Scientists prove Goedel's ontological (God) theorem!?

[Kenneth Regan]

Re: Universal Corruption

Embarrassing to relate, an outdated version of my cosmology-and-religion talk got onto my webpage; it is fixed now.

[Adam Cormier]

Re: Universal Corruption

Embarrassing to relate, an outdated version of my cosmology-and-religion talk got onto my webpage; it is fixed now.

I enjoyed reading over the slides from your talk. Having Hawking's Many World's theory imply creationism's plausibility I'm not sure if I buy though, even if there are an infinite many worlds, creationism being correct in one doesn't necessarily follow from this. Number Analogy: 1,3,5,7 to infinity would be an infinite set of numbers but exclude an entire other infinite amount of numbers 2,4,6,8...etc. We know that the facts in our world have to correspond to at least one real world, but because we have no evidence for creationism it is only possibly found in the infinite amount of worlds, therefore the mainstream evolutionary view is more realistic to follow even giving Hawking's Many World's Theory is correct.

I think my number analogy is also good for responding to the multiverse theorists who say that in a multiverse every possible event happens, where even if there are an infinite number of universes it is possible an entire other infinite of possible events is excluded from the multiverse.

On the points on why should believer's care, I feel that one can get many of those benefits from studying philosophy and not necessarily having to be a believer to think and contemplate the why questions and the bigger questions behind life and the universe.

Is it still possible that even though religion and science don't fight (I disagree because I'd say at its core the scientific approach to truth is based on axioms that don't allow God to exist [or at least has no reason to interfere with humanity], metaphysical naturalism for example), philosophy and religion do. They both view a lot of the same questions on morality, knowledge and metaphysics.

Also when you say that many scientists and believers/non-believers believe the universe to have a 'mind' is more of an argument from popularity. Is there any actual proof of this mind of the universe?

Would you mind going over your proof for free-will, as I can't make it out just from the power-point slides, I'm divided on that issue, but I'm probably closer to hard determinism now than anything else. Also you make a pretty big jump at the end there, the possibility of a god/deity does not make it automatically possible the judeo-christian God does, which I would argue has many more logical problems to face than a simple pantheist or even deistic god.

[Kenneth Regan]

Re: Universal Corruption

Thanks, Adam. Your point about multiverse theory is one I also query (can all but finitely many universes be "duds"?) but it's argued by many proponents that nothing possible is excluded, and Brian Greene's book The Hidden Reality takes that aspect as read. My bit about Hawking and creationism is half-joke, half a point about modal necessity. The "why should believers care?" slide is addressed only to believers. I don't have a proof for "universal mind" (I'm contra-pan[en]theism actually) nor for free will, only a suggestion on the latter. Do you grasp how we can have "hard determinism" in the bird's-eye view yet the experience of non-determinism in the frog's-eye view? That's the crux of what I draw from quantum mechanics. What follows it is not meant to be more than "K3: Modeling" as presaged near the beginning.

[Adam Cormier]

Re: Universal Corruption

Thanks, Adam. Your point about multiverse theory is one I also query (can all but finitely many universes be "duds"?) but it's argued by many proponents that nothing possible is excluded, and Brian Greene's book The Hidden Reality takes that aspect as read. My bit about Hawking and creationism is half-joke, half a point about modal necessity. The "why should believers care?" slide is addressed only to believers. I don't have a proof for "universal mind" (I'm contra-pan[en]theism actually) nor for free will, only a suggestion on the latter. Do you grasp how we can have "hard determinism" in the bird's-eye view yet the experience of non-determinism in the frog's-eye view? That's the crux of what I draw from quantum mechanics. What follows it is not meant to be more than "K3: Modeling" as presaged near the beginning.

I have Greene's book I should really get to reading it.
ahh, thanks for clarifying on those issues.

I don't really understand the bird's eye view vs frog's eye view point. Are they both equally objective 'realities' of our universe, or are they both based on perception making them subjective?

If our universe if almost fully mechanistic (follows a law of cause-and-effect) at everything besides the quantum level, it is most likely that our own selves being part of nature and the universe are also mechanistic (necessarily following from our genetics and experiences/environment) leaving out free-will entirely. Does quantum indeterminacy have an effect on our free-will? Even if it did if we are not in control of them, how can it be said to have free-will even if we perceive that we do?

[Kenneth Regan]

Re: Universal Corruption

I don't really understand the bird's eye view vs frog's eye view point. Are they both equally objective 'realities' of our universe, or are they both based on perception making them subjective?

One of the linchpin theorems in computation theory is that a nondeterministic finite automaton (NFA) N can be simulated by a deterministic finite automaton (DFA) M. The NFA N has a set of local states q0,q1,...,q(n-1) it can be in. An NFA's computation starts up in state q0 and thereafter may have choices. Depending on the code of N, it might go q0-to-q1-to-q3-to... or q0-to-q4-to-q2..., and either of these may have further branchings, possibly cycling back to an earlier state. The DFA M has "super-states" that are sets of states of N. Its single state at a given time represents the set of all "possible worlds" N could be in at that time. Continuing the example, M would start up in the state Q0 = {q0}, and deterministically progress to the super-state Q1 = {q1,q4}. The state Q2 after that would be {q2,q3}, and would remain that even if N allowed a direct local branching from q4 back to q3. If N had a branch from q4 back to q1, however, or from q1 to itself (no local change), then the next state would be {q1,q2,q3} instead. And so it goes---deterministically but with up to 2^n total states rather than just the original n. So the analogy is:

N = local = frog's-eye view = what we experience, perceiving randomness.
M = global = bird's-eye view = deterministic, but we don't experience the totality.

The analogy starts becoming concrete when we think of M not as having subsets Q of {q0,...,q(n-1)} but rather distributions D of probabilities p0,p1,...,p(n-1) on these states. Or better, assignments A of amplitudes a0,a1,...,a(n-1), which are complex numbers whose absolute values are the square roots of these probabilities. The D view defines a Markov chain. The A view is what we get in quantum mechanics, and comes with the deterministic evolution defined by Schrödinger's equation. Thus the deterministic evolution at bird's-eye level is managing the sets of possible local worlds q that receive nonzero amplitudes at any given time, while the amplitudes themselves govern the likelihood of experiences by those in q who actually live at frog's-eye level. The "Garden of Forking Paths" slide attempts to picture the interface between the levels geometrically, conveying the spatial "room" of the talk's title.

If our universe if almost fully mechanistic (follows a law of cause-and-effect) at everything besides the quantum level, it is most likely that our own selves being part of nature and the universe are also mechanistic (necessarily following from our genetics and experiences/environment) leaving out free-will entirely. Does quantum indeterminacy have an effect on our free-will? Even if it did if we are not in control of them, how can it be said to have free-will even if we perceive that we do?

My talk "ducks" the scientific line on free will, first posing a different question, then reintroducing free will only in theological modeling. For the latest and best effort I know to preserve a scientific approach to free will (apart from global workspace theory which tends against it), I'll refer you to a post and long paper by my blogging Überpeer, Scott Aaronson.