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Popcorn_Sutton
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I think my mail says I got a bunch of responses overnight but I’m not seeing them.
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Popcorn_Sutton
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To address your point on the soul though, I have had some unexplained experiences. They’ve been described as astral projection, out body experiences, disembodied spirits, and psychic phenomena. Here’s one experience of mine-
While I was about 21, I worked at a hotel folding towels all day. The head honcho was an absolutely miserable old woman swearing left and right and treating her employees like garbage. I took it upon myself to try and lighten up the mood a bit, and she was not having it. I asked her one simple question “where you from?” When we caught eyes, I’ve never felt such a potent blast of energy sweep through my spinal cord and up to my brain stem. She must’ve felt it too though because her demeanor instantly changed. She told me where she was from and lightened up. Not even 15 minutes later I had the most uncontrollable waterfall of tears pour out. It was strange and very impactful on me. To this day, I refuse to look psychotic people in the eye.
Another experience-
I had a best friend for over 14 years of my life who also became very miserable and suicidal. He was my favorite person to be around and we would hang out every day. Well, towards the end of our friendship, he became very judgmental towards me. I remember feeling his presence as if it was an extreme weight upon my back. One day, I was all by myself, and I knew it was his presence, and I just waved my hands in the air and shouted “get off of my back!” It was as if he was literally there pushing down on my shoulders making me much heavier than I actually was. After I shouted that though, I heard an “ok” and it was like the weight was instantly lifted off of me. We were no longer friends after that.
While I was about 21, I worked at a hotel folding towels all day. The head honcho was an absolutely miserable old woman swearing left and right and treating her employees like garbage. I took it upon myself to try and lighten up the mood a bit, and she was not having it. I asked her one simple question “where you from?” When we caught eyes, I’ve never felt such a potent blast of energy sweep through my spinal cord and up to my brain stem. She must’ve felt it too though because her demeanor instantly changed. She told me where she was from and lightened up. Not even 15 minutes later I had the most uncontrollable waterfall of tears pour out. It was strange and very impactful on me. To this day, I refuse to look psychotic people in the eye.
Another experience-
I had a best friend for over 14 years of my life who also became very miserable and suicidal. He was my favorite person to be around and we would hang out every day. Well, towards the end of our friendship, he became very judgmental towards me. I remember feeling his presence as if it was an extreme weight upon my back. One day, I was all by myself, and I knew it was his presence, and I just waved my hands in the air and shouted “get off of my back!” It was as if he was literally there pushing down on my shoulders making me much heavier than I actually was. After I shouted that though, I heard an “ok” and it was like the weight was instantly lifted off of me. We were no longer friends after that.
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abucs
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Does non-deterministic have to imply randomness?
Would it not be just as much a descriptive error to define ‘free thought’ as ‘random’ as it is to define it as ‘deterministic’?
As such, doesn’t the concept of ‘free thought’ fall outside both of these definitions?
Would it not be just as much a descriptive error to define ‘free thought’ as ‘random’ as it is to define it as ‘deterministic’?
As such, doesn’t the concept of ‘free thought’ fall outside both of these definitions?
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abucs
Guest
With regards to the discussion with time and causality; don’t we accept that time began with the Big Bang and before this occurrence there was no time?
Doesn’t it do everyone’s head in to wonder how there can be a cause producing an effect over zero time? And yet here is our Universe, against all logic.
Doesn’t this point to a deficiency in our logic of understanding the true relationship between causality and time?
And if we have a deficiency in logic regarding the true relationship between causality and time, is it proper to use deficient logic to rule out free will when, like the Big Bang, it is attributed to something outside the bounds of causality in time?
Doesn’t it do everyone’s head in to wonder how there can be a cause producing an effect over zero time? And yet here is our Universe, against all logic.
Doesn’t this point to a deficiency in our logic of understanding the true relationship between causality and time?
And if we have a deficiency in logic regarding the true relationship between causality and time, is it proper to use deficient logic to rule out free will when, like the Big Bang, it is attributed to something outside the bounds of causality in time?
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Servant19
Guest
Are you familiar with the work of Sam Parnia who is deducing that consciousness is external to the body? And that the mind expresses what the consciousness (name removed by moderator)uts into it?
If so, and you are expressing that belief then you are expressing Baha’i theology here…
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balto
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Welcome to the forums! 
I am actually studying to become a scientist myself, so I definitely understand the need to have things make rational sense. Suffice it to say I have not felt the need to comprise reason for my Catholic faith and this becomes more apparent to me the more I learn. I hope that you find the answers you are looking for. You might be interested in the philosophy forum, although sometimes passions can run a little high over there.
