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

Faith & Science Conversation
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Indeed! It is particularly irritating because this all came from someone jumping to an unwarranted conclusions on a disconnected subject – and he does that a lot in so many directions that I am learning to simply ignore him.

This is not about dictionary definitions but about the theory of truth.

Science is an activity not a religion or a philosophy. And science is not the same thing as naturalism, assuming that the scientific worldview define the limits of reality itself. That I am not a naturalist should be abundantly clear by now. Science provide excellent evidence that an objective aspect to reality exists but no evidence whatsoever that reality is exclusively objective. Furthermore this is a question for metaphysics not science. Science has some bearing and implications for metaphysics to be sure but it doesn’t actually address the question of reality and doesn’t have to do so.

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One shouldn’t ignore anyone because:

  1. even the uneducated get some things right and are worth listening to in that regard.
  2. ignoring someone whose views one doesn’t like means one loses the opportunity to see where one’s own ideas are wrong (unless of course one feels one’s ideas are never wrong, then ignoring everyone else is probably a good idea)
  3. No one has all knowledge and interchanges teach us about facts and views we don’t know about.
  4. Debating one’s opinions and views either sharpens one’s arguments or shows they are fallacious.
  5. ignoring data one doesn’t like makes one no better than a yec.

For all of these reasons we all should at least listen to opposing points of view.

I haven’t properly introduced myself here. I don’t do this to brag, it is relevant to correcting some people’s view of me I have a bachelors in physics, but it was a special degree Oklahoma U. offered which required taking most of the course work for a masters, but no thesis, so no MS. Because the job market for physics was so bad when I graduated, I decided to go do Master’s work in Philosophy of Science. I did one year, and I believe this was the best year of my life for learning fundamental issues. Then we found we were going to have a son, we had no money and I found a job as a geophysicist. I started in seismic processing, but that got old, so by age 29, I had 60 people working for me and was in charge of training all the geophysicists Atlantic Richfield hired. By 32 I was an Area geophysicist, kind of a slave task master lol. At 35 when the oil crash came I was laid off, having run afoul of a VP who found herself in charge of who left the organization. Her eyes quickly saw me as a good candidate to get rid of. lol

I started a consulting business and survived the worst industry downturn every for 4 years on my own, and really learned the oil business at that time, and when I came back to work for bigger oil companies, it took a year and I was in charge of South Texas, then Geophysical manager for the Western US. After that they moved me for years to manage the geophysical effort in the Gulf of Mexico which was the most important place the industry was working at that time. I’ve told yall I then went to Scotland as manager, then back to the States as Director of Technology, and then off to China as Exploration director for the country. I then retired and started my own very successful consulting business and invented some new seismic processes with a partner and we started that business as well. Then I retired when the oil price crashed in 2015 and my clients disappeared. I and my teams have been involved in finding 34 oil fields in my 47years in the business with a billion bbl of recoverable oil.

In my 20s I read nothing but geology books, in my 30s, I studied General Relativity and programming, in my 40s I studied anthropology extensively and in my 50s, I got tired of that and did work in history… At one time I had a 4000 volume personal scientific library 95% of which I had read. I had 500 anthro books and 3000 articles, had more physics books than anthro, a nice load of philosophy books, not to mention gobs of geology texts, and some rarer 19th century theology books I picked up while in Scotland. I lost a 3rd of the library when hurricane Allison hit Houston in 2002 and I got rid of it last year so my kids don’t have to clean it out when the cancer gets me.

But, from age 19 on, when I read anything I found interesting I kept the quote–initially on 3x5 index cards, and then in the 80s I computerized them, so I have about 200 megabytes of quotes, factoids and things and views I found interesting, from all those journals and articles over a 50 year life time (about the size of 200 books worth of quotes and they are computer searchable).

I think when I connect data from various places in novel ways, some think, unwarrantedly, that I might be jumping to conclusions.

