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sara
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 Posted Friday, April 21, 2006 @ 03:51 PM
I heard an interview with Swinburne on public radio. Or else it was someone who knew Swinburne and quoted him a lot. I can’t recall. The only thing I remember distinctly is that the guy said something like…”The probability that God exists is slightly greater than 1/2.” That amused me. I guess he means in our Universe…. or, should I say, in our “current space-time continuum.” But, what if there are a multitude of Universes or dimensions? The odds might decline. Or maybe not….depending on the nature of those realities? Reality at the quantum level is a really puzzling. Can’t use logic to figure it out….indeterminancy is its essential feature. By definition, science and logic exclude the possibility of studying and verifying supernatural phenomena…right? Especially “one of a kind” occurrences…. Seems obvious to me. Or am I missing something? |
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Posted Monday, April 24, 2006 @ 00:57 AM
Offhand, I am not exactly certain how the objection to many possible worlds is answered, though I would be greatly surprised if Swinburne had not only anticipated but provided an argument for it. I do know that in his argument concerning the problem of evil, he counted as evidence of evil any possibly unknown creatures on any possibly unknown universes with evil impulses such that ill effects resulted from their actions. I also know that from what I understand of probability theorems, there are two main ways of calculating probability, the one apparently more stringent than the other. The Bayesian probability method is likely the one used regarding the existence of God, though it has apparently received a lot of criticism. (However, it is the probability method successfully used by e-mail spam filters; its strength and its weakness appears to be that it is more flexible.) Or maybe the man used frequency probability: I am really quite new to such sophisticated uses of probability theorems. Yeah, reality at the quantum level is puzzling. It is not completely devoid of determinacy, you just can’t precisely calculate the position and momentum of subatomic particles at the same time using strictly linear methods. Most systems following Newtonian physics were linear and assumed a graphical function. However, a lot of the models now used in physics have been developed around what was previously considered to be indeterminate: what once was called noise or chaos. (More on that in a moment.) In fact, the positing of multiverses (as opposed to universes)—“multiverse theory,” as it is sometimes dubbed—is really the recognition that different models of science do not, as of yet, jibe with one another. The problem in a nutshell (or so says sagacious Eric the wise) is that the stuff outside our heads (which we will assume is really there and that our senses are speaking the truth) is not one in the same with the stuff inside our heads. A friend and fellow philosophy major sent me his research paper on Derrida and deconstruction this weekend, and I singled this paragraph out of his paper for comment. He writes: Quote: Consider, for a moment, the term “de-construction” itself. By implication, it involves a dis-assembling, a dis-connection. However, de-construction is not de-struction, for destruction entails the annihilation of an underlying, inherent structure, while deconstruction involves a brick-by-brick disassembly of a human construction. In short, to deconstruct a philosophy of presence is to reveal that its foundations and theories are constructions themselves, and as such, are based upon other ideas, which are “open to interrogation…demonstrably unstable and lack ultimate grounds.” Some of my reply was as follows: Quote: In many ways, this goes back to that important distinction between “truth” and “reality”—between all that does in fact exist and our imperfect human means of the former’s “re-presentation.” … It would be nice to have a mind so fluid and flexible that it could just flow around each new aspect of reality it encountered such that these aspects were perfectly represented exactly as they are, but as long as we are dealing with the (I am nearly certain necessarily) analytic structure of language which does in fact shape the mind and our perceptions of the world, this will likely never happen. But could it ever happen? For the only way for this to be true would be if the thing inside the head could be the same exact thing as the thing outside the head as well, but this is impossible, for the thing inside the head is not the thing itself but a re-presentation of that thing: a thought, a construct, a correspondence. There will always and ever be an insuperable gulf between perceiver and perceived, however accurate the correspondence—unless, of course, we are to admit Berkeley’s conception that thought and reality are in fact one: that esse est percepti, material reality in truth spiritual substance. (You will have to admit that there is brilliance behind his position however improbable it ultimately seems, particularly in noting how empiricism unwittingly fuels skepticism.) But then again, since we are ever and always human, what exactly is “objective”? Ironic, really, that true objectivity could never be accomplished objectively. So then, with the view in