Freethought & Rationalism Archive

lunachick · 11-06-2002, 05:04 PM

Galiel: Thank you for your thoughtful reply to my question. You've given me something to think about.
I'll look out for the Tao Te Ching, purely for its literary style and poetic license, which I will no doubt enjoy. I guess sometimes the beauty is in the ideas and the presentation of those ideas, rather than in it 'being true'. Truth, lies and magic - these are a few of my favourite things!

<silly mood mode - feeling like Julie Andrews today. Heh.>

Thanks again for clarifying things for me.

lpetrich · 11-06-2002, 05:07 PM

I'm knowledgeable in some of the math involved in particle physics, and I find the whole "mystic physics" thesis to be a load of male-bovine excrement.

Quantum mechanics does have some very odd properties, but I do not see how such properties justify "mystic physics" interpretations.

In particular, something called the "collapse of the wavefunction" is often held to justify "mystic physics" views. To illustrate, let us consider an experiment that demonstrates that some entity has both particle and wave properties. This is contrary to familiar experience and macroscopic-scale physics, in which entities are either particlelike or wavelike. But it has been observed in a variety of experiments.

Imagine a demonstration of diffraction and interference. Light from a single source passes through two slits, and on the other side, it produces some interference fringes, which is clearly a wavelike property.

Now try to record those fringes with some photographic film, which contains silver-halide grains that get activated by incoming light. But this is a VERY localized process; one quantum of light will get absorbed by exactly one grain. A quantum being a single "unit" of light energy, and is clearly a particlelike property.

The pattern of film-grain activations is truly remarkable; it is totally random, yet its probability distribution corresponds to the intensities one finds from light's wavelike properties. It is as if each quantum of light (photon) was not acting like a bullet coming from the source, but had traveled through both slits and was spreading out over the entire film. Only to shrink to the size of one film grain.

This is the "collapse of the wavefunction", and how it happens has been the subject of much controversy.

One common interpretation of it is the Born or Copenhagen interpretation, which states that it happens as a result of an act of observation. This has been a favorite starting point for some "mystic physics" interpretations, which take this to mean that an observer's thinking can somehow influence the phenomenon being observed, or else that that phenomenon is nothing more than a Matrix-style hallucination.

However, this collapse is entirely independent of one's thought; attempts to discover quantum psychokinesis, as it might be called, have failed.

Ronin · 11-06-2002, 05:48 PM

Gotta love those silly pagans.

~ Merry Part, Kassiana.

AllakaZAMMMM ~

[ November 06, 2002: Message edited by: Ronin ]

Living Dead Chipmunk · 11-06-2002, 07:02 PM

Ronin, if you're not going to participate civilly, please don't incite others. This thread is relatively polite. Your insults aren't contributing to anyone's enlightnment, just their blood pressure. If you don't believe someone's point is valid, please inform the rest of us as to your thought process rather than simply engaging in blatant ad homeniems.

I can imagine why HD and Kass have such a reactive attitude if you're par for the course on these boards.

~

DC said:

Quote:

Or painting pictures for the pleasure gained from painting pictures

Pleasure isn't logical. What does pleasure do for you? What does it do for anyone else? There are more objectively beneficial ways to use spare time. Anything quantifiable that painting actually does, some other activity most assurededly does better.

[ November 06, 2002: Message edited by: Living Dead Chipmunk ]

Demigawd · 11-06-2002, 07:36 PM

Pleasure isn't logical. What does pleasure do for you? What does it do for anyone else? There are more objectively beneficial ways to use spare time. Anything quantifiable that painting actually does, some other activity most assurededly does better.

What do you think you're accomplishing channeling Mr. Spock via Ayn Rand via a freshman course in philosophy? You still haven't addressed how favoring others above oneself is logical, rational, objective, or whatever. "Assurededly", a person creates meaning to existence within the context of one's own experience.

