But you wont find intellect in the brain

[Moonstruck888]

actually those people saying that are just more uninformed little fellas on messageboards

Well, when I put the same search term, in quotes, into google scholar, it still returned results.

Of course, I’ll yield to your expertise when it comes to pathetic little men playing the big shot on message boards.

Every particle has an associated wave component that is said to collapse under observation. If the metaphysically challenged Copenhagen interpretation of QM is to be accepted at face value, which it most certainly is not by every physicist, then your man Wheeler is adding more rather difficult to test metaphysics into the pot, as he admits here:

““Nonsense,” said the reductionists. “Rubbish,” said the materialists. “Completely absurd,” said the naïve realists. “Yup,” said the mathematicians.”

you seem angry, take a chill moment

I don’t feel angry, I feel contemptuous.

and btw, John Wheeler was one of the most respected physicists of the 20th century, he didn’t deal in “metaphysically challenged pueudo scientific bunkum”

Yeah, sure… Not by me he isn’t. Not if he accepts maths over experimentation.

“As long as you avoid asking what it means, there are no problems.” – John Gribbin.

 

[ronnie_bonigli]

there is clearly no hope to trying to talk rationally to an angry atheist, who doesn’t like to admit he has no idea what he’s talking about, to the point where he looks down on a important 20th century physicist like John Wheeler, a guy who ***taught ***people like Richard Feynman and Hugh Everett. It must be an atheist thing, to think you know everything, even when you’re on a subject about which you know absolutely nothing

 

[Moonstruck888]

there is clearly no hope to trying to talk rationally to an angry atheist, who doesn’t like to admit he has no idea what he’s talking about, to the point where he looks down on a important 20th century physicist like John Wheeler, a guy who ***taught ***people like Richard Feynman and Hugh Everett. It must be an atheist thing, think you know everything, even when you’re on a subject about which you know absolutely nothing

Hugh Everett? You talk about reality and you dare to invoke Hugh Everett? The Everett interpretation has even more metaphysical baggage than the Book of Genesis.

I don’t think it’s my knowledge or outlook that’s in question here.

I don’t think I know everything about Quantum Mechanics. I just think your idea of it is a joke. A bad one. QM is great for building electronic devices. It is an absolute non entity when it comes to understanding the Universe.

“I hate it, and wish I’d had nothing to do with it.” --Erwin Schroedinger.

 

[ronnie_bonigli]

and I’m sure you look down on Richard Feynman as well. and why not Roger Penrose and Henry Stapp while you’re feeling smug, yet clueless?

poor supercilious atheists, if only someone would give them a mirror

 

[Moonstruck888]

and I’m sure you look down on Richard Feynman as well. and why not Roger Penrose and Henry Stapp while you’re feeling smug, yet clueless?

poor supercilious atheists, if only someone would give them a mirror

Actually, no. I have great respect for Feynman. He would never put maths above physical evidence.

 

[Moonstruck888]

poor supercilious atheists, if only someone would give them a mirror

Poor supercilious bonigli. If only someone would give him a mirror.

You have the mental agility of a tree and the predictability of a daytime soap opera.

 

[inocente]

Following ronnie’s link in #97, I never realized that Wheeler’s delayed-choice thought experiment had ever been done for real, and don’t understand why it didn’t make more of a splash at the time.

Due to my allergy to interpretations, I went off to find the original paper.

They got the same results as would be expected if consciousness played a part, but the delayed choice was made by a completely unpredictable machine (a very classy random number generator).

To me, that is objective evidence that blows the consciousness interpretation right out of the water. What do you guys think?

Roch et al Oct-06 (pdf)

 

[ronnie_bonigli]

To me, that is objective evidence that blows the consciousness interpretation right out of the water. What do you guys think?

Roch et al Oct-06 (pdf)

But where those results actual until a human observer looked at them? Maybe the two possible results were in a superposition state until someone looked them up. It’s the old Wigner’s Friend paradox.

Whatever is the answer, the rabbit hole does get deeper and deeper with every passing decade as they come up with new experiments, like the experiments verifying Bell’s Theorem, that two phase entangled particles, no matter how far separated, even if they were separated by light years, still act as one quantum wave function and a collapse at one particle instantly effects a collapse at the other particle. And the important thing is, these paradoxes are based on actual experiments and not merely musings on what the mathematics and formalism suggest.

 

[rvilbig]

But where those results actual until a human observer looked at them? Maybe the two possible results were in a superposition state until someone looked them up. It’s the old Wigner’s Friend paradox.

Whatever is the answer, the rabbit hole does get deeper and deeper with every passing decade as they come up with new experiments, like the experiments verifying Bell’s Theorem, that two phase entangled particles, no matter how far separated, even if they were separated by light years, still act as one quantum wave function and a collapse at one particle instantly effects a collapse at the other particle. And the important thing is, these paradoxes are based on actual experiments and not merely musings on what the mathematics and formalism suggest.

