Mormonism Live on Free Will

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huckelberry
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Re: Mormonism Live on Free Will

Post by huckelberry »

Rivendale wrote:
Tue Mar 29, 2022 11:16 pm
huckelberry wrote:
Tue Mar 29, 2022 9:23 pm
I am sure I have missed some counterexample sometime but the only people I recall proposing that "faith can only be true faith if you have no evidence" are agnostics or atheists.(to characterize believers)
The epistemic distance theodicy assumes this.
It is only within this framework of epistemic distance that it is possible for humans to genuinely have free will to exercise faith. For indeed, if God’s existence were undeniable, then faith would mean nothing and people would have no choice but to believe. Human persons cannot be free unless “placed at an epistemic distance”
Rivendale, checking your phrase "epistemic distance theodicy"I find my thinking falls in that general realm but differs from your statement. I understand the freedom in question is opportunity to learn not just exercise something called faith. The distance referred to is the fact that evidence for god is not conclusive proof. You appear to equate lack of conclusive proof with lack of evidence. I think we learn about god and ourselves through exploration of living.

If god produced the proof you are thinking of, whatever that could be, it would not give people the material to understand which God wishes us to develop. God would be stuck in the role of just being a big power over us.
God wants us to gain understanding through our relationships with each other and ourselves.(those being the active part of a relationship with God)

evidence, not proof, lies in these areas I think.
existence of people
existence of the marvel of order in the universe which produces thinking beings and a marvel of the natural world.
Revelation and inspiration both personal and communal. (these are more of a call to learn than a bunch of dogmas so yes they have left a wide range for different peoples contradictory understandings)
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Re: Mormonism Live on Free Will

Post by Rivendale »

huckelberry wrote:
Wed Mar 30, 2022 5:20 pm
Rivendale wrote:
Tue Mar 29, 2022 11:16 pm


The epistemic distance theodicy assumes this.
Rivendale, checking your phrase "epistemic distance theodicy"I find my thinking falls in that general realm but differs from your statement. I understand the freedom in question is opportunity to learn not just exercise something called faith. The distance referred to is the fact that evidence for god is not conclusive proof. You appear to equate lack of conclusive proof with lack of evidence. I think we learn about god and ourselves through exploration of living.

If god produced the proof you are thinking of, whatever that could be, it would not give people the material to understand which God wishes us to develop. God would be stuck in the role of just being a big power over us.
God wants us to gain understanding through our relationships with each other and ourselves.(those being the active part of a relationship with God)

evidence, not proof, lies in these areas I think.
existence of people
existence of the marvel of order in the universe which produces thinking beings and a marvel of the natural world.
Revelation and inspiration both personal and communal. (these are more of a call to learn than a bunch of dogmas so yes they have left a wide range for different peoples contradictory understandings)
Hi Huckleberry. I enjoy your input.
[If god produced the proof you are thinking of, whatever that could be, it would not give people the material to understand which God wishes us to develop. /quote]

I would ask why he apparently does provide proof to many? Paul got his. Joseph Smith got his. David Koresh got his. And by what mechanism does one use to know God's wishes? Some people never get a chance to develop. They die young or suffer from some mental or physical defect. Thousands of conflicting ideologies seem to reflect a defective communication system or mirroring the cultural fears of death.
God wants us to gain understanding through our relationships with each other and ourselves.(those being the active part of a relationship with God)
How does anyone know what God wants? Scriptures are subjective . Anecdotes from theologians are subjective. In fact anyone claiming to speak or know the mind of God wield great destructive harm. And again, what mechanism does one use to know that positive interpersonal relationships with either ourselves or others is God's way of perpetuating human progression?
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Re: Mormonism Live on Free Will

Post by huckelberry »

Rivendale wrote:
Wed Mar 30, 2022 8:39 pm


I would ask why he apparently does provide proof to many? Paul got his. Joseph Smith got his. David Koresh got his. And by what mechanism does one use to know God's wishes? Some people never get a chance to develop. They die young or suffer from some mental or physical defect. Thousands of conflicting ideologies seem to reflect a defective communication system or mirroring the cultural fears of death.



How does anyone know what God wants? Scriptures are subjective . Anecdotes from theologians are subjective. In fact anyone claiming to speak or know the mind of God wield great destructive harm. And again, what mechanism does one use to know that positive interpersonal relationships with either ourselves or others is God's way of perpetuating human progression?
Rivendale, You present some important questions. They ask more than pat answers but I do not have lots of time at present and maybe longer answer is not appropriate.My first thoughts were maybe a bit glib but then again maybe they are as good as I got.

If God is not concerned with our developing our best then what point would there be to being concerned about his or its concerns? Well our creator could naturally have an interest in our well being.

If there is an after life for humans I think there could be a sharing of the learning done here which could be important seeing our individual experiences vary so much. No point in asking me how that would work. I have no information.
(Paul or Koresh?)
I think it is possible some individuals are given more revealing inspiration than others. I think humans are tempted to think they know more than they do.

The learning I see is through the trial and error of living and the use of our reason.(I do not see believers and unbelievers as working against each others. I think that people who tear down for their own pride do work against those who wish to build up)
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Re: Mormonism Live on Free Will

Post by drumdude »

The answer is that you believe in Mormonism because you were exposed to Mormonism.


You would believe in Islam if you were exposed to Islam.


There’s nothing special about Mormonism, or Islam, or Scientology. Nothing that makes one more or less true to an unbiased observer. Once you realize your beliefs are a consequence of your birth and childhood, your genetics and circumstances, all of which were out of your control, it opens up a whole new way of thinking and self reflection.
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Re: Mormonism Live on Free Will

Post by huckelberry »

drumdude wrote:
Thu Mar 31, 2022 8:53 pm
The answer is that you believe in Mormonism because you were exposed to Mormonism.


You would believe in Islam if you were exposed to Islam.


There’s nothing special about Mormonism, or Islam, or Scientology. Nothing that makes one more or less true to an unbiased observer. Once you realize your beliefs are a consequence of your birth and childhood, your genetics and circumstances, all of which were out of your control, it opens up a whole new way of thinking and self reflection.
But I do not believe in Mormonism. I was raised in the LDS church but officially left forty years ago because I did not continue to believe it. I am not the only person on this board who has made such a change.

I do not think it is terribly uncommon for people to change beliefs from what they start with though I suppose a majority of people remain in the group they started in. It is certain that my beliefs are influenced by things beyond my control. I do not have complete information and understanding. However I still am able to learn and think. I find significant the portion which is within my control.(and repeating the earlier observation in this thread, my control refers to my brain my limited abilities and the processes of my physical make up. it does not refer to some imaginary me free of myself and my limitations)
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Re: Mormonism Live on Free Will

Post by drumdude »

huckelberry wrote:
Fri Apr 01, 2022 5:05 am
drumdude wrote:
Thu Mar 31, 2022 8:53 pm
The answer is that you believe in Mormonism because you were exposed to Mormonism.


You would believe in Islam if you were exposed to Islam.


There’s nothing special about Mormonism, or Islam, or Scientology. Nothing that makes one more or less true to an unbiased observer. Once you realize your beliefs are a consequence of your birth and childhood, your genetics and circumstances, all of which were out of your control, it opens up a whole new way of thinking and self reflection.
But I do not believe in Mormonism. I was raised in the LDS church but officially left forty years ago because I did not continue to believe it. I am not the only person on this board who has made such a change.

I do not think it is terribly uncommon for people to change beliefs from what they start with though I suppose a majority of people remain in the group they started in. It is certain that my beliefs are influenced by things beyond my control. I do not have complete information and understanding. However I still am able to learn and think. I find significant the portion which is within my control.(and repeating the earlier observation in this thread, my control refers to my brain my limited abilities and the processes of my physical make up. it does not refer to some imaginary me free of myself and my limitations)
I can't tell my computer to think up a new computer game for me. It's limited by the hardware and software.

I don't think humans are any different. It's more complicated but it's the exact same fundamental principles at work. I'm in as much control as my computer is at the end of the day. If I had been born with a different set of genetics and a different upbringing, I would be a different person. There's no "soul" of me that is independent of my genetics and my history. We're all the sum total of physical forces unless you believe in an unprovable unfalsifiable supernatural force.
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Re: Mormonism Live on Free Will

Post by Physics Guy »

drumdude wrote:
Fri Apr 01, 2022 5:25 am
There's no "soul" of me that is independent of my genetics and my history.
That might depend on what you mean by "independent".

Information of any kind is in some ways dependent on material representation, as one finds out when someone cuts a cable and YouTube goes out.

In other really important ways, though, information of any kind is independent of material representation. You can talk about a story or a movie or a theorem without ever mentioning anything about the binding of the book or the glass in the projector lens or the chalk on the chalkboard. Leaving out those physical details isn't just an approximation or a mistake, either. The story itself, the movie itself, the theorem itself—they are all real and legitimate topics of discussion, independent of any particular physical representation they may have.

Even things as simple as a breeze or a stream, a wave or a flame, are in a sense independent of material. You're not going to have a stream without water molecules. The stream is nothing but a lot of water molecules. It's not any particular set of water molecules, however, and indeed all of the water molecules that make up the stream today will have flowed away elsewhere by tomorrow and been replaced by different ones. The stream will not have changed.

That doesn't mean that the stream is really some immaterial essence of stream-ness which merely somehow hangs around along with the moving water molecules, invisible and intangible, and so not even wet, yet somehow "really" the stream "in itself" or something. Thinking that way about streams or winds or waves or flames would be getting the point completely wrong. Thinking that the story or the movie or the theorem was somehow an additional invisible substance that was merely accompanying the ink or the light or the chalk would likewise be quite wrong. The theorem is there on the chalkboard, and so is the chalk, but in different senses of "being there".

A soul is not a thing like a water molecule or a piece of chalk. It's something more like a song or a theorem. Like them, it is in some ways dependent on matter, and in other ways not. Being an item of information or form, rather than of substance, doesn't make a soul any less of a soul.

As most people know, diamonds are made of pure carbon, which also makes up coal and pencil-lead graphite. It's a pretty surprising fact, and you could hardly blame a jeweler who somehow hadn't heard of it for not wanting to believe it. There's a natural tendency to think, "Nonsense, I know carbon, it's dark and opaque and crumbly. You're telling me that diamonds are dark and opaque and crumbly? Um, no. Diamonds are clear and colorless and extremely hard. You clearly do not know diamonds. Made of carbon, indeed!"

Yes, diamonds are made of carbon. That doesn't say at all, though, that they are dark and opaque and crumbly. It doesn't deny in the slightest that they are clear and colorless and hard. The jeweler merely knows too little about carbon to realize that carbon can very well be clear and colorless and hard, if it is in the right structure.

Nothing else that the jeweler knows about diamonds is wrong, though. Diamonds are how they are, every bit. The jeweler doesn't actually have anything to lose from recognizing that diamonds are carbon. They're still diamonds. The jeweler knows a lot about them and it's all still perfectly true. A chemist who knows all about carbon crystallography may be able to learn a lot about gem cutting from the jeweler.

I think of souls the same way.
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Re: Mormonism Live on Free Will

Post by dantana »

*Woo Alert* Please avert your eyes if you are allergic. Physics Guy, Rivendale, Drumdude, I'm not totally sure where I'm going with this but, isn't matter itself sometimes not measurable? That is, when particles are in their wave state aren't they then at that time, in essence, immeasurable with physical instruments?
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Re: Mormonism Live on Free Will

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The famous "wave-particle duality" of quantum mechanics doesn't mean that particles can somehow switch into an alternative wave form, like a superhero adopting their mild-mannered secret identity.

An analogy that is actually quite mathematically exact is to say that a quantum particle is like a musical note. It has some particular pitch. The pitch is the human brain's perception of the frequency of the sound waves. The A above middle C is standardised to a frequency of 440 cycles per second. The highest pitch that humans can hear, far above anything used in music, is 20,000 cycles per second frequency. The lowest frequency of sound wave that we perceive as a tone, rather than as a fluttering breeze, is around 20 cycles per second.

Musical notes are also played at particular times, in sequence, to make up a tune. If you play your middle C half a beat too late, the conductor will frown at you. So musical notes have both frequency and timing.

If you got a computer to play music with nano-second precision, however, and with the same high precision measured the changing air pressure of the sound produced, you would notice that a note can never have both its frequency and its timing precisely defined. This is just a matter of logic.

A frequency is by definition how often a pattern repeats itself over time. The frequency of Wednesday is once per week, the frequency of Christmas is once per year. You have to have at least one or two repetitions of the pattern in order to say at what rate it repeats. A single isolated event has no frequency, by definition. A single sharp pulse of sound has no particular pitch; it's a dissonant chord of all kinds of tiny fractional intervals of pitch.

So a sound wave with a particular frequency has to extend over some period of time. If it keeps on playing steadily over a longer time, then the pattern is repeating quite exactly many times and the frequency can be identified quite precisely. If the note only plays for, say, three cycles, that means that in the first cycle the sound is still ramping up, and already by the third cycle it's dying down again, and so actually none of the three cycles of high-to-low air pressure is exactly the same, so the frequency just doesn't exist as an exact figure, because no true repetitions of the pattern occur at all. You can still give a ballpark frequency, though, because you got three kind-of-similar cycles over, say, a hundredth of a second. That's for sure higher than a frequency of ten cycles per second, and for sure lower than a frequency of a thousand cycles per second. So you can assign a rough frequency range to the very short note. The longer the note lasts, the more precisely you can pin down its frequency—not just as a matter of practical measurement, but as a matter of conceptual definition of what frequency means.

If your note lasts long enough to have enough repeated air pressure cycles to define the note's frequency to within a narrow range, then this automatically means that the time at which your note is played is that much less precisely defined. The note isn't played at one exact instant of time; it goes on for a while. If the whole note lasts a second, then there's that one-second fudge factor in the precise timing of when the note is played. If the note lasts only a tenth of a second, then the timing of the note is that much more precise.

The time at which the note is played is only defined to within a certain ballpark range. The same is true of the frequency. And this is not a practical limitation in how well we can measure sound, but a logical consequence of what the timing and frequency of musical notes even mean. And it is also a logical consequence of these two definitions that the precisions of timing and frequency are inversely related. You can only make frequency more precise by making timing less precise, and vice versa.

Quantum mechanics takes over that simple wave logic of timing and frequency, and says that it applies to the position of a particle in space (analogous to timing of a note in time) and the velocity of the particle (analogous to the frequency of the note). Quantum mechanics does not tell us anything—not anything at all—about why position and velocity of particles should be like timing and frequency of notes. It simply asserts that this is so, and then lays out precise mathematical rules for how particles move—rules that are rather like the equations for sound waves moving through air. Insofar as this means that particles "are" waves, they don't sometimes change into waves. In the sense that they are waves at all, they are waves all the time.

Particles are hard to detect, not because they are waves, but because they are small. A typical atom is several times smaller than the shortest wavelength of light that human eyes can detect. When a light wave interacts with something smaller than its wavelength, it doesn't reflect from the object so that your eye can see the reflected light wave and your brain can infer that something was there, reflecting the light. Instead the light wave just kind of bulges a bit and goes on past the tiny disturbance. So you inherently cannot see things that are below the wavelength of visible light. They're invisible because they're too small to see.

Microscopes do not help when things are that extremely small, because they just focus light, but don't change its wavelength. Atoms are sub-microscopic. Electrons are at least a hundred times smaller still, if you take the largest reasonable interpretation of what the size of an electron should even mean (the Compton wavelength). There's another reasonable interpretation of electron size according to which their size is literally zero and they are mathematical points.

We can detect atoms and electrons by other means, though. Devices to detect sub-microscopic particles are complicated, and can work in a number of different ways. The wave nature of quantum particles imposes some logical constraints on how particle properties can be measured, and no devices can get around logic. Beyond that, though, there are all kinds of practical limitations and constraints related to how particle detectors actually work and exactly what they do.

We don't even entirely understand how our detectors work. We understand them well enough to build them, and have them perform as expected, but we don't understand them well enough to resolve our basic questions about exactly what quantum measurement means. Devices which can detect individual electrons are themselves composed of bazillions of electrons all interacting together, so our remaining difficulties in understanding individual electrons are only amplified many times when we try to understand the detectors themselves at that ultimate level.

The natural laws which govern individual particles under carefully controlled circumstances seem to be rather simple, but the detectors through which all our observations of individual particles come are more mysterious. It's kind of like following a Go tournament through the reports of media controlled by a powerful state. You can't help but wonder whether some of what you read about the tournament may be tinged with propaganda or affected by political power struggles among the ruling elite. Politics is harder to follow than Go.
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Re: Mormonism Live on Free Will

Post by dantana »

Well, all those tomes of new age quantum P. books I read years ago, and PG explains it in a couple of paragraphs. Thankyou.

I had always been of the understanding that the particle when existing in it's wave state was just, in essence, a potential. Everywhere and nowhere specific, until it was measured or viewed, which caused it to 'collapse' into it's solid form. This works nicely for woo theory but, not any more I guess.
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