Cipher Girl · 11-06-2002, 08:05 PM

I also work with a lot of engineers. I've noticed that the engineers tend to be one of two types as they progress in their careers, the scientist-engineer, and the manager-engineer. The scientist-engineer is one who is an engineer by education but seeks answers to engineering challenges like a scientist. The manager-engineer tends to stay in the comfortable engineering box and seeks advancement by climbing the management ladder rather than by solving problems in an original and creative manner.

At work I've noticed the manager-engineer types also seem to be the most overtly religious types. Sometimes they almost seem to be a tight little group looking down on the rest of the engineers, physicists, and mathematicians like myself. The rest of us seem to be a lot less religious and more freethinking.

Egoinos · 11-06-2002, 08:06 PM

Some of this thread has gone way over my head, but I would like to comment nevertheless.

I am perfectly willing to accept, and know from personal experience any number of theists who are highly intelligent, rational, and educated. Some of the most brilliant people in history - most of them, in fact, have been theists. I would agree with the examples posted earlier, of Thomas Aquinas, and of the many other theologians, philosophers, and scientists who were theists. We fall into a very dangerous trap if we begin to say that religious belief means that a person cannot think rationally, or is stupid. It would also be rather mean-spirited. I don't know about anyone else, but it does not threaten me or my lack of faith in any way to know that there were and are people many times more intelligent than I am who are believers in one deity or other.

I am slightly puzzled as to why we would assume engineers and other scientists to be more rational than others, but maybe thats because I am not a scientist.

In a sense (drawing on personal experience here) rational believers compartmentalise. I think this only applies to the foundation of belief, though, the original belief in your deity of choice. Once you've got over the "reasons to believe a god exists" and "reasons to believe X god is that god" then reason and logic can be applied perfectly well to religious belief. The reason I am not a theist is that I could not find reason enough to believe in those two conditions, and thus could not have such a belief to begin with. People can and do find their own reasons to believe those two conditions, but not, I would say, on a rational or logical basis, but on faith. Faith because they want to believe there is a god, for whatever reason, faith because they believe they have had a personal encounter with that god, faith because they have been brought up to believe in a god, whatever. The point is that the reason they so believe is personal to them, its subjective. Such a belief is defensible against all attacks, though not so good for evangelism. Its also presumably reasonable and rational to the person - and we cannot attack that particuarly, because we can't experience whatever they have experienced, what we can attack is the objective claims most theists make for their beliefs. They cannot be satisfied with saying "X belief is right/reasonable/rational/logical to me and so I believe it" but must say "X belief is true in all cases", once they move into objectivity their beliefs can be attacked, and should be, because they have no real basis. I sometimes wonder if we do not have a religion ourselves, when we claim objective truths about our own lack of belief, and attempt to convert others to the same.

However, I don't see that there is anything wrong, necessarily, with the idea of a rational theist - its not an oxymoron, not really. Perhaps we see too many raving fundies, who most certainly are not rational, and thus generalise about all theists from their actions. There are rational theists, who have rational reasons for their own beliefs - even if those beliefs cannot be extended so that others must believe in them too. Why each theist believes as they do, is a matter for them personally, you'd have to ask them for their reasons.

--Egoinos--

Starboy · 11-06-2002, 08:11 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Demigawd:
You still haven't addressed how favoring others above oneself is logical, rational, objective, or whatever. "Assurededly", a person creates meaning to existence within the context of one's own experience.

To talk about the rationality of selfishness and altruism is like talking about the logic of blue and red. They are artifacts of existence. The best we can do is come up with explanations for selfishness and altruism that work and make sense in relation to current scientific knowledge.

Starboy

Living Dead Chipmunk · 11-06-2002, 08:18 PM

Demigawd said:

Quote:

You still haven't addressed how favoring others above oneself is logical, rational, objective, or whatever.

You may not have noticed, but I provided an alternative argument in case you didn't agree that helping others was logical. In the same post as I provided the first example.

