Parallel Universes Are Real 1066
It's in Scientific American, it must be true. This month's cover story:
Parallel Universes.
"The simplest and most popular cosmological model today predicts that you have a twin in a galaxy about 10 to the 1028 meters from here." That number's a lot bigger than 10 to the 101.42 meters, which are the farthest observable objects in what we call our universe. And anyway, twin or not, anyone outside my light-cone is dead to me. That's just a rule I have. If you're skeptical of the multiverse, go read our discussion of a similar article from
two days ago.
Religion (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Religion (Score:2, Insightful)
Er, our light cone ought to be bigger than that (Score:1, Insightful)
And no matter how you cut it, 10^14.2 is only 10,000 light seconds, which I seriously doubt is the extent of our visible universe.
Binary assumption on the existence of protons? (Score:5, Insightful)
You might as well say that heaven exists X meters from here because of the probability that there is an equivalent 100 ly radius of space where I exist but my puppy dog is still alive and their is no war and I eat ice-cream everyday.
Man, I am going to have to sleep on this one...
This doesn't make sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Probabilities and reality (Score:5, Insightful)
So there is a place where everyone on Slashdot is getting laid! Quick, let's fire up the old improbability drive and head out there and join them!
Seriously though, this is no major jump in thinking, and is rather flawed when you stick to the basics. Just because something may be infinite in size does not necessarily mean there are an infinite number of events taking place within that space. There is no such thing as a probability of exactly 1 or exactly 0. That's why we have probability theory in the first place.
Acceptable theories (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Religion (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Religion (Score:5, Insightful)
Questions of ontology, epistomology, and teleology are not answered by a simple denial of God. (Neither are they answered by a simple assertion of God, but that's another issue).
My own philosophy tends towards the empirical, and the scientific method indeed has a great track record. But science, by definition, exludes all non-empirical observations. We all, however, have memories of "unreal" experiences. Dreams, fiction, emotions. The experience of self-conciousness. The perception of time.
I would not argue that any non-empirical philosophy is science, but neither would I claim that science is the only rational way of interpreting the phenomena of the universe. People of far greater intelligence than you or I have held deep religious beliefs. It is the height of arrogance to dismiss entire systems of knowledge in such an offhand way.
Also, I would argue, that the effect of religion on society has been been beneficial at least as much as it has been harmful. For example, in medieval Europe, the church was the only social institution that would allow social advancement through education without regard to birth. I do not think we would have modern liberal democratic states without that history. Perhaps you post as an AC because you do not want your shallow ideas examined too closely.
Re:Acceptable theories (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, I hate to break it to you, but most of these sightings usually can be explained. The rest cannot be verified one way or the other because of lack of data. A Joe off-the-street eyewitness is probably one of the worst observers out there. Think back to the classic psychological experiments regarding eyewitnesses in surprise situations. Then there's a very small amount of anomolies out there, which are just that.
To take some anomolies and project a whole ET scenario because there were unexplained lights in the sky is simply jumping to a conclusion. Toss in the new religion that has sprung out of UFOs its its hard to get anything close to objective data. Even worse, contactees are completely out there and the supposed messages from the ETs went from "get rid of your A-Bombs" in the 50s to "We will probe your ass" in the 90s. For an amusing read check out Joe Simonton's encounter [about.com] with a superior race who hands him pancakes.
Why does UFO have to translate over to "spacemen" when its probably more accurate to theorize unexplained weather events or space-time events? Using occam's razor I think its fair to say anyone with a comprehensive alien theory is really pushing it and her work probably has more in common with religion (wish fulfillment) than science.
Beware theories that are easily liked, its way too easy to be duped by them.
Re:Scientific Omnirican (Score:4, Insightful)
The hand-painted cover art was usually much more aesthetically pleasing than today's Photoshop hacks. I've grown somewhat used to the latest format (it doesn't physically grate on my nerves like it did at first), but I still can't say I like it.
They probably feel that they need all of the visual distractions and information tidbits to compete with the Internet. The ironic part is that I often use the Internet to find an experience like the old Scientific American. I type a topic into Google and I find a nice boringly formatted academic paper to read.
Falsifiability (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Buddhism and science tie together reasonably we (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I don't know about your eyes (Score:2, Insightful)
It's probably just for comparison with 10^(10^28) though.
Re:Religion (Score:1, Insightful)
If they're not, your assertion isn't simple enough. The existence of God is a priori knowledge: undeniable, simple and atomic. From the existence of God you can derive all human rights as inalienable because nothing humans invent can supercede them.
Consider the alternative: if rights are merely human ideas then anyone could legitimately contest them. Any strongman could declare himself God for a day... and in aetheist regimes, such as the Nazis or the USSR they did just that.
I think once you begin to understand yourself, the rest of the universe should begin to fall into place, allowing for the fact that it is rather big and complicated.
Re:Religion (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Buddhism and science tie together reasonably we (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Multiverse to Nadaverse to Omniverse (Score:3, Insightful)
This doesn't answer anything, but I am yet to see another way around the causality problem (defining something as 'acausal' doesn't solve it, it just dodges it).
