Wigner's Friend, the existence of the immaterial soul and death of materialism

I don’t think Matt has ever said God is like the number 3. But here is the thing, You think God is spirit. We agree on this. Did God create man in his own image? If yes, then we too are in some part at least, spirit. That is the immaterial soul. If no, God didn’t create us in his image, then

  1. why does the Scripture say something so false, like we were created in his image?

Genesis 1:27 So God created mankind in his own image , in the image of God he created them

  1. Why does the Bible say that we will worship God in spirit, when in fact we are matter?

John 4:23-24 Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. 24 God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.

Just sayin, it seems difficult to worship in spirit when we don’t have one?

I must disagree about Jesus’ resurrected body being spirit. The physical body would have still been in there if all that resurrected was spirit. If it was spirit, it couldn’t have offered this:

Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe

If the resurrected body was immaterial spirit, that would have been evident to the disciples. And the women clasped his feet. Surely they would have noticed that he was nothing physical if this wasn’t a bodily resurrection: Matthey 27,9

9 Suddenly Jesus met them. “Greetings,” he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshiped him.

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Preach it, gbob!

Oh, man, I ain’t no preacher lol, just a geophysicist trying to make sense of this world. Trying to use observational facts to the best of my ability.

Nowhere does this say that they believe “that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications.” (google definition of materialist) Naturalists say things like this because they think the scientific worldview defines the limits of reality. It is like Carl Sagan’s famous claim that if isn’t measurable then it is veridically worthless equating truth itself to the methods of science. I quite understand that it sounds very similar because they do not believe in anything spiritual. The point is that they have shifted their metaphysics and if you want to combat them effectively you need you shift your tactics to match this.

Darn right. The problem is they changed the presupposition. Its not that everything is matter anymore. Its that the scientific worldview describes the limit of reality itself. The new presupposition is just as wrong as the old one.

And thus you play into the hands of their new strategy, which is to show that science has a better understanding of the “immaterial” than religion ever did.

Yup.

Nope. I am not buying the pagan ideas of Plato and Matt which equates the conceptual world of the mind with the spiritual and how he defines “immaterial.” That is Neo-Patonism not Christianity. And with Matt’s preoccupation with appearances I very much doubt that what “created in God’s image” means to him is ANYTHING like what it means to me. To me it means that God’s infinite actuality is reflected in our infinite potentiality so that we are capable of receiving all that God has to give in a never-ending relationship called eternal life.

Paul says that we have one in 1 Cor 15 “If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body.” I am just not buying this whole pagan immaterial spiel.

Yep, that is indeed a problem with your pagan immaterial spirituality, requiring you to discard the words of Paul in 1 Cor 15 in order to accept the stories of the resurrected Jesus. But I don’t have that problem.

I wonder what counts for you as a “materialist’. I’m not religious and I don’t find any use for a supernatural category. But I don’t believe consciousness or our minds are entirely explainable in terms of brains, biology and physics. I do believe there is no consciousness without brains but the consciousness they generate are not just more dominos in a deterministic cosmos. I do think free will such as it is arises with consciousness, at least once that becomes sophisticated enough. I suspect you are imagining materialists as being more limited than need be, much the way many online atheists glibly assume Believers are moronic and superstitious. I think we are all better off to address the best cases that can be made for positions we don’t share.

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You might not buy it Mitch, although quantum says consciousness is apart from and unbound by the laws of physics and that is pretty much the definition of immateriality. Bell’s theorem requires free will, and even science it self requires free will. Free Will means a Will that is not determined and the only way that can exist is if it isn’t subject to the laws of physics.

The only escape from Free Will seen in Bell’s theorem is to assume a superdeterminism in which everything that happens was determined at the Big Bang. It was determined that you would hold the position you do, that I would hold the position I do, and that all of our science experiments would give the results they do. Thus, the experiments don’t tell us about nature, they just tell us what was predetermined. Further the universe has to be in conspiracy to make Bell’s theorem come out the way it does. In that way and that way alone, called Superdeterminism, can free will be avoided. But as Wiki said:
The implications of superdeterminism, if it is true, would bring into question the value of science itself by destroying falsifiability, as Anton Zeilinger has commented:

[W]e always implicitly assume the freedom of the experimentalist… This fundamental assumption is essential to doing science. If this were not true, then, I suggest, it would make no sense at all to ask nature questions in an experiment, since then nature could determine what our questions are, and that could guide our questions such that we arrive at a false picture of nature. A. Zeilinger, Dance of the Photons , Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2010, p. 266

and others say the same thing:

In any scientific experiment in which two or more variables are supposed to be randomly selected, one can always conjecture that some factor in the overlap of the backward light cones has controlled the presumably random choices. But, we maintain, skepticism of this sort will essentially dismiss all results of scientific experimentation. Unless we proceed under the assumption that hidden conspiracies of this sort do not occur, we have abandoned in advance the whole enterprise of discovering the laws of nature by experimentation.” (Shimony A, Horne M A and Clauser J F, “Comment on the theory of local beables”, Epistemological Letters , 13 1 (1976), as quoted in Jan-Åke Larsson, “Loopholes in Bell inequality tests of local realism”, J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 47 (2014))

There is no way this can be emphasized too much. Freedom of the human experimenter means that he is free from the laws of nature to choose his own path. Such freedom means his consciousness is not subject to the laws of physics. That is what it means to be free. That means consciousness has to be immaterial because all material things are subject to the laws of physics. This is the great self-defeating conundrum of materialistic science. And further, this isn’t pagan belief, it is scientific fact.

