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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Santa Cruz Mountains and Monterey Bay
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Jun 23, 2014 - 10:32pm PT
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scientific materialism is not a sustainable philosophy
humans will transcend scientific materialism either by developing an understanding of the spirit that moves in all things or by destroying our delicately balanced life support systems
(at this point probably both)
the former is analogous to butterflies emerging from the re-purposed cells of greedy worms
the later is analogous to a squashed bug
best of luck with all that
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Jun 23, 2014 - 10:39pm PT
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Well, given humans as a species display no more consumptive or reproductive intelligence than bacteria in a petri dish I'm personally not betting on 'transcendence', but hey, that's just me.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Jun 23, 2014 - 10:59pm PT
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Thanks healeyje. Always more homework to do.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 23, 2014 - 11:22pm PT
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I don't know if our assumption that the universe is explainable by only physical theory
I'm not sure how you would show it wasn't. Perhaps Jan or Tom or Largo or someone could provide such a scenario. You can't just make the assertion based on logic, but provide some "thought experiment" whose outcome would contradict the hypothesis that the phenomena was driven by a physical process.
The fact that we lack a definition of "mind" or a complete physical theory of it is not an demonstration that we will never have a physical theory for it. But showing why we could not have a physical theory would be interesting.
As far a scientific dogma, the gravitational constant isn't one, that is the idea that it varies has been around for a while. Certainly Dirac suggested that it might be changing on a very long time scale
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_large_numbers_hypothesis
and the "new" universe filled with cold dark matter could have a number of strange things going on in it... dark energy pushing things apart, dark matter pulling things together. But we have some ways of looking at the measurements and comparing with our theories and their predictions.
we know that the experiments are limited, and hiding in the uncertainties of those measurements could be some physical phenomena we have not yet understood. those fluctuations in the measurements are explained by the limits of our ability to measure the quantity, in this case the gravitation constant.
until those experiments improve their accuracy, we have no way of distinguishing the fluctuations due to a time varying gravitational constant and the statistical fluctuations of the measurements.
if we improved the measurement accuracy and the fluctuations had the same amplitude, then we would need to find an explanation that is not statistical.
so far that has not been the case.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Jun 24, 2014 - 12:29am PT
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So at present , due to the difficulties encountered in accurately measuring the gravitational constant ,there is no way to ascertain if it actually fluctuates or not?
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Jun 24, 2014 - 12:33am PT
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Wiki: Under the assumption that the physics of type Ia supernovae are universal, analysis of observations of 580 type Ia supernovae has shown that the gravitational constant has varied by less than one part in ten billion per year over the last nine billion years
Ed, could you elaborate a bit on this...?
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Jun 24, 2014 - 12:39am PT
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Several measurements in the past decade did not succeed in improving our knowledge of big G's value. To the contrary, the variation between different measurements forced the CODATA committee, which determines the internationally accepted standard values, to increase the uncertainty from 0.013% for the value quoted in 1987 to the twelve times larger uncertainty of 0.15% for the 1998 "official" value. This situation is an embarrassment to modern physics, considering that the intrinsic strength of electromagnetism, for instance, is known 2.5 million times more precisely and is steadily being improved. (The situation of G becomes more understandable if one considers the weakness of gravity: the total gravitational force twisting on the pendulum of a typical Cavendish torsion balance is only equivalent to the weight of a bacteria and that small force must be measured very precisely.)
The weight of a single bacterium. Wow.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 24, 2014 - 01:15am PT
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http://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.1534.pdf
the Chandrasekhar limit determines the fate of stars which would become type 1a supernova
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrasekhar_limit
and that limit depends on G, the gravitational constant...
this is a factor in the amount of energy produced by the SN...
so you can look at the energy released by Type 1a SN as a function of their red shift, which means you are looking back in time
if G were changing, the amount of energy released would also be changing as a function of the red shift
that's a simple explanation of the statement from the paper linked above
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Jun 24, 2014 - 06:59am PT
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It took Ed just 19 lines of print to come up with a counter explanation. So I ask, why couldn't the anonymous committee of scientists have done that instead of banning Sheldrake?