I am actually studying to become a scientist myself, so I definitely understand the need to have things make rational sense. Suffice it to say I have not felt the need to comprise reason for my Catholic faith and this becomes more apparent to me the more I learn. I hope that you find the answers you are looking for. You might be interested in the philosophy forum, although sometimes passions can run a little high over there.I admit that I don’t know enough about linguistics to be able to decide whether language is pattern recognition or not. May I suggest that you look at it from a different angle? I think the significant point is that humans can understand the concept of pattern recognition and then apply it to developing a language to convey these abstract ideas. How would the datum of “pattern recognition” be contained in the brain in a solely material fashion? Wouldn’t the concept of pattern recognition essentially be either a dimensionless point or an understanding of the infinity of all possible patterns? The fact that a computer can be programmed to recognize patterns only shows that a human can impart intentionally and semantic meaning to the electrical states of a computer.
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balto
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I don’t know that it is necessarily true for us to understand an infinite number of outcomes to have meaningful free will (if that’s what you’re arguing). It would be like saying I can’t perform meaningful addition because I can’t entertain all conceivable addition problems simultaneously or even be familiar with all of them over a finite span of time. I think the fact that we have the potential to understand any finite set of an infinite set of decisions is enough for free will.
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Popcorn_Sutton
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Freedom is an illusion that we believe we have. If we were truly free, we’d be able to post these messages for yesterday to see. We’d be able to reach out and grab infinitely many separate objects simultaneously with one hand. We can’t be free or else language wouldn’t work.
I believe in the big bang, but I don’t think any of us really know what it was. M theory is making a good attempt in my opinion, but I still don’t think that it’s right. My hypothesis is that black holes are actually super solid objects. Here, imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/971111e.html , it says that you can estimate the temperature of a black hole by measuring the temperature of the radiation. The radiation is 1 ten millionth of a Kelvin degree above zero. That is extremely close to absolute zero. Imagine having an object at absolute zero, which can theoretically outlast the existence of our universe because it’s so solid, and slamming it into another super solid object. The result could be that there is so much matter in the two objects, that colliding them causes the “cotton candification” of the matter, and hence, creating a galaxy.
Also, as a recent discovery, the Higg’s field itself can solidify. The Higg’s field is considered to be nothing. So basically, if you slap nothing hard enough, you get something. This supports Lawrence Krauss’s hypothesis “Something from Nothing.” This still means that the needs to be causality prior to the big bang. A while ago, I thought that this might be the case. I can’t even pretend to say that I know what happened “before the beginning”, God does seem like a plausible thesis, but for my purposes, as a philosopher and a scientist, it’s not even worth postulating. It’s completely irrelevant. My goal, as a scientist, is to prevent or minimize death and rejection and make things convenient. My goal as a philosopher is to help bring understanding whenever and wherever I can. There’s nothing that I love more that acquiring knowledge.
I’m not familiar with his work, but the hypothesis is both called Quantum Consciousness and The Big Wow Theory. In my experience with computational neuroscience, I have to assume three things, things are inherently deterministic and absolutely cannot be random, reality exists external to the observer, and that consciousness is the result of quantum entanglement. If any of these were wrong, there would be no pragmatic interface, and intelligence itself would be bunk.
Thanks for taking the time to write that, I enjoyed it. The datum of “pattern recognition” turns out to be a quantum mechanical event, with classical physics tacked on. If you look at the calcium activity in a rats brain, it supports this claim (sorry I don’t know where to find the video, but it was used on “Through the Wormhole”). Imagine that knowledge exists physically. Imagine that what your hear peaks your interest. What happens is that sensory mechanisms translate information (fluctuations in the position and pressure of everything) into a material form. Once the unit of knowledge is created, it prompts all equal units, which then prompt surrounding units as long as they are within your knowledge. It’s like making a bubble. The bubble doesn’t just appear or disappear at any single moment, it forms the shape of a bubble, expands, and then finally closes itself off until it pops. That’s basically what it happening in your brain, but the bubble is prompting all equal bubbles. The bubble itself is a pattern, or y(o) (any positive whole number of occurrences including 0). I call it a unit of knowledge.
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Popcorn_Sutton
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A pattern is a dimensionless point too, by the way. It’s just a point of reference. Within this type of framework, you can never assume infinity. Assuming infinity is like throwing in the towel, it should be considered a fallacy. The reason behind that conclusion is that infinity is unobservable. So yes, there is a distinction between possible and probable. What happens (at least in theory) is that you maximize your knowledge, so when you read this message, you’re not memorizing the entire thing in the first read. It is possible, but accessing that information would be highly improbable. What happens is that you break the message down into separate units and segment them according to action potentials (or statistical significance). So, knowledge is a list. On that list you have all possible sequences. You can access the list in an instant, and you use it when you access time as well, because time is an organized sequence of knowledge.
