h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Oh, and getting back to the round circle that seems to have started all of this, in the traditional "infinate but bounded" universe, the perfectly round circle would have to be the perfectly straight but infinately one diminsional line.
LOTL
M93

I dont think you can say darwins model is useless, just that it is working in a regional rather than a worldwide manner.

Admittedly, some of the empires of the past have covered huge chunks of land, but nothing has ever been totally global.

Also finding a way to be better doesnt necessarily mean destroying, just controlling.

I've always felt that Darwin's model failed in that respect, that everything was a competition with the winner gaining the spoils. It seems to me that it's all about being able to fill a vital niche in the ecosystem. If your particular species can find it's own particular food, in it's own particular way, without upsetting the structure and destroying all other life around you, then your species will survive. Usually, if one species procreates too much, another species will look to it as a food source. If one procreates too little, it will find better ways to protect itself, or die off. But the ones that survive aren't super-species that have won staggering victories over the bodies of slain species, they're just able to find enough resources to exist, and protect themselves from their enemies long enough to continue the species.

the beauty of a firm belief in a "higher Power" is that i know reality and virtual reality are separated by a permeable membrane, easily passed through.@

Er, not to be too picky but that sounded a wee bit like preachy rhetoric

"reality is the creation of the expectations of those who believe in it"? Hrmmm. Perhaps those that believe in reality are simply the creation of reality? Too easily reversable, though I do know what you are getting at.

William Gibson's 'consensual hallucination' comes to mind...

There's a danger inherent in assuming that just because matter is mostly empty space that it isn't still matter. Remember, the key term is RELATIVITY What seems solid, is, and has to be treated as such. Otherwise you wind up being rather like a person living in abject poverty because he doesnt believe in money. I'm not so sure expectation enters into it so very much.

Oh dear, oh dear... some very silly ideas in the last few posts.
So the material we see around us is mostly empty space. True; only neutron stars are actually wholly matter, in the strictest sense. But however convinced you are of this fact (and I am as confident of it as I am that the sun will rise tomorrow) you cannot walk through the wall. Perhaps you have a mental image of particles passing through the same region, but missing each other? But sadly the atoms in the wall, and the atoms in your body, are orbited by negatively charged electrons. When the electrons in your body come close to the electrons in the wall, the like charges repel, and you are stopped by the wall. No matter how much faith you have that you will succeed, the principle of electric repulsion has the casting vote in what happens.
And as for there being another way of knowing the truth, information coming from visions, dreams, hallucinogenic trips, etc. Suppose you are at a party in someone's flat / apartment where there are plenty of drugs around. A friend who has been doing a lot of acid suddenly stands up and announces that he can fly, and moreover that there are elves flying outside waiting for him to join them. Will you
a) let him go, because his visions and beliefs are just as valid as any reductionist scientific model
b) be very careful to keep him away from any open windows
Not a hard call, is it?

the answer is @. and, if you have true faith, you go with him. yes, there is the chance of getting an electric shock when you go through the wall, but even if you get electrocuted, the trip through, and, of course, the view from the other side make it all worthwhile. hell is for people who don't believe.@

Perhaps you have extrapolated my standpoint a bit far, given the available data!! Yes, people have been effectively reduced to the point that they think that reality is just what we can see, despite scientific discoveries (since Pasteur (also a Godly man!) especially!) to the contrary. PS Is a 'theolian' a life form from Star Trek?

Phobos, I think the idea Mordek was trying to get at in his earlier post seems to have sort of passed you by... he is suggesting that physical laws are mutable byproducts of human consciousness. So unless you want to tackle that notion directly i'm not sure if a discussion of electrons colliding either furthers or detracts from his enthusiastic if questionable views.

Regarding your second point; let me ask you this. A buddy of yours comes along, we works for NASA, he wants to borrow 5 million dollars so that he can send a probe to mars, and he can absolutely 99% guarantee that there will be NO problem because he has rigorously defined mathematical and scientific models predicting that the probe will land safely on mars without interference, so can he please have the cash.

Do what you will. I'd tell him to stuff it.

I was being a bit snide but I think you completely missed the point of that thread of discussion. Empirical knowledge is not absolute. Read "Myths Models and Paradigms" by Ian Barbour, or "The structure of scientific revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn. Science is a model-building system using empirical evidence as its basis. The visions, hallucinations and dreams that you so readily dismiss on the grounds that they don't fit into this category denies a vast and powerful part of human knowledge. Perhaps you would like to explain to me why Hindu poetry written millenia ago described fractals and chaos theory, or why zen mystics understood things about non-local space that quantum physicists are still struggling to grasp, or how Taoists managed to develop superdeterminism as a cosmology a long time before Einstein came along. Perhaps you would haev me think that Carl Jung's life work was a fraudulent waste because he dealt with dreams and dream states. But I think that's arrogance honestly. There are different ways of knowing, and you have blinded yourself to most of them.

a moment of bliss...Thank you, TG. If you can't, just once, act in blind faith, I feel that I've failed. forget all your pessimism, it's Groundhog Day!!!!!!!!!!! You will repeat this day for all eternity. For GOD'S (my) sake, make this the day you've always dreamed of, wished for, hoped for. Pain or pleasure, Heaven or Hell, it's for everyone, nay, everyTHING to decide. STEAM...@

I am not as well educated as alot of you when it comes to science, but I have felt conflicted when it comes to religon, just like everyone else. I just thought that I would share my favorite written work on the subject of science and religon.