My interests are very broad. I have over 110 publications (30 of which I would not support any longer), but with Gordon Simons, we have published together in Perspectives on Science and Christian faith, Journal of Theoretical Biology(On eukaryote gene orientation), Journal of Statistics and Planning(Markov models for Eukaryotes) . I have published in The Leading Edge (the main reputable journal on exploration geophysics–subject was gravity) ,and the subjects I have published on include geophysics, geology, history, biology, anthropology, statistics, and information technology and a couple I would say were more philosophical or theological. I also have had 5 patent applications, which were stopped by the policy of the company that bought the company I worked for–one was on Chemistry on how to turn natural gas into useable liquids, and we had tested it–it worked! But that company didn’t do patents; didn’t want them. Oh well.

I’ve been in 34 different countries, including Antarctica and Tibet, and I speak Mandarin which I learned when I lived there. I have lived a very good life, and no one should feel sorry for me for my cancer. Few get to live a life like this.

I am still ignorant of many many things because there are far too many topics for one person to learn in one lifetime. Further, when I open my mouth, I speak like the countryboy from Oklahoma that I am and everyone’s estimation of me drops like a rock. lol

But everyone is free to ignore whoever they want to. lol

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I would not presume to know how the spirit interacts with matter—God is spirit–how does he interact with the world? Or do you say he doesn’t interact with the world and thus is equivalent to Plato’s demiurge?

Classical Christianity believes Jesus Christ is a co-equal with God, who came to earth as a man. God is spirit; presumably pre-natal Jesus was as well. How did he interact with the body of Jesus, or do you think he didn’t? If the spirit, or whatever the part of God Christians believe became Jesus, didn’t interact with his body, then who was it saying and doing all the things that Jesus is claimed to have done?

And if the view is that Jesus was JUST a man, no more, then the Christian theology of salvation is pretty much done for–stick a fork in it.

All these questions you raise are quite interesting but skepticism about the human soul boomerangs back on our theological view of who and what Jesus was. If Jesus was just a man totally like us, then you can be consistent between your scientific and theological views (I am assuming you are a Christian with a general view of Jesus as God. If that is wrong, this argument doesn’t apply).

If neither the spirit of God nor the soul of Jesus can interact with the world because one would have to alter the Dirac equation, then what is the point of being a Christian when it isn’t real? Platonic demiurge, or Bahai agnosticism about any and all knowledge of God is far more likely to be true.

As to the Dirac equation, most people would view quantum uncertainty as a more likely place for God to deal with the world and not leave too much of a record, so the Dirac equation might be well, a bit of a red herring. I will quote Euan Squires again:

" Quantum theory offers at least two possible roles for a ‘God’, where we use this term for a being that is non-physical, non-human, in some sense superhuman, and is conscious. "The first role is to make the ‘choices’ that are required whenever a measurement is made that selects from a quantum system one of the possible outcomes. Such a God would remove the indeterminacy from the world by taking upon himself those decisions that are not forced by the rules of physics. Although expressed in non-traditional terms, this is reasonably in accordance with the accepted role of a God. He would be very active in all aspects of the world, and would be totally omnipotent within the prescribed limits. Prediction of his behaviour from the laws of physics would be impossible (note that we are not permitting any hidden variables in this chapter), although from both the theological and the scientific viewpoint we would want to believe that there were reasons for at least some of the choices: otherwise we would be back with random behaviour and the God would not have played any part. It is interesting to note that this role might even permit ‘miracles’, if we were to regard these as events so highly unlikely that they would be effectively impossible without very specific, and unusual, ‘divine’ choice. For example, according to quantum theory, there must be a small but non-zero, probability that if I run into a wall, then I will pass right through it. This is a special case of the potential barrier experiment and the wavefunction on the left-hand side, corresponding to transmission is never quite zero. Then, however small the probability for transmission might be, a God would be able to select it as the outcome, if he so chose. ”Euan Squires, The Mystery of the Quantum World, 2nd ed., (Bristol: Institute of Physics Publishing, 1994), p.66-67

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Actually gbob, I think Mitch was talking about me. About as often as I am on here (which isn’t very often, but things have slowed down a bit at church) I am challenging the presupposition of materialism. I am fully persuaded that nonphysical phenomenon (such as mathematics, wave functions, the Dirac equation, etc.) saturate the universe, and I am just as fully persuaded that this is not a philosophical conclusion, but rather a scientific one. Materialists do everything they can to make it a philosophical discussion, but all those esoteric words are simply unnecessary.

