There are inaccuracies in this video. Here is the first of what he said which is wrong.
He said, we cannot even assign physicality between measurements.
This is incorrect. The correct statement is that we cannot always assign measurement values to an object before a measurement. What this person fails to understand is that this is about incompatible measurements. Let’s take an example…
If you measure the spin of an election in a particular direction, then you get either an up or down result in that direction. If we now consider measurement of that electron in a perpendicular direction then we know that the result of such a measurement will be up 50% of the time and down 50%. This is not simply a matter of not knowing which it “actually” is, but that the spin of the electron really isn’t either up or down in that direct. But this DOES NOT mean that we cannot assign any physicality to the spin of the electron between measurements. Quite the contrary we know exactly what the spin of that electron is because we just measured it. and if we repeat our measurement in that same direction we will get the same result. We cannot assign an up or down value to the spin in the perpendicular direction because that measurement is not compatible with the previous measurement. And we know that the measured spin in the first direction is a superposition of up and down spins in the perpendicular direction.
I will add more as I watch more of the video…
As for the claim of Bohr… “no phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon” This is not a result of physics but is a claim of the philosophy of logical positivism which is has fallen out of favor.
In the next discussion of Schrodinger’s cat this person makes a false equivocation between measurement and observation. It is quite clear from our experiments that observation by conscious observers have no effect whatsoever on these experiments and it only the measuring device that matters. Thus the decision with Schrodinger’s cat occurs when the measuring device decides whether to release the poison or not, and thus there is no superposition of cats or scientists. How this happens is a different discussion which I can explain if you like.
BTW in the wider discussion which he starts the video with about whether reality is objective or subjective, my position is that it is both. We have excellent evidence that there is an objective aspect to reality but no evidence that reality is exclusively objective.
Clearly this is not the case. In fact, one of the things I say quite frequently is that science requires objective observation but life requires subjective participation. The conclusion is obvious: science is utterly inadequate for the living of our lives.
??? All I can come up with for making sense of this is New Zealand ???
P.S. I am not really finding anything in the video or what you said that has relevance to what I said about being the god of your own dream.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
123
What is total free-will? Can you point to it? Is there a TED Talk that shows it? How is it allowed?
Absolutely. How can we grow without pain? It seems that consequent to pain, we struggle and we gain strength, insight, motivation and resolve. So I should have delineated the thought-experiment to become the option of creating a world without sin, but otherwise to continue to have bad behavior. The more I think about it, the grayer that thought becomes. How could we define sin? Where would we draw the line from clear sin to borderline bad-actors? Never mind…
Have you finished watching the video? Are there any spacetime slices where God is not? He is present in all and all are the present to him. He is omnipresent and omnitemporal, nothing hyphenated. Anyone who thinks otherwise is the dreamer.
Nope. And if you expect me to watch the final part answering questions regarding other videos, then forget it.
I have already agreed God is omni-temporal, even though the word is not in the dictionary and I hyphenate it because it complains of a spelling error when I do not. But your question is trying to sneak in an annihilation of the temporal ordering of the universe. Logic requires that God choose between knowing the future (as a singularity of events rather than as a superposition) and participating in the present. And that applies separately to every point in space-time with the Minkowsky conical division at that point between past and future.
Continuing to watch the video I see that he continues with the two previously mentioned errors which make nonsense of his philosophical conclusions. Consciousness has no impact and even the measuring devices do not create reality but only alter it to one of the states compatible with that particular measurement. And measurements are just an interactions involving large numbers of particles (conscious observers are not required) and these kinds of interactions happen all the time without any scientists involved. As for the participatory universe… I certainly believe that living organisms participate in their own creation, but no scientists did not cause the big bang by observing it.
Yes. A nice way of saying you’re insane. Joking about my own comments.
I think I did a poor job in agreeing. Our functional intentions may be subjective, but reality insists. Proper repeatable test results beat theory.
I was equating dream to subjectivity. It seems we agree about the functional usefulness of subjectivity. The dream you mentioned looked like another word for subjectivity. e.g. God had a subjective purpose.
I’m not understanding what you mean by God of his dream if not a subjective purpose. Trying to make sense of what you mean.
