Daniel Peterson and D&C 131.

[Rivendale]

“If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true ... .

Lewis's general strategy of meta-argument here may have been interesting, but he screwed it up totally at the first step. Why on Earth should atomic motions have nothing to do with truth? To suppose that nothing which is determined by atomic motions can ever have any tendency towards truth is obviously idiotic. Even the simplest mechanical computers can perform reliably perfect arithmetic. Lewis's premise is only even plausible if one simply hasn't thought about the issue seriously at all.

If we actually think about how atoms behave, we should realize there is every reason to suppose that a large number of atoms subject to the laws of nature including natural selection will end up collectively encoding an accurate depiction of reality. Large collections of atoms that can reproduce their organisational patterns and also manage to simulate the world accurately have a huge selection advantage.

Their patterns proliferate. Here we are. Lewis's argument is nonsense.

This argument always bothered me. Motions of atoms in a person's brain are subjected to the natural laws of the universe. Lewis and others imply that it is random. And not only that they imply that the laws of logic have no grounding in objective truth. It is the same argument that evolution is random. It isn't. Evolutionary advancements ratchet their way to preserve the organism. The argument is also used for protein generation in DNA. What are the chances that this particular protein is made? It is all ad hoc reverse engineering nonsense. Chemistry is all about environmental conditions and raw materials, not chance. It is time for the tornado in a junkyard nonsense to go away.

[drumdude]

Lewis's general strategy of meta-argument here may have been interesting, but he screwed it up totally at the first step. Why on Earth should atomic motions have nothing to do with truth? To suppose that nothing which is determined by atomic motions can ever have any tendency towards truth is obviously idiotic. Even the simplest mechanical computers can perform reliably perfect arithmetic. Lewis's premise is only even plausible if one simply hasn't thought about the issue seriously at all.

If we actually think about how atoms behave, we should realize there is every reason to suppose that a large number of atoms subject to the laws of nature including natural selection will end up collectively encoding an accurate depiction of reality. Large collections of atoms that can reproduce their organisational patterns and also manage to simulate the world accurately have a huge selection advantage.

Their patterns proliferate. Here we are. Lewis's argument is nonsense.

This argument always bothered me. Motions of atoms in a person's brain are subjected to the natural laws of the universe. Lewis and others imply that it is random. And not only that they imply that the laws of logic have no grounding in objective truth. It is the same argument that evolution is random. It isn't. Evolutionary advancements ratchet their way to preserve the organism. The argument is also used for protein generation in DNA. What are the chances that this particular protein is made? It is all ad hoc reverse engineering nonsense. Chemistry is all about environmental conditions and raw materials, not chance. It is time for the tornado in a junkyard nonsense to go away.

Well said. But don’t expect apologists to listen. They have to keep hammering home the old tired arguments until they’re dead. Hopefully the next generation of Christian apologists come up with something new.

[huckelberry]

. Chemistry is all about environmental conditions and raw materials, not chance. It is time for the tornado in a junkyard nonsense to go away.

Well said. But don’t expect apologists to listen. They have to keep hammering home the old tired arguments until they’re dead. Hopefully the next generation of Christian apologists come up with something new.

drumdude,
Speaking as a Christian apologist (at least sometimes) I agree with Rivendale's observation. I also made the same general observation as Physics Guy a few minutes before he posted his observation. His may carry more authority but both he and I make observations not locked into that tired anti evolution thing.

[drumdude]

Well said. But don’t expect apologists to listen. They have to keep hammering home the old tired arguments until they’re dead. Hopefully the next generation of Christian apologists come up with something new.

drumdude,
Speaking as a Christian apologist (at least sometimes) I agree with Rivendale's observation. I also made the same general observation as Physics Guy a few minutes before he posted his observation. His may carry more authority but both he and I make observations not locked into that tired anti evolution thing.

I agree with your question about the link between the quotes and materialism. I don’t see it either.

[Alphus and Omegus]

Alpha and Omegus, I may being missing something you are looking at but to my understanding it is clearly an analogy to the concept of ether which is under consideration not an identity one with the other. The fact that the idea of ether has been shown to be an incorrect understanding of light does not help nor hinder the analogy. I do not see much in the analogy which is different than proposals in the opening of the gospel of John. It sounds like fairly traditional speech about the power of God.

Well there could be some move in those words to seeing the power of God as something existing before and logically prior to the individuation of God. That would be not so traditional. Whether or not that lean in thought is a good or bad idea I do not think it is dependent upon the specific ideas of ether. Ether was an idea of the time which could be used for an analogy.

It's more than just an analogy, the fundamental traits of both ether and spirit seem awfully similar: a medium/substance that is invisible, omnipresent, quintessent, primordial, and ineffable.

Roberts and JFS had enough good sense not to explicitly say spirit is ether, but they're pretty close to it.

[Physics Guy]

The only thing that really worried me was the ether.

Ether might be a good analogy for material spirit, at least in some ways. The Wikipedia article on luminiferous aether seems good, for anyone who wants a quick history of ether theories. Years ago in a small rural museum I found a popular science book from around 1900 with a clear exposition of ether theory, which emphasised that the whole concept was only a hypothesis and was under dispute. I was impressed.

It's important to recognise that the ether idea wasn't just silly. It involved some pretty surprising assumptions but we should know by now that crazy things can still be real. In a sense we even still believe in an ether. We don't call it that, but if I describe what vacuum is like in quantum field theory most lay people would probably say that it doesn't sound like mere nothing, that it sounds more as though all of space is filled with some kind of stuff, all the time. At a technical level, sure, it's something totally different, but the differences probably don't translate well into intuitive terms.

My view is that the scientific history of the luminiferous ether is a good example of how ambiguous Occam's razor can be in practice. When the ether theory was popular, it was supported by Occam, in the following sense: if light and other electromagnetic phenomena were stresses and vibrations in a material medium, kind of like sound waves and winds only different, then there was no need to postulate any additional basic principles besides Newtonian particle mechanics. Particles alone explained everything, fundamentally. Sure, we had to postulate lots of different kinds of material particles, including an extra set just to explain light, but we already knew that there were tons of different kinds of material particles in the world. That was clear. Adding one more kind of particle to the already long list, instead of setting up immaterial fields as a whole second class of entities beside particles, seemed like the conservative, parsimonious choice.

Accepting fields that were simply themselves, as fundamental entities, meant accepting field theory as a whole second body of fundamental principles alongside mechanics. Particle mechanics was Kansas, field theory would have been Oz. Occam might have been against postulating a new kind of particle, but he was a heck of a lot more against postulating a whole second world. Or so it seemed. In fact there were never two worlds—but I think this fact itself made that harder to recognize.

As I just taught in my course last semester, electrodynamics is a mechanical system. The relevant degrees of freedom are field mode amplitudes, instead of particle positions, but they're all just functions of time obeying differential equations. So today we realize that and say sure, particles or fields, it's all the same basic thing anyway, so never mind what kind of mental picture you want me to have, I'll choose that for myself, just show me the equations already. But for a long time I bet the very continuity between particles and fields must have held people back from stepping beyond particles-only. You could go a long way into accurately understanding electromagnetic fields, mathematically, without ever hitting any shocking difference that forced you to accept that you were not in particle Kansas any more. People like Maxwell himself could construct beautiful solutions to the field equations, without the slightest loosening of their background assumption that the fields were merely features of the material ether, like the waves on a lake.

It was only after some decades of experience working with fields, both mathematically and in labs and technology, that people began to realize, wait a minute, you know, we've been in Oz all this time—and it's Kansas. Having both fields and particles as basic entities didn't really count as having two completely different kinds of things, after all; the differences seemed like mere details. Only then did postulating an ether to support the fields, instead of just having the fields by themselves, seem like postulating an entity unnecessarily. The verdict of Occam's razor was reversed on appeal.

Occam's razor just isn't as useful as one might wish, because what counts as postulating an entity unnecessarily can depend on perspective. The history of ether theories is a good example of this.

The specific contribution of Einstein wasn't really to demolish the ether. Taking the field equations themselves as the only fundamental laws was his starting point, not his conclusion. He looked at a certain weird mathematical feature of the electrodynamical field equations from 1865, namely that they have their own in-house version of how to change between reference frames—a bizarre version that can differ wildly, in extreme cases, from the good old basic logic of Galileo and Newton. Others had noticed this bizarre detail of electrodynamics before, but the standard view was that it was just an artefact of taking the field theory too literally when it was really just an approximate description of the material ether. Einstein postulated instead that the weird electrodynamic version of relativity was the only correct one, and ported it into mechanics in general, for particles as well as for fields. It wasn't so much that this made the material ether impossible as that it made it every bit as weird as the ether-less field theory ever would be. Once Kansas is full of flying monkeys and munchkins, there's no point in pretending that Oz and Kansas are different. I think that's really how the ether finally died.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

PG,

This may be a non sequitur to your post, I’m not sure, but does quantum entanglement depend on a materialist reality? What I mean is if you have an electron *here* and another electron *way over there* and they become entangled, how in the “F” do they react to each other? Is there a material connection, or is the connection immaterial? My understanding of QE is limited to sci-fi, so how would a lay person such as myself be able to understand QE in a way that’d make sense?

As an aside, I don’t know why Mormons don’t latch onto the interdimensionality of God because it could resolve a lot of theological problems as it relates to this reality. For example, if God and heaven exist outside the 3rd dimension, then talking to a human, even appearing to a human would be as ‘simple’ as picking the 4th dimensional point in time to present themselves, and when they appear it’d probably match up nicely with Moroni’s appearance or even JC when He comes back (the heavens opening or bursting open and all of a sudden a host of angels are right there).

3d time is x -> x -> x -> X -> x -> x -> x with the big x just being you moving through space and time at a certain point. This creates big problems for a deity who lives in this universe that’s governed by 3d+time laws. However.

4d is you looking at the row of x’s, which represent the totality of space and time. If you’re an interdimensional deity and want to talk to Joseph Smith who is 14 and located here xxxxxxxxXxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx with the big x being him at that point in time all you’d do is pop in at the big x. And then later you’d have Moroni pop in here xxxxxxxxXxxxxxxxxYxxxxxx with the big Y being him popping in at that point in space and time. As you can see both the big x and big y events are there and not dependent on 3d linear time and space, but rather are points in reality where the event occurs.

- Doc

[Physics Guy]

Whatever entanglement is, it doesn't seem to be an interaction. It's more like a weird feature of logic that our brains do not like, like the Monty Hall problem only worse.

If I saw a coin in half the hard way, and send each side to a friend, then whoever gets the head knows right away that the other friend got the tail, and vice versa. That's not an instantaneous interaction between the two friends or their coin halves. It's just logic. The only interactions happened in the past, when I sawed. That action created a correlation involving two objects that then were sent far apart. A little weird but no paradox.

The simplest case of quantum entanglement is kind of like that, though only up to a point. Two things do have to interact at some point, in some ordinary way, to get entangled. If they later get separated, a certain logical connection remains even though they're now far apart. The added wrinkle, compared to the sawed-in-half coin, is that the separated quantum halves don't exactly have just two possibilities, head versus tail. Each separated piece can be measured in different ways, and exactly how each gets measured can be decided independently for each one. The measurements on one don't affect the measurements on the other one in any way that would let you use the effect to send information, but if you have a lot of these entangled pairs and repeat the independent measurements many times, then bring the two sets of measurements together and compare, you notice correlations between them that do depend on what exactly got measured in each place.

Why is that? No-one can really say. We don't have any answer for why. Simply stating that it is so is the deepest theory we have at this point. Quite seriously, all that you could ever learn from quantum theory would simply let you state more precisely what kinds of correlations appear. It wouldn't explain, in the slightest degree, why they do.

People sometimes say that it's as if the two separated halves are somehow only one thing, or that it's as if the two halves interact instantaneously across distance. That's only really like saying, when you open your envelope and find a sawed-off coin with the face and know right away that your friend got the tail half, that it's "as if" the two half coins were still one thing, or that it's "as if" a mysterious force reached across space instantaneously and turned your friend's half-coin into a tail. Those "as ifs" aren't actually insightful or helpful. They're weird ways of describing a simple logical relationship that was created by an ordinary interaction in the past.

All the statements you read about quantum entanglement being a form of interaction, or something, are similarly wide of the mark. Whatever it is, that's not it. It's just some weird case of logic.

Unfortunately it's not a form of logic that makes intuitive sense to us humans. So if you don't see how this makes sense, it's not your fault. It's not because you don't get it. Nobody gets it. All we can do is state what happens in simple mathematical terms. That's just a statement, not an explanation. If there is anything more to say about how or why entanglement works, we don't know it yet.

Maybe there is no explanation. Maybe God is just going to say, "Why the heck do you think I should base the whole universe on the same kinds of rules that your brains mocked up to help you run from the tigers? The fundamental rules are matrix algebra because I like matrix algebra. What have you got against it?"

So I guess this wasn't actually such a non sequitur because it does bring us back to Lewis's bogus meta-argument against materialism. Evolution and other natural laws do imply that our material brains should have some tendency to represent truth, but no, they don't imply that our brains have to be infallible judges of truth. Some of our intuitive feelings about what makes sense and what doesn't may simply be wrong. This isn't a reductio ad absurdum that disproves materialism. It's a fact that we have to accept.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Thanks for taking the time to educate me, PG. It’s appreciated.

eta since this is a DCP thread -



- Doc

[huckelberry]

I agree with Doc thanking Physics Guy. I am unsure if I want to understand that Photo Doc has posted however.