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Post by spritznar on Apr 13, 2017 19:56:53 GMT
To my mind, however, given that you literally cannot prove any such thing as a Multiverse (you can posit it as a consequence of this or that, but you can't prove it), such statements are basically as much a matter of faith as my own belief in God. The multiverse simply enjoys the veneer of scientific legitimacy because famous scientists came up with the idea. seconded. i think sometimes science gets so much right about our daily human experience that we forget how much we're just guessing about the rest of it. i'm a firm believer in science, but the best scientists know how much they don't know (but isn't it fun to speculate?) |
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Post by Deleted on Apr 13, 2017 21:48:26 GMT
I'd agree with you that that is a sound position to take. Well, thanks. For the record, I likewise consider the teleological argument, as you gave it, sound. It evolves from a different first principle. I would even reckon that the marvel we feel that inspires either argument is similar. Edit: It is not, in fact, a transcendent creating force of the universe that I am opposed to, but rather that it should necessarily resemble human reason (or the god of Christianity, or the Kingdom of Prussia), or that the teleological argument should suffice as proof of this. That the principle of sufficient reason implies that the Universe has a reason does not give any information about said reason. (In mathematics, this is the difference between an existential proof and a constructive proof.) Ingenious design of the incipient "spark" (not necessarily anything thereafter) is also a stance taken by a vast number of people (including the cited scientists Bacon, Alhazen and Nabokov; I'll add Kepler for good measure, who used the laws of planetary orbits that he discovered to make the same argument). This is of little concern to me. My enjoyment of music does not depend on how many or few people listen to the same music, and so on. If that's the case, you could look into string theory, which strives to give explanations for the natural constants as constituent parts of the only possible universe, or so I hear. (I'm not a physicist and claim absolutely no knowledge of string theory.) What we are acting out is indeed the unresolved issue of whether the anthropic principle should be understood in the "weak" or "strong" sense. But I'll add that of all people in the world, I would think a physicist most likely to discover the truth about the inception of our universe (which you may designate God), if that is possible at all. That scientists forget what they don't or can't know (I assume this means God) is, in my opinion, a dismal cliché -- sorry for the strong words; many famous European scientists of the past (and let's include mathematicians, let's name a few: Riemann, Euler, Cauchy, Bolzano...) professed themselves as Christian anyway. Part of my suspicion against the quoted order-purpose-reason implication chain is, in fact, that Hegel appears to have forgotten what he cannot know. Edit: This is perhaps my most important point. Reason allows humans to think causally, determine order, link facts to each other... But like a beginning student's understanding of physics may be correct but basic, human perception and reason might also be insufficiently evolved (yet) to understand the universe beyond its most basic and orderly laws, the understanding of which has enriched the lives of our species and allowed it to thrive. And that, if life and reason are so integral to the universe -- why is Earth unique in a sea of apparent lifelessness? (This does not concern the validity of the design argument; any designing entity may well have intended to make life and reason rare, through whatever whim of genius; but it concerns what Hegel proposed, or how I understood it.) A closing ecumenical note; the Christ rewarded reason in pagans, or, more closely, the belief that the elected children of God naturally, even inadvertently spread their happiness and nourishment to everyone (Mark 7, 24-30). (PS. "Bolzano" is actually marked with a red squiggle by this browser's spell-checker, suggesting "Boolean", "Blazon" and "Bonanza". As is "multiverse". Which I don't think is necessary at all -- we only need the world to be tohu vabohu and the no-matter-how-unlikely possiblity of "the orderly universe" as a state we can arrive at from "nothing", with all other, perhaps much more likely, states being "nothing"; with no time extant yet, we will have all the time in the world to wait for the near-impossible to happen.) |
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Post by warrl on Apr 14, 2017 3:25:04 GMT
The problem with Hegel's idea is that large quantities of randomness often produce statistical order - and everything we can see without instruments, contains large quantities! Yes, but that statistical order will be localized and won't apply to the whole set. The whole point of calling something random is to say that it is unordered. You can flip a coin 1000 times and have it land all heads 50 times in a row, or tails 25 times in a row, or perfectly alternate 30 times. Locally, the set it ordered, but overall the set is random. On the contrary, the set as a whole is pretty predictable. It'll be pretty darn close to half heads, half tails. And if you have a thousand instances of a thousand coin-flips, the distribution of the results of those thousand instances is even more predictable. Interrogation of the whole gives us the reality of order emerging from randomness, but trying to apply overall conclusions to tiny subsets of the whole shows that it takes large quantities for that emergent order to emerge. |
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Post by Runningflame on Apr 14, 2017 5:21:39 GMT
Can I just say, I am loving this conversation? To repurpose the coin-flipping analogy, this cordial discussion of opposing philosophical viewpoints is like finding a run of 50 heads in the sea of "random" noise, trolls, and flamewars that constitutes much of the Internet. Kudos to all involved! Yes, but that statistical order will be localized and won't apply to the whole set. The whole point of calling something random is to say that it is unordered. You can flip a coin 1000 times and have it land all heads 50 times in a row, or tails 25 times in a row, or perfectly alternate 30 times. Locally, the set it ordered, but overall the set is random. On the contrary, the set as a whole is pretty predictable. It'll be pretty darn close to half heads, half tails. And if you have a thousand instances of a thousand coin-flips, the distribution of the results of those thousand instances is even more predictable. Interrogation of the whole gives us the reality of order emerging from randomness, but trying to apply overall conclusions to tiny subsets of the whole shows that it takes large quantities for that emergent order to emerge. I think the two of you are working with different definitions, so let's nail down what we mean by "order" and "randomness." (Leaving aside the discussion of whether coin flips truly count as random...) - A series of coin flips is random in the sense that knowing the first 1000 results does not enable you to predict the 1001st one. There is no relationship between successive flips. In this sense, there is no pattern, no order in coin flips.