The difference between reality and a dream is two things:
Reality has logical coherence where the end is not independent of the means. In dreams you can do things by whatever means because it doesn’t have to make any sense. So only the dreamer god can do whatever you say by whatever means you care to dictate. A God who creates things which are real has to know how.
The dream has no independent existence but vanishes whenever the dreamer turns his attention elsewhere. Thus I described this as being like a carpenter who cannot even make a table which stands on its own the way it is supposed to.
And the point is that we are all gods of our own dreams. So a dreamer god is nothing impressive or special. And so I have no reason to have any special regard for such a trivial god who does nothing real anyway.
So the spacetime slice concept annihilates temporal ordering. It sure looks like you’re stuck in your own present and present limited concept and denying some of the realities of relativity. And God is really not omnipresent. How can he be omnipresent in only one slice? Dream on.
Nope. Your question does. Those slices are not places in space-space time.
Omnipresence means that He can be found in all locations of space-time not that he reduces space-time slices to single places to be, as your question implies. God doesn’t have to reduce the superposition of possibilities in such slices – it is point by point according to the Minkowsky structure of space-time.
Only according to your pseudoscientific subordination of science to serve your own theological rhetoric.
Omnipresent and omni-temporal only means God exists at all places and times and not that God annihilates the spatial-temporal ordering. In the same way I am present in a portion of the past, present, and future but this does not mean that future is already written for me either.
I’d love to know what you think about the issue. It has been a very controversial topic among intellectuals. Sam Harris, among others, is adamant that not only do we not have free-will, we do not even have the illusion of free will. As Sam Harris says, “Free will touches morality, law, politics, religion, public policy, intimacy, guilt and personal accomplishment. It should not be viewed as the simple “free to make my own choice”. And without it, sinners and criminals are nothing more than poorly calibrated clockwork and should not be punished”. Can any of us control what our next thought will be? If not, then where is the free will?
If any of us were atom-for-atom the same as a sociopath, we would be the same as them. We could not see the world differently than they do. Every choice we make is made as a result of preceding causes, thus are not truly choices. Even our thoughts and intentions arise from a background that we cannot and do not control. We confuse it with what we know as “I could have acted other than what I did, thus I had free will”. We have conscious choices for sure, but everything that makes up those choices is determined by prior causes outside your control. We are not really “choosing” what we want in the first place. There is a difference between something appearing in our consciousness and something originating in our consciousness.
I have read that there are MRI studies (I’m looking for them now) that tell us our brains indicate our choices milliseconds before we are aware of our choice. None of us are aware of our next mental state until it occurs, so how is that free-will?
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
133
The latter studies prove nothing. I agree with Harris. Completely. But until we address injustice, we gotta take socially dangerous victims of it off the streets.
All it takes is a single instance of a single person originating an action for determinism to be false.
When Harris talks about how we are all capable of overcoming the subject-object distinction, I just think to myself, he has no idea what he is talking about.
We can steer our thoughts if we want to. I dare say most do not recognize that they are just habitually thinking the same sorts of things over and over and maybe even have become addicted to a flawed frame of reference or are at least comfortable in it. Just like I can steer my eyes away from the girly covers of magazines at the checkout lines at the store, if I catch myself and realize I am being anxious about something, I can intentionally remember the most frequent mandate in the Bible (“Do not be afraid”, “Fear not!”, “Be anxious for nothing”, “Fret not”, etc.), and then I can intentionally remember who is sovereign over time and circumstance and that he is trustworthy, based on history, others’ experiences and my own.
The funny thing about Harris’ determinism is, IMO, his claim that the only difference between Sam Harris the nice guy and Sam Harris a serial killer is “Luck”.
Sam Harris. I don’t have the exact quote from The End of Faith in front of me, but I found this and it gets pretty close:
“Perhaps the most important thing one can discover through the practice of meditation is that the “self”—the conventional sense of being a subject, a thinker, an experiencer living inside one’s head—is an illusion.”
That reminds me of the Descartes joke where he goes into a bar and orders a drink. When he finishes it, the barkeep asks him if he would like another. René answers, “I think not”… and vanishes in a puff of logic.
How do we not even have the illusion of free will? I know I’m deluded, but I sure have the impression that I have choices, and that I am responsible for them.