THE SCIENCE OF MYTH

If you ever question beliefs that you hold, you're not alone. But you oughta realize that every myth is a metaphor. In the case of Christianity and Judaism there exists the belief that spiritual matters are enslaved to history. The Buddhists believe that the functional aspects override the myth, while other religions use the literal core to build foundations with. See, half the world sees the myth as fact, while it's seen as a lie by the other half, and the simple truth is that it's none of that, and somehow no matter what the world keeps turning. Somehow we get there without ever learning. Science and religon are not mutually exclusive. In fact for better understanding, we take the facts of science and apply them. And if both factors keep evolving, then we continue getting information, but closing off possibilities makes it hard to see the bigger picture. Consider the case of the woman whose faith helped her make it through when she was raped and cut up and left for dead in a trunk her beliefs held true. It doesn't matter if it's real or not, cause some things are better left without a doubt, and if it works then it gets the job done.

- Screeching Weasel

I hope that you won't look down on this just because it is a song by a punk band. It makes sense to me. I personally don't think that we're ever going to know what is going on, and that's fine with me.

Back to the original question, is God omnipotent? Probably. Then why do bad things happen? That's easy, if nothing bad ever happened, we wouldn't know it when good things did.

[Mordek] is suggesting that physical laws are mutable byproducts of human consciousness."
Then he would let the man on LSD jump out the window, because the physical law of Gravity is a mutable byproduct of his Human Consciousness, which is convinced that it can fly?

"He can absolutely 99% guarantee that there will be NO problem"
Then he's a fool. Rockets explode, computers crash, people use the wrong units, and we end up with millions of $ of spaceprobe splattered over the Utopia Plain. Nothing wrong with the theory though...

"Science is a model-building system using empirical evidence as its basis. The visions, hallucinations and dreams that you so readily dismiss on the grounds that they don't fit into this category denies a vast and powerful part of human knowledge"
Dreams and visions are a vast and powerful part of human superstition. They only count as evidence about the nature of the mind, and so are useful to psychiatrists. They have no place in any investigation into the nature of things in the physical world.

"Perhaps you would like to explain to me why..."
Yes, I'd love to. Let's take them one at a time.

FRACTALS: mathematical objects produced by iteration of a complex algorithm on the Argand plane. Exhibit self-similarity and infinite detail.
Perhaps our Hindu poet saw a tree, observed the self-similarity between the large-scale structures of branches and boughs, and the small scale structures of twigs, and the self-similarity evident in the bays and inlets of a coastline, and extrapolated the idea. I doubt that the secrets of modern mathematics were revealed in any vision or dream.
CHAOS: in which a small difference in initial conditions produces a large difference in eventual outcome. This may be seen in a game of cards, in which a small difference in the position of the Ace of Hearts determines whether you win or lose, or in many other instances. No Hindu poet, however, was ever able to use chaos to achieve anything, or for that matter appreciated the underlying theory - they simply noted the phenomenon. Mathematicians have been able to find many applications for chaos, such as finding the most efficient trajectory for a spacecraft to save fuel. 'Does God Play Dice?' by Ian Stewart is a good source of info on chaos, the theory and applications.
Zen: according to the alt.zen FAQ:
"One of the central points of Zen is intuitive understanding. As a result, words and sentences have no fixed meaning, and logic is often irrelevant."
So, I may sit and meditate, then claim to have an Intuitive Understanding of something. In fact I may come up with anything. I could claim to have discovered that the Square Circle is possible. Then I don't even have to defend my claim, because logic is irrelevant, and only logic can show the impossibility of said square circle. In hindsight we might say that some of them had ideas that have parallels in modern physics, but without logic there is no way to tell which are valid and which are completely ridiculous.
Superdeterminism: in which the history of the universe is uniquely determined and unchangeable. So, quantum mechanics and its probabilistic nature - confirmed by every experiment anyone can think of - disappear. It's really just the old Fate vs Free Will argument, and that doesn't need any visions or the intellect of an Einstein to hit upon - every civilization that ever existed had this debate.

