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Can you elaborate on that? Seems to me there must me a creationary force that is uncreated.

by cjjuice 10y ago

Udo 10y ago
> Can you elaborate on that? By "constant-vector-forward time-dimensional context" he essentially means causality. > Seems to me there must me a creationary force that is uncreated. That is not strictly true in the larger context of physics. Emergent phenomena do not need to be explicitly created, they can arise spontaneously based on simpler parameters. The (religious) idea that higher-order concepts beget lower-order concepts is true almost nowhere in nature. It's just "a thing" for humans, since we are tool creators and our tools are generally less sophisticated than ourselves. In nature, higher-order things grow out of lower-order things by mere virtue of their properties without any creative act being involved. For example, a collection of atoms will form molecules, not because someone has intentionally designed those molecules, but because the atoms' properties allow for the formation and interaction of molecules.
- cjjuice 10y ago
  What do you think about the intelligibility of the world? If the universe was not created, why can we predict it with such accuracy? Wouldn't it just be random? To me, the fact that science even works is evidence for creation.
  - Udo 10y ago
    > If the universe was not created, why can we predict it with such accuracy? Scientifically, there is nothing to suggest these two are related in any way. I could ask "if cows weren't orange then why do Oreos have white filling?" it would have the same amount of meaning. To stay with my example, I posit the only reason you think cows are orange and therefore Oreos have a white filling is because someone told you so. To an unbriefed outsider, these statements are wrong and factually disconnected. > Wouldn't it just be random? There are lots of places where randomness exists in the universe, but more importantly what we're talking about in regard to emergent phenomena is chaos, not randomness. It's the interaction of many unpredictable little factors, and that does not necessarily lead to meaningless entropy. > To me, the fact that science even works is evidence for creation. Again, this makes sense because you have been taught that. For someone who is not familiar with these teachings this sentence may not be parseable. By the way, I apologise if this sounds insensitive, I don't mean to be disparaging here. I merely want to invite you to see this from the perspective of someone with a different cultural background where the symbols that are essential to your everyday life may not exist or even be understood.
    - cjjuice 10y ago
      Same could be said about science. Correct? We are making stories out of randomness? And it's laws only have meaning in a learned context? Are you arguing semantics? No apology needed. You are not being insensitive, only expressing you point of view, which I appreciate greatly.
      - Udo 10y ago
        > Same could be said about science. Correct? We are making stories out of randomness? And it's laws only have meaning in a learned context? Are you arguing semantics? No, that's not it. If you only ever need to talk about the world with in-group peers and you never need to do any science, you can absolutely get by with an arbitrary story. But there are many instances where it becomes essential whether facts were pieced together into a story, or whether the story came first and facts are invented to fit it. Imagine two groups of people getting placed on two different planets without any knowledge about anything. They don't have any books, any cultural knowledge, nothing. Now give them a couple thousand of years and compare what knowledge they have amassed. They both have access to the same universe, so they can make the same observations and figure out the same things about the mechanisms governing it. They both likely figure out how quantum physics works and discover relativity, because those are discoverable facts that apply anywhere. It doesn't matter what the philosophical outlook of the people doing this research is, as long as they constrain themselves to the facts they will come to the same conclusions. But if you compare their religions, if they have them, they will likely be very different. One of them may have an Abrahamic-like creation myth. One might be closer to Buddhism. They might come up with completely different ideas we can't even conceive of. This happens because in the absence of facts you can just make up arbitrary stuff. And when they meet, each one will think their own religion is obvious and inescapable, but to the other one those arguments will sound like the complete non-sequiturs they actually are. In fact, you can observe the same thing on this planet. If a Hindu, a Christian, and an atheist on today's Earth want to exchange information, they have do it with a factual framework, because cultural/religious conventions and definitions are not transferable across these boundaries. When two biologists are talking about adaptation mechanisms, it's not fruitful if one uses stone age scripture as a reasoning tool. You asked if laws only have meaning in a learned context. Of course we mostly get to learn from other people, that's how knowledge works in the face of a very limited lifespan, resources, and capabilities. But it still matters where that knowledge originally came from, it's still significant if those laws actually reflect how the universe works or if it's just made up stuff that is in conflict with observable reality.
  - 0xcde4c3db 10y ago
    An important aspect of randomness is that probability distributions are observable. Randomness doesn't imply a universe of nothing but white noise; it means that we can't make predictions about a random process beyond knowing the probability distribution. But it turns out that knowing something about probability distributions counts for a lot. Card counting is a mundane example.
- cicero 10y ago
  What is the cause of the existence of a universe in which emergent phenomena can arise spontaneously?
  - Udo 10y ago
    We don't know yet. Which is not the same as "my deity did it". And by the way, postulating a creator god should be unsatisfying to you as a believer, too. Because even in your own framework, this raises only more questions like "who or what created my god"?
    - cicero 10y ago
      God doesn't require a creator because existence is intrinsic to him. At the burning bush, when Moses asked for God's name, he replied "I am that I am." Also, I am not postulating a creator god; I am reporting on the God who has revealed himself. I didn't used to believe in God until I encountered him through various means. You could also encounter God if you seek him. "Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened." (Mt. 7:7-8) Now this is not an instant or casual thing. Seeking is a life-long and life-consuming thing. I've been at it (with an openness towards religious truth) for 37 years and I'm still discovering new stuff. Science is cool because it tells us about the universe that God created, but faith is better because by faith we come into contact with the author of the universe.
boznz 10y ago
Maybe it's the same as a missile spontaneously becoming a whale and a bowl of petunias.
0xcde4c3db 10y ago
Maybe not (or may be, I suppose) what parent was referring to, but consider the following possibility: "People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a nonlinear, nonsubjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey... stuff." -- The Doctor [1] To be a bit more serious, causality in general is (by some accounts) an open philosophical problem. That is, there's no generally accepted proof (and not even really a concept of what would prove or disprove) that causality actually exists as an independent rule/law/standard/phenomenon, as opposed to being an abstraction of correlation that we made up to reason about our decisions [2]. For all we know it may be that an effect without a cause violates merely our intuitions, not the laws of nature. [1] Doctor Who S03E10 - Blink [2] http://www.iep.utm.edu/hume-cau/ http://www.iep.utm.edu/hume-cau/
- cjjuice 10y ago
  Thanks. A world without causality surly seems absurd. However, i'm sure dogs feel the same way about physics. On many things it just comes down to a choice of the world you want to live in.
- cicero 10y ago
  Isn't science all about understanding causes? It seems funny that scientifically minded people turn to Hume only when we're talking about God.