- A series of coin flips is predictable in the sense that you can be pretty sure, within certain bounds of error, that about 50% will be heads and about 50% will be tails--though it's always possible that an unlikely outcome will occur and you'll get 90% or even 100% heads. You could call this emergent order; I would prefer to call it a property of the randomness.
- If the coin lands heads 50 times in a row, we humans start to infer a correlation among the results, namely something like "If the last three (or 50) were heads, the next one will be heads too." You could call such a run local order; I would prefer to call it a false pattern. There isn't any pattern there at all, it just looks that way to us. If this constituted order, the order would be "The odds of heads are 100%" (or something more sophisticated, like "There will be a run of 50 heads somewhere between flips 234 and 297"). But actually, we know that the odds of heads are still 50%. The order we think we see isn't order at all, but merely another artifact of the randomness. (Another way to approach it: the sequence TTHTHHTHTHHTTTHHTTHH is exactly as (un)likely as the sequence TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT. The only difference is that one looks to us like a pattern, and the other doesn't.)
In summary, I think I wouldn't use the word "order" to describe coin flips at all--they are purely random, with a probability of 50% heads and 50% tails over the long run, and various fluctuations in the short run. Systems that create actual order out of chaos are self-organizing systems (a fascinating topic). They typically have some kind of feedback loop, such that increasing organization facilitates further organization. Simple example: a new star coalescing under gravity. When it reaches a certain density, it has enough mass to attract more matter to itself, which increases its mass further, and so on. To bring it back to our discussion: we see order (a star in the midst of relatively empty space) arising out of disorder (a diffuse cloud of gas), because of the action of the laws of physics on "random" initial conditions (ignoring the origins of the gas cloud for the sake of argument). The philosophical question then is, whence the laws of physics? We observe our universe to have properties that tend to create self-organizing systems. Does it have these properties due to a rational mind designing it, or due to tiny probabilities occurring in a vast multiverse?
@korba: the stance you mention in which the initial "spark" is designed, but nothing after, is known as deism. To my understanding, it was fairly popular around the 1700s, which happens to overlap with Hegel's career. It occurs to me that Hegel's argument really is an argument for deism, and so you are correct that the teleological argument is not sufficient to indicate the existence of the Christian God. The distinguishing factor about the God of theistic faiths such as Christianity is that God continues to intervene in the universe even after its creation; which means that in a theistic worldview, the universe is not always predictable or "rational"--in the sense of perfectly following set laws--because God's direct action creates exceptions. For example (you'll indulge me given the current time of year): an exception to the universally proven rule that three-days-dead bodies stay dead. |
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Post by warrl on Apr 14, 2017 6:24:45 GMT
I wouldn't use the word "order" to describe a single coin flip either.
However, when you are talking about situations where "one instance" consists of thousands or millions or quintillions^2 of coin flips, and there are numerous instances, yes the randomness of the coin flips DOES produce an order in the instances. The order emerges from the large number of random events.
An example of a situation where one instance consists of a huge number of coin flips may be found in the fact that your fingers don't spontaneously melt or catch fire.
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Post by Runningflame on Apr 14, 2017 17:49:15 GMT
Hm, well, that's an interesting point. Quantum mechanics turns a lot of our intuitive ideas about the world upside down, doesn't it? I'll have to think about that some more.
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