Thanks for the introduction. Myself, I’m actually a pastor. Back in the heyday of print journalism, I was the chief editor of The Daily Texan at UT Austin–the largest student paper in the country. I did very well and got some nice awards. However, during my last year, we got into a gut-wrenching, 6-month brawl with Neo-Nazis. All 3 networks came to our publishing board meetings, and the University put armed guards in our offices because I had a stack of ransom-note hate mail that included several death threats.

So I burned out, left journalism for good, and went to China. My Chinese is horrendous, but today I’m actually at a Chinese church plant north of Houston now.

The issues we discuss here are important to my students, and I think most of the time what they get confused by is not the facts of science, but rather the meaning of words. So I do my best to stay engaged. And I saw your post and thought it had everything to do with the question of materialism. Thanks for pressing on.

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That’s beautiful! I think that’s exactly what I was talking about when I said it’s not mind-over-matter but rather mind-before-matter. I’m getting that book.

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The point was that I should put up some resistance to you leading me off topic in so many directions. And you should be asking more questions about what other people think about these other issues rather than jumping to convenient conclusions.

You have some… so we found that we do have things in common besides an interest in physics.

My MS in physics did not require a thesis. Mostly it was about doing well on the rather difficult Graduate Record Examination and then taking even more of those graduate level classes I was enjoying so much already. A lot of those were in the math department actually studying numerical methods and topology. And of course, the real point of graduate school are the research projects you work on – In my case these were in theoretical physics. I did do a thesis for my MDIV at a theology school, which is where I did most of my reading on the philosophy of science.

Ah but a lot of that does not come through on the internet. We all have such crosses to bear from the inheritance we have from family. For me it is a bit of a supercilious way of speaking I have from my father and although somewhat invisible to me has come through on the internet well enough for many people to become a little irritated with me. I do hope I have manage to shed a little of that over the years.

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Nope… It was gbob who led me into the theory of truth stuff which MarkD noticed was off topic.

The effort is admirable but when you miss the mark then it tends to do more harm than good.

The correct presupposition is that of naturalism, that the scientific worldview is the limit of reality itself.

Equating mathematics to spirituality is so far off the mark that you do more to reinforce the presupposition of the naturalists than to challenge it.

And that is cool. Despite my MDIV, I lacked the calling.

But tell me… as a pastor, do you really think that mathematics is the substance of spirituality? Or do you think it is possible that your intellectual arguments may be leading a little astray in that area? I often tell people that I think scientists show us one of the greatest examples of faith in modern times – one that religious people would do well to learn from. But that is far cry from seeing it as a spiritual enterprise… unless… surely you do not equate intellectual activities with spirituality.

That makes you a hero in my book!

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Thanks, Matt, for introducing yourself. I am impressed that, as a pastor, you are actively interested in quantum mechanics and philosophy, and about the pernicious affect that materialism has had in science, but in our culture more generally.

When I made the paper “Quantum Soul,” that Glenn and I wrote, available to members of our church forum, a former pastor, now retired, was the first person to request a copy. With his request, he also wrote, “According to a recent ‘Astronomy’ article, some astrophysicists have concluded that there is a “different kind of existence” at the center of a black hole. Intriguing.” He has always been interested in astronomy, but curiously, his sermons seldom included much science content, but could easily have. Whatever he did say about astronomy was always precise and accurate. For my part, I am a retired professor of statistics from UNC-Chapel Hill. I studied physics as an undergraduate and graduate student, and have maintained my interest in the subject, but am nowhere near as knowledgeable about the subject as Glenn. I became a Christian when I was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, and was mentored there, for three years, by a godly professor of mathematics. I am greatly indebted to him.

