which should win?

[Eman Resu]

Should Einstein just not speak to journalists? That would be snooty.

He hasn't spoken to anyone in 58 years - or have you put this in the present tense because of a sudden belief in Life everlasting?

[mal4mac]

He lives on in my mind. I just wish his mind lived on in my mind.

[Methexis]

science or religion?

science eventually has to prove god exist is its ultimate task . it has not done that yet because it is too busy proving ufos do.
religion cannot prove god exist but what it has is a script that says it does. not enough arguments to prove god does not exist either.

or may be both will eventually outdo each other and time will take it all.

what do you say?

First, I doubt that proving or disproving God's existence is what most scientists are or should be concerned with. There are more pressing issues such as global warming, starvation, illnesses, etc that seem more important in a world that's learned to accept that God's existence relies on belief and not proof for the past two thousand years. That being said, some scientists will still fruitlessly turn their efforts to finding God in God particles and whatnot. If there is a god and he had wanted us to *know* of his existence rather than *believe* in it, wouldn't he have found a way to make himself known to us?

[mal4mac]

First, I doubt that proving or disproving God's existence is what most scientists are or should be concerned with.

Who are you to say how most scientists should spend their spare time? No government will fund most scientists to do this, so its only ever going to be a spare time activity for most. Campaigning against irrationality seems a worthy way of spending ones spare time.

There are more pressing issues such as global warming, starvation, illnesses, etc ...

The opponents of the idea of global warming are just like Christian believers in ignoring the evidence. They believe there is no global warming so they can can carry on gobbling up the Earth's resources without feeling guilty. Why shouldn't they believe without knowing? Christians do it all the time. There are many crank doctors out there pushing quack medicine that, again, go against the scientific evidence. Why shouldn't they believe in the quack medicine? You don't need to to know, belief is enough, Christians have shown this.

To oppose irrationality in the pursuit of religious belief is to encourage rational thought in general, and to attack the basis on which irrationality holds sway in other areas.

That being said, some scientists will still fruitlessly turn their efforts to finding God in God particles and whatnot. If there is a god and he had wanted us to *know* of his existence rather than *believe* in it, wouldn't he have found a way to make himself known to us?

The "God particle", the Higgs boson, has nothing to do with God, here "God" is used as a metaphor for "of central importance", it's like describing Alexander the Great as "a God amongst men". There is no "whatnot" in which scientists try to find God, unless you want to extend the title of scientist to include Biblical scholars who look for evidence of God in biblical texts (and have found no good evidence.)

[YesNo]

I like the way Methexis brings us back to the original post. It doesn't seem to me that there is any conflict between science and religion, so there is nothing to win or lose.

However, different religious groups have conflicts with each other.

Some think they are on the side of science and reason and caricature their opponents as not. Looking closer at what these groups mean by science and reason it is clear that science and reason is valuable only as long as it justifies their dogmas. When it doesn't, they have no problem inventing fantasy lands built on ideas such as "many worlds" or "hidden variables" or "determinism's compatibility with free will".

I guess that's fine. The world needs dreamers, but these dreamers slip into irrationality when they start believing that they are better than any other religious group.

That's the only conflict I see going on. I hope whoever wins such conflicts respects the civil liberties of others. Since I don't see that happening, I hope there never is a winner.

[MorpheusSandman]

I don't count Dawkins as a scientist.

Luckily for the rest of us, actual scientists do.

The so-called "science" he claims to be part of is just a belief system. He uses science as a way to assert self-righteous superiority over others.

Evolutionary biology is a belief system? Have you even read Dawkins' books on evolutionary biology? Would you mind pointing to any of the actual science in those books that is wrong, that's merely "part of JUST a belief system" that isn't actually supported by the science? Have you even read one of his "popularizing" books like The Greatest Show on Earth that lays out what Dawkins feels are the best evidences for evolution? Can you name anything in THAT book that's wrong, pseudo-science, that's only "part of a belief system"?