Ignore this fact if you want but ignoring facts is not a good habit to get into.

Well perhaps the simplest way to define materialism is by saying what it prohibits: Based on the beliefs illustrated by the several quotes I’ve given above, materialists insist that everything in the universe is composed of physical/material stuff–whether matter, energy, dark matter, dark energy, very tiny strings, quantum fields, etc. There simply cannot be anything that is nonphysical, end of discussion. And so with our minds, our thoughts and emotions and hopes and dreams and abstract thoughts–all those things are, literally, matter in motion.

By contrast, I am saying that things like mathematics are nonphysical. Philosophers and naturalists will talk all day about what such things are, but I am not saying what they are. I’m just saying what they’re not: they’re not physical. And by implication, neither are we.

Mitch, you keep giving stuff philosophical names and then insisting that we’re talking about philosophy. By contrast, I want to ignore all such talk and make a simple observation: we don’t know what phenomena such as mathematics is, but we do know what it’s not. It’s not physical. The scientific establishment zealously and stubbornly disagrees with that conclusion, and then starts giving everything a bunch of philosophical names and explanations.

Hi Matt. I agree with everything you say up to this last sentence, which says more than I think you actually want to convey: certainly my big right toe is material, and that is part of me. What I think you are trying to conclude is that some aspects of who we are are not physical. And I would agree.

Quantum physics doesn’t say any such thing… sounds like your pseudoscience philosophy books.

Incorrect on both counts. I believe in free will but your claims are just not true.

Bell’s theorem requires correlations between the measurement of entangled particles to obey a certain inequality if the results are determined by hidden variables and the accepted premises of the scientific worldview are correct. Testing this discovers that the inequality is violated which means that the measurements are not determined by any variables within the accepted premises of the scientific worldview.

Your claim about science requiring free will sounds a lot like similar abundant claims that the time delay discovered between when certain decisions are made and our awareness of those decisions means that there is no free will. People are always trying to use science to prop up their philosophical and religious beliefs. I prefer to acknowledge when my beliefs are subjective conclusions and not indulge in such pseudo-scientific justifications like a used car salesman.

As an incompatibilist I certainly agree that determinism is not compatible with authentic free will. On the other hand, I think that free will ironically also requires the laws of nature and thus free will only happens in the interaction between the determinate and the indeterminate. Only that way can this apparent contradiction be real, where we are both the cause of our action and yet free at the same time. The one thing I am absolutely sure of is that throwing in a non-physical cause is entirely inadequate to rescue the concept of free will from its philosophical inconsistencies.

Your talk of Bell’s theorem reminds me of the early advertisements for chiropractics claiming that it could cure any illness – claiming way too much, to the point of absurdity!

Like I have said before, the fact that we agree on our conclusions does not mean that I will ever agree with your arguments. Just because a conclusion is true doesn’t mean an argument made for that conclusion is objectively sound.

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Mitch, obviously you pay no attention to the statements from physics literature I have provided with regard to Bell’s theorem. And equally obviously, you never seem to show that you have read anything on quantum in a long long time, Thus, I don’t know what to say to you when you just ignore what I put in front of you. I guess you are not interested in learning anything other than that which you already believe. Zeilinger is a leading luminary in physics. If you want to call what he says is propping up religious beliefs, then clearly you don’t know Zeilinger.

Secondly, You raised this issue: “the time delay discovered between when certain decisions are made and our awareness of those decisions means that there is no free will.”
Since I already addressed those experiments in my post on Bell’s theorem (I mentioned the names of the researchers involved, and clearly you don’t know their names, meaning clearly you haven’t actually read anything I have written. That is your right, but it is also my right to think you have nothing of value to add to the discussion. Given this, I don’t see much reason to waste much more time with you.

Simons, I’m not sure I understand what we disagree about.

Hi Matt,

My point is pedantic (and I think valid), but not worth repeating or trying to further clarify. Essentially, we agree, so I am content to leave it at that. I do appreciate your wading into this thread, and you have done very well in my opinion.

Gordie

Hi Gordie,

Thanks, Gordie, it’s been fun. I must confess that I only just now read your & Gbob’s article Quantum Soul. It’s excellent. I realized that’s where a couple of the quotes you used came from. I could barely keep up with some of the deeper physics discussion, so I kept veering into much more basic issues of physicalism. But please keep fighting for clarity.

