paper that started information theory.
“The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have _meaning-, that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.” C. E. Shannon, " A Mathematical theory of Communication" The Bell System Technical Journal, 27(1948):3:379-423, p. 379
WEaver who was a cofounder of Information theory said: (one of the advantages of being extremely curious about things all my life is that I read stuff like this for fun)
“The word information, in this theory, is used in a special sense that must not be confused with its ordinary usage. In particular, information must not be confused with meaning.
"In fact, two messages, one of which is heavily loaded with meaning and the other of which is pure nonsense, can be exactly equivalent, from the present viewpoint, as regards information. It is this, undoubtedly, that Shannon means when he says that 'the semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering aspects.’ But this does not mean that the engineering aspects are necessarily irrelevant to the semantic aspects.
"To be sure, this word information in communication theory relates not so much to what you do say, as to what you could say. That is, information is a measure of one’s freedom of choice when one selects a message. If one is confronted with a very elementary situation where he has to choose one of two alternative messages, then it is arbitrarily said that the information associated with this situation, is unity. Note that it is misleading (although often convenient) to say that one or the other message conveys unit information. The concept of information applies not to the individual messages (as the concept of meaning would), but rather to the situation as a whole, the unit information indicating that in this situation one has an amount of freedom of choice, in selecting a message, which it is convenient to regard as a standard or unit amount.” Warren Weaver, "Some Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication, in Claude E. Shannon and W. Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949), p. 8, 9
Such information is due to an arrangement of matter. Landauer proved that information is physical, not some etherial thing, and it is the opposite of thermodynamic entropy. When you erase your computer, that is when entropy goes up from the disk part of the computer–it is the loss of information.
Meaning and knowledge are interrelated. Knowledge includes theorization about causation, and the connection between disparate observations. I gained knowledge when I found out that Arabia drained to the Mediterranean 5.3 myr ago and the Pison which is said to drain Havilah (in Arabia), could be real. I might have gained some Shannon information as well, but that is a separate thing from knowledge. Example. Why were the early US colonists against the kind of taxation England was putting on to them? Because many of them had fled Ireland which had had the same kind of tax treatment and it killed the Irish flax industry impoverishing the Irish and they fled here. That is knowledge The Theory of Evolution is knowledge. It is not to be found contained in rocks. It is the human who comes up with that theory which didn’t exist until Anaximander in 600 bc first stated that case. All those rocks sitting on earth with fossils never once thought of evolution. Nor did they communicate evolution to the human. The information contained in the rock is due to the arrangement of atoms and molecules inside the rock. Yes, there is lots of information in that rock, but it isn’t knowledge…
In case you haven’t noticed, not a single book has ever been produced without a conscious human writing it. So, any knowledge obtained from a book, is due to a conscious human mind that wrote the book. Rocks don’t write memoirs of their existence.
It’s been done.
One big rock.
Many rocks.
Books.
Computers.
TV.
They can and indeed already have taught classes.
Yep. Same thing.
Books are a means by which people put knowledge in animate objects. But no just because people do so doesn’t mean that all things with knowledge must be created by human beings. Rocks ARE a memoir of their existence for those who can read them. And with AI we have demonstrated that computers which are also inanimate objects can discover and teach us new knowledge that nobody has known before.
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