GENIUS FORUMS

Loki wrote:He compares atheism to the belief that randomly splattering various paint colors over a blank wall for billions of years will eventually produce a Mona Lisa. Absurd, right? Yes, Atheists are absurd.

I don't know nothing about no Mona Lisa, but I bet you'd get a pretty decent Jackson Pollock right off.

Hypothesis: Life is more like a Jackson Pollock painting than the Mona Lisa. (Is this falsifiable?)

Yeah, but life looks nothing like a Pollack painting. Pollacks painting looks like a bunch of random splattering. A mono lisa looks like it was done with consciousness.

Loki, you are saying: "Life is more like the Mona Lisa than a Jackson Pollock painting," as if it were an obvious fact needing no further discussion.

If you think about it, that's kind of bizarre.

Although it's fitting, I guess, for a thread that was supposedly about Robert Anton Wilson.

Life doesn't necessarily look like it was "done with consciousness" to me.

Wishful thinking does not constitute a persuasive argument.

Huh.

Sounds like someone needs a good whack with the zen stick.

I have to say human life looks more like a Pollack painting to me. Full of drunken spontaneity; without any real purpose.

Yeah, I'd have to concur. It's definitely more Pollack than Mona Lisa.

Pollack was chaos. DaVinci was order. Pollack was probably athiestic, DaVinci likely religious.

Even in chaos, there is order - purpose is simply higher order pattern recognition.

Diebert van Rhijn wrote:How likely? What is the chance it was determined by random factors :?)

'Likely' describes Bayesian belief distribution, not statistical probability. Those two are commonly confused, but they are very different.

Diebert van Rhijn wrote:Could you define "random chance" for me here? To me this seems merely describing a pattern of distribution in time or space or both. From that perspective there's nothing that can be caused completely by "random chance", it's more that some things manifest as distribution.

Semantics. If you throw a quantum die, its outcome will not be determined by the prior state of the world as best as we can determine. Randomness is when the outcomes of an event comprise a distribution such that specific outcomes aren't determined by the prior state of the system.

Loki wrote:Yeah, but life looks nothing like a Pollack painting. Pollacks painting looks like a bunch of random splattering. A mono lisa looks like it was done with consciousness.

So does a diamond molecular lattice; and yet it wasn't. The tetrahedral molecular structure of a diamond crystal is an artifact of the physical relationship between the individual 4-valent carbon atoms.

Take a sack of spherical marbles and pour them into a bucket. They will exhibit orderly behavior too -- the same sort of order as a diamond exhibits, in fact; because tetrahedral lattice is one of exactly two possible optimal packings of spheres, the other being the dodecahedral lattice.

Order can be emergent. it happens all the time. Only the abject paucity of the faith-soaked 'imagination' can explain this pathetic, narrow-minded, blinkered denigration fo the magnificence of the natural world. You people want your Universe to be small, provincial, populated by anthropomorphic fantasy figures as mentally impoverished as yourself. You want a tiny, comfortable cradle of a world, you are afraid to look out the window and reach for the stars. You prefer to play with your crib toys instead. Those stars make cute tinkly sounds and have blinking lights!

You are just like xians who insist that the world was made in 6 days. Billions of years of cosmic history, stardust which comprises every one of us, the incredible forces which came together to make out world -- it's all too scary for them, too open-ended. They demand a neat wrapped-up narrative, a comforting myth. Just like you.

Well, my work is done.

By posturing as an extremely generic New Ager, I incited some interesting comments from the likes of you people.

What you wrote on this thread was great, Vic - - but part of the credit for your writing goes to me.

Yeah, fuck you too.

haha, Come on now, no hard feelings. If it's any consolation, there was a time (a few years ago) when I really was a New Ager much like the persona I puppeted on this thread. That's probably why I was able to be convincing.

More consolation for Vic:

Your few posts on this thread really helped support and clarify my own (relatively recent) atheistic stance. You expounded your ideas with liveliness, and hopefully the readers will be as inspired as I was.

In your writing, I also detected a hint of compassion for those who fall down the ignoble New Age path that we had once fallen prey too. Behind your sometimes vicious persona, I see there is a man with a heart.

Where did I slip up and give that impression?

Good bit of trolling there, Loki. I had you figured for a wishful-thinking noob.

Victor: If you throw a quantum die, its outcome will not be determined by the prior state of the world as best as we can determine. Randomness is when the outcomes of an event comprise a distribution such that specific outcomes aren't determined by the prior state of the system.

Well, how can we really claim the latter, if formerly we say ‘as best as we can determine’? Do/can we actually know/determine the entire prior state of the system? Or am I missing something?

Wait, do you think trolling means you aren't an asshole?

Sapius wrote:

Victor: If you throw a quantum die, its outcome will not be determined by the prior state of the world as best as we can determine. Randomness is when the outcomes of an event comprise a distribution such that specific outcomes aren't determined by the prior state of the system.

Well, how can we really claim the latter, if formerly we say ‘as best as we can determine’? Do/can we actually know/determine the entire prior state of the system? Or am I missing something?

yes, you are.

