Can being come from Non-being ?

Religion and Secularism
81

Lausten: “Don’t claim that evidence of such a thing is not possible.”

Do you not believe “We never know what another thinks or believes, even if he or she tells us.” is self evident? Surely no one here believes we can get that deep into another’s head.

Lausten: “You defended the Bible, saying the authors are known.”

I think I did not defend the Bible nor state that the authors are known. I did say that Blaire’s statement was false. I defended my position in a subsequent post.

I am not insulted. I expressed what “appeared” to me to be Blaire’s use of a modifier to add weight to a term which “appears” to be used as a negative. If you think I misread that into it, then I will apllogize,

82

Hey Bob, for what it is worth, I agree that one doesn’t have to be a Christian to defend Christianity just as a defense attorney doesn’t have to be the criminal charged with the crime. Accusing you of being a party to the crime would be objectionable in a court of law.

83
Do you not believe “We never know what another thinks or believes, even if he or she tells us.” is self evident?
This kind of "you can't know" stuff is what I'm asking you to stop doing. (That's a really poorly constructed sentence).

Whether or not I believe what you say about yourself is up to me, but you can still simply state, “Blaire, I’m not a Christian”, or that you are, or whatever you want. Blaire’s statement was not unreasonable and does not warrant an argument. You can simply clarify. What you are doing now is arguing for the sake of arguing, otherwise known as trolling.

You said, “Beside that I think “devout” is another one of those words you chose to use to strengthen your condemnation of something you reject.” and then later you said you weren’t insulted. If you weren’t insulted, then why say you think he intended to condemn? That’s what trolls do.

 

84

I had a nasty cold this weekend and couldn’t focus on anything for an hour, but today I had the time to listen to the excellent lecture about quantum fields on page 3. What was interesting is, I also skimmed Adonai’s video, and they contained the same picture of the model of “nothing”. Write4’s video explained what you were looking at much better and also explained what we do and don’t know about the beginning of our universe. In Adonai’s, it shows the model, then sort of moves on, leaving it as some incomplete theory that we can just put aside. Where that moves on to, is the theories that developed in the 90’s and into the 2000’s about how our physical universe had to have had a beginning. This is the trick that creationists are playing right now.

If you accept the math, we are created by fields, fields have bumps in them that make what look like particles, then the classical periodic table of elements. The theory is somehow those fields interacted and created a fireball that lasted for 380,000 years and eventually cooled and here we are. But we don’t know what kicked that off. That’s the last fraction of a second that believers in a creator are hanging on to. And as Write4’s video points out, there hasn’t been much coming out Cern lately, so they’ll have plenty of time to rejoice about that.

85
TimB said,

Thoughts physically exist while their correlated firing of neurons physically exists.


I tend to agree with that analysis. I do have a question if what we “perceive” is in fact a photon generated image. The neurons do not emit photons.

This PDF (free to download) may better explain ;

Abstract Regular physics is unsatisfactory in that it fails to take into consideration phenomena relating to mind and meaning, whereas on the other side of the cultural divide such constructs have been studied in detail. This paper discusses a possible synthesis of the two perspectives. Crucial is the way systems realising mental function can develop step by step on the basis of the scaffolding mechanisms of Hoffmeyer, in a way that can be clarified by consideration of the phenomenon of language. Taking into account such constructs, aspects of which are apparent even with simple systems such as acoustically excited water (as with cymatics), potentially opens up a window into a world of mentality excluded from conventional physics as a result of the primary focus of the latter on the matter-like aspect of reality. The paper, now available in published form at doi.org/10.1007/s41470-019-00049-w, was a contribution to an issue of Activitas Nervosa Superior celebrating the 90th birthday of Henry Stapp.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328968105_The_Physics_of_Mind_and_Thought
86

Lausten: “If you accept the math, we are created by fields, fields have bumps in them that make what look like particles, then the classical periodic table of elements.”