No free will involved.
No free will involved.
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balto
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But a Higg’s field can’t be said to be nothing. Nothing is the absence of existence. If a Higg’s field were nothing, it would not exist at all.
Okay, let me see if I understand this correctly (please correct me if I have it wrong). You’re saying that we receive sensory (name removed by moderator)ut which is then translated into neurochemical firings in the brain. This causes certain patterns of brain states (like if you were viewing the brain specific regions of the brain would “light up” in a particular order). That sounds plausible enough but I’m not sure that it is sufficient to explain other aspects of rational thinking such as our ability to entertain abstract concepts. If I may be so bold, consider this example. Say I am trying to think about the concept of triangularity, which has an infinite number of possible instantiations. So I form a mental image of a particular triangle that I have viewed in the past and that causes a cascade that signals all the other stored information on anything triangular which produces the pattern. How do I know, as an outside observer, that the pattern corresponds to triangularity and not something else, like my geometry homework for instance? Presumably there are an infinite number of functions that satisfy such a finite set of data points.
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Popcorn_Sutton
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Yes about the brain part. There’s something interesting about it though, the patterns of brain activity happen like this 4 fire off, 2 fire off, 6, fire off, 5 3 1 fire off, 19 fire off, then 19-n fire off continuously, so there is a real pattern to it that corresponds to quantum entanglement.
Chomsky describes it as a snowflake. Perfectly designed by nature.
The best way that I can think of for the moment is by using an MRI and a pattern detector. It’s basically like using a dictionary. What I would prefer is if we were able to literally point at something and say “THAT is our knowledge of the triangle.”
Chomsky describes it as a snowflake. Perfectly designed by nature.
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josie_L
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Who said Hell was going to be some sort of social gathering, i.e., tea with Mussollini anyone?
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josie_L
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That not’s freedom you’re describing, that’s sci fi.
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josie_L
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So, you don’t have the freedom to speak your mind? Or to freely “choose” to “believe” in this or that.
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Popcorn_Sutton
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If I need to believe in determinism for engineering purposes, believing in freedom is inconsistent with that. The more you think about it, the more you come to accept that freedom is an illusion, and that when a “choice” presents itself, you’re really just using Bayes theorem to calculate which is best. The part that is upsetting about this belief (the belief in freedom) is that it makes us subject to pressure. If you’re hanging out with someone who’s obsessed with being alpha, then your fear of getting hurt or shunned will cause you to do things that you wouldn’t otherwise do.
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balto
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My understanding of quantum mechanics is limited admittedly so let me see if I am still following. It may be the case that the pattern isn’t ABCDABCBA but (ABCDABCBA)*n where n is some finite positive integer. If that’s the case I’m not sure if the problem is resolved because now instead of having a two-dimensional system, we have a three-dimensional system: repeat unit, n, and output concept. But there’s still indeterminacy among the 3D functions that would satisfy these data points. I don’t doubt that phenomena like these describe the activity of the brain, but my entertaining of the concept of triangularity is determinate in a way that no completely physical system can be and can be summoned at will. I think it’s more likely that the pattern, whatever it is, is given semantic meaning by the thinker, like how we give semantic meaning to the character sequence “triangularity” but not “xyofjklsjkfsl.” The reverse would be that there’s meaning in “triangularity” that we could discover, but that’s not true because we could have just as easily called it “ytiralugnairt” and had it refer to the same concept.
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balto
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I agree that determinacy is needed for engineering and scientific purposes and that believing scientific systems are indeterminate is not compatible with engineering applications. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that nothing is free. Tremendous gains have been made in the physical sciences because the assumption of determinacy is valid for those systems, but the same progress has not been replicated in the social sciences for instance quite possibly because there is real indeterminacy and freedom involved so the assumption of determinacy is not valid for those systems.
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josie_L
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Freedom is not a scientific concept, hence, science should not determine what Freedom is!
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abucs
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I have read about quantum engineering product designs that use the knowledge of quantum indeterminancy.
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Popcorn_Sutton
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I’ve come to learn that I’m really not a physicist. When I read papers on unitary mathematics, I don’t even know how to search the characters they use, I don’t think I’ll ever learn what they are talking about because of it. I do know the theory’s though, and I find evidence to support them in my own research.
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