What Wigner’s Friend paradox reveals is that our knowledge of wavefunction collapse is limited as finite human beings. But that limitation in our knowledge doesn’t mean that actual reality exists in these superstates; it only means that we can’t, as limited human beings, determine the actualization of these *potential * states that are expressed in the notation of superstates. Herein is the beauty and simplicity of using Aristotle’s terms of potency and act, just as Heisenberg recommended: superstates only represent potential reality. Furthermore, the fact that reality must have existed prior to human consciousness suggests that there is another consciousness in the universe that collapses wavefunctions. This is the wisdom of the QM interpretations of Wolfgang Smith and Robert John Russell: God is immanently creating by bringing potencies (superstates) to act (collapse). (cf Jn 5:17, Ps 118:24.)

Also, I don’t think Bell’s Theorem is relevant here. That theorem describes particles whose states have been entangled in the lab, but we certainly don’t feel that our choices are somehow entangled with the choices of another individual. Epistemologically, our choices are truly free and unentangled with distant individuals.

-Ryan Vilbig
ryan.vilbig@gmail.com

 

[ronnie_bonigli]

What Wigner’s Friend paradox reveals is that our knowledge of wavefunction collapse is limited as finite human beings. But that limitation in our knowledge doesn’t mean that actual reality exists in these superstates; it only means that we can’t, as limited human beings, determine the actualization of these *potential * states that are expressed in the notation of superstates.

-Ryan Vilbig
ryan.vilbig@gmail.com

Not really

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigner’s_friend

 

[inocente]

But where those results actual until a human observer looked at them?

The point that I and rvilbig raised is God sees all before we do, and so we can’t have anything to do with it.

rvilbig chooses (I think) to see the consciousness interpretation as proof of God’s existence, while I choose not to. At best it will later be disproved, which may be a minor upset to anyone who hung their faith on it, but really I think it is not even wrong. God wants faith without proof, and we cannot test Him.

As the experimenters quote Fenyman in the paper, QM is simply a “mystery which cannot go away”.

To me the consciousness interpretation is now an invisible pink unicorn, a holy hoof-ness without purpose or inspiration.

 

[ronnie_bonigli]

The point that I and rvilbig raised is God sees all before we do, and so we can’t have anything to do with it.

rvilbig chooses (I think) to see the consciousness interpretation as proof of God’s existence, while I choose not to. At best it will later be disproved, which may be a minor upset to anyone who hung their faith on it, but really I think it is not even wrong. God wants faith without proof, and we cannot test Him.

As the experimenters quote Fenyman in the paper, QM is simply a “mystery which cannot go away”.

To me the consciousness interpretation is now an invisible pink unicorn, a holy hoof-ness without purpose or inspiration.

I don’t think any of Quantum physics offers “proof” of God’s existence, and if God was always collapsing wavefunctions, then we wouldn’t have the mystery of the Quantum “measurment problem”; that the wavefunction will continue to evolve according to the Schrodinger equation in a superposition of different states ***until ***an observer enters the picture. I don’t know what the answers are, I just find it all amazing

 

[ronnie_bonigli]

getting back to the O.P. idea about a non-material element in the intellect, I’ll ask; In the materialist paradigm, what existence do abstract mathematical concepts like the number π or the √2 have outside of the firing of neurons in someone’s brain? These are things that do not exist in the material world, they are abstract ideas that the intellect grasps during conceptual thought, yet if the materialist view of “mind” is correct, they are wholly produced products of neurons and nothing more

 

[inocente]

That’s an excellent question, and how about the beautiful Euler’s Identity

View attachment 8265

(For anyone looking in who doesn’t know, e is the base of natural logarithms and i is the imaginary square root of -1. Along with pi, both of them happen to turn up a lot in physics.)

 

[Leela]

getting back to the O.P. idea about a non-material element in the intellect, I’ll ask; In the materialist paradigm, what existence do abstract mathematical concepts like the number π or the √2 have outside of the firing of neurons in someone’s brain? These are things that do not exist in the material world, they are abstract ideas that the intellect grasps during conceptual thought, yet if the materialist view of “mind” is correct, they are wholly produced products of neurons and nothing more

It depends on what you mean by materialism. I don’t think anyone really subscribes to materialism as the notion that everything ought to only ever have a material description. What most people do subscribe to is the notion that everything can have a material description. You’ve given a material description of pi as it exists in the material world (such as lighted pixels on my computer screen), but that is not the only possible useful description of it. It is also an idea–a set of relationships. It is the ratio between the circumference of any circle to it’s diameter. It is 4 times the arc tangent of 1. It is a term in various physics and statistics equations. It can be described in lots of ways and none of these ways needs to be thought of as the essence of what pi REALLY is.

When you talk about a non-material element to the intellect, you can mean a couple different things. If you just mean that we often talk about intellect with descriptions that are not materialistic, then of course there is such an element. If you are saying that there is an extra-added ingredient to intellect that is not material in nature, then you are saying something more controversial. I don’t think of things as having fundamental natures that stand apart from the descriptions we use for them.