I have supported and promoted that view at the layman level for quite some time. One big question is: what constitutes a field? To me the one thing that makes sense is that a field is a volume containing physical things of some, or multiple, sorts. Thus I see magnetic and gravitational fields as evidence of a flow of those things which produces a potential for other things to be displaced. I wonder if we dismissed the notion of an aether too early.

I liken it to our atmosphere and our description of tornadoes and hurricanes as things or the oceans and our description of the Gulf Stream as a thing. We understand the causes of these things. What is lacking is the cause of the bumps and what drives the flows causing magnetism and gravity.

87
One big question is: what constitutes a field? To me the one thing that makes sense is that a field is a volume containing physical things of some, or multiple, sorts.
You're imposing a Newtonian physics on the quantum field. The answers you are looking for are somewhere in the math, string theory or the standard model or maybe something new, but saying quantum fields "is a volume containing physical things" is definitely a step in the wrong direction. Sometimes I wonder if making computer models of a vacuum, one that contains no particles, nothing that we interact that, then displaying it with colors and something bouncing around on the screen, actually just confuses people. It takes a concept of no physical anything and displays it as something with form. The display is fields interacting with each other, not anything with form or mass. But it looks likes forms and we only experience forms that have mass.

Did you watch the lecture on page 3?

88

Bob: “What is lacking is the cause of the bumps and what drives the flows causing magnetism and gravity.”

What do you think of Wallace Thornhill’s view on gravity?

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=schopenhauer+philosophy+&&view=detail&mid=9906274175F3A998FCCB9906274175F3A998FCCB&&FORM=VDRVRV

89

Lausten: “You’re imposing a Newtonian physics on the quantum field.”

I believe the universe is mechanical, so I do see it in Newtonian terms. I think displacement accounts for all observed motion. That seems to me to be the simplest notion and thus the most probable. (Something about a dude and his razor.) The question is how the displacement (among fermions in the visible universe) is achieved.

Lausten: “Did you watch the lecture on page 3?”

Yes, I did view the lecture on page 3. Very nice. Thanks to Write4U. I saw no explanation of what a quantum field is, only that something is observed and then attributed to a field.

I think it is very probable that our senses are capable of reacting to inputs only in discrete units, quanta if you will, and thus we are limited to observing in that way. If so, even if we receive inputs in smaller quantities, we would not recognize them in smaller units than our sensors allow. This could play havoc with the equations.

Take the photon for example, I believe I am correct when I say we have not been able to observe any quantity of light less than one photon. I think the photoelectric effect may be related to this idea in that it is the frequency and not the amplitude that seems to be the cause.

 

90

Sree: “What do you think of Wallace Thornhill’s view on gravity?”

Wow, a full hour. I’ll have to find the time.

91
(Something about a dude and his razor.)
If you believe in a mechanical universe, then we really can’t talk about quantum fields. I would not expect that you or I would understand what they are from a 1 hour lecture or even from hours of study. It takes years of math and physics, and those who know it the best will tell you there is much still to be understood. This is all beyond are ability to sense in any direct way. As he pointed out, neutrinos are passing through us all the time without interacting with us. That doesn’t “play havoc with the equations” though. Why would it?
92

Can this serve as an example of something emerging from a dynamic nothing.

 

93

Lausten: “If you believe in a mechanical universe, then we really can’t talk about quantum fields. I would not expect that you or I would understand what they are from a 1 hour lecture or even from hours of study. It takes years of math and physics, and those who know it the best will tell you there is much still to be understood.”

I agree completely. I do not discuss quantum fields.

I made a choice years ago to not learn the language of quantum physics or study it primarily because I understood that it is an attempt to put a sort of everything-is-a-particle overlay on physics. That language overlay makes it pretty much impossible for a layman to get any intuitive understanding of what things actually are. I don’t believe that sort of obscuration is necessary or helpful in developing a Grand Unified Theory.

