My mind's in a knot... (Re: Who/what created God?)

Why? Are you saying a theory of everything is impossible? IMO we cannot cut off that part of our existence that we do not like. It doesn't sound like a good way to understand the conecpt of reality and what lies beneath it. How can we ever know if there is god or not, if we don't understand what we are experiencing? In our day to day experience non locality doesn't appear to play any role(there probably wouldn't be us otherwise, in the way we experience reality), but there is a joke in physics circles about the non-local nature of quantum mechanics(the way quantum objects "move"). It says if you are hungry and want a baked turkey, go to your kitchen and wait. There is a chance different to zero, that a turkey will appear in the oven. The bigger the turkey, the less the chance and for a big turkey you may wait several billion years. Now if the turkey had to be the size of an atom, i wouldn't ever bother going to restaurants and paying bills. Maybe it's incomplete but that's a small minority's view. And i don't see how it would change what's already been tested in experiments. Making sense of it is not the same as testing it. Although i am no physicist, i'd venture to say that it's highly unlikely that physicists will find solid balls of matter in QM or somehow disprove the wave/particle duality.
BTW, would you apply this incredulity to evolution theory and say that evolution might be overturned in the future as the explanation of how a wolf turned into a pekingese? I could come up with a variety of reasons but mainly because there is both a highly explicit and implict order in our experience and this consensual reality kind of puts us in the centre of everything. This doesn't necesarily imply that I am confident that human logic can be extended to this said ultimate reality(if there is one) and conclude that god exists(though this word is flaky), but if we fully trust our reasoning, the concept of god does make a great deal of sense. Are you sure? Is a beam of photons a quantum object(that moves as waves) or a relativity object(since it moves at the speed of light, which is a property of relativity)?You are touching some emotional strings - i've seen physicists on other forums ready to throw relativity out the window because of the implications of QM(figuratively speaking, they were using a metaphor, in the real world no one discards relativity as it describes what we observe, while QM shows what we cannot). Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

I don't know if i should be saying this publicly(wish there was a PM option on the forum) but you can no longer think about your body as a fixed object comprised of a fixed number of atoms. This simply isn't true because not only elementary particles have this property of departing the classical object they are "entitled" to, but whole atoms. It's pretty fucked up but during your life time, a sizeable portion of the atoms of your body are simply not yours. When you look at yourself, you cannot speak of "my atoms", this is wrong. Some of the atoms you are seeing can be anywhere in space, including, well, part of my body. This is a property of their wavefunctions and the uncertainty principle. So QM not only challenges our notions of space and time, but of who and what we are.This is redefining the way we look at the world, and if someone feels bad about this, you can be sure that at the most fundamental level, something exists. This something IMO and in the opinion of the physicists i adhere to, is consciousness. I think it is the essence of everything and IMO it might be a good candidate for the role of "Ultimate fundamental realty". Are we the imagination of ourselves or are we someone's creation? Tough one. If you don't take seriously the experiments of Benjamin Libet, you should be fine.PS. I sometimes get emotional over this, but i find it so monumental(English being not my native language doesn't help me portray my emotions properly) that Einstein, the brightest physicist of All time and quite possibly the brightest man the Earth ever gave birth to, in 1954 sent a letter to the wife of one of his best friends that had just died. In it he said:"We physicists know, that the distinction between the past, present and future is a stubbornly persistent illusion"While Einstein was a realist and was fighting all his life against the findings of QM(calling QM silly), towards the end of his life in 1954(one year before he died), it appears that this brightest man and physicist of all time, was on his knees pleading defeat in the face of the mounting evidence against realism.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