I also don’t think that there is some extra-added ingredient to the human intellect that we ought never try to describe in material terms or one for which material terms will always be “inadequate” in the absolute sense. Adequacy of descriptions is never absolute and always relative to the purpose for which a description was made, and material descriptions don’t always meet out purposes since our purposes are so diverse. That is why talk about fundamental natures falls flat for me. No particular description is any more the fundamental nature of a thing than any other description that may be used for entirely different purposes.

A modest non-reductive materialism would say this: everything always can have a material description so long as material descriptions serve certain of our purposes.

Best,
Leela

 

[ronnie_bonigli]

It depends on what you mean by materialism. I don’t think anyone really subscribes to materialism as the notion that everything ought to only ever have a material description. What most people do subscribe to is the notion that everything can have a material description. You’ve given a material description of pi as it exists in the material world (such as lighted pixels on my computer screen), but that is not the only possible useful description of it. It is also an idea–a set of relationships. It is the ratio between the circumference of any circle to it’s diameter. It is 4 times the arc tangent of 1. It is a term in various physics and statistics equations. It can be described in lots of ways and none of these ways needs to be thought of as the essence of what pi REALLY is.

Best,
Leela

But according to the materialist paradigm ALL ideas are just the firing of neurons in someone’s brain, and nothing more. Take inocente’s example of “i”, the square root of -1. You will not find “i” embodied in the material world, it is an abstract concept, the only place you find it is in human minds, and if human minds are soley the firing of neurons, then “i” is nothing more than the result of some neuron firings, it has no genuine existence. Of course in a neo-platonist view, we could say that “i” has an existence in the nonmaterial world of Platonic forms, and that the nonmaterial element in the intellect makes contact with that Platonic world through it’s abstract reasonings.

 

[LogisticsBranch]

The human intelligence is in human bodies because that is the only place it can be. Desks, cars, paintings and computers can’t multiply. A painting needs a painter. A car needs an engineer, a desk needs a carpenter and a computer needs a programmer. Human beings are created spontaneously from other human beings and ultimately other lifeforms that were also created spontaneously.

We are stuck in fragile disease prone bilogical bodies that last for a blink of an eye with no gurantee even then because they need no design and we have no design. We have no design because we have no designer. Intelligence isn’t a miracle. It’s a survival trait that has been selected from a myriad of possibilities and enhanced as millions of years have passed, simply because it is so advantageous.

I wish to deal with your usage of the word intelligence. You are lacking the ability to convince me that your statements are valid. This is from the Human Genome Project.

In reality, there is no universal agreement on the definition of intelligence, even among those who study it for a living.

Having established a definition for research purposes, the investigator still must measure the behavior with acceptable degrees of validity and reliability. That is especially difficult for basic personality traits such as shyness or assertiveness, which are the subject of much current research. Sometimes there is an interesting conflation of definition and measurement, as in the case of IQ tests, where the test score itself has come to define the trait it measures. This is a bit like using batting averages to define hitting prowess in baseball. A high average may indicate ability, but it does not define the essence of the trait.

Behaviors, like all complex traits, involve multiple genes, a reality that complicates the search for genetic contributions.

As with much other research in genetics, studies of genes and behavior require analysis of families and populations for comparison of those who have the trait in question with those who do not. The result often is a statement of “heritability,” a statistical construct that estimates the amount of variation in a population that is attributable to genetic factors. The explanatory power of heritability figures is limited, however, applying only to the population studied and only to the environment in place at the time the study was conducted. If the population or the environment changes, the heritability most likely will change as well. Most important, heritability statements provide no basis for predictions about the expression of the trait in question in any given individual.
ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/elsi/behavior.shtml

 

[Moonstruck888]

I wish to deal with your usage of the word intelligence. You are lacking the ability to convince me that your statements are valid. This is from the Human Genome Project.

I’m sorry, but I don’t see how I can address this unless you be more specific.

 

[Leela]

But according to the materialist paradigm ALL ideas are just the firing of neurons in someone’s brain, and nothing more.

You’ve completely missed my point. I’m saying that either that is not what a materialist is, or there is no such thing as a materialist. It sounds to me like you are trying to set up a straw man so you can give him a good thrashing.

Again, a materialist is someone who thinks that everything CAN have a material explanation and not someone who thinks that everything ONLY EVER ought to have a material explanation. It can be useful to think of ideas in terms of their correlates in brain activity, and it can be useful to think of ideas using Dawkin’s notion of “meme,” and it can be useful to think of ideas as mental constructs, and in lots and lots of other ways. No one need ever say that this one way of talking about ideas is THEE way that ideas ought only ever be talked about. You are attacking a straw man. No one says that ideas ought only ever be talked about in terms of electrical impulses in the brain.

 

[LogisticsBranch]

I’m sorry, but I don’t see how I can address this unless you be more specific.

You don’t need to be sorry. I think you need to take the time to slowly read, examine, and learn from the previous posting of mine. Explore the website I provided. I don’t need to be any more specific than that.