94

So, Bob, you’re answer to finding a Grand Unified Theory is to ignore all the science about the Grand Unified Theory? I think you are looking for the “story” of the universe. That’s fine, we need that. Joseph Campbell talked about we are living in a time without myth, and we need a story to ground ourselves to. But the universe is describe by math. You can’t change that.

95
Lausten

You’re imposing a Newtonian physics on the quantum field. The answers you are looking for are somewhere in the math, string theory or the standard model or maybe something new, but saying quantum fields “is a volume containing physical things” is definitely a step in the wrong direction.


I don’t think so. If fields are not physical within volume then what are they? Nobody knows what a field “is”, really, it is sometimes described in very rough analogous terms as a fluid-like substance.

Sometimes I wonder if making computer models of a vacuum, one that contains no particles, nothing that we interact that, then displaying it with colors and something bouncing around on the screen, actually just confuses people. It takes a concept of no physical anything and displays it as something with form.
To say the vacuum is "no physical anything" is again, I think, incorrect. The vacuum must be something, else it would be absolutely nothing at all, in which case it would not be a vacuum. The vacuum is all fields in balance, no curvature.

Gravity may be expressed as a curvature of space, with the classic 2D analog being a sheet of elastic material stretched out with a weight in the middle of it causing another moving object, say a ball rolling along the surface, to “naturally fall” in a curved path toward the weight that is causing the depression in the elastic material.

But what is the true material that gravity curves? It is the vacuum, space. Space is a material, or more likely a sort of “solution” of materials. Absent an electric charge, or a magnetic dipole, or a mass, or a nuclear particle the materials that is space are all in balance, not “curved”, no “density” gradient. But in the presence of these sorts of things each respective material in space takes on a curvature in 3 dimensions.

The display is fields interacting with each other, not anything with form or mass.
If, for example, the presence of mass curves space then space has form, the curvature induced by the presence of mass.

It seems then that space is a superposition of perhaps 4 materials that are curved independently, each by different sorts of things, giving rise to the 4 known forces of nature.

Did you watch the lecture on page 3?
Sorry, I could not locate that. Did you provide a reference? I went back up the thread and did not see it, maybe it is time to get stronger glasses again :-)

But yes, the universe is entirely mechanistic, no poof whatsoever.

96

Stardusty, you just dropped off my list of people worth responding to. Just because you don’t understand quantum physics, doesn’t mean nobody does.

97
Did you provide a reference?
Page 3 of this thread. Go to the top of the page or any page in this thread, click 3, it's the 3rd or 4th post. Here ya' go buddy.
98
Lausten

Stardusty, you just dropped off my list of people worth responding to. Just because you don’t understand quantum physics, doesn’t mean nobody does.

 


Inability to form a rational response noted.

Nobody understands quantum physics. If you think you do you are kidding yourself.

Apparently you do think you understand quantum physics, and that self delusion correlates strongly with your inability to form a rational response the my pointing out your several errors. When one thinks they understand something they do not understand that creates an intellectual dead end of irreparable error for that individual, apparently your present state of thinking on the subject.

Nobody Understands Quantum Mechanics - Richard Feynman

 

 

99

Lausten,

Yes, page 3 of this thread, of course, duh, thanks for reposting.

Yes, I have watched that particular lecture in the past.

“There is something physical there” (magnetic field)

“There is something that fills this room, it is like a fluid, and in fact it fills the universe, it is the electron field” (paraphrased slightly, 19:52)

“The waves of this fluid get tied into little bundles of energy”

Animation at 23:04 depicting the very real an physical and active field in “empty” space.

 

Did you watch the video you linked to the rest of us here?

 

100
TimB replies: A hallucination also has neurological correlates that comprise it. That is something physically real.

…

Thoughts physically exist while their correlated firing of neurons physically exists.


No one claimed that it does not correlate to something else that is very much material!

It’s about our own personal perspectives and formalizing a certain awareness/appreciation that there is something fundamentally different between the human “Mindscape”, and the “Material Physical Universe” from which its spawned, so to speak.