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you will love it. His book Conscious Mind in the physical world has some interesting quantum arguments based upon math, but a lot of that book is a bit more philosophy, but still interesting. There are articles Squire published that seem to argue for one universal soul, but the book seems more to argue for individual soul. I don’t know what he ended up believing.

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Your encouragement has been very appreciated. I was feeling, as I often do, rather lonely out there. My son is a pastor and I admire those of you who handle that pressure well. I would never want to be one–and I would be an atrocious one anyway so most congregations cheer that I have no aspirations in that direction. lol

What part of China were you in? I was in Beijing but because I could handle conversations I made it to Shanghai, Hang Zhou, Guang Zhou, Cheng Du, She Kou, Shen Zhen, Lhasa, and lots of other places. Leaping Tiger gorge in SW China is the deepest canyon on earth, and I stood at the bottom of it.

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Good clarification, Mitch: I don’t want to equate mathematics with spirituality. However, the rationality that perceives and uses math–I might call that spiritual. But I’ll start just by observing that both must be immaterial.

In my mind, that is almost beyond question. The materialist only retort is to start rambling on about philosophy. But if we just stick to the facts:

  1. Math is objective.
  2. Math is immaterial. And I’ll add here that math and language are, for all practical purposes, one-and-the-same thing. If we could not do one, we could not do the other.
  3. How could the brain perceive things that are immaterial? Of course, it cannot. "If these objects are real but immaterial, in what extrasensory ways does a mathematician perceive them?” asks neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene in his book, The Number Sense.
  4. So if the brain cannot perceive math, then we must not be our brains. We must be just as immaterial as math is. We must be using our brains, in principle, the same way that we use an abacas.

As to what math actually is I haven’t been too concerned. It’s just immaterial words. Now Dehaene is an ardent materialist/monist, and so it’s very revealing that at the end of his book (which is an excellent book, by the way), in the chapter titled “What are numbers?”, he actually insists (“If I insist so strongly on this…”) that we not ask that question. Why not ask it? Is it because otherwise monism and materialism would evaporate? No, it’s because we’d be torturing students with a bunch of monotonous philosophy. It’s very telling that even though he’s not writing a textbook–so there’s no danger of torturing students–he still doesn’t want to talk about it.

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We probably do have more in common that it would appear from our flashing clashing swords.lol One reason things can’t stay totally on one topic is that every part of one’s world view affects other parts. Your view of truth is relevant to how you view metaphysical objects. Thus, if we are discussing things like the soul, it is absolutely necessary to know if someone says those things are absolutely verboten, then that would be interesting to know why? Because one can’t get to the bottom of the soul issue without exploring why one views them that way.

I really would like to hear your response to my post last night on the metaphysical nature of the multiverse. In shortened form:

your view of truth says it should not have metaphysical objects.

metaphysical objects are things we can’t observe.

We cant observe any other universe than the one we live in

Therefore, the existence of the Big Bang requiring a beginning shouldn’t be able to be explained by referring to metaphysical infinitudes of unseen universes

Therefore, the fine tuning of this universe can’t be said to come from a cosmic lottery which is what physicists do.

“A popular way to explain the Goldilocks factor is the multiverse theory. This says that a god’s-eye-view of the cosmos would reveal a patchwork quilt of universes, of which ours is but an infinitesimal fragment. Crucially each patch, or ‘universe’, comes with its own distinctive set of local by-laws. Maybe the by-laws are assigned randomly, as in a vast cosmic lottery. It is then no surprise that we find ourselves living in a patch so well suited to life, for we could hardly inhabit a bio-hostile patch. Our universe has simply hit the cosmic jackpot. Those universes that can’t support life - the vast majority in fact - go unobserved.” Paul Davies, “Laying Down the Laws,” New Scientist, June 30, 2007, p. 30

And he over states his position in the last phrase. It isn’t that ‘the vast majority in fact-go unobserved’, it is that ALL but our universe go unobserved. There is NO other universe we have observed. And if as your deflationism view says, we shouldn’t have metaphysical objects, or in other words we should work only off of what we see. We see exactly, precisely one universe that had a beginning and is incredibly fine tuned.