There is no such thing as 'actually know'. All knowledge is provisional and contextual. All knowledge is subject to revision. You are demanding divine revelation, not knowledge.

We similarly don't know that we live on the outer surface of a planet. There are very elegant mathematical models which cohere with all observations and yet which have us live on the inner surface of a 'bubble' in the infinite solid. We don't 'actually know'. We simply have our best predictively powerful theories, and they comprise knowledge.

We also have numerous attempts to ascribe determinism to quantum mechanics, which all tend to fail with various degrees of spectacle and/or perversion. The Einsteinian hidden variable theory, for example, was disproven by Bell's Theorem. In contrast, the transactional interpretation and the Bohm interpretation both avoid the Bell trap, at a cost -- transactional interpretation posits causality working backwards in time, and Bohm interpretation posits entities which are in principle unknowable (i.e. it's an ontological interpretation). Alternatively, many-worlds and many-minds interpretations also posit entities which are completely inaccessible, and still leave us with a de-facto randomness -- in this mind or universe, the outcome is still random by the definition of randomness I gave above, and you need a god's-eye view of the multiverse to render it otherwise.

So yeah, if you are willing to reach far enough, you can avoid accepting non-determinism -- by either surrendering unidirectional causality, or by embracing noumena and giving up on epistemic methodology of science; and by some other, even more spectacular, concessions. You are never forced by evidence to accept any specific conclusion, you can always find an alternative exploration if you are willing to twist far enough.

Don't get all moralistic on me Hodges. You brought up a great point with the whole Pollack analogy. Console yourself with this.

Unidian wrote:Good bit of trolling there, Loki. I had you figured for a wishful-thinking noob.

Being such comes a lot more natural than I'd like it to !

If ones strength is stupidity, then use that stupidity wisely. You know what I mean?

Wrote all this before seeing Victor's explanation, which is more complete.

Sapius wrote:

Victor: If you throw a quantum die, its outcome will not be determined by the prior state of the world as best as we can determine. Randomness is when the outcomes of an event comprise a distribution such that specific outcomes aren't determined by the prior state of the system.

Well, how can we really claim the latter, if formerly we say ‘as best as we can determine’? Do/can we actually know/determine the entire prior state of the system? Or am I missing something?

Probabilities and distributions are statements about our knowledge of a system, or formalizations of opinions about a system.

Perhaps Victor should have said "... specific outcomes aren't determined by the known (or given) prior state of the system."

There are always limits to our knowledge. We can say what's happening in the known part of the system, but we can't really make a statement about the unknown part, pretty much by definition, and physicists would generally rather not speculate.

In the quantum world, to go any further you have to start talking about "hidden variables," and let's just say that's a big ol' can of worms there.

vicdan wrote:Bohm interpretation posits entities which are in principle unknowable

From http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-bohm/

As Bell (1987, page 201) has written, referring to Bohmian mechanics and similar theories,

Absurdly, such theories are known as ‘hidden variable’ theories. Absurdly, for there it is not in the wavefunction that one finds an image of the visible world, and the results of experiments, but in the complementary ‘hidden’(!) variables. Of course the extra variables are not confined to the visible ‘macroscopic’ scale. For no sharp definition of such a scale could be made. The ‘microscopic’ aspect of the complementary variables is indeed hidden from us. But to admit things not visible to the gross creatures that we are is, in my opinion, to show a decent humility, and not just a lamentable addiction to metaphysics. In any case, the most hidden of all variables, in the pilot wave picture, is the wavefunction, which manifests itself to us only by its influence on the complementary variables.

There was, however, one physicist who wrote on this subject with even greater clarity and insight than Wigner himself, namely the very J. S. Bell who is frequently credit for demonstrating the impossibility of a deterministic completion of quantum theory such as Bohmian mechanics. Here's how Bell himself reacted to Bohm's discovery (Bell 1987, p. 160):

But in 1952 I saw the impossible done. It was in papers by David Bohm. Bohm showed explicitly how parameters could indeed be introduced, into nonrelativistic wave mechanics, with the help of which the indeterministic description could be transformed into a deterministic one. More importantly, in my opinion, the subjectivity of the orthodox version, the necessary reference to the ‘observer,’ could be eliminated. ...

But why then had Born not told me of this ‘pilot wave’? If only to point out what was wrong with it? Why did von Neumann not consider it? More extraordinarily, why did people go on producing ‘‘impossibility’’ proofs, after 1952, and as recently as 1978? ... Why is the pilot wave picture ignored in text books? Should it not be taught, not as the only way, but as an antidote to the prevailing complacency? To show us that vagueness, subjectivity, and indeterminism, are not forced on us by experimental facts, but by deliberate theoretical choice?

vicdan wrote:There is no such thing as 'actually know'. All knowledge is provisional and contextual. All knowledge is subject to revision.

Do you actually know the above? Is the above provisional and subject to revision?

Victor: There is no such thing as 'actually know'. All knowledge is provisional and contextual. All knowledge is subject to revision. You are demanding divine revelation, not knowledge.

But of course... I assumed what you mentioned was a divine revelation, not that I was demanding one.