I'm still waiting to hear how pleasure can serve any rational purpose when activities that actually better oneself are avaliable. I don't appreciate your condescention, either. As for what I'm trying to accomplish, I'm attempting to argue that there's absolutely no logic behind pleasure. Maybe it lowers blood pressure and helps us live longer? I don't know, I'm trying to get the answer from you.

If you *don't* believe pleasure has to be logical, please tell me how HD's original assertion about atheism and extreme rationality was incorrect.

I'm genuinely in unfamiliar territory here, and your answers aren't helping explain anything. It's frustrating.

Living Dead Chipmunk · 11-07-2002, 08:34 PM

Still can't figure it out.

I have a feeling this is one of those things that I just won't be able to get on my own no matter how much I sit here and spin my wheels over it.

Any help?

11-06-2002, 05:48 PM	#63
Ronin Veteran Member Join Date: Jun 2002 Location: Mississippi Posts: 5,047	Gotta love those silly pagans. ~ Merry Part, Kassiana. AllakaZAMMMM ~ [ November 06, 2002: Message edited by: Ronin ]</p>

11-06-2002, 07:36 PM	#65
Demigawd Veteran Member Join Date: Jul 2002 Location: On a sailing ship to nowhere, leaving any place Posts: 2,254	<strong>Pleasure isn't logical. What does pleasure do for you? What does it do for anyone else? There are more objectively beneficial ways to use spare time. Anything quantifiable that painting actually does, some other activity most assurededly does better.</strong> What do you think you're accomplishing channeling Mr. Spock via Ayn Rand via a freshman course in philosophy? You still haven't addressed how favoring others above oneself is logical, rational, objective, or whatever. "Assurededly", a person creates meaning to existence within the context of one's own experience.

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11-06-2002, 05:04 PM	#61
lunachick Veteran Member Join Date: Sep 2002 Location: NZ Posts: 7,895	Galiel: Thank you for your thoughtful reply to my question. You've given me something to think about. I'll look out for the Tao Te Ching, purely for its literary style and poetic license, which I will no doubt enjoy. I guess sometimes the beauty is in the ideas and the presentation of those ideas, rather than in it 'being true'. Truth, lies and magic - these are a few of my favourite things! <silly mood mode - feeling like Julie Andrews today. Heh.> Thanks again for clarifying things for me.

11-06-2002, 05:07 PM	#62
lpetrich Contributor Join Date: Jul 2000 Location: Lebanon, OR, USA Posts: 16,829	I'm knowledgeable in some of the math involved in particle physics, and I find the whole "mystic physics" thesis to be a load of male-bovine excrement. Quantum mechanics does have some very odd properties, but I do not see how such properties justify "mystic physics" interpretations. In particular, something called the "collapse of the wavefunction" is often held to justify "mystic physics" views. To illustrate, let us consider an experiment that demonstrates that some entity has both particle and wave properties. This is contrary to familiar experience and macroscopic-scale physics, in which entities are either particlelike or wavelike. But it has been observed in a variety of experiments. Imagine a demonstration of diffraction and interference. Light from a single source passes through two slits, and on the other side, it produces some interference fringes, which is clearly a wavelike property. Now try to record those fringes with some photographic film, which contains silver-halide grains that get activated by incoming light. But this is a VERY localized process; one quantum of light will get absorbed by exactly one grain. A quantum being a single "unit" of light energy, and is clearly a particlelike property. The pattern of film-grain activations is truly remarkable; it is totally random, yet its probability distribution corresponds to the intensities one finds from light's wavelike properties. It is as if each quantum of light (photon) was not acting like a bullet coming from the source, but had traveled through both slits and was spreading out over the entire film. Only to shrink to the size of one film grain. This is the "collapse of the wavefunction", and how it happens has been the subject of much controversy. One common interpretation of it is the Born or Copenhagen interpretation, which states that it happens as a result of an act of observation. This has been a favorite starting point for some "mystic physics" interpretations, which take this to mean that an observer's thinking can somehow influence the phenomenon being observed, or else that that phenomenon is nothing more than a Matrix-style hallucination. However, this collapse is entirely independent of one's thought; attempts to discover quantum psychokinesis, as it might be called, have failed.