Well, no. Cause and effect is a concept that you brain is hired wired to think in terms of and there's no way you can really break out of that. The thing is, to discuss the beginning of the universe, we have to go outside the realms of "time" as we know it - time being a very much internal part of our universe. Outside of this box, cause and effect has no real meaning. Yes it appears to dodge the issue, and is kind of hard to get your head around, but think about it for a while and I think you'll find it's the only way to tackle the issue head-on.
Not really (Score:3, Insightful)
Only if you discard reincarnation, Nirvana, various supernatural beings like the "Monkey God" (as seen in the famous classical Chinese book "Voyage to the West" - basically the whole religion. You might as well say Christianity fits with science because there was that flood thing in Genesis and floods have been known to happen. Just like a broken clock which is right twice a day, religions can sometimes be congruent by chance with science.
While scientists would not particularly go for the whole reincarnation game, there is a lot of logic in it
No. At the root of it is the assumption that there is a "soul" responsible for our thoughts that is somehow separate from the brain, just like in Christianity, Islam, etc. According to science, we think because neurons fire in our brains. When the brain dies, no more thoughts.
Re:Religion (Score:2, Insightful)
Atheism is as much a dogma as religions. Atheism states that there is no God, end of story, and yet this hasn't been proved by science yet either afaik. People have died because of religions, they have also died because of atheism. (cf USSR under Stalin).
Agnosticism is probably the contrary to BOTH religion and atheism, but that is a different issue.
Re:Religion (Score:5, Insightful)
If God has granted us free will, then we have the right to choose our course of action, whether or not it leads to our downfall.
If God stops anything he doesn't want to happen, then we have no free will, our lives are pre-destined, and nothing we do matters, because the end is already pre-ordained.
Taking the latter approach seems to relieve you of any personal responsibility for your actions, does it not?
Re:Multiverse to Nadaverse to Omniverse (Score:3, Insightful)
From this, i concluded that there cannot be a begining. If there was a begining, then something must have caused that begining, and so something was there before the begining.
Trapped in your own logic, eh? Well, we all are. Our brains operate logically; we have faith in such concepts as cause and effect, etc. But you are trying to explain with rules of logic an illogical concept: a effect with no cause, the first cause.
From here you can either take a leap of faith and accept a first cause, deny the first cause and close your eyes and ears to the problem, or accept that some things are simply not explainable given the set of logical rules you (as human) are given to work with.
But unfortunately, being logical beings as we are, we can't accept either of those outcomes, so we are trapped in an absurd world where we are aware of the problem, but we can never discover the answer.
Such is life. :(
A fundamental contradiction in the multiverse (Score:3, Insightful)
My bet is 2 or 3.
You are confussed. (Score:5, Insightful)
In countries like Thailand all these influences mixed and thus the Budhism practiced there is different to Budhism in other places with less hindu influence.
Reincarnation and Nirvana are of course all as faux as any religion dogmas.
Re:Religion (Score:4, Insightful)
Axioms differ from faith in that, while both faith and axioms are unprovable, axioms are *disprovable*, in that the axiom that leads to contradictory views may be safely discarded. An act of faith on the other hand cannot be disproven or discarded.
Re:Acceptable theories (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Buddhism and science tie together reasonably we (Score:1, Insightful)
Buddhists do, in fact, believe in Entropy. One of the core buddhist beliefs is that nothing lasts forever, even the universe.
You can call it what you want, that's not science. That's naive vitalism.
And lightning is fire from the gods... until we conducted the proper experiments. Buddhism predicted entropy long before it could be scientifically proven. Science hasn't entirely figured out how humans tick yet. Buddhism provides answers that flow along the same patterns as scientific principles that we have discovered. It's not perfect, but the IDEA is in the right direction.
My experiences in this matter are, in fact, very strongly rejecting of Buddhism, and my "experimental data" is considered by many of those on the other side of Buddhist ideology to be aberrant and sometimes even false.
That sounds more like predisposition than dispassionate scientific method. Also, remember, there are as many forms of Buddhism as there are people on the earth. The first Buddha, in the end, made the wisest proclamation of any religious leader I've ever heard of. He told his followers that everything changes and, when times change, Buddhism should change, just keep the core ideals in tact, and it should be a good way to live.
The bits of Buddhism that you seem to reject, reincarnation and other vedic-inspired teachings of the old Buddhists weren't central tenets. People in the west tend to focus on them because they are the areas that are so blatantly against the christendom that is so embedded in our society. And, of course, the staunch eastern Buddhists tend to be rather haughty and disdainful of western society, which makes things a bit more difficult. Far too many people can't see that both societies have great merit.