No, no... that's completely wrong. You fail to understand that I am not advocating the concept of God. I am merely advocating the most radical change/departure of old concepts the human kind has ever witnessed. I posit that QM says something very radical about our "existence", that we are as virtual as the particles that give the energy to the Hamiltonian operator. I will very briefly discuss this here now and will return to it later as i have to go out in a few minutes(provided we don't get kicked out of this thread for departing the what created god question).So I posit that there is space, all the space of the universe. Let's for a moment imagine it's a real, objectively existent space(imagine that Bell's inequalities were not violated by QM). I will try in layman's terms to describe what QM says about the functioning of our world(what we experience, generally referred to in physics as "outcomes").We basically we have this:SPACEHamiltonian -- Wavefunction -- Outcome(particle-like entity)The Hamiltonian derives its potential energy from, well, the future. As cavediver said, this had been known for nearly 40 years in quantum chromodynamics. Then you have the mathematical probability distribution of the future outcome(derived by the time-dependent Schroedinger equation) spread out throughout space(the wavefunction). Then something(this is uncharted territory in physics) causes the state vector reduction and a particle-like entity to appear. But this particle-like entity, whose exactly the same peers constitute the whole world, derives its energy from the future, it's an energy that is simply not there in "space". This is very counter-intuitive, but your wife and children also appear to be deriving their mass/energy content of their haha "physical" bodies also from the future. If virtual processes are all there is to matter(the world), you have to ask - what if Bell's theorem holds?(it's been holding for 40 years now).You'll have a pretty decent picture of our physical world - "physical" matter that derives its energy/mass from the future(energy is an abstract mathematical entity, you cannot picture it), in a non-local(think of it as non-existent) space.Then we have a very BIG question? WTF is it that causes the sensation of a "world" out there, with all of its orderliness, cause-effect logic, evolution, its comprehensible history, its meaning and logic, your relatives, all the people on the planet? It could be some mad scientists from the future, but if anyone wants to at least somewhat logical, you cannot approach this topic with "why do we have to bring up the supernatural?". This is burying your head in the sand, for fear that the basic tenets of atheism may not hold to thourough scrutiny. There is simply no Supernatural anymore, there is simply the Unknown.If we don't bring up this Unknown, we will never find out the Truth. Isn't it why we are all here on EvC? Is there another reason people have been flocking here?Should we stick our heads in the sand?I vote - No with both my hands.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

This is how matter gets its energy/mass content - by means of virtual particles that borrow energy from the future for a very short time, without breaking the 1st LOT, then they annihilate. And there is not a very clear border between virtual and "real" particles, they are both excitations of the respective quantum field(if you treat the concept in this way).Here is a good question for a philosophical discussion that portrays very closely our situation:Do the icons on your desktop exist? If they do, where do they exist and what are they?(wish i could make the spelling mistake it-bit ). Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

Technically it's been known for a while - from quantum fluctuations. Most of the mass of atoms comes from virtual particles which are pairs of "particles"(for lack of a better word) created in quantum fluctuations. If the LHC finds the theoretical Higgs boson(which scientists believe gives atoms the remaining missing mass through those same virtual particles), we will know that "everything" comes from nothing.It's good that you are picking up speed in this quantum weirdness because we are nearing "the wall" so i am sure you'll understand the additions i'll make to the previous diagram about the quantum world view as it creates our sensation of an existing classical world(out of nothing):Unknown/Mad scientists from the future/God/Consciousness/?? -- in a Non-local space(objectively non-existent) -- Quantum fluctuations(virtual particles give energy to->) -- Hamiltonian("something" - the Unknown selects the->) -- Wavefunction(that evolves through the TDSE to the->) -- Outcome(measurement - "particle", selection of alternate histories) -- Quantum system(macro world - e.g. onifre's human body)You cannot introduce the concept of time anywhere in the chain, but at the very end, where our sensation of existence is. And there are no particles until there is interaction. Until an interaction takes place, there are only possibilities, and possibilities are not partilces.So what is Life?If you have understood the chain, you'll be more confused than you previously were.So when you look at the stars - these are all quantum fluctuations in a non-local quantum space. Those virtual particles are all there is in our "world", and where do they come from? It seems you want to read the mind of God(or the mind of the unknown).So think about it, what is it that fools us that there is space out there, when a photon doesn't travel any distance and no time passes as it travels through the "universe" from its frame of reference? Or when a particlular wavefunction is selected out of all the possibilites throughout space instantaneously? Or when an electron is here and it's on Alpha Centauri a moment later?It's clear, "something" directs those quantum fluctuations into creating "objects"(appearances or "schaumkommen" as Schroedinger refers to them), incl. extremely sophisticated objects like humans. This cannot be chance, not all of us. There is no way in the fucking Hell, chance could create 20 billion humans(all that ever lived) through "random" quantum fluctuations. All this highly organised "information" that builds humans and the "universe" all the way up from the quantum fluctuation up to the realm of our existence is more than a gogool bits(according to Michio Kaku), that's more than 10^100 bits. Just the information in atoms of the 100 trillion cells in a human body, according to Anton Zeilinger, is about a thousand billion billion billion bits.There is no way. It's not chance. I think God could have done a better job sweeping his trails.And frankly, if something is nothing, there has to be something that accounts for the orderliness of our sensation. We have to assume that Max Tegmark, John Wheeler, Anton Zeilinger, Fred Wolf, Amit Goswami and other physicists are right and information in a mathematical structure is the essense of everything, everything in this "place" we call universe. I often refer to us as "consciousness" for lack of a better word, and what lies beyond it is the unknown. We are the icons on your desktop and we see ourselves(that's how we exist - if you have a good imagination, you'll get the picture of our existence), and we live in a special time where we can see beyond the illusion of the 5 senses that tell us that something exists into the nothing. The correct version is - nothing exists into the nothing but information and consciousness. Those "real" particles are created out of nothing into the nothing. And you cannot talk of space and time at the quantum realm. If you introduce space and time, you are saying relativity is wrong(unless you are talking about relativistic QM, eg Dirac's equation, which is imposing our illusional macro concepts in QM, but it works - otherwise there wouldn't be a universe for us to describe). IMO that's a big challenge before the future TOE, as some of those working on it believe it should be understandable to everyone.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

