Choosing a faith

GDR, sorry, but my quip was a slap at your intellect. It was not a serious observation.I have loads of real evidence. The kind of evidence anyone can see, feel, experience.You have not but your emotions and your personal incredulity as your evidence. Your evidence cannot be experienced outside your own mind. You cannot explain your evidence since it is but a list of your personal emotional preferences. No one else can experience your god, GDR. Not from the evidence you present to us. It is vacuous.

Oh, stop with your errant armchair analysis. You do not understand the terms well enough to use them appropriately.My response was a pointed refutation of your view that the old intellect was fit to rule today. Straw man, my ass. The argument is bigger than a talking snake. You neglect the crux of the argument. Your religious mindset has the intellect of a cave man.

Materialism is the philosophy that most closely matches the reality we see around us. You know, the standard model, ΛCDM, QFT, evolution, love, all that stuff. Reality. All those cold dead un-loving, mindless particles and the mindless hidden powers that move them.Materialism doesn’t make any decisions or draw any conclusions. Materialism is an aid in analyzing reality. It answers questions like “how” and “using what” for all the actions we see in this universe. Answers you cannot give for your god.The conclusions are drawn by the scientific method using many different tools including materialism. I know the result is not to your liking but the consensus is no gods are necessary for this universe and none can be considered viable in this universe. Therefore, any consideration for such is absurd.You can believe as you may but revealed reality stands above all. That revealed reality shows no gods are necessary for this universe and none can be considered viable in this universe. And you are right. But, you don’t have to believe in that. It’s another one of those revealed reality things. Like your god. Except in your vision of god any cosmology would have fit. There is no cosmological vision.Physics was assemble by disparate pieces over centuries but when we wind it up and let it go it produces only the one cosmology (within error bars): ΛCDM.Our math from this matches, in some cases to 15 decimal places, the universe we can probe and test and see that we actually have.That is a power your god cannot come close to displaying.

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The revealer of reality is the one true god of this universe: physics, and it reveals its secrets to us humans. The same way you know I am right. It threatens all life in the universe in all things. Such a monster would destroy causality and take the entire universe with it.

Why do you feel this?It is rejection of the squeamish concept of ... the void, isn't it?Without the physical body to encase it where does that living spirit that is you go on death? Where does that energy go?That is energy, actual physical photons, and it will obey the commands of the universe.That energy must dissipate back into the physical ecosystem, into the surrounding tissue and air as all gradients of thermodynamic excess must. The void is your consciousness' only future as a human living in this universe. To avoid this conclusion you conjure an emotional fantasy world where that spirit, where you, can continue to experience consciousness in a universe where everything else has an end.There has to be more!Sorry, GDR. We are not special. We are physical flesh and blood animals that evolved enough chemistry to think, feel angst and create fantasies trying to dispel the destiny of the void.

Well personification being what it is then no, not necessarily.But you knew that.

You can’t disagree. Percy did not voice an opinion. He stated a known fact.If you dispute the fact then you must show the fact wrong. You cannot just assert that it is wrong or just disagree with what it shows.Percy’s post is fact. "The writings that did survive until today are the testimonies of the early Christian churches of the Jewish diaspora which had never had any contact with Jesus and had no reliable source of information about him."You have to deal with facts. You cannot just disagree and ignore them.

If someone is going to be a religious nutjob then I guess defining a ‘nice’ religion is better than most alternatives. If your GDR Cult of Christian Love gets to Phoenix I’ll come visit. I won’t laugh at the love parts. The rest, however …

This is way way old PopSci misunderstanding. Change your sources. See Sean Carroll. Consciousness has nothing to do with measurement.

NO, no, no, it was a humorous quip and taken, at least by me, as so. I even tried to tease you with that knowledge.Your withdrawal is not necessary, not accepted. Everyone else is being too stuffy. You were fine ... and appreciated.

Not so. An observation can be as simple as a puff of air. Whether a consciousness is there to interpret the measurement or not that outcome is the same. Such collisions cause decoherence of the entangled particles. That is an outcome whether consciously measured or not. Observation is not limited to minds and meters.Observations show the outcome of the measurement. They do not create the outcome.If you've read Carroll then realize that, unlike Copenhagen, the wave function collapse (observing the state of a system) is not limited but the wave function must include the observer and the measurement apparatus.In this an observation is not dependant on the included observer but on the state of the whole system's wave function.

Yes. Though it gets complex.We are defining a quantum system. Until there is an observation the best we can say is the particles properties are undefined. The Universe (that unintelligent personified glory that is all) does not know the properties of the particles because their probability wave is still unresolved.As soon as a puff of air (atoms in a stream) enter the picture those atoms collide with, thus revealing to the Universe (decoheres), the properties of all the particles, both original air and target particles, and serves as the apparatus of the measurement resolving the probability wave. No consciousness necessary.The wave function will collapse into the revealed attributes of their individual particles quantum states (Copenhagen)or,The wave function of the system is updated to include the new quantum information, particles positions, momentum, etc, and those particles are not seen in superpositions of states. Wave functions do not collapse, the story goes. The probabilities of future observations are altered, updated, and the mathematical formalism of the wave function continues to evolve. (Carroll) And that would be error. Again, observation requires neither mind nor meter. And an observation is anything that would resolve any of the quantum properties of a system. All it requires is for the decoherence to happen and that can be accomplished by hitting the thing with anything else. That decoherence resolves the probabilities in the math to reveal the eigenstate, the quantum numbers that describe the particles.And it gets deeper from there.The issue I see here is that we are talking electrons and not baseballs.Take a single electron around a proton, a hydrogen atom. Where is the electron? QM says not even the Universe can know until something interacts with the atom, then the eigenstate of the electron can be resolved.With a baseball you have gazillions of particles all nestled and josseling in one small space with constant decoherence and resolution of the probability wave happening for every particle within the ball instantaneously and constantly. The quantum probabilities have been resolved and the baseball has a definite position, momentum and all other properties.And it stays that way even when you personally are not there to consciously 'observe' the baseball. With the electron ... no so much. It falls back to being in a superposition, with properties unknown, as soon as the first collision is complete.At least that's my story. From what I see in this world from my research, this is not too far off the reality. I think.Maybe someone like Son Goku can come along and correct any glaring errors.

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Isn’t the number of faithful happy believers the evidence for god? It is a solid number that can be scientifically determined. So there is scientific evidence for GDR’s god, yes?

There is a major problem with consciousness. Like dark matter. We don't know what it is or how it works but we are damn well going to find out.The sooner we figure this out the sooner we can have real progress.Then we can make AI systems with an AC (artificial consciousness) and they will be our gods.