Can you elaborate on that? Seems to me there must me a creationary force that is uncreated.

by cjjuice 10y ago

Can you elaborate on that? Seems to me there must me a creationary force that is uncreated.

Udo 10y ago

> Can you elaborate on that? By "constant-vector-forward time-dimensional context" he essentially means causality. > Seems to me there must me a creationary force that is uncreated. That is not strictly true in the larger context of physics. Emergent phenomena do not need to be explicitly created, they can arise spontaneously based on simpler parameters. The (religious) idea that higher-order concepts beget lower-order concepts is true almost nowhere in nature. It's just "a thing" for humans, since we are tool creators and our tools are generally less sophisticated than ourselves. In nature, higher-order things grow out of lower-order things by mere virtue of their properties without any creative act being involved. For example, a collection of atoms will form molecules, not because someone has intentionally designed those molecules, but because the atoms' properties allow for the formation and interaction of molecules.

cjjuice 10y ago
What do you think about the intelligibility of the world? If the universe was not created, why can we predict it with such accuracy? Wouldn't it just be random? To me, the fact that science even works is evidence for creation.
- Udo 10y ago
  > If the universe was not created, why can we predict it with such accuracy? Scientifically, there is nothing to suggest these two are related in any way. I could ask "if cows weren't orange then why do Oreos have white filling?" it would have the same amount of meaning. To stay with my example, I posit the only reason you think cows are orange and therefore Oreos have a white filling is because someone told you so. To an unbriefed outsider, these statements are wrong and factually disconnected. > Wouldn't it just be random? There are lots of places where randomness exists in the universe, but more importantly what we're talking about in regard to emergent phenomena is chaos, not randomness. It's the interaction of many unpredictable little factors, and that does not necessarily lead to meaningless entropy. > To me, the fact that science even works is evidence for creation. Again, this makes sense because you have been taught that. For someone who is not familiar with these teachings this sentence may not be parseable. By the way, I apologise if this sounds insensitive, I don't mean to be disparaging here. I merely want to invite you to see this from the perspective of someone with a different cultural background where the symbols that are essential to your everyday life may not exist or even be understood.
  - cjjuice 10y ago
    Same could be said about science. Correct? We are making stories out of randomness? And it's laws only have meaning in a learned context? Are you arguing semantics? No apology needed. You are not being insensitive, only expressing you point of view, which I appreciate greatly.
    - Udo 10y ago
      > Same could be said about science. Correct? We are making stories out of randomness? And it's laws only have meaning in a learned context? Are you arguing semantics? No, that's not it. If you only ever need to talk about the world with in-group peers and you never need to do any science, you can absolutely get by with an arbitrary story. But there are many instances where it becomes essential whether facts were pieced together into a story, or whether the story came first and facts are invented to fit it. Imagine two groups of people getting placed on two different planets without any knowledge about anything. They don't have any books, any cultural knowledge, nothing. Now give them a couple thousand of years and compare what knowledge they have amassed. They both have access to the same universe, so they can make the same observations and figure out the same things about the mechanisms governing it. They both likely figure out how quantum physics works and discover relativity, because those are discoverable facts that apply anywhere. It doesn't matter what the philosophical outlook of the people doing this research is, as long as they constrain themselves to the facts they will come to the same conclusions. But if you compare their