You seem to like to conflate Dawkins the scientist with Dawkins the philosopher; they are not the same. Yes, Dawkins' philosophy is influenced/formed from his science, but your mistake is in assuming that it's the other way around, that Dawkins' philosophy has somehow tainted his science. I have not seen any of Dawkins' opponents give an example of this, and the reverence for Dawkins within his own field is good evidence against this. If Dawkins was, indeed, skewing the facts of evolutionary biology to fit his philosophy, then other evolutionary biologists would be all over him, as they are other "popularizers" or "appropriators" that use "bad science" for ulterior purposes.

But what is authority in science?

Not you, being neither a scientist, nor an authority.

What clues would I use to accept or reject an authority? Here are some:

All I've seen you ever do is reject authorities that espouse beliefs you don't want to believe. You've already made up your mind on a number of subjects, and you reject every authority that espouses them; just like any religious zealot.

1) If the authority is engaging in partisan activity that I find suspicious, I reject that authority. (This is enough for me to reject people like Dawkins.)

Dawkins is a perfect example of an authority whom you reject, yet can not even say where/why he's wrong. Someone being biased and partisan does not make them wrong. I'm pretty partisan that the Earth is spherical; Dawkins is pretty partisan that evolutionary biology is factual and that Creationism/ID is bunk. Despite our being partisan, we are both correct.

2) If I have found that the authority has misrepresented evidence, I reject that authority.

This would mean you'd reject every Creationist/ID authority, which is good.

It doesn't seem to me that there is any conflict between science and religion, so there is nothing to win or lose.

Depends on what you (or anyone) means by "science" and "religion." I'm more inclined to say that religion is in direct conflict with the scientific method. Religion poses questions, answers them, and then never seeks to rigorously test them; this method is completely incompatible with science, where every proposed answer is put to rigorous testing to see how well (if at all) they hold up. Besides that, there are numerous examples of religion making claims about the natural world that HAVE been contradicted by science. The numerous people unwilling to accept evolution solely because of their belief that Genesis is literally true is one example of a direct conflict. The more moderate believers like to say that such views are extremist, but I really don't see how the notion of an unfalsifiable deity is really any less extreme given that it comes from the same source as any other fundamental beliefs.

Looking closer at what these groups mean by science and reason it is clear that science and reason is valuable only as long as it justifies their dogmas. When it doesn't, they have no problem inventing fantasy lands built on ideas such as "many worlds" or "hidden variables" or "determinism's compatibility with free will".

Despite your authoritative pronouncements, I can't help but notice you have yet to address the evidence for Many Worlds and the evidence against Copenhagen I posted in our last thread on the subject. Here's my post again that you ignored, which I will continue to copy/paste EVER SINGLE TIME YOU BRING UP MANY WORLDS until you can actually address the evidence for/against these interpretations as opposed to, you know, just claiming that they're fantasies concocted by dogmatic atheists:

I am NOT going to start another Many Worlds discussion with you. You have displayed ad infinitum that you don't even understand what Many Worlds is despite having four different people attempt to explain it to. You never even responded to my list of evidence in the last thread:

MW:

1. MW’s first basic claim is that QM works all the way down, which would mean everything is in a state of superposition. So far, this has been confirmed by every test done on molecules with 2424 particles. There is no evidence for a “collapse” that separates the quantum and classic worlds.

2. MW’s second basic claim is that the wavefunction is real, which would mean that we should be able to use it to make the exact kind of predictions we’re able to make.

3. MW is compatible with everything we know about classic physics, the same classic physics that have been consistently accurate in modeling large objects in spacetime. The only exception is gravity; however, in being deterministic, local, and real, MW is at least capable of being reconciled with gravity as we learn more.

4. MW being compatible with classic physics would follow the pattern of a more comprehensive theory subsuming an approximate theory, the same way GR did with Newtonian Physics and modern evolution did with Darwinian evolution.

Compare with CI:

1. CI claims that there is a collapse and that this collapse separates the indeterministic world of QM with the deterministic world of GR. So far, this collapse/split has NOT been found in any tests that have been done, and it is certainly not required in any of the mathematical formulas.

2. CI treats the wavefunction as non-real, and if it’s non-real then we shouldn’t be able to make the predictions that we do.

