Back in the day, I had stumbled upon a YouTube video of Ken Miller lecturing on Intelligent Design. It was a pretty good lecture and devastated the ID argument rather well. Of course, this is all old news, but I want to comment on something from Miller's book (Finding Darwin's God) which he mentioned in the video.
I picked up the book expecting a pretty good argument for being a scientist AND believing in god at the same time. For the first half of the book, Miller totally kicked the arse of ID, I thoroughly enjoyed that half. The second half, however, I didn't enjoy. That half was the entire reason I bought the book; I was genuinely interested in Miller's argument for god. His argument sucked.
Basically, Miller's argument was the argument from free will. God gave us free will, he exists! Woo woo! Right? No, not right. His reasoning was that free will isn't compatible with determinism. Lucky for us, God made happenings on the quantum level indeterminant. And with out ever clearly explaining the correlation, Miller claimed the inderterminism displayed at the quantum level is translated to free will at the human level.
And that's bullwoo. So an action of ours is predetermined by our genetics, experiences, etc? Instead, apparently, our actions are indertiminant! But if something isn't caused, it's random. And if our actions are random, then how are we in control of them?
I think what may have happened is that Miller confused quantum inderterminism with libertarian indeterminism. Libertarians reject hard determinism and say that new causal chains are enacted each time a rational agent acts ("A stone is moved by a stick, a stick is moved by a hand.") Their reasoning is that the universe is indeterminant because we have some mysterious free will which is untethered by the need for cause and effect. I've heard fellow philosophy majors who subscribe to this say that free will "is simply mysterious!" That's no explanation.
So all in all, the book was a good read. Now I need to check out Miller's new book, which I think I may actually buy.
Also, I just had a thought. Emotional appeals tend to really suck because they aren't necessarily based on any good evidence. When creationists say, "And you think the universe/humans/the avian flu came about from an ACCIDENT!!?!?" one thing they may be saying is that such a claim would take away their meaning of life, and that makes them feel sad. Really, the universe isn't meant to adhere to our need for meaning... So even if everything is 'an accident', I don't see the big deal.
Showing posts with label quantum mechanics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label quantum mechanics. Show all posts
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Welcome
to my new blog.
Right, so, onto business.
We all know that classic movie, "What the Bleep..." and it's main thesis that we create the universe (with one of the opening lines "why do we always recreate the same reality?")
A lot of people take this at face value, a sad sign of the times. Somehow, the movie was able to convince people that since a 'probability wave' collapses to a single point when a particle is observed along with other characteristics (such as spin) that this obviously means we create reality by looking at it. Of course, if anyone were to actually stop to think about this idea they would hopefully run into some kinks with the theory.
One of the first questions I'm sure would be what if there are no minds around to do the observing? What exactly created reality then? If you accept Bleep's thesis, it seems right to say that you think reality began with some form of conscious life which could observe (otherwise nothing could exist since nothing was 'creating reality'). Of course, this runs into major problems such as being incompatible with nearly every theory of the universe (ex. Big Bang didn't happen apparently). Also, evolution is a little shaky now, since the first life forms would have to be conscious. Basically everything popped into existence relatively recently!
Also, the way the movie presents this idea seems to be that we have some sort of say in how reality works. This is apparent with, again, the line "Why do we recreate..." assuming we can do otherwise if we wished, with their example that writing on yourself will suddenly make you healthy, or maybe even with the 'experiment' Bleep showed in which words were written and crystals formed (the idea was that we can alter reality by trying to communicate a certain idea... and the universe 'feels' it). Let's give the thesis a little bit a ground to work though. Let's assume that reality is somehow shaped when it is observed (as this article suggests). This still doesn't mean that we can impose our will on reality, and that's what the Bleep was going for. We still have no control over what reality is like, it is out of our hands. The mistake Bleep made, was to assume we had some say. Damn false assumptions.
Right, so, onto business.
We all know that classic movie, "What the Bleep..." and it's main thesis that we create the universe (with one of the opening lines "why do we always recreate the same reality?")
A lot of people take this at face value, a sad sign of the times. Somehow, the movie was able to convince people that since a 'probability wave' collapses to a single point when a particle is observed along with other characteristics (such as spin) that this obviously means we create reality by looking at it. Of course, if anyone were to actually stop to think about this idea they would hopefully run into some kinks with the theory.
One of the first questions I'm sure would be what if there are no minds around to do the observing? What exactly created reality then? If you accept Bleep's thesis, it seems right to say that you think reality began with some form of conscious life which could observe (otherwise nothing could exist since nothing was 'creating reality'). Of course, this runs into major problems such as being incompatible with nearly every theory of the universe (ex. Big Bang didn't happen apparently). Also, evolution is a little shaky now, since the first life forms would have to be conscious. Basically everything popped into existence relatively recently!
Also, the way the movie presents this idea seems to be that we have some sort of say in how reality works. This is apparent with, again, the line "Why do we recreate..." assuming we can do otherwise if we wished, with their example that writing on yourself will suddenly make you healthy, or maybe even with the 'experiment' Bleep showed in which words were written and crystals formed (the idea was that we can alter reality by trying to communicate a certain idea... and the universe 'feels' it). Let's give the thesis a little bit a ground to work though. Let's assume that reality is somehow shaped when it is observed (as this article suggests). This still doesn't mean that we can impose our will on reality, and that's what the Bleep was going for. We still have no control over what reality is like, it is out of our hands. The mistake Bleep made, was to assume we had some say. Damn false assumptions.
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