mind that the thing outside the head is not the same as the thing inside the head and never will be (except insofar as the thing inside the head is the subject of its own inquiry): I say again, with the view in mind that “reality” is of one nature and “truth” of another, we must consider that logic is but a tool used to “get at” truth, as is likewise the predicting of some kind of determinacy. Put another way, our models of the stuff outside the head must in some way be meaningfully represented by the stuff inside the head, or at least stuff that could be meaningfully represented in at least some heads that took the time to study it out. Thus, different ways of looking at the world may have great accuracy in some regards but begin to fade out around the edges when it comes to other aspects of the world. Stephen C. Pepper shows this to be the case in World Hypotheses when he divides the major epistemological theories of the world up into four categories (he was later to add a fifth after contemplating the thought of Alfred North Whitehead), which include, among other things, pragmatism and naturalism, to use the common names (he called them contextualism and mechanism). Pragmatism can tell us a great deal about “horizontal reality”—how to get to point B by assuming point A: if it really is true that such-and-such, then such-and-such is likely or true. But pragmatism never pretends to ever be able to get to any top or bottom of truth, its speciality is navigating from horizontal strand to horizontal strand. (Again, we do well to remember that “truth” is the stuff inside the head and not the stuff outside: the stuff outside presumably is unaffected by our attempts to “get at it” and very likely does have some kind of top or bottom which pragmatism never pretends to “get at."  Naturalism, by contrast, does a wonderful job in explaining matter but is lousy in terms of describing abstracts, such as the way idealism is capable of effecting. So too with scientific models of the universe: different theories help us key in on different parts of the world, providing more or less adequate means of getting the stuff outside our heads symbolized adequately inside. Yet what emphasizes one part of reality tends to neglect the other parts and vice-versa.When it comes to scientific theories, what holds for ordinary physics (angular momentum, mass, and such not) begins to break down on the microscopic level, and what functions on the macroscopic level (relativity, Newtonian physics, etc.) tends not to coalesce well with the other medium and small-sized theories. Thus, science, as with that peculiar branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, seeks a “theory of everything.” Trying to put together all the different theories at present which emphasize one little corner of the world to great precision soon results in what would be many different, parallel universes all stacked on top of each other (or something like that), thus the perhaps tongue-in-cheek reference to “multiverse theory” or the (science-)fictionalized “parallel universes.” Now, back to indeterminacy. Previously, Newtonian physics tended to chart reality in terms of straight lines—or at least lines of some sort, such that points occurred along this kind of ordered geometric regularity. Anomalies in such experiments were considered chaos or noise. But then the study of this chaos itself began to devolve into non-linear ways of charting reality, known better as “chaos theory.” Chaos is not completely disordered, it is simply ordered in a non-linear way. There is nothing illogical about that—strictly speaking, a violation of logic would be a complete contradiction, not something that as of yet cannot be adequately represented: that as of yet cannot be symbolized in here from the world out there. ThinkQuest has an excellent article (even if its author could have benefited from a spell-checking program) entitled simply Chaos Theory. The author begins by talking about a pile of stones: the effect of gravity and other forces will cause those stones to stabilize themselves, some falling or shifting as the forces exerted on the instability of their being stacked one on top of another dictates. Theoretically, one could construct an absolutely identical second pile of rocks such that one could predict what would happen with the first pile by carefully observing what is true of the second, exactly identical pile. In sum, the second pile models the first, just as what is inside the head must model what is outside. Now then, reducing the complex interactions of the world to linear equations is obviously not going to provide an exact model of behavior, for “what is outside the head” is far too complex for all of that. But that does not necessarily mean that there is indeterminacy in the nature of such behavior or that it is illogical, merely that what is outside the head cannot be modeled inside the head in terms of pure linearity alone. Here are a few carefully selected excerpts of the article mentioned above (and, being the perfectionist I am, any spelling errors found therein have here been corrected): Quote: After research into complex systems, we now know that noise is actually important information about the experiment. When noise is inserted into the graph results, the graph no longer appears as a straight line, nor are its points predictable. At one time, this noise was referred to as the