There's something more - current progress in all 5 versions of String Theory, as we have previously discussed, point to a Holographic universe(in as much as ST is correct of course). A holographic universe is a non-local universe, where you, me and everything else is appearances, schaumkommen and holograms, similar to the icons on your desktop. You can certainly think of us as projections separate in space, but in our essence we are all ONE.If a TOE is to be successful, it has to be non-local, because, sorry, there is no universe. Not in the way we've been told by our mums and dads. Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

No, I am not a physicist, I am more of a novice, the last time I dealt seriously with physics was 17 years ago when i was preparing for an entry exam to a tech school. I haven't paid too much attention to physics since then, but I have been thoroughly obssessed with physics for the last 4 months or so. I am reading textbooks and books on QM in all of my free time, day and night. I don't have free time(I even sleep on the lower floor of my house as my wife goes to bed early while i'm still reading), it's funnt but I just cannot stop reading physics stuff. It felt bad in beginning, now it's ok, at times i even feel better - I don't take bad things too seriously.But that's a dangerous slope, you have to decide for yourself if you are ready to accept this, as it will change your life forever. If you are not comfortable, don't even bother. Einstein was a realist and hated what quantum theory implied, and he attacked QM for at least a decade, every time being proven wrong. He would go to his house in solitude(he devised the hidden varibales as an explanation for the EPR paradox that were proven not to exist), then he would prepare for another attack seeking inconsistencies, then another... He failed, you'll more than likely fail too. If you are not prepared to accept what i've told you above, it's better if you go away and forget what we talked about.You could have a look at this way - QM is a mathematical statistical science. It gives incredibly consistent mathematical predictions. They are more than incredible and that's the main reason why physicists believe QM is valid, because it gives accurate descriptions that match experiments. Multiple times, with zero failures and in the case of QED the accuracy is 1 billionth to what mathematics predicted. It's a separate topic but most of our theories are not wrong, as has been discussed in other threads here, it's just that they are approximations of something that physicist believe they can track down with absolute certianty and acccuracy. So for now, QM is the most accurate model physicists have created to date, But...this is only mathematics. At those incredible miniscule scales, it's hard to take pictures of anything(not that there is anything to take picture of, or touch or feel or see). We can only see the remnants of interactions of those said "particles". But as i said QM is a statistical field of physics. Look at it this way -If someone much older than you approached you and said he was your father, although he didn't look in any way like your father. Then he told you each and every little detail you could think of from your entire history together, would you believe he is your father who allegedly underwent a thorough plastic surgery?This is the same with QM, it doesn't make sense, it's extremely radical and mind-blowing but each and every detail fits like a glove. And i'd say it fits the greater picture and introduces sense in the something out of nothing paradox. After all, we need to move on, the Earth is not flat. If you had a time machine and returned to 1413, would anyone believe you that the Earth is round? I've seen people who even today find it unbelievable that it's not flat(the flat earth society). They believe it's supernatural, but what is really supernatural? Isn't a cloud of mathematical waves of possibilities, that talks, eats, walks, thinks, dreams, sings, falls in love, etc.... Supernatural? How in the world is this considered Natural? If you think this is not our world, think about it - would you let some mad Russian scientist remove 0.5% of the atoms of your body(your left kidney) and sell those atoms for 3000 Euro on the black market in Dubai?But out of the physics community and their specific jargon, there is no talk about this. You have to find your way through the veil pulled by physicists over the eyes of the general public, by a mountain of vague and hard to understand terms and concepts.Some physicists disagree, they posit that the wavefunction is a real objectively existing object, but their arguments are weak, they don't correspond to reality(most of them are aware, but they are fighting, or just turn a blind eye). If you are interested in this and your mind is in a perfect mental condition - go ahead, see for yourself both sides of the story. This has been of great interest and pleasure to me, I think this is the greatest debate physicists have ever had between themselves in the entire history of physics. This is pushing human logic to its limits to explain the unexplainable. You'll see unbelievable propositions, outright idiocy(some interpretaions are really flaky) and very often evidence of the extraordinary power of the human mind in some of the brightest scientists on Earth.PS. If the universe is mathematical as Max Tegmark and co. say and it's run on a computer, we should expect to find some cheat codes, right?Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