As for Jung, if he was using dream and hallucination information to investigate the mind, then that is well and good, for such visions obviously provide information about what is going on in the subconscious. If he tried to use dreams to discover new physical truths, he would be mad.
The chemist Kekulé dreamed up the structure of benzene, you may object; but he did not take a dream as evidence, merely inspiration. Experiments had to be done to test this hypothesis. The next night he might have been dreaming of being pursued by a giant carnivorous carrot - but no such monster exists in the world. So, how do we tell which of our dreams may inspire a new discovery, and which are completely irrelevant? That's right: experiment! Without experimental evidence, all we can know is Cogito Ergo Sum.

Very succinctly put, GreyRose. Nicely put, and absolutely true. When it comes to truth, education and science only cloud the facts. Sorry, Phobos, but GreyRose is right. Happy Groundhog Day.@

I'll leave it to Mordek to defend his own viewpoint, but I would suggest that he would claim something similar to what you described could happen. Most people who ascribe to this theory tend towards favouring more subtle demonstrations of it, like Jung's syncrhonicity.

You completely missed the point about the mars probe. Go back and read it again. It was an analagous parody of your own point to demonstrate that science has its own follies and misconceptions. It was probably weak for its intended purpose but I didn't think it was so subtle as to be entirely misunderstood. My guess is you are favouring being obtuse over being wise.

Regarding your views on empirical data vs intuitive data: all I can say is that you are professing a belief but offering no rational basis for it. Who cares what you believe... I believe the sky is pink!

Seriously, your views seem to echo those of David Hume who once offered the notion that 'only that which is empirically verifiable can be said to be true, or meaningful'. That means every time you tell your wife you love her, you are lying, by this definition. I'm not sure that's helpful. But what I find most staggeringly inept about this viewpoint is that it misses the obvious; you cannot verify empirical verification empirically. Therefore the statement is by its own definition not meaningful.

Hindus and fractals: You should try writing a poem sometime; such things tend to use a part of the brain very similar to the part of the brain which brings intuitive/creative impulses to the conscious fore.

Chaos: really depends on your definition of achievement; I'm afraid you'll have to take that up with a Hindu. Fritjof Capra might tell you to stuff it.

Zen: Try "The Tao of Physics". Your grasp of zen, which meditates on riddles of cognitive paradox, is markedly weak.

Superdeterminism; Taoists worked out free will in a superdeterministic framework centuries before either concept was well understood in other cultures. They acheived this 'breakthrough' by way of meditation on the aforementioned riddles.

Jung did try to use his data to describe reality in a new light and his work was brilliant. You are arrogant to assume he 'must be mad' because his view does not coincide with yours, particularly if you have not read his works carefully. I urge you to reconsider.

One last thing: I do not mean to in any way infer that empirical data is not worth pursuing or using. I do not wish to imply that lsd-induced synpatic malfunctions are to be confused with what is going on in the world "outside" that person's head. I think my original point has become obfuscated here and I should clarify it; there are alternate ways of knowing. You may know something because you tested it; you may know something because you feel it; you may know something because you dreamed it; or saw it; or whatever. In any case, the knowledge may be shown later on to be off the mark, and thus an open mind should be reserved so that the cognitive models you build of reality can continually evolve. No knowledge is absolute; no method of achieving knowledge will always provide what is sought after.

Hence the koan;

I know that I know nothing.

Think about it.

I'm totally out of my depth , but here goes anyway......

I totally agree with your point about alternate ways of knowing. What i can't understand is that people can not accept this and yet at the same time are perfectly happy to believe in the existence of a higher being ( call it what you will) based purely on a faith that they would not accept as proof of the existance of anything else.


BTW I would have to agree with your assesment of Phobos knowledge of Zen

Yeah, people often make assumptions about the logic of foreign philosophical systems without realizing that bivalent logic as known in the western world was developed in greece (based on the principle of the 'logos') and is therefore specific to a grecian view of the world.

One interesting topic to look up is the case of the Aymaran indian tribe, a group living in central america that got wiped out by the mayans about 60 years before europe invaded. They had their own language, and they had 9 different words for yes and no. Their language is viewed as an example of 'trivalent' logic, the assertion that the universe contains a meaningfuly defineable maybe as well as a yes and a no. An interesting study, and one I feel probably relates to the unraveling of riddles such as quantum indeterminacy.

Im pretty sure Umberto Eco had something to say about western logic ( i think he called it Aristotleian logic) and it limiting effect on western thinking.

Having treked in Nepal i found it a lot easier to understand their belief in demons etc, just by being immersed in the terrain it evolved from.

With plenty of time on your hands to think about such things you do begin to question some of the assumptions you have been raised with, as a totally different set of assumptions seems equally, if not more so, relevant and 'logical' in the new environment(certainly to the people who live there).

We ought to have a word in english which could be used in the same way.

How about YO.

I love it! I always knew those rap artists were in fact profound individuals seeking enlightenment and knowledge of the cosmic order. Heh. Perhaps we should find a different word, or at least spelling for it. Maybe 'Io'?