And interestingly, as often as quantum is claimed to be the most verified theory we have, it also had the biggest missed prediction with regard to the cosmological constant.

How does this apply to the soul? Well, God has something similar to a soul, and the fine tuning can’t easily be explained without reference to the multiverse, which we have taken off the table by your rule of truth.

So, it would be quite kind of you if you would explain why the unseen multiverse is not metaphysical but an unseen God is?

Would it be different if our world were created by an unseen civilization as some suggest? Would they be less metaphysical than God? If so, why so?

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I visited all those places except for Lhasa. I spent 2 years in Shantou, 1 in Shanghai, and 4 in Nanjing. I never made it to Leaping Tiger Gorge. I had planned to visit the 3 Gorges one summer, but we cancelled. And now it’s all under water.

I admire your language skills. I made the mistake of trying to learn Cantonese first. I should have stuck to Mandarine.

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Agreed. The whole idea of a cosmic lottery breaks down at every level, but especially at the broadest level. If we “won the lottery”, then who is running it? Lotteries depend on a massive, well-organized government to work.

Again, the meaning of words matters. The words randomness and chance are only coherent in the context of a much larger dictionary, and they only have meaning in the context of a much larger, non-random universe. If everything is random, then the word loses all meaning, just like if everything is meaningless, then this sentence is pointless. Literally. This is not just semantics. This is basic, coherent, logic.

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Aya, duty calls. I’ll be mostly MIA for the next couple of days :grin:. Y’all have a great weekend!

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I have been thinking about this statement by Mitch. Originally I said he had kinda conceded my point, and in some sense, if what he says is true, he has, but, I want to show a discrepancy between what he says here and the many world’s view of quantum. If consciousness can’t be put into the formalism of quantum theory (which is what I used and what Everett used in his dissertation), then there is no way that Everett could be correct. When the universe splits in two in the Everettian view, it doubles the number of conscious beings, all of whom are duplicated by a quantum process. Here I am closing the jaws of a trap: Mitches view should be published as a strong objection to the Many world’s interpretation of quantum. How can quantum split them if they can’t be described by quantums formalism? Some how, I think it would be rejected in review.

The serious point is that all other views of quantum think that consciousness IS modelable by quantum. That IS the consensus view. Over and over one can see statements that consciousness is a physical process of the brain, subject to the laws of physics. While we may not know the details quantum formalism is said to apply to consciousness. If it doesn’t, then Many Worlds is disproven.

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I will have to point you to this Monday (my sisters family is coming this week, to see me.). But I know Matt will like this sequence of quotes from a quantum book:

"Popper describes all such objects, substances and fields as belonging to what he calls ‘world 1’. There are two more ‘worlds’ in Popper’s philosophy. World 2 consists of states of the human mind, conscious or unconscious. These must be considered real for exactly the same reason as were world-1 objects–i.e. they can affect the bahaviour of physical objects. thus a particular state of mind can cause the brain to send a message along the nerve that causes the contraction of a muscle and a movement of a hand or leg, which in turn may cause an undoubted world-1 object such as a football to be propelled through the air.

"Beyond worlds 1 and 2 is world 3. following Popper, world 3 is defined as the products of the human mind. these are not physical objects nor are they merely brain states, but are things such as stories, myths, pieces of music, mathematical theorems, scientific theories etc. these are to be considered real for exactly the same reasons as were applied to worlds 1 and 2. Consider for example a piece of music. what is it? It is certainly not the paper and ink used to write out a copy of the score, neither is it the compact disc on which a particular performance is recorded. It isn’t even the pattern on the disc or the vibrations in the air when the music is played. None of these world-1 objects are the piece of music, but all exist in the form they do because of the music. the music is a world-3 object, a product of the human mind, which is to be considered as ‘real’ because its existence affects the behaviour of large-scale physical objects–the ink and paper of the score, the shape of the grooves in the record, the pattern of vibrations in the air and so on." alastair Rae, Quantum Physics, Cambridge University, 2004, p. 64

**

"Another example of a world 3 object is a mathematical theorem such as ‘The only even prime number is 2’. Everyone who knows any mathematics must agree that this statement is true and it follows that it is ‘real’ if only because world 1 objects such as the paper of this page and the arrangement of the ink on it would have been different otherwise. The reality of scientific theories is real in even more dramatic ways. It is because of the truth of our scientific understanding of the operation of semiconductors that micro-chip-based computers exist in the form they do. Tragically, it was the truth of the scientific theories of nuclear physics that resulted in the development, construction and detonation of a nuclear bomb."