Maybe because we are all different, and we all react different to different stimuli and change. I accept other people's reactions even if they don't conform to my expectations, moral code, and culture because we are all different in our mentality and view toward the world. I was simply hesitant for fear that there is a chance that is different to zero, that someone might get a paranoia over this. Maybe you are right, maybe no one really cares if the world is real or not, but i still feel that this knowledge should be "served" with caution. At least because we are all differently attached to our pre-conceptions and assumptions, some are even dogmatic about their beliefs and I had to consider that maybe some of them won't let go of old concepts that calmly. Or maybe I am wrong, who knows, only a survey could tell. Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

We are talking about 10^-21 to 10^-23 sec. Particles come and go, at those short intervals it is thought that the 1st LOT remains unbroken. The expression "borrow energy from the future" is methaphorical IMO, it's the same as saying it comes from the vacuum or from the nothingness. Define "nothing". Until it's officially found, it is nothing as per dictionaries' definition. They are the same thing. A neutrino doesn't care if we call it matter or energy. Billions pass through your body every second. Then they go ahead and pass... right thru the Earth, then they go on on their long journey and pass right thru the Sun and go on an on. It is observed, but you are thinking classically in the quantum domain. Oh yes? You want to teach Stephen Hawking that the quantum fluctuation universe hypothesis is wrong? Everything cannot come from nothing? You can bet it can. That's how matter is formed according to QCD. Why don't you have a look what NASA have to say before jumping to primitive human common sense and intuitive conclusions(and everything is not the same everything that say a gardener will have in mind):WMAP- Life in the Universe"The motor for making stars (and galaxies) came early and was very subtle. Before the completion of the first fraction of a second of the universe, sub-atomic scale activity, tiny "quantum fluctuations", drove the universe towards stars and life. With the sudden expansion of a pinhead size portion of the universe in a fraction of a second, random quantum fluctuations inflated rapidly from the tiny quantum world to a macroscopic landscape of astronomical proportions. Why do we believe this? Because the microwave afterglow light from the Big Bang has an extraordinarily uniform temperature across the sky. There has not been time for the different parts of the universe to come into an equilibrium with each other *unless* the regions had exponentially inflated from a tiny patch. The only way the isotropy (uniformity) could have arisen is if the different regions were in thermal equilibrium with each other early in the history of the universe, and then rapidly inflated apart. WMAP has verified that other predictions from the inflation theory also appear to be true."Take a look at the graph on the left and the text below it.I don't care what those 5 senses tell you, or what your mum or Jesus Christ told you. It is wrong, reality is an illusion, you come from nothingness and you are nothingness. What we all are is information and speaculatively, probably - consciousness. It makes sense. No no. I didn't say that we are nearing a wall of weirdness and human comprehension. I meant that we are hitting the wall of nothingness, where matter appears to take its mass/energy content - the quantum fluctuations. LOL. I said "Unknown, God, MSFTF, consciousness, ??". Those two question marks mean we don't know and it might be something else. You have to know that in science nothing is 100% certain. Only in religion and in atheism is anything 100% certain(they are the same horseshit BTW, they just use different names). Although this sounds scientific to some, it means "we don't have a goddamn clue" wrapped up in pretentious wording. You could apply this BS to God, unicorns or Santa Claus and declare in a pseudo-scientific manner that unicorns are:an emergent entity of self-organization in no uncertain terms.I have to admit one thing - atheists are way more eloquent than YEC's. We cannot hope to understand what we truly are, what reality is, let alone what a vague concept like god is. For all i know, this Unknown can work and process a large data set of information. Maybe the Unknown is us, maybe we are the creators of everything, who knows... Only atheism and religion claim to have the final answers.BTW, this Jesus vs Darwin thing is really ridiculous. Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

