PeterJ

Aristotle's logic works fine for QM. It just needs to be applied properly. It rarely is. Usually people take some apparent contradiction - wave/particle, x-spin/y-spin etc - and assume that A's laws apply to them before confirming that they would in fact conform to A's definition for a true contradiction. This causes havoc in philosophy and some trouble in physics. It leads Heisenberg to the view that A's logic must be modified for physics. Actually it just needs to be applied more carefully than usual. As to what the laws are, they are a formal description of how people naturally think, and all animals so it seems, or the ideal to which their thinking process aspires.

Oh boy. What is there to say to this? How can ritual prove anything about reality? To suggest that religious believers verify their theories by performing rituals is to suggest that they are all completely nuts. And for a person to persistently call people who disagree with them stupid is very revealing. Immortal - you are way off. You say - "The message of all these religions Buddhism, Taoism, Advaita Vedanta(Hinduism), Neoplatonism, Gnostic Christianity etc are one and the same and i.e. Gods are real and these Gods are everywhere in all aspects." This just gives away your failure of scholarship. Anybody here, assuming they know how to do a simple literature review, will find it easy to verify that this is not true. It is not even worth arguing about it.

Well, in my not at all humble opinion it's a lack of education that prevents religion from being understood more widely and causes this idea that religion is the opposite of rational thinking. It's utter bs. What people do is fail to apply any rational thinking to religious issues and then complain that their religious ideas are not rational. Doh. Or they pick on some straw-man like american protestantism, as if defeating such an easy target makes any difference to anything. Sure, many religious people are poorly educated. So, in my opinion, are many professional physicists. Many seem to hold the idiotic idea that rational thinking is somehow in opposition to religion. All this means is that their idea of religion is in opposition to their idea rational thinking. So what? What may be forgotten is that our education system does not teach religion in a rational way. Indeed, it teaches that religion is irrational thinking. Or it does in the UK. It is as if we are free to choose what to believe regardless of any facts. If religion is often irrational this may be a self-fulfilling educational outcome. I will always be annoyed that my very good education taught me nothing whatsoever about religion, just the usual bowdlerised version of Christianity. Luckily I'm a rational;a thinker and got over it. If were going to argue statistics then they show that happiest society on earth is a Buddhist one, and this seems the most important measure of social health. It may be the only one that matters.

Okay Immortal. I give up. I'll leave you continue to represent religion.as a lot of dogmatic nonsense impervious to analysis. , . . . .

Tar - I've read quite a few of your posts here and agree with a lot of what you say. Your objections seem mostly very reasonable. Immortal - I respect your enthusiasm for evangelicising and share it. But your approach is not working. Tar is not an outright sceptic and clearly thinks a lot about these things, but the discussion is not leading towards any agreement. So, how about cutting me a little slack and assuming temporarily that my grasp of the issues is at least no worse than yours, so that I can chat without having to argue all the time. I won't;argue with you anymore, that's also an approach that doesn't work, but I'll try answer any questions you might ask to put me on the spot. Yes. The self is crucial to the process of individuation. This is what the Vedas tell us. Indeed, it might almost be their central message. . Your question is answered by the Dalai Lama, who writes that the self is not something we need to give up or overcome in practice, for it never existed in the first place. It is simply a matter of realising this. We do not have to lose the self to find it, What we already have is not the self but the Self. There is nothing to lose or find, just something to realise. For you world is fundamentally individuated, or, in more vedic language, consists only of what is 'created'. .This is the intra-subjective (not 'objective') universe. If there is an objective spacetime universe we'll never know it. So for you this world and its contents is real, cannot be reduced to a further phenomenon, and it makes no sense to you when someone suggests that the self is a fiction. Without it there would be no spacetime universe. But this is the exact point. Without the self there is no spacetime universe. It is by seeing beyond the self that we are able to verify that it is not truly real. It is precisely because the self is crucial to the psychophysical and intrasubjective universe that it is possible for every human being to learn more about the nature of reality than can be learnt in physics, and to write it all down, as far as it can be written down, three thousand years before Gallileo. . To make the Upanishadic view plausible in physics (as opposed to plausible to the occasional physicist) is a job for physcists. In two essays in the first issue of the journal here www.anti-matters.org Ulric Mohrhof explains the Vedic view of quantum mechanics, This is sometimes known as the 'Pondicherry' interpretation of QM, I have never found a better explanation of the relationship between physics and mysticism. The second article is the more technical, and perhaps wil be more appealing to physicists, but the first one is worth reading first I think, since it puts the second in a more general context. The second one is often beyond me, but I'd be happy to discuss the first. . Individuation would be an illusion. Brahman would be all. There would be no other phenomenon. Thou art that. Erwin Schroedinger is excellent on the relationship between the (seemingly) individuated 'self and the uniified Brahman. He shows that it is at least possible to be a successful physicist while sharing the world-view of the writers of the Upanishads. If he uses the word 'God' it is only ever to say that He is God, just as we all are. I wonder, Tar, if the self is not even more crucial that you think it is.