Meanwhile, we're up against the same old brick wall again. One could argue that the best explanation for a non physical universe is that there was a point in time when the physical universe did not exist, yet something brought it into existence. The scientists reply that we don't know the answer now, but someday with better instruments we will. The non materialists will say the scientists are using the wrong instruments to explore a non material universe. The scientists say that they can only work with what they have. etc. etc.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Jun 24, 2014 - 07:28am PT
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Tell me Dingus, what are the great advances in human behavior that science has brought about in the past 1,000 years? Watch the news and ask yourself if humananity as a whole has made all that much ethical progress during this period? Has science changed the fundamental nature of human beings?
Take slavery for example. Science didn't end slavery in most of the world, it was a change in the perception of human worth based on an appeal to a higher sense of ethics than materialism and pragmatism.
The concern for a non material outlook mainly involves individual human beings and the groups they live in, not the nature of the universe. Unfortunately the religious fundamentalists have muddied the whole picture by trying to assert what were personal and small group philosophies for life onto explanations for the universe.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Jun 24, 2014 - 07:40am PT
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As for Sheldrake, he is trying to come up with a new metaphysics. Maybe he will be seen as a pioneer in that field five hundred years from now or the last of the scientific apologists for a dead way of life? In the meantime, give him credit for trying (not to mention his 80 published papers on science).
Science already says it doesn't deal with the non physical. Therefore, something other than pure science will have to come up with a philosophy of life that can inspire the average person in our herd of 7 billion to a higher ethical level. Until someone does that, I say let us at least try to refine the systems we have.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Jun 24, 2014 - 08:11am PT
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Non physical as in metaphysical, philosophical, spiritual, religious and as in subjective.
Put the way science usually states it, science only deals with the material, physical world. Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems pretty clear to me ??
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Jun 24, 2014 - 08:29am PT
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Matter seems pretty clearly to belong to the physical universe as does the energy we normally observe around us. Whether or not there are other more subtle forms of energy in the universe not normally experienced by most people, that have a non physical origin is the question though, isn't it? That's at least for some of us.
Or perhaps we need a whole new paradigm for thinking about this? We did only just discover dark matter so I suspect we have a lot of other discoveries awaiting us as well.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Jun 24, 2014 - 08:37am PT
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But the source of it all? Can you prove that is physical?
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Jun 24, 2014 - 08:50am PT
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whatever existed before the big bang would be a good start.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Jun 24, 2014 - 10:12am PT
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Why there (big bang creation myth)? Is it simply because that is the point beyond which science cannot yet peer?
Not particularly. I'm not out to challenge science in its realm but I do have curiosity about what lies beyond that border and whether there is any meaning to it all. It doesn't take much imagination to see that if there is a deeper meaning it must lie in what was before the physical world.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 24, 2014 - 10:41am PT
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Energy is a word with many meanings yet no universal definition. What we normally refer to per energy is a physical effect, or energy tranferring from one system to another to accomplish "work." But this effect only defines energy by virtue of what it does, not what it is. The "what-it-does" angle is so inherent to our discursive minds that "what-it-is" definitions are often seen as either trick questions or a waste of time, to use John S's language.
Take emotions, for example, which some psychologists see as energy ("e") in "motion." Feelings are dynamic subjective qualities that move and intermingle like fish in a school. When an emotion gets stuck, like anger or sadness, we often need a bit of help to move out of it.
But we know feelings only by their efect on our mind-bodies. Trying to get our hands on what feeling ARE, in and of themselves, beyond what their effect, is like trying to shovel smoke, and whyh simplyu answering, "How do yoiu feel?" is such a challenging question. In fact trying to get hold and grasp any subtecive content in and of itself is a slippery business because most of it is a moving target.
Perhaps trying to get hold of and define what energy IS, beyond it's physical effect, is also a slippery slope vouchsafed by the lack of a universal definition.
JL
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 24, 2014 - 11:25am PT
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My point, dear Dingus, is that what you postulate as a thing is in fact, not. Put simply - with perhaps the exception of photons, energy is not a thing per se. Rather, energy, itself, refers to a condition or state of a thing.