chaos in the experiment. The process of studying the noise in an experiment is one of the major parts of the chaos theory. Another important word which has been used repeatedly is complex. What is the determining factor making one system more complex than another? The complexity of a system is defined by the complexity of the model necessary to effectively predict the behavior of the system. The more the model must look like the actual system to predict the system’s results, the more complex the system is considered to be. The most complex system example is the weather, which can only be modeled with an exact duplicate of itself. On the other hand, a simple system to model is to predict the amount of time it takes for a train to travel from point A to point B, assuming there are no stops in between. To predict the time we need only know the speed of the train and the distance between the two points. The formula is simple: mph/miles. Our old example of the pile of stones, which may look like a simple system, is actually very complex. If your goal was to predict the eventual location of each individual stone, then you will have to know very detailed information about each stone: their shape, weight, and the exact starting location. If there is even a minor difference between the shape of one stone in the model and the stone in reality, the modeled results will likely be very different. Predictability becomes very hard, making the system highly complex. One of the most essential elements in a complex system is unpredictability. The generator of this unpredictability is what Lorenz calls sensitivity to initial conditions, otherwise known to the world as the butterfly effect. This concept means that with a complex, nonlinear system, very (infinitely) small changes in the starting conditions of a system will result in dramatically different outputs for that system. ***** After discussing sensitive dependence, we are ready to summarize the qualities of a chaotic system. A chaotic system has these simple defining features:
Much like physics, chaos theory provides a foundation for the study of all other scientific disciplines. It is actually a tool box of methods for incorporating nonlinear dynamics into the study of science. For many people, the work in chaos represents the reunification of the sciences. Notice that last sentence: For many people, the work in chaos represents the reunification of the sciences. What if the “theory of everything” evades us at present, not because it is illogical, but because it is non-linear? What if chaos theory, by charting reality in non-linear ways, could come closer to approximating, or modeling, the apparently indeterminate systems (because their apparent indeterminacy is seen through a traditionally linear lens)? Anyway, it is getting late and while this is greatly fascinating to me and I am learning even as I write, I must sign off. Briefly, another article that looks promising (and which I have partially skimmed already and partially pored over) is “What Do You Do With a Wavefunction?” I assume—though I could be terribly mistaken, an actual embarrassment to myself and others—that wavefunction might be non-linear examples that help calculate at least the probability of quantum mechanics: help, but not yet solve, that problem of knowing precisely both the position and the momentum of a fundamental particle at the same time and not just one or the other. The last two things I will say about science, logic, and supernatural experience, especially of the “one of a kind” variety, is that there is a very real sense in which every event is one of a kind: even the most exacting empirical study is never exactly the same, though so statistically close as to be deemed “close enough” to proceed empirically. Among others, Hume points out the impossibility of ever being able to perfectly replicate anything. I know what do you mean by “one of a kind,” of course, but for what it is worth… My second observation is that on the topic of supernatural things lacking a criterion of study, our Ten Essential Texts in the Philosophy of Religion text, which I would highly recommend, debates that very thing. Philosophy never listens for long to the dogmatism of science, for it proceeds in part by speculation: by saying: “Yes, I hear you saying that such and such is impossible. But what if….” And, sometimes, the impossible becomes possible, for a new way of getting the things outside, inside, emerges and what was once thought unknowable becomes known—only to present ten times as many questions or more as what it answers, of course. One essay I wish I could share (but could not find online, and, especially after typing all the present post and as late as it is getting to be am not up to scanning at present), is William Alston’s “Religious Experience as Perception of God” (and to some degree the skeptical “A Religious Way of Knowing” by C.B. Martin as well). These guys take the lid off the question all over again… about the time somebody says impossible… but then new impossibilities rise to take the place of old ones… and the food gets pushed around on our plates yet another time. We again take note of the patterns we are capable of producing… and we learn. But what is outside the head will never be gotten inside completely, for then it would be the thing itself—and that is absurd.
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