Typist - I would agree with most of what you say. I see the point of research such as that at Cerne, but the cost is an issue. Blue sky research is all very well when it's cheap, but to sink all these resources into the Higgs project seems absurd in hindsight. But I also agree with whoever said we have no choice. The potential commercial and defence benefits of such research naturally means that the money will always be forthcoming for grand technological projects. Shame it cannot be spent on acquiring wisdom, which is a much cheaper project. But the acquisition of wisdom attracts no grants.

'Obviously'? There is nothing obvious about it. Or, if there is, then philosophers of mind are all fools. It is found to be impossible to explain consiousness once we say that it is caused by inanimate materials, and this should be a clue as to what is obvious and what is not. Your comment is like saying it is obvious that planets follow circular orbits. Yes. there are always more people, This is because scientific advances makes it possible to overcome natural checks and balances and allows the population to run riot. I sometime think that scientific advances are entirely the result of selfish genes. I'm not knocking science, by the way, just the short-sightedness of the way we use it, and questioning the idea that we can measure human progress by how clever our gadgets are.

I'd rather say that science, or science as we currently define and thus contrain it, is limiting progress in humans. But that's just me. . I rather think that progress in physics will depend on making it more simple. As for the idea that AI machines may take over from physicists, I doubt this is anything to panic about. No instance of AI has ever been observed or even proved possible in principle. They're very good at adding and subtracting of course.

Is suspect we're not going to have any choice about what we do, Our house will be put in order for us whether we like it or not. .

+1 It would also be a wild conjecture to assume that God has these properties. It is all too easy to assign properties and qualites to God that make it possible to disprove His existence. But it would prove only that God cannot have said qualities. Anyway, there are much better arguments than the one proposed here. In the second century the Buddhist sage Nagarjuna gave a devastating disproof of the OP's decidedly anthropomorphic God. Much better than any other I've seen.

I do not see scientific advance as the answer but the entire problem. I think we all will in the end, when it's too late. .

I can agree with much of what you say, ydoaPs, but physics is definitely not ontology. Physics is not about what exists, as you say in your comments, and studies the behaviour of what it assumes to exist. Metaphysics asks whether it really does exist and what it is. . The OP asks " How can anything that can be measured be beyond the physical?" I would say it cannot be. A measurement is a physical thing, the face of a dial or meter, the length of a ruler or elapsed time etc. . "If it can not be measured how can it be said to exist? Can anger be measured? We know whether we are more or less angry than we were five minutes ago, so it does seem to be measurable. But if a phenomenon is in principle immeasurable then it is not in spacetime and we would have to think of it it as unmanifest, not as existing or not-existing. I prefer to define metaphyscis as the study of the world as a whole. It takes the results of the natural sciences and of personal experience and uses logic to extrapolate from these to a fundamental theory or set of first principles. A metaphysical statement is therefore one that makes a claim about the world as a whole, i.e what is true or false non-relatively, non-contingently and absolutely. As all such statements are undecidable metaphysics produces a very different world-view to physics, which does not ask such questions or make such statements. I suppose you could say that metaphyscis is an attempt to make sense of physics, or to find an interpretation.

Just look at the music industry. The easy and virtual replication of music has destroyed it. .

The interpretation problem is not as difficult as some here think it is. But it requires a sympathetic approach and a belief that the problem can actually be solved. It seems some are tempted to assume that it is all a matter of opinion, and there's no way to counter this view that doesn't involve work, which we won't do if we believe it's all a matter of opinion. It's a self-fulfilling objection to religion. .

