Wounded King

Its a pretty inhospitible playground where it is many light years from the roundabout to the swings and the intervening distance is hard vacuum. Does this mean that Mars is the sand pit?

Anti-Materialist

Could be...

sticking to your analogy...

We're still trapped in the pre-k playpen. We won't be going anywhere until we are old enough to know how to unlock the gate to the playpen. The sand pit is attached to the playpen, with a much easier barrier to cross.

You gotta keep the pre-k types locked away by themselves. When they are older, they will be more responsible and thus better able to handle the more dangerous toys.

JL

Wounded King

I fear this particular group of Pre-K kids is still in danger of collectively falling face first in a puddle and drowning themselves before they ever reach that maturity.

Clutch

Ockham's Razor only applies up to "empirical adequacy". Of a group of theories that explain the data, choose the simplest. This is almost tantamount to advising: Don't believe that for which you lack evidence. Which seems pretty straightforward.

Unfortunately, simplicity itself is paradoxically not a simple topic.

Jinto

First, your theory makes no predictions about whether or not FTL travel will ever be discovered, in the sense that it would be falsified if FTL travel remains impossible. Atheism also makes no predictions about FTL travel - special relativity is neutral with respect to the existence of God. Since niether your theory nor it's competitor makes any predictions regarding FTL travel, one cannot be said to have a predictive advantage over the other.

I predict that you most certainly won't do that, due to the fact that you will be entirely too dead to say anything.

Funny, I can see a use for etheric vision. If you could teach others how to do it, it could be used to give a type of sight to the blind. It would also allow scanning into shielded containers where conventional means of detection prove impossible, thus giving it significant military value.

Of course, I'm guessing that your etheric vision doesn't give you the ability to read tarot cards through electrical tape, or otherwise detect anything that can't be noticed by a blind person (blind people can sense a person's arm moving in front of them through subtle cues like displacement of air it causes when it moves.)

Good luck with James Randi. You'll need it.

Well if your conscience bothers you that's fine, but the fact remains that starting a religion is one of the fastest ways to get rich quick, as fans of L. Ron Hubbard can certainly attest.

Physicists argue for "closed timelike curves" (a fancy way of referring to time travel without sounding like a crank), but I have never heard of anyone who argued that they can violate the 2LoT. As for all possible universes, it depends on whether you are talking about logical possibility or physical possibility. It is logically possible to have a universe where the 1LoT doesn't hold, so entropy would be no problem. As for physical possibility: I doubt it. The 2LoT is a nessecary consequence of systems moving toward thermodynamic equilibrium, which is in turn a nessecary consequence of the laws of probability.

Obviously. If God could not effect FTL travel, it would take him over 100,000 years to affect events on the other side of the galaxy. We would never call a being with such an abysmal response time God.

I would add to this the necessity of there being some laws that that reality follows, and which this God is subject to. If there is no order, then the possibility of conscious thought goes right out the window.

First of all, if we accept (as many do) that our current physical laws are part of our reality, then there is nothing that would prevent reality from coming into existence, because when it began to exist there were no physical laws to prevent it. But this line of reasoning faces a bigger conundrum, namely that "coming into existence" supposes the existence of a time t where something didn't exist. But GR predicts that there IS no time t before the universe began. Thus, the universe, despite being finite, never came into existence, but rather has always existed.

First, as I have stated elsewhere, "nothing" is an inherently unstable state. If there is "nothing," then logically there is also nothing preventing it from becoming "something." Additionally, the existence of "nothing" is prohibited by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, because it requires a state where the position and momentum of the system are precisely known. So, why there is something rather than nothing is well answered.

Second, any answer to why reality exists is going to then become part of our reality and itself demand an explanation. If you propose, for instance, an infinite causal chain, you're going to recieve the problem of what caused that chain, as well as the additional problem of how you avoided an infinite buildup of entropy. You will also need to explain why it is that chain that exists and not some other logically consistent chain. That it just is is not an explanation, but rather a concession of the fact that it is inexplicable. While the proposal of infinity may help to explain our current 3-space, it does not explain at all our 3+1 spacetime. In contrast, an acausal model of the universe, such as the hawking-turok instanton, can explain the entire 3+1 spacetime, and has the further advantage that it does not require an explanation of why entropy has not built up to infinite levels. A brief overview of the hawking-turok instanton is given at the link I provided previously.

I don't think that general relativity provides any non-singular solutions for multiple time dimensions. As for the second law of thermodynamics, I would suspect that the problem gets even worse, since you now have that many more ways for disorder to propogate.

If I saw a license plate that said "spank-me," I would know it's custom issue from the fact that standard issue plates almost universally have a format that combines numbers and letters, and so the absence of numbers is a dead giveaway. As for ABC1234, I would consider that to be random until and unless informed otherwise, because it is no less probable than any other combination of numbers and letters. Someone, somewhere has undoubtebly been issued that plate as a matter of pure chance. After all, the probability is only 175,760,000:1 against. More than that number of license plates have been issued.

By the way, Nikolai, how did you know my license plate number?

Anti-Materialist

Well - I say the universe has a great big "spank me" licencse plate on it's rear end...

or perhaps it says "grow life here"


either way - it looks custom ordered to me. I know, I know - it's a judgement call. These things always come down to judgement calls.

Jesse

Suppose we calculate that there is only a one-in-a-trillion chance that a solar system will form in such a way that it contains an earthlike planet suitable for life. That would suggest earth has a big "grow life here" licence plate on it, but would it suggest to you earth was "custom-made"? After all, there are a lot more than a trillion stars in the universe.

Similarly, even accepting anthropic coincidences in our universe, that could just mean our universe (or our region of the universe, assuming different regions have different values of physical constants) is one of many universe, and there are enough that there's bound to be a few with life-giving properties.

hyzer

Of course the reason our planet looks custom ordered is because all life evolved to fit it.

One liquid molecule to another “gee, look how this container was designed just to hold us!”

Or, slightly more obtusely, “wherever you go, there you are.”

Jesse

To a limited extent that's true, but there are probably a limited number of possible conditions in our universe where fairly stable complex molecules akin to DNA could exist (of the atomic elements, only carbon and silicon can form these types of molecules--for problems with the idea of silicon-based life, see this page...likewise, for a discussion of the possibility of life which uses some alternative chemical as a solvent instead of water, see this one), and without something like that it's hard to see how you could have heredity (not to mention complex internal machinery of any kind), a basic requirement for any possible form of life. On most planets, no life of any kind could ever arise, if this argument is correct.

Chimp

Hello again Anti-Materialist

We could start out with a very simple hypothesis or ...assumption.

Existence "exists".

That is to say that existence is mathematical, such, that every permutation and combination OF existence DOES exist.

Every conceivable ordered and non ordered universe scenario exists in a type of probabilistic "sample space". Certain universes will be like ours, with well ordered constants and laws that support life. Other universe will be ontological dead ends without the correct laws. Total chaos.

This universe operates according to certain rules, analogously to a self programming algorithm.

If mathematics only approximates reality, then the laws of probability agree "exactly" with reality!

There seems to be a remarkable concordance with mathematics and the observable universe

Chimp