You two are coping really well, that's impressive. I think the answer lies in your question . We can f*ck something, if we can't agree on a commonly accepted purpose of life past replication(all atheists agree replication is the only humanly known purpose of life), what else can we do? I have girlfriends who believe this is the very point of life, who knows maybe they are right. And maybe atheists are right on this and there is no purpose beyong replication(I know Hugh Heffner agrees with me and didn't Sigmund Freud say - a man cannot sleep with all women but it doesn't mean he doesn't have to give it a try).No, seriously i don't know what we should do about it. Maybe we shouldn't do anything, there is no way to see what lies beyond the illusion without dieing. Maybe "everything" stops, i am not willing to try and find out "prematurely".

Reading comprehension... I did say collective, which means collective for all atheists. Something that you can all agree on?Can you show me a single Thing that you All atheists agree on as a purpose of life? And not some subjectively inferred notion like love, objectivity, justice, peace and other BS... (all these can be subjectively interpreted as being good or bad, depending on the particular situation).It's got to be something that you can objectively and verifiably put to a test and see that what you call Nature designed it in that way, through certain means, as the Meaning of life. I claim the only thing all atheists can agree on and that can be scientifically verified as the meaning of life is replication(sex).So is there such anything beyond replication? Name it please. Or is life meaningless? It's your choice to believe what you want. If you think that matter doesn't come from nothingness, ok. If you believe Bell's theorem non-locality is wrong, ok. If you think string theorists proposing the Holographic Model of the Universe are crazy, ok. If you believe the universe is expanding into something, ok. But that's a religious belief because evidence to the contrary is in your face on all 4 points.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

Matter is "converted" from energy and energy comes from nothing through quantum fluctuations. I am. I am very strongly implying that even if there is a region of space with a zero net energy, quantum fluctuations occur that are the foundation of the existence of matter. Yes and it comes from nothing. This isn't in any way related to what i said in the quoted paragraph. At all. Yes, quantum fluctuations do not break the 1LOT. So? Yes and it doesn't. So? We are treading into territory i am not comfortable in, but i want you to point me to a peer-reviewed paper that says the total energy of the universe is not zero. AFAIK, there is no way to know this. ...from nothing. That's what it says, if you have grasped the meaning. Before a layman can indulge in theoretical physics speculation, we have to be formally trained physicists. Let's stick to what we know from experiments, and not look like idiots who imagine they can deal with these highly speculative sophisticated mathematical theories and what lies behind them. You cannot hope to grasp them without formal training and at least partly being introduced to the mathematical formalism involved, it's not that easy to catch up with modern physics. At all. In fact, if you are a physicist dealing with certain field of physics, you cannot hope to be up to date with all developments in all of physics. Let's not look like Beavis and Butthead, please.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

The universe split at a quantum event and in this universe this copy of me is neither Beavis nor Butthead.Now seriously - do we give up locality or QM? How do we keep both QM and realism without hidden variables? Should we give up what the 5 senses tell us or the results of the experiments and can you think of a way they can both co-exist? Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

Agreed this time, it doesn't mean we are 100% correct but if space is non-local as is the current understanding and matter comes from quantum fluctuations, what does it say about reality?It's confirmed: Matter is merely vacuum fluctuations | New ScientistBTW, when i said unknown/god/scientists from the future/?? i left the door open for other scenarios. This isn't even close to explaining purported purely hypothetical branes(not brains) and universes, as in: That's why i objected, we need to stay where we can find experimental support and most of all - correct understanding.
Otherwise i agree, Einstein was a clerk in a patent office when he wrote SR. Then he became a physicist. John Wheeler used to say - if you want to learn - teach(referring to his students as a mode of feedback of ideas).

And here are other famous real-life physicists who don't agree(although CD didn't specifically say what he disagrees with, you assume you know):Reality in the melting pot | Paul Davies | The GuardianAn experimental test of non-local realism - PubMedhttp://www.quantummechanicsandreality.com/...o_objective.htmPage not found – Physics Worldhttp://arxiv.org/abs/0704.0646v2Deletion notice | ScribdI will not clutter this thread with more links to Heisenberg, Bohr, Amit Goswami, John Wheeler and others but i need to know on what basis do you assume to know who's right among physicists? Did you do yourself any research to know what it's all about before jumping to conclusions? And do you know what cavediver disagrees with?