Quantum Non-Linearity: June 2022

Tuesday, June 21, 2022

Dualist Examples

Western Dualism was historically expressed as deism; this is the view that God is to his created world as the skilled human artisan is to the automata of the 18th century. In both cases the created object is thought to have an animus of it's own, an animus by which it is able to function autonomously: Sci-fi stories where the created object runs out of the control of its creator tap into this paradigm. When pushed too hard deism leads to a creation cut adrift from its Creator and eventually death of God secularism: Somehow it is supposed that the cosmos is sufficiently self-provisioned to create and run itself.

...this kind of thinking represents a cultural legacy whose effects can be found among both atheists and Christian theists. It is a short step from deism to atheism. and the consequence is that some Christians see it as their duty to do all in their power refute any hint that so called "natural forces" have the efficacy to generate life, because for them such an efficacy can only mean "God didn't do it". See this for example:

DUALIST: What some of us find curious is that Christian evolutionists so seldom want to grasp the fact that the problem for most Christians is Darwinism, which is an explicitly materialist and naturalist theory of everything

(https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/biologos-hopes-to-calm-the-fears-of-ignorant-christians-about-evolution/)

MY COMMENT: The above presents us with a "Darwinist" strawman frequently seen among anti-evolutionists; that is: an explicitly materialist and naturalist theory of everything . No! Real "Darwinism" does not claim to be a theory of everything except in the minds of some atheists and Christian theists who think alike on this question, But Darwinian-like processes, if they are to work at all, are necessarily provisioned by highly contingent conditions and information. Therefore "Darwinism" is far from a "natural process". And at least some of those "Christian evolutionists" the hack above refers to do grasp this fact.

Although I'm not necessarily committed to standard theories of evolutionary mechanisms myself, I would never argue against evolution in the fashion presented above: Given that this quote comes from what claims to be an Intelligent Design stable I find it curious that this pundit does not want to grasp the facts of her glaring inconsistency: For although one might argue against evolution from a Biblical literalist standpoint, ID per se doesn't contradict evolution. This followers because effective evolutionary mechanisms require such a high degree of contingent input that this too is easily cast into the mold of Intelligent Design.

Below we have another hack who also thrusts his misconceptions into the mouths of Christians who don't agree with him:

DUALIST: So why aren’t the idea of the big bang and the creation account in Genesis compatible? Well, the big bang is based on the religion of naturalism, which assumes that the universe arose by natural processes. It’s a way of trying to explain everything without God. We should never take elements of a different religion and mix them in with Christianity and the Bible....(https://answersingenesis.org/astronomy/universe-final-era/)

MY COMMENT: Once again we see a crypto-atheist concept of "naturalism" being used as the strawman by which an attempt is made to spiritually intimidate Christians into accepting the misleading views of this author. Once again "natural forces" are wrongly portrayed as the automatic nemesis of a creator God; therefore, according to this author one must reject "the religion of naturalism" unconditionally. It is true that many an atheist thinks just like this author and believes that "natural processes... explain everything without God". So here we have a Christian fundamentalist with an atheistic mindset skipping over the fact that it is logically impossible for natural processes to explain themselves: they can only ever be descriptive of natural history and therefore are bound to be the depository of a high informational contingency.

Now consider the following from the same post:

DUALIST: Now, what many Christians don’t realize is that the big bang isn’t just a story about the origins of everything—it’s also a story with predictions for the future. In the most common model, the universe eventually reaches thermal equilibrium with zero energy available (a “heat death,” but it’s not hot as there’s no energy—so it becomes cold). But this is opposite of what the Bible states will happen in the future!

Once again we see this author thrusting his strawman arguments into the mouths of Christians who disagree with his own flawed way of thinking. He's assumed the because atheists extrapolate the laws of physics willy-nilly into the future then so must Christians who accept the big bang. Now, one can understand why from an atheist standpoint there is little choice but to assume one can extrapolate physical laws into the far future; what else can they do? But unless one makes predictions to test hypotheses, far-flung predictions of this ilk are metaphysical because unlike the past we get no observational messages from the future. So unless we can go there ourselves such predictions cannot be tested. See here where I took this issue up with another fundamentalist.

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION

“Ideas Versus Experience!" is a slogan expressing the uneasy relation between what we think the world to be and what our actual experience suggests it is. Experience makes or breaks ideas. But the reverse is also true: Well established ideas can influence the recognition, acceptance and even the perception of experience. In short there is a two way dialogue between ideas and experience. Sometimes that dialogue can turn into an argument, even a row.

The success of Science is based on a formalisation of this potentially contentious relationship as it seeks to support or refute theoretical notions by systematically comparing them with experience. In the far less formalized contexts of daily living we probably are using a similar heuristic when we display a tendency to drop ideas that lose the confrontation with experience, and retain those that win. Winning ideas, like the gladiators of the Roman arenas, live to fight another day. This Darwinian slant on the struggle for ideological survival is itself ideology that must, for consistency sake, submit itself to the very process it purports to describe. For example, it should be able to give account of the resilience of traditional theories in the face of contra indicators. And in the extreme, explanation also needs to be given of how conspiracy theorists continue to hold on to a ramifying structure of untested elaborations.

Human theoretical visions are often grand and sweeping, confidently affirming states of affairs that are far beyond immediate sensation. The vast unseen domains covered by our best theories contrasts with the limitations on human perceptual resources, resources that only allow a very sparse experimental sampling of our most ambitious ideas. Even a professional scientist only ever tests a small portion of any theoretical structure. Moreover, our theoretical concepts are ambitious enough to cover unreachable areas like the center of distant stars, sub-atomic dimensions, events long past into history, and very complex inscrutable objects like the human mind and its societies. Thus, science is metaphysical in as much as it has to admit that it covers vast domains inaccessible to testing in practice if not in principle. For the intelligent layman even the keyhole view of the experimental scientist may not be available. So whence comes the authority to affirm ideas that are often so grandiose in their sweep that they make claim to impinge upon the very meaning of life the universe and everything?

The fact is that for most of us the really big ideas diffuse through to us from our societal context, and at most these big ideas are only illuminated here and there, at a very few places, with actual direct experience of the phenomenon they conceptualise. These big ideas float around in the ether-like-media of society in the form of books, lectures, programmes, and the Internet etc, objects that the postmodernist philosophers call "texts".

For someone such as myself the battle to make sense of life was joined as soon as I was aware of mystery. But looking back it is clear to me that I haven't done an honest scientific experiment in the whole of my life. For me the effort to bring sense and integration to the complexity of life boils down to grappling with the many texts of society; These texts carry both big theoretical ideas and raw data from which ideas crystallize. These texts are compared with other texts in the search for coherence and consistency. These texts take the place and role of experiments as one tests theories using texts. These texts are in effect the experience of life. My own modest attempt at grandiose theorising has already been presented to the world. (See this blog "Physics and the Wild Web") and my excuse is that I have simply inherited the theoretical hubris of the human race.

The postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida said, "There is nothing outside the text". I think he was at least right about the primary role texts play in the life of those like myself whose instinct has been to grapple relentlessly with the riddles of life, and to seek out meaning and go where no man has gone before. But one could equally claim, "There is nothing outside the experience". For one might read the "text" of the clouds in the sky as a predictor of impending weather just as one reads socially generated symbolic configurations as the predictor of certain kinds of thought or potential experience. For the text is just as much an experience as more primeval phenomenon like thunder and lightning. Texts are part of our cosmic experience and they imperceptibly grade into the more conventional notion of experience. Where the crossover point is, is difficult to say.

Postmodernism may have got it right about the primary role of the text, but it has made one very serious mistake. Where I would radically differ from the postmodern view is that I believe the mass of social texts, if we allow them, naturally converge upon grand consistent narratives and those narratives are here to stay. And that is because these texts, I submit, are part of a world with an underlying rational integratedness and that integratedness is being revealed to us bit by bit. For revelation it is: Revelation is what we cannot discover unless God chooses that we discover it. My perceptions and reason, limited though they may be, were not self-made, they had to be discovered as gifts. These gifts are given to all of us; one can but trust and use them. Reason is a grace of Revelation. For this reason the hubris of theory making is justified.

Quantum Non-Linearity

Tuesday, June 21, 2022

Dualist Examples

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION