Why Quanta, Consciousness, Big Bang

[David Sklansky]

Some of the high falootin philosphers in another thread derided the fact that I would see scientific ignorance of things as a reason to believe in God or even intelligent design by a non omnipotent being. And for the most part I agree with them.

But I didn't make it clear, I guess, that I wasn't just giving examples of things scientists have not yet explained. Rather I was specifically choosing three things that are extremely bothersome, very related to religion, and in at least two out of the three cases, not likely to be understood in the forseeable future, if at all. I don't have time to go into them now but others are welcome to elaborate. Hopefully someone will bring up the DELAYED double slit experiments and their implication.

By the way, the one issue that may be decided fairly soon is human consciousness. We will learn a lot when we find out whether computers can be made conscious. If so, that knocks out pretty much all religions except Sklanskyanity.

[Bodhi]

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Hopefully someone will bring up the DELAYED double slit experiments and their implication.

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Yes, someone please enlighten me.

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By the way, the one issue that may be decided fairly soon is human consciousness. We will learn a lot when we find out whether computers can be made conscious. If so, that knocks out pretty much all religions except Sklanskyanity.

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You're gonna be annoyed with me for this one, but what do you mean by "conscious" and "consciousness?" More specifically, what is your position on the question of privileged access, the notion that only the conscious subject has epistemic access to its own mental content? If someone believes in priveleged access, then they can never be convinced of artificial intelligence.

[BluffTHIS!]

Clearly through history, humans with less scientific knowledge have attributed various things to various deities precisely because they couldn't at that time explain them. And regarding "miracles", I think I have covered my own views in other posts and made the point that God acts mostly when He "interferes" through normal phenomena and coincidences.

Regarding quanta, consciousness and the big bang, and such things as the double slit experiment, even if one day science explains these things through a unified field theory, an explanation of consciousness, and a better understanding of how the big bang took place and might possibly take place again, then what still will be unexplained is the First Cause of all things. This is the primary question. Even Stephen Hawking and other physcists who like him don't believe in a personal god, nonethless frequently use the term "God" for a first cause.

The delayed double-split experiment is one of the most fascinating things in science to me. It surely points out that we don't really grasp something about physics on a subatomic level, something intimately connected with particle/wave duality and possibly the extradimensional nature of subatomic physics. I don't however, believe it or it's eventual scientific explanation if we ever figure it out, to have much religious significance. Religion is not concerned so much with how something in God's creation works, but rather that as stated above, He was the First Cause and that He created us to know and love Him.

Regarding consciousness, this is a deep topic. It is clear however, that humans and other animals like chimpanzees and dolphins that might have an advanced degree of conciousness even if not as great as ours, don't depend for that consciousness on algortithms written by another human. And if even a star trek type of Data android could be constructed, then that would have no religious significance whatsoever, since the divine soul of humans does not depend on consciousness, but on an infusion by God at conception. My post in the extraterrestial thread regarding all sentient beings not necessarily having souls expands on this.

[David Sklansky]

"And if even a star trek type of Data android could be constructed, then that would have no religious significance whatsoever, since the divine soul of humans does not depend on consciousness, but on an infusion by God at conception."

So God would allow beings who were conscious, had feelings, and were aware of him, to not enjoy what he can offer even though they believe in him?

[BluffTHIS!]

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So God would allow beings who were conscious, had feelings, and were aware of him, to not enjoy what he can offer even though they believe in him?

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It is possible. I explained further in your Last Question thread.

[David Sklansky]

"even if one day science explains these things through a unified field theory, an explanation of consciousness, and a better understanding of how the big bang took place and might possibly take place again, then what still will be unexplained is the First Cause of all things."

An unexplained First Cause does little to argue for the specifics of organized religions or for a god that is intervening in our lives or will give us an afterlife.

Secondly while I personally haven't thought much about this First Cause issue, it is my understanding that a lot of very smart people have thought about it deeply. And most of them do not share your view that it is some kind of slam dunk argument for any sort of god whatsoever. And when very smart people speak, I listen.

[BluffTHIS!]

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An unexplained First Cause does little to argue for the specifics of organized religions or for a god that is intervening in our lives or will give us an afterlife.

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Since the biggest "intervention" imaginable is creation itself and all that flows from it, it seems very logical indeed that such a creator would continue to "interfere". Interfering post-creation in fact is not as much interference as the great interference of creation in the first place.

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Secondly while I personally haven't thought much about this First Cause issue, it is my understanding that a lot of very smart people have thought about it deeply. And most of them do not share your view that it is some kind of slam dunk argument for any sort of god whatsoever. And when very smart people speak, I listen.

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If you don't call a First Cause "God", then what would you call it? And if you just want to call Him "The First Cause", I won't object on grounds of semantics. Since even if you project the universe back to a quantum singularity and could figure out everything about the bang, the fact is there is no observable data on what took place before that singularity or whatever, and all the deep thought in the world won't figure it out. Again, if those deep thinkers don't want to call the first cause "God", that's fine, but they can't call someone/something who is the First Cause of Creation anything that wouldn't mean the same thing to religious believers of whatever faith, because those actions signify the omnipotence attributed to "God".

[David Sklansky]

"Since the biggest "intervention" imaginable is creation itself and all that flows from it, it seems very logical indeed that such a creator would continue to "interfere". Interfering post-creation in fact is not as much interference as the great interference of creation in the first place."

As I wrote before, it is quite reasonable that he wouldn't interfere even if he could. Because once he does, he enters a slippery slope that doesn't allow him to judge fairly.
And it once is conceded that it is not impossible that he doesn't interfere, then it is a simple matter of looking at the evidence. Which points overwhelmingly to the conlusion that he doesn't (and even more overwhwelmingly to the conclusion that he hasn't for many hundreds of years at least.)

[MortalNuts]

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Secondly while I personally haven't thought much about this First Cause issue, it is my understanding that a lot of very smart people have thought about it deeply. And most of them do not share your view that it is some kind of slam dunk argument for any sort of god whatsoever. And when very smart people speak, I listen.

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You guys might enjoy reading this essay by Sean Carroll (a physicist at Chicago):

"Why (Almost All) Cosmologists are Atheists"

It's not particularly profound or anything, but it does go over some of the relevant issues reasonably well.

-mn

[drudman]

Quantum weirdness is a huge trip. Three years ago, Daryn and I got drunk and talked for hours about it, and we were both pretty freaked out. Delayed double slit experiment might just be the King of quantum weirdness.

The idea is you take a card and put two small slits in it, very very close to each other (we're talking microscopically, the distance between the slits is only about 1000x the wavelength of the light you're going to shoot at it) and you shine light at it. Cover one or the other slit, and you get a single cone of light shining through the open slit. If light were like a particle, when neither slit was covered, one would expect to observe a solid band of light, brightest in the middle where the two light cones overlap. Instead, you get alternating bands of light and dark, like you would if you used ripples of water instead of light. This indicates that light sometimes behaves like a wave.

That was revolutionary, but what is shocking is if you fire individual quantum particles, instead of a steady stream of them. In 1989, some guys from a Japanese electronics company (Hitachi?) fired individual electrons instead of photons. Very oddly, the intereference pattern still showed up! This is highly weird, because with only one electron passing through at a time, how could there be any interference?