11-06-2002, 08:05 PM	#66
Cipher Girl Senior Member Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: Sunny Southern California Posts: 657	I also work with a lot of engineers. I've noticed that the engineers tend to be one of two types as they progress in their careers, the scientist-engineer, and the manager-engineer. The scientist-engineer is one who is an engineer by education but seeks answers to engineering challenges like a scientist. The manager-engineer tends to stay in the comfortable engineering box and seeks advancement by climbing the management ladder rather than by solving problems in an original and creative manner. At work I've noticed the manager-engineer types also seem to be the most overtly religious types. Sometimes they almost seem to be a tight little group looking down on the rest of the engineers, physicists, and mathematicians like myself. The rest of us seem to be a lot less religious and more freethinking.

11-06-2002, 08:06 PM	#67
Egoinos Regular Member Join Date: Feb 2002 Location: Edinburgh Posts: 423	Some of this thread has gone way over my head, but I would like to comment nevertheless. I am perfectly willing to accept, and know from personal experience any number of theists who are highly intelligent, rational, and educated. Some of the most brilliant people in history - most of them, in fact, have been theists. I would agree with the examples posted earlier, of Thomas Aquinas, and of the many other theologians, philosophers, and scientists who were theists. We fall into a very dangerous trap if we begin to say that religious belief means that a person cannot think rationally, or is stupid. It would also be rather mean-spirited. I don't know about anyone else, but it does not threaten me or my lack of faith in any way to know that there were and are people many times more intelligent than I am who are believers in one deity or other. I am slightly puzzled as to why we would assume engineers and other scientists to be more rational than others, but maybe thats because I am not a scientist. In a sense (drawing on personal experience here) rational believers compartmentalise. I think this only applies to the foundation of belief, though, the original belief in your deity of choice. Once you've got over the "reasons to believe a god exists" and "reasons to believe X god is that god" then reason and logic can be applied perfectly well to religious belief. The reason I am not a theist is that I could not find reason enough to believe in those two conditions, and thus could not have such a belief to begin with. People can and do find their own reasons to believe those two conditions, but not, I would say, on a rational or logical basis, but on faith. Faith because they want to believe there is a god, for whatever reason, faith because they believe they have had a personal encounter with that god, faith because they have been brought up to believe in a god, whatever. The point is that the reason they so believe is personal to them, its subjective. Such a belief is defensible against all attacks, though not so good for evangelism. Its also presumably reasonable and rational to the person - and we cannot attack that particuarly, because we can't experience whatever they have experienced, what we can attack is the objective claims most theists make for their beliefs. They cannot be satisfied with saying "X belief is right/reasonable/rational/logical to me and so I believe it" but must say "X belief is true in all cases", once they move into objectivity their beliefs can be attacked, and should be, because they have no real basis. I sometimes wonder if we do not have a religion ourselves, when we claim objective truths about our own lack of belief, and attempt to convert others to the same. However, I don't see that there is anything wrong, necessarily, with the idea of a rational theist - its not an oxymoron, not really. Perhaps we see too many raving fundies, who most certainly are not rational, and thus generalise about all theists from their actions. There are rational theists, who have rational reasons for their own beliefs - even if those beliefs cannot be extended so that others must believe in them too. Why each theist believes as they do, is a matter for them personally, you'd have to ask them for their reasons. --Egoinos--

11-07-2002, 08:34 PM	#70
Living Dead Chipmunk Regular Member Join Date: Oct 2002 Location: South Carolina Posts: 312	Still can't figure it out. I have a feeling this is one of those things that I just won't be able to get on my own no matter how much I sit here and spin my wheels over it. Any help?

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