[quote]mertdawg wrote:
[quote]kilpaba wrote:
[quote]Aragorn wrote:
[quote]mertdawg wrote:
[quote]Aragorn wrote:
Scientism, In the words of a mathematics professor I am talking with–who by the way is agnostic, and not religious:
“Let us say that a person I am toalking to says ‘I believe in creationism’, then I can say I probably don’t want to talk with this person because they are ignorant…However if you think science is the answer to all, you’re an arrogant shithead. Not only that, but whereas I think the first person is ignorant, the second person I KNOW is ignorant. They must not know Bell’s theorem and Godel’s theorem, and they must not know a lot of other things…”
Btw, my professor friend really hates the Dawkins brand of atheism, termed “fervent atheism” by him. He has big problems with him (and Hitchens, et al.).
Godel was a logician, hung out with Einstein and a lot of those people, and he basically proved that no matter what there was no way to have a perfect list of axioms that explain everything.
“you write down your list of assumptions, and one of two things will happen: a) you will have too many and you will be able to deduce a contradiction of some sort in your list, or b) you have too few and there is at least 1 proposition that you do not know and CANNOT BE DEDUCED from your list (or in other words is permanently unknowable). There is no way to have just the right amount of axioms.”
In other words, no matter what you do you have the existence of a-rational premises (not to be confused with irrational). Again, in the words of my friend “Which is to say that there is ALWAYS a realm in which math and science has no purview. And this is speaking strictly in mathematics, which is extremely cut-and-dried, and you can’t tell me that the UNIVERSE, which is very much infinitely more a gray area than simple mathematics, can be deduced OR explained by science alone. In other words, if you want to believe that science is the answer to everything…well, you are supremely ignorant or arrogant, or both.”
It’s not necessarily saying whether an a-rational statement is true or false, and it is NOT necessarily saying that you have no evidence for this a-rational statement, or that you DO have evidence for it. It is basically saying that it is outside your sphere. It is absolutely beyond your power to understand it vis a vis your axioms. There exist these statements that have to be true or false, but which you cannot deduce. So you have to believe or disbelieve it without being able to deduce or prove (or DISprove) it.
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Yes thank you for your clear explanation. I posit that human’s have free will. [/quote]
What is interesting is that if you understand Godel’s theorem–and the implications of Bell’s–it all but disproves determinism, which I had always thoufht little more than a philosophical parlor trick.
I am not sure if I quite understand you here, and i’m at work so this is a first impression, but I would say that yes, that is the case. Reason (meaning logic and observation) is the only skill we possess. And that is exactly what Godel did via logic.[/quote]
Determinism as defined how? Neither theory seem to outright reject that humans don’t have free will. Not being predictable in behavior is NOT the equivalent of having free will. Free will, at least as most define it, implies a conscious control over outcomes and actions distinct from one’s makeup and environment. Now if you define ‘free will’ as simply being inherently unpredictable, well then perhaps they do, but that is not what most people are driving at when they say humans have free will otherwise EVERYTHING would have ‘free will’.[/quote]
I agree that Goedel, to me seems to only show our limitation in ever fully describing the deterministic laws. The only perfect model of the universe IS the universe.
But the Bell theorem, as I understood it perhaps 10 years ago, was that not only is there an array of “apparently” possible paths, but that there could not have been inherently inaccessible data present in the physical universe that actually made one of those paths occur. One path occurs instead of another, or another, for no physical reason whatsoever.
That’s why the multiple simultaneous universe model was created (as a pure assumption) because some physicists couldn’t accept that the course of events in the universe could actually in theory be inluenced by factors that were not part of the physical universe.
IOW not only is the universe a dice game, but the dice are not in the universe.
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Well I do not claim to have a firm grip on Bell’s Theorem so I really can’t contest this point too much. From the synopsis I read, I will just say if we cannot observe everything about the universe how do we know that no physical causes would influence the decision? It is a bit of a eat your cake and have it to scenario to say we can’t know everything that is going on but that we know that no physical thing is at the root of the cause. I am sure our physicist friends have a good answer for this, but it is not immediately obvious to me how they can rule this out once they have conceded we cannot know or measure everything within the universe.
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