"The reader may well have noticed an important aspect of these world 3 objects. Their reality is established only by the intervention of conscious, human beings. The piece of music or the mathematical theorem results in a particular mental state of a human being (i.e. a world 2 object) which in turn affects the behaviour of world 1. Without human consciousness this interaction would be impossible and the reality of world 3 could not be established. It is this fact that leads Popper and Eccles to extend their argument to the reality of the self-conscious mind itself. Only a self-conscious human being can appreciate the reality of world 3 objects, which are real because their existence can (via human consciousness and brain) affect world 1 objects. It follows that human consciousness itself must be real and different from any physical object, even the brain." Alastair Rae, "Quantum Physics," (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 66

**

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I would not. Just the opposite in fact which would be clear if you followed my link posted above to the reasons why I believe.

And as I also explained above the end of materialism was the discovery of science that everything including matter are just different forms of energy. So the atheists shifted from materialism to naturalism and thus you are beating a dead horse that died more than a century ago.

Thus the far more important point is that this mathematical description which science excels at is not the totality of reality. The atheists LOVE to cast religion into the role of primitive science and so last thing that you want to do is make it look like science has the better handle on the immaterial aspect of reality than religion does. SO it is not about the dead horse of the immaterial nature of reality but about the fact that there is more to reality than what the mathematical equations of physics describe.

Incorrect. It is a demonstrable fact of neuroscience that it most certainly can. Light, math, social values and other immaterial things the brain most certainly has adapted to apprehending them all. AND not only that but computers can do the mathematics even better than we do. If you want people to believe in the value of spirituality then the intellectual realm of mathematics is the completely in the wrong direction to point them in. That can only play into the hands of the naturalists.

Not entirely… Mostly to be sure. But the old hat that mathematics is the universal language is an assumption that we are beginning to have reasons to doubt. The answers are certainly objective but the subjective part is in the questions we choose ask. Thus it is entirely possible that an alien civilization out there may have asked very different questions to get something playing a similar role as mathematics does for us but which is totally different from ours.

Though… this is actually better for your implied attempt to connect math with spirituality. Because the objective has more to do with science/physicality and I think it is rather demonstrable that subjectivity is an inherent part of spirituality.

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The problem is that the quantity is too much. I do have other things to do. So, you force me to pick and choose.

Incorrect. I only object to metaphysical assumptions in the theory of truth itself.

I have no idea what you are talking about now. I am working with the definition of metaphysics as the study of the nature of reality, according to which this statement makes no sense.

Correct, which is why I see no reason to believe in any multiverse of any kind. Such ideas and speculations are on no more objective footing than ideas and beliefs about God and angels. I choose God and the angels.

No more, to be sure, than our own choice to explain it by an infinite spiritual deity.

correction… what some atheist naturalist physicists do… This is certainly not an area of accepted science demonstrable fact.

Here I shall simply refer you to an earlier post in this thread. I can also suggest that you look up the discussion of this topic in other threads: such as this one or this one or this one or this one.

Explaining the imagined positions of your characters would be your job as an author of this fictional discussion not mine.

… so you are using the word “metaphysical” as a synonym for some combination of spiritual and fictional…??? it is very confusing.

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LOL, in my view you are picking the easy ones to respond to.

Metaphysical dictionary definition is can’t be perceived by our senses. That is all it means. and we can’t perceive the things that are used to void a design argument from the anthropic principle.

So, when you use the word metaphysical in your definition of truth, I simply use what the word means, not any personal definition of that sound.