3. CI is incompatible with everything we know about classic physics.

4. CI being incompatible with classic physics would be the first time in the history of science that a new theory completely contradicted a previous, merely approximate theory. What’s more, it would be the first time that we found that things work differently at different levels, despite the fact that classical physics works exactly like we’d expect if it was QM all the way down.

The ONLY advantage CI has is that it can derive the Born rule, but it does this by assuming things that is has absolutely no reason/evidence for assuming. It’s not all that different than assuming the existence of God to explain lightning before we knew about meteorology and electricity. Sure, it explains lightning, but there’s no reason for assuming its true. What’s more, there’s no reason to assume that MW can’t derive the Born rule as technology, especially quantum computing, advances.

Instead of addressing these issues, you chose to make the MW/CI issue about the nature of choice, and your Wishful Thinking that choice must exist because you want it to, and that choice can only exist in an indeterministic universe. Until you deal with the evidence above, you're the one believing in "collapse" mythologies in spite of the evidence.

In your last post you even stated the absurdity that: "The world is not divided between the indeterministic quantum world and the deterministic world after some sort of collapse. The whole world allows for indeterminism..." which shows that not only do you not understand MW, you don't understand CI. CI very much DOES divide the world between the indeterministic quantum world and the deterministic macro world; that's PRECISELY what the collapse DOES! It says that an indeterministic wavefunction collapses to a particle that then functions "like a well-behaved billiard ball" as one poet put it. After the collapse, particles DO function according to the determinism of Einstein's GR. It's stunning to me that you didn't know this (although I'm not sure why, at this point, I'm stunned by what you don't know about QM).

[Calidore]

This Many Worlds/CI thing always makes me think of bumblebees. The laws of aerodynamics are supposed to make it impossible for bumblebees to fly, but they do. That doesn't mean bumblebees are breaking the laws; it just means our understanding of the laws (or bumblebees, or both) is incomplete.

By the same token, it seems to me that if what we know of quantum physics leads us to conclude that either 1) entire universes somehow spring into being every time anything with multiple possibilities happens, or 2) everything only exists when observed rather than vice versa, then we clearly don't know enough to have any business making guesses in the first place.

[MorpheusSandman]

1) entire universes somehow spring into being every time anything with multiple possibilities happens

That's the science fiction version of Many Worlds. The real version is somewhat different. See here for a good laymen's explanation. The problem is, we already know that particles are in multiple positions. From that, there appear to be only two fundamental possibilities; one is that these superpositioned particles magically, indeterminately, collapse upon observance into the single world governed by the determinism of General Relativity, in which those particles are non-real until observed, and in which their actions can travel thousands of times faster than the speed of light; or that all particles are always in a state of superposition, including the particles that make us up, in which case there are many worlds, and the world we are observing are the product of multiple particles becoming entangled (which explains the observational collapse). Keep in mind that Bell's Theorem already ruled out there being the possibility of hidden variables that could reconcile CI with GR.

As the above article suggests, it's not that our knowledge of QM is incomplete (if it was incomplete our predictions using it wouldn't be so deadly accurate), the problem is that people can't wrap their head intuitively around the explanation and people don't give up ingrained preconceptions easily. Not to mention that people don't like to think of themselves as being no different than particles. The tests have been done, the results are in, but, much like with many people and evolution, some people don't like the answer, so they keep insisting that we need more testing before we decide. However, given the state of current evidence, the probability of any single world theory being correct is slim to none. Yudkowsky gives an even more thorough, bleaker view of the possibility of any single world theory being correct here. To quote the directly relevant parts:

You shouldn't even ask, "Might there only be one world?" but instead just go ahead and do physics, and raise that particular issue only if new evidence demands it.

Could there be some as-yet-unknown fundamental law, that gives the universe a privileged center, which happens to coincide with Earth—thus proving that Copernicus was wrong all along, and the Bible right?