Matt

The other day before I had to go for medical scans for a couple of days, it was claimed, erroneously, that Bell’s theorem said nothing about free will. I know it does say we have free will, and free will means we are not pre-determined by physics to set up our experiments in a particular way. It also means our consciousness is something that is not subject to the determinism of physics. I thought I would first point out that even Newtonian physics requires that the scientist have free will. Physicists, Tony Rothman and George Sudarshan wrote a wonderful book Doubt and Certainty where they talk about free will in Classical physics. If scientists lack free will, experimental science is meaningless. They say:

Finally, we might agree with Hamlet: “Find out the cause of this effect / Or rather, say, the cause of this defect.” What the Dane had in mind was the paradox of the Newtonian universe: in a strictly causal world, the existence of causality cannot be established. If every event is determined by every preceding event, then the concept of free will is meaningless, as is the notion of running an experiment, which presupposes that conditions can be varied. Yet, if the experimenter’s very actions are predetermined, then nothing has been varied and no “experiment” has been carried out. To put it another way, one needs a defect in causality to verify causality. That is to say. . .”
“Apparently, Newtonian physics did not clarify all issues.” Tony Rothman and George Sudarshan, Doubt and Certainty, (Reading, Mass.: Perseus Books, 1998), p. 74

Consciousness is the defect in causality. We are not deterministic beings.

Now to Bell’s Theorem. Below are well qualified physicists all saying that Bell’s Theorem assumes free will, contra to the earlier claim:

"Our box-pair demonstration of the encounter with consciousness rests on the assumption that we could have chosen to do an experiment other than the one we actually did, that we have free will . The same is true for our Bell-type experiments demonstrating Einstein’s "spooky actions." The existence of a quantum enigma depends crucially on free will. So let’s talk about free will ." Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, Quantum Enigma, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 172-173

The first is free will. Bell’s analysis only produces his inequality if the two experimenters have genuine freedom to choose how they set their detectors. In an experiment with spins, that means being able to make measurements along axes that they can choose independently. But maybe that isn’t possible. “The idea is that everything could be somehow determined at the beginning,” says Gisin. Perhaps the creation of the particle pairs and the experimenters’ choices are fixed by a vast web of cause and effect set up long ago, in which case the “choices” would be predetermined and beyond anyone’s control. Some fundamental law might mean that these choices always lead to a violation of Bell’s inequalities.
Unsurprisingly, not many physicists go for this idea. So what of the other assumption behind the inequality? ." Buchanan, Mark, 2005. "Double Jeopardy," New Scientist, June 18.p.34

Why don’t they go for it? Because it would mean no experiment means anything at all and we learn nothing about nature with an experiment. If the results are predetermined from the big bang and the experimenter’s action is determined from the big bang, then the very basis of science is undermined because experiments only tell us about what was determined, not what is. Further, the universe must conspire to predestine the violation of Bell’s inequality to make it look like we have free will when we don’t. That is why so many articles talk about superdeterminism requiring a conspiratorial universe. If you want to evade free will, this is the universe you will get, a meaningless one where no science can be conducted–just like in Newtonian physics above. If one choses this option, then why debate its truth or falsity? This view means we take the intellectual positions we do because it was predestined, not because it is a good idea. We don’t have the freedom to know what a good idea is under this superdeterministic view.

The proof of Bell’s inequality is based on the assumption that distant observers can freely and independently choose their experiments. As Bell’s inequality is experimentally violated, it appears that distant physical systems may behave as a single, nonlocal, indivisible entity. This apparent contradiction is resolved. It is shown that the "free will" assumption is, under usual circumstances, an excellent approximation. Asher Peres, "Existence of "Free Will" as a Problem of Physics" Foundations of Physics, VoL 16, No. 6, 1986, p.573

In order to be more specific about the errors in their results, we will first present our own proof of Bell’s theorem and discuss its assumptions, emphasizing aspects of freedom and control, and then turn to a refutation of the arguments of Hess and Philipp." R.D. Gill, et al, Comment on “Exclusion of time in the theorem of Bell” by K. Hess and W. Philipp." Europhysics Preprint p. 3 https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/33227435/0204169v1.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1558742264&Signature=VwRfDAaGH8uJbZdUOsG8GSBd2mQ%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DComment_on_Exclusion_of_time_in_the_theo.pdf

"To be sure, the criterion in question acquires its whole significance from the implicit assumption that our free will is something real." B d’Espagnat, The concepts of Influences and of Attributes as seen in Connection with the Bell Theorem, p. 14 http://cds.cern.ch/record/124059/files/lpth-80-17_001.pdf

One may not want to accept that our conscious beings are something special, not subject to the deterministic laws of physics, that is certainly a choice one can make, but just know, physical determinism is the death knell of science, both classical and quantum. Bell’s theorem is widely recognized for showing that we have free will.

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