I consider myself Buddhist, but I'm not sure I buy reincarnation (I haven't come to ANY conclusions about afterlife, if it exists at all), and I certainly flat out reject the vedic stuff. That said, the core ideas that the first Buddha stressed aren't really metaphysical. The previous poster mentioned the "middle path". You misinterpreted what he was saying as if Buddhists were suggesting it was a scientific principle. They do not. The middle way is about how to live your life with the least amount of suffering. If you go to extremes, chances are, you won't be very happy. Too much ice cream is bad for you, not enough and life will be bland. The problem is that the Buddhist writings out there now tend to come from a decidedly eastern perspective, where metaphysical imagery is used constantly, even about completely mundane things. The images are all great wheels and ever-turning cycles and "paths". But if you break down what they are saying, it's just allegory for very real ideas.
I ask you to take another look at Buddhism. Without the metaphysical jargon, you'll find it much more compatible. Buddhism is all about ideas. Think of it, as I do, as the "Great Hypothesis". Don't take what it says as dogma, but as an idea to test. I found, once I broke through the jargon and poor translation and eastern mystic mush-heads, that much of it was self-evident.
Re:Religion (Score:3, Insightful)
Seen in this light, a religion does not have to "true" or "real" to be beneficial. A stubborn insistance on empriricism is a religious belief. No mystical belief can be science, but that doesn't make it "wrong."
Religion may be something we can outgrow, or it may be that God is talking to some people and not to you. Lack of evidence is not proof of falsehood.
Whether "true" or "false," the perversion of a religious belief into a socially maladaptive behavior (like crashing planes into buildings) does not, in itself, invalidate the belief. Or even devalue it. I suspect that Islam has motivated more good and socially constructive behavior than it has evil or socially destructive behavior.
So many shallow thinkers smugly believe in their superiority because they "aren't deluded" by "absurd" beliefs in "sky-daddies" when they fail to realize that their empircism makes religious expereince invisible. The observer cannot be separated from the observation.
All religion may be wish fulfillment by people who are afraid to die. So what? Religion isn't the disease. Certainty and self-righteousness are the disease, and it is being displayed in equally stark and terrifying ways by the "superior" atheist camp in this discussion.
I am, myself, not a believer in any faith, but I'm not so bigoted a mind as to reject something that is a living idea in so many lives, nor am I so quick to arrogate my prejudices to the status of "truth." If all the athiests and people of faith in the world would just do one another the same courtesy, we might have a more peaceful world, with or without religion.
Re:Religion (Score:5, Insightful)
First, note that logic is not an axiom, but that which is applied to axioms. If you don't have logic, than there's no point to axioms, since axioms are only meaningful as part of a logical system.
Second, some axioms are more dopey than others (e.g., whatever the Pope writes is a truth direct from God), and some systems have axioms that allow an end run around logic, thus rendering them void as logical systems.
The only axioms necessary for science are:
1. There exist a class of sentient observers whose observations are commensurate (i.e., essentially interchangeable).
2. Occam's Razor.
Note that 1. must be held by any belief system, or you can't meaningfully communicate with anyone else.
Note also that 2. is violated wildly by bible fundamentalists (e.g., Joshua 10:12-14 interpreted to mean that Joshua literally stopped the sun in the sky!).
Let's not pretend that the inanity of religious literalism is on the same logical footing as science. It is not.
Re:Religion (Score:3, Insightful)
Mathematicians have gone to a great deal of trouble since then to prove the usefulness of logical arguments based on a very small set of axioms. Accepting that logic is true is either in itself an axiom, or the afore mentioned set of axioms need to be added to your 2 axioms. These would be (IANAM nor do I have my books from PHIL 305 -- please correct errors):
- a != a is always false (controversial -- some mathematicians go to a great deal of effort to avoid this one)
- a && b is true if a is true and b is true
Apart from that I really don't believe Occam's Razor is more than a good rule of thumb. A lot of very good science thoroughly and unashamedly violates it.And as my final point -- that you don't believe in the statements in a single book from a single religion is not sufficient proof that all organized religions and all religious beliefs are bogus. Single religious beliefs need to be evaluated seperately just as hypotheses in science should be evaluated seperately. While an organized religion should be evaluated as a whole (the reason I left the religion I was raised in and haven't joined another), that evaluation should not be extended to other religions, or even used to generalize about members of that religion.
Nonetheless, I do like your first axiom: There exist a class of sentient observers whose observations are commensurate (i.e., essentially interchangeable). I just have to ask which group you are going to accept for your "class of sentient observers"? Depending on your answer, you're going to get some wildly varying results.
Re:Not really (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, there is a LOT of BS "science" out there... a lot... and I certainly don't want to cast my lot with those faking liars. BUT: The original point that we don't know what happens in the brain, we don't really understand consciousness -- that is certainly isn't getting a fair shake around here. We ARE self-aware. At a different level than the other animals we know of in THIS universe. We do MATH. We observe QUANTUM LEVEL EFFECTS. (I'm guessing we are the first animal on this planet to do that.) We spend 6-8 hours a night DREAMING. We can get measurably better taking PLACEBOS. There are certainly a lot of things about mind/brain/consciousness that we don't know. I don't think spoon benders or psychic hotlines or the like have anything to them at all. But the fact is that YOU exist, you have a brain which shapes your moods, shapes your perception, shapes your store of information
(waits for the flames)
Re:No, skip the metaphysics here (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Multiverse to Nadaverse to