Asking that particular question—rather than a zillion other questions in which the center of the universe is Proxima Centauri, or the universe turns out to have a favorite pizza topping and it is pepperoni—betrays your hidden agenda. And though an unenlightened one might not realize it, giving the universe a privileged center that follows Earth around through space would be rather difficult to do with any mathematically simple fundamental law.

So too with asking whether there might be only one world. It betrays a sentimental attachment to human intuitions already proven wrong. The wheel of science turns, but it doesn't turn backward.

We have specific reasons to be highly suspicious of the notion of only one world. The notion of "one world" exists on a higher level of organization, like the location of Earth in space; on the quantum level there are no firm boundaries (though brains that differ by entire neurons firing are certainly decoherent). How would a fundamental physical law identify one high-level world?

Much worse, any physical scenario in which there was a single surviving world, so that any measurement had only a single outcome, would violate Special Relativity.

If the same laws are true at all levels—i.e., if many-worlds is correct—then when you measure one of a pair of entangled polarized photons, you end up in a world in which the photon is polarized, say, up-down, and alternate versions of you end up in worlds where the photon is polarized left-right. From your perspective before doing the measurement, the probabilities are 50/50. Light-years away, someone measures the other photon at a 20° angle to your own basis. From their perspective, too, the probability of getting either immediate result is 50/50—they maintain an invariant state of generalized entanglement with your faraway location, no matter what you do. But when the two of you meet, years later, your probability of meeting a friend who got the same result is 11.6%, rather than 50%.

If there is only one global world, then there is only a single outcome of any quantum measurement. Either you measure the photon polarized up-down, or left-right, but not both. Light-years away, someone else's probability of measuring the photon polarized similarly in a 20° rotated basis, actually changes from 50/50 to 11.6%.

You cannot possibly interpret this as a case of merely revealing properties that were already there; this is ruled out by Bell's Theorem. There does not seem to be any possible consistent view of the universe in which both quantum measurements have a single outcome, and yet both measurements are predetermined, neither influencing the other. Something has to actually change, faster than light.

And this would appear to be a fully general objection, not just to collapse theories, but to any possible theory that gives us one global world! There is no consistent view in which measurements have single outcomes, but are locally determined (even locally randomly determined). Some mysterious influence has to cross a spacelike gap.

This is not a trivial matter. You cannot save yourself by waving your hands and saying, "the influence travels backward in time to the entangled photons' creation, then forward in time to the other photon, so it never actually crosses a spacelike gap". (This view has been seriously put forth, which gives you some idea of the magnitude of the paradox implied by one global world!) One measurement has to change the other, so which measurement happens first? Is there a global space of simultaneity? You can't have both measurements happen "first" because under Bell's Theorem, there's no way local information could account for observed results, etc.

Incidentally, this experiment has already been performed, and if there is a mysterious influence it would have to travel six million times as fast as light in the reference frame of the Swiss Alps. Also, the mysterious influence has been experimentally shown not to care if the two photons are measured in reference frames which would cause each measurement to occur "before the other".

Special Relativity seems counterintuitive to us humans—like an arbitrary speed limit, which you could get around by going backward in time, and then forward again. A law you could escape prosecution for violating, if you managed to hide your crime from the authorities.

But what Special Relativity really says is that human intuitions about space and time are simply wrong. There is no global "now", there is no "before" or "after" across spacelike gaps. The ability to visualize a single global world, even in principle, comes from not getting Special Relativity on a gut level. Otherwise it would be obvious that physics proceeds locally with invariant states of distant entanglement, and the requisite information is simply not locally present to support a globally single world.

It might be that this seemingly impeccable logic is flawed—that my application of Bell's Theorem and relativity to rule out any single global world, contains some hidden assumption of which I am unaware -

- but consider the burden that a single-world theory must now shoulder! There is absolutely no reason in the first place to suspect a global single world; this is just not what current physics says! The global single world is an ancient human intuition that was disproved, like the idea of a universal absolute time. The superposition principle is visible even in half-silvered mirrors; experiments are verifying the disproof at steadily larger levels of superposition—but above all there is no longer any reason to privilege the hypothesis of a global single world. The ladder has been yanked out from underneath that human intuition.