I am baffed as to how someone can hold this view. Of course there is objective truth. Of course there are better and worse interpretations of the scriptures. Yes, we must make our own interpretations, but it is not an arbitrary choice. The idea is interpret the words to mean what the person who said them meant them to mean. I can agree that all our concepts of god are anthropomorphic, but this would not be enough to refute theism. Perhaps we cannot conceive of God as He is and are forced, if we must try to conceive of Him, to create Him in our own image. I happen to believe that the unreality of God is an absolute truth, but saying our concepts ot Him are anthropmorphic is not an argument for or against. At any rate, religion is not post-modernism. It is just difficult to understand, and even people who have no understanding will insist on promoting their views. So outsiders see a mass of contradiction, being unable to separate the wheat from the chaff. The way to tell how good an interpretation we have is to test it against the literature. When almost all the sages can be seen to agree, leaving aside the details, and if our interpretation helps make sense of the world, then we can know we are on the right track. Another way is to check whether our intepretation gives rise to any logically refutable ideas. or theories. If it does then it is not correct. .

I cannot agree that generally philosophers are open minded. On average I find them just as set in their ways as any group of people. Indeed, the fact that there is a tradition of philosophy called 'western' which is a failure, and which can be safely characterised as mere 'footnotes to Plato', more or less proves narrow-mindedness. It is physicists who were able to open their minds to quantum mechanics. For the most part philosophers have yet to get out of the Newtonian box.

The concept of freewill has been called into question by metaphysics since it began. Neoroscientists often don't mention this, but let's give credit where it's due. In reality neuroscience can have nothing to say about freewill, it is beyond the scope of the discipline,.although some neuroscientists who like to do metaphysics do express opinions.

Interesting thoughts. Don't entirely go along with it, but I'd agree with the idea that a fragmentation of knowledge occurs when we do not have a metaphysical foundation with which to bind it together, and that this is a major problem in the sciences and in some religious belief systems.

Thanks for the re-reading Proximity. It's so easy to misread people. I do it all the time. But I think we agree about most of this. Again in this thread I see the comment that philosophy has nothing to do with science. In this case the size of the universe has nothing to do with science. It is an attitude that leads to the abandonment of reason. Consider this - "If a universe with finite age is infinite as indicated by the WMAP results, then it must have inflated at an infinite rate. Pink elephants aside, what part of that doesn't answer the OP?" None of it. It does not even address the question. It would be complete insanity to imagine it possible that anything could inflate at an infinite rate. Pink elephants are at least imaginable. What on earth would 'inflation at an infinite rate' mean? Better to simply call it instant inflation, since such inflation could never be observed or measured. Even better still to come up with an idea.that computes. .

Existence is paradoxical. It is a misunderstanding. This is why it makes no sense to us.

Proximity - Your post above may be the longest forum post I've ever agreed with. A very sane view I would say.

I would agree with Proximity. Nasa is talking nonsense here, doing not just pseudo-science but pseudo-philosophy. If the universe is infinite then Big Bang theory is wrong. Full stop. It is incomprehensible to me that scientists should take any other view. I feel that the simple wysiwyg model that science uses for the universe falls apart when we start asking this kind of question. The answer to it, in my opinion, is that the universe does not have a size, and so is finite or infinite depending on which of two wrong ways we want to imagine it. This solves the problem of the absurdity of the idea that it is finite or infinite, and explains why it is absurd.

Yes, our brains and consciousness will limit us if we think that there is no knowledge to be had except via mentation. There is also knowledge by identity, which Aristotle reasoned would be the only form of true knowledge. Hence 'Cogito'. But my guess is that there is no such limit and we can know whatever can be known. The Upanishads tell us, 'the Unknown is not the Unknowable', and I have come to trust this old text. .

Yes, there is a third alternative. To find it would require examing exactly what you mean by 'exist'. Consider Heraclitus' comment 'We are and are not'. By this view it is not completely true that we are and not completely true that we are not, and there is a third option. On his view this would also be true for space. It would be true for everything.

I would not expect physics to answer the question about the size of the universe. It is a question for metaphysics, as are all questions that ask about fundamentals.and absolutes. When we examine this question we find it gives rise to a paradox. It makes no sense to our intellect that the universe is finite or infinite. Physics is helpless in this situation and must resort to logical analysis. Or this is my view at present. . .