religions, if they have them, they will likely be very different. One of them may have an Abrahamic-like creation myth. One might be closer to Buddhism. They might come up with completely different ideas we can't even conceive of. This happens because in the absence of facts you can just make up arbitrary stuff. And when they meet, each one will think their own religion is obvious and inescapable, but to the other one those arguments will sound like the complete non-sequiturs they actually are. In fact, you can observe the same thing on this planet. If a Hindu, a Christian, and an atheist on today's Earth want to exchange information, they have do it with a factual framework, because cultural/religious conventions and definitions are not transferable across these boundaries. When two biologists are talking about adaptation mechanisms, it's not fruitful if one uses stone age scripture as a reasoning tool. You asked if laws only have meaning in a learned context. Of course we mostly get to learn from other people, that's how knowledge works in the face of a very limited lifespan, resources, and capabilities. But it still matters where that knowledge originally came from, it's still significant if those laws actually reflect how the universe works or if it's just made up stuff that is in conflict with observable reality.
- 0xcde4c3db 10y ago
  An important aspect of randomness is that probability distributions are observable. Randomness doesn't imply a universe of nothing but white noise; it means that we can't make predictions about a random process beyond knowing the probability distribution. But it turns out that knowing something about probability distributions counts for a lot. Card counting is a mundane example.
cicero 10y ago
What is the cause of the existence of a universe in which emergent phenomena can arise spontaneously?
- Udo 10y ago
  We don't know yet. Which is not the same as "my deity did it". And by the way, postulating a creator god should be unsatisfying to you as a believer, too. Because even in your own framework, this raises only more questions like "who or what created my god"?
  - cicero 10y ago
    God doesn't require a creator because existence is intrinsic to him. At the burning bush, when Moses asked for God's name, he replied "I am that I am." Also, I am not postulating a creator god; I am reporting on the God who has revealed himself. I didn't used to believe in God until I encountered him through various means. You could also encounter God if you seek him. "Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened." (Mt. 7:7-8) Now this is not an instant or casual thing. Seeking is a life-long and life-consuming thing. I've been at it (with an openness towards religious truth) for 37 years and I'm still discovering new stuff. Science is cool because it tells us about the universe that God created, but faith is better because by faith we come into contact with the author of the universe.

boznz 10y ago

Maybe it's the same as a missile spontaneously becoming a whale and a bowl of petunias.

0xcde4c3db 10y ago

Maybe not (or may be, I suppose) what parent was referring to, but consider the following possibility: "People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a nonlinear, nonsubjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey... stuff." -- The Doctor [1] To be a bit more serious, causality in general is (by some accounts) an open philosophical problem. That is, there's no generally accepted proof (and not even really a concept of what would prove or disprove) that causality actually exists as an independent rule/law/standard/phenomenon, as opposed to being an abstraction of correlation that we made up to reason about our decisions [2]. For all we know it may be that an effect without a cause violates merely our intuitions, not the laws of nature. [1] Doctor Who S03E10 - Blink [2] http://www.iep.utm.edu/hume-cau/ http://www.iep.utm.edu/hume-cau/

cjjuice 10y ago
Thanks. A world without causality surly seems absurd. However, i'm sure dogs feel the same way about physics. On many things it just comes down to a choice of the world you want to live in.
cicero 10y ago
Isn't science all about understanding causes? It seems funny that scientifically minded people turn to Hume only when we're talking about God.