For example, a book sitting on a table possesses "potential energy" because of its condition of being able to fall if nudged off the table. A ball flying through the air has energy ("kinetic energy") because of its relative velocity with respect to the ground. It likewise possesses potential energy because of its height above the ground.
But our very own Dingus speaks of energy as if its a thing. No cigar on that one, amigo.
We all know that energy can be stored, bought and sold, and transported. The reason that energy has all these aspects is, unlike many "conditions" that objects may be subject to, energy is conserved. that is, the condition of having energy is always passed from one object to another, never created anew or destroyed. In this way, energy is pretty unique among conditions.
A good example of how energy is passed along from object to object is a water wave. A water wave gives the impression that there is an object or an energetic thing moving across the water because the shape of the water doesn't change very much. But there is not such object moving - rather, the movement itself of the water molecules is passed from each collection of water molecules to the next through the forces between the water molecules.
Similarly, people are familiar with heat flowing from one object to another. For a long time, because molecules are far too small to see, people thought that heat might be a kind of fluid-like substance, which some called "caloric fluid" that flowed from one thing to another. Nowadays, we know that heat energy is the microscopic motion of molecules, and that this state of motion, not the molecules themselves, is what "flows" from hot objects to cold objects.
We can appreciate Dingus' mania to make energy into a thing, because the rational mind can only see nothing and things. But verily, all "things" are not necessarily so.
JL
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MH2
climber
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Jun 24, 2014 - 12:20pm PT
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Yep. You can definitely measure energy.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 24, 2014 - 12:41pm PT
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One could argue that the best explanation for a non physical universe is that there was a point in time when the physical universe did not exist, yet something brought it into existence.
we actually don't know, of course there are at a naive level only two ways to think of this: 1) that before some time there was nothing, and after that time there was something or 2) there has always been something.
It does beg the questions what is something and what is nothing. The "vacuum" is filled with virtual particles. Those particles aren't "real" so we could say they are nothing. But the probability of them existing is not zero, so we can compute the effect, and measure that effect on the physical universe. So even when there is "nothing" there is a finite probability of there being "something."
The big bang defines a time when this particular instantiation of the universe came to be, it is very possible that this is only a part of a bigger picture, and that we are starting to get the vaguest of glimmerings of that big picture.
We don't know, and we are open to different cosmologies... it is not a dogma, though the core belief is that we can understand it all through our physical theories, not needing more than that.
The scientists reply that we don't know the answer now, but someday with better instruments we will. The non materialists will say the scientists are using the wrong instruments to explore a non material universe. The scientists say that they can only work with what they have. etc. etc.
I think that the nature of the empirical approach, which is a vital component of doing science, is that there are things we don't know that we must learn about, and we go about it by both extending our current understanding (using our theories to infer) and using our experiments to investigate nature.
So far this has worked quite well, even when we cannot explain something like "energy" to Largo's satisfaction. There is no problem with the concept of energy, it is built up from a large number of observations, organized into concepts and formalized in mathematical theory. We make predictions based on those theories that experiments can measure, and even point to things no one has observed or measured before.
I think that when Feynman exhorts the philosophers to "just eat the steak" it is a humorous (at least to a physicist) way of pointing to a practical approach to understanding the universe. It recognizes that we cannot know the "Truth" but can only approximate it in some provisional manner.
Taking this physical path to understanding means giving up on knowing the "Truth," as Weinberg pointed out, there is a point where we cannot know. If you aren't comfortable with that then science is probably inadequate for your needs.
Philosophically, science does provide an approach to understanding the human condition that renders most of the other philosophies obsolete, and even barbaric. Just take the central idea of western justice, that we possess "free will", and therefore we are ultimately responsible for our acts. It fails to consider most of what we've learned of human behavior scientifically... occasionally creeping in by way of "pleas of insanity", somehow the definition of "insane" is loosing your free will. Well how does that happen?
What are the implications of swearing "on the Bible" the truthfulness of your testimony?
It is interesting to ponder what our judicial system would be if it were informed by what science we know. But it is just an example of many places where a science can intersect with "practical philosophy".
Perhaps we are still so attached to the ancient ways of thinking that it is not possible, even in this day and age, to throw off those deeply traditional beliefs.
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