There is no experimental evidence that the macroscopic world is single (we already know the microscopic world is superposed). And the prospect necessarily either violates Special Relativity, or takes an even more miraculous-seeming leap and violates seemingly impeccable logic. The latter, of course, being much more plausible in practice. But it isn't really that plausible in an absolute sense. Without experimental evidence, it is generally a bad sign to have to postulate arbitrary logical miracles.

[cafolini]

God already won.

[MorpheusSandman]

God never played the game because s/he/it never existed.

[cafolini]

God never played the game because s/he/it never existed.

This is not a game. But how could s/he/it be used if s/he/it never existed. Don't be ridiculous. ROFLMAO. Insane case closed.

[MorpheusSandman]

This is not a game.

I read this imagining Liam Neeson's voice.

But how could s/he/it be used if s/he/it never existed.

S/He/It is not used, simply imagined.

[Calidore]

Morpheus: Thanks for the links. Laymen's explanations are what I would need. Even so, on skimming them I think I'll tab and read them later when my brain feels up to it. I do have to say that rhetoric like in the first three paragraphs you quoted tend to make me distrust the writer somewhat. Not to mention that the supporting links in that person's articles are to articles also written by him. Looking past the fact that Eliezer agrees with you, can you recommend his article(s) just on the basis of content minus the sales job, or (preferably) do you have a more neutral source of information?

[mal4mac]

I do have to say that rhetoric like in the first three paragraphs you quoted tend to make me distrust the writer somewhat.

Yes, it's pure rhetoric. And he calls himself "The Physicist"! Read *actual* books by top physicists, with *actual* names, working at top universities, like Stephen Hawking and Brian Greene. Otherwise how do you know you aren't reading stuff made up by a janitor?

[YesNo]

The more moderate believers like to say that such views are extremist, but I really don't see how the notion of an unfalsifiable deity is really any less extreme given that it comes from the same source as any other fundamental beliefs.

Those many worlds are just as unfalsifiable as any deity.

Despite your authoritative pronouncements, I can't help but notice you have yet to address the evidence for Many Worlds and the evidence against Copenhagen I posted in our last thread on the subject. Here's my post again that you ignored, which I will continue to copy/paste EVER SINGLE TIME YOU BRING UP MANY WORLDS until you can actually address the evidence for/against these interpretations as opposed to, you know, just claiming that they're fantasies concocted by dogmatic atheists:

I'm not an authority, but I'll pick a couple issues to respond to with what I currently think is true:

You mentioned in that post that "CI treats the wavefunction as non-real". That is to its credit. That means the "collapse" is just a mathematical tool to get a useful result. The wave function is a way to get the probabilities that a collection of particles will show certain results overall. It doesn't represent a real field or entity. I don't see how that could be evidence for Many Worlds.

You claimed that I wrote: The world is not divided between the indeterministic quantum world and the deterministic world after some sort of collapse. The whole world allows for indeterminism..." I probably did. I don't think the only indeterminism that exists is at the quantum level. That only provides us with another piece of evidence that the universe is not deterministic as we can tell from the evidence of our own experience.

After Bell showed that QM does not allow for determinism and local (slower than light speed) behavior I think it is useful to bunch the different QM interpretations into how they view these two features:

1) Deterministic and Local: This position has been falsified by science (Bell's theorem and the experiments confirming it). It seems as if Many Worlds proponents think they can recover it. This makes Many Worlds unscientific. Failure to derive the Born probabilities confirms that MW is not even an interpretation for QM.

2) Indeterministic and Local: This is where the Copenhagen interpretation as well as the various alternate, consistent or decoherent histories interpretations fit. This is the only position for which there is evidence for matter-energy entities.

3) Deterministic and NonLocal: This is where Bohm's interpretation lies. It presumes superdeterminism. Essentially we are in the Matrix with no Zion-like resistance movement possible, but there is no evidence for this.

4) Indeterministic and NonLocal: I don't know of any QM interpretation that fits in this category. Perhaps consciousness as some sort of "field" could have these properties, but not matter-energy entities. Various psi studies may confirm this or not.