by cantleave 140 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
Dear PSaramento,
I knew I could rely on you to come up with a spiritual answer, amidst all this scientific discussion.
Good thread by the way Cantleave, and educational comments from all, thanks.
Of course ,Psac's picture just PROVES there is a God. His creation is truly wondrous,especially the curvy bits !
Love
Wobble
I just think of two things: 1)That the universe is made entirely of energy. 2)That I have consciousness and am self-aware. I have thoughts, emotions, desires, etc.
How can that really happen? Is it possible that energy can have different levels of consciousness? I think there are levels below us... in the form of animals. (which couldn't possibly comprehend our level of consciousness). Could there be levels above us that we can't possibly comprehend?
Since I don't know how energy is really operating on the quantum level, I don't think I will ever know for sure.
Does consciousness arise from energy in the complex form of matter which somehow jumps through a nearly infinite number of hoops to arrive as me? Or does energy become conscious and self-aware first, creating the perception of a physical universe around us?
Wobble said Good thread by the way Cantleave, and educational comments from all, thanks.
I have really enjoyed following this. As I said before I lit the fuse and watched the fireworks. Yes indeed a great thread, but nothing to do with me really.
Razziel: When many people think of statistics, they think of estimators and Chi-square tests and so on. Baysian probability (as advocated by Jaynes and many, many others) is a very different foundation of probability theory - in that viewpoint there are no estimators or stuff like that, instead you start out by looking at the problem of infering things you cant be 100% certain of, so you want to quantize the uncertainty in a number (aka a probability), and then see how these numbers interact - the only thing you really know about them is that in the limit you are 100% certain about something, since in that case the rules should reduce to the rules of ordinary logic. Well, if you take that as an input and do a lot of mathematics you arrive at probabilities which behave like bays law says. The difference is that in this viewpoint its all subjective - not 'estimators' that give 'universally true' estimates and probabilities, but as Jaynes show by a large number of examples, this is really what you want.
The second part of jaynes project was to re-derive statistical mechanics so it rested on information theory, specifically the concept of entropy (also a subjective quantity). He does that and rederive the laws of thermodynamics, etc. He also introduce the concept of maximum entropy (maxEnt). Its really exiting stuff and something that is still debated, for example, the second law of thermodynamics can be seen as a problem with conservation of information (or rather, the problem that a system cannot hold information enough to describe itself), rather than the usual interpretation. I would say Jaynes book is a must for someone who work with inference or statistical mechanics, and its really fun - he has several appendixes which are only there to rip on mathematicans.
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This was a good thread - to bad i never got to hear about this exiting law DD threw around earlier ;-) .
I believe that we're the pin ball and God is the pin ball wizard playing the pin ball machine.
DV
1. Is this issue primarily driven by people in USA?
2. Why did the creationist religion find its feet in a supposedly developed country of USA?
3. Is Creationism self-perpetuated in USA by politicians because see a ready pool of votes in it?
4. Using the well-known picture of the Solar System, would someone please describe for me how it would have looked and operated on each day were the account at Genesis 1 literally correct (including the source of light before the Sun made its appearance and how the waters sat above the firmament).
Doug
PaulOC
Does consciousness arise from energy in the complex form of matter which somehow jumps through a nearly infinite number of hoops to arrive as me? Or does energy become conscious and self-aware first, creating the perception of a physical universe around us?
You might find this interesting on conscieousness:
I want to bring this BTTT, simply because It was the thread that changed my world (even Universal) view, just over 2 years ago.
I haven't read all of the posts, I'll just comment. I think probability fails in explaining certain things. While there are certain things that seem impossible, statistically speaking, they happen or have happened anyways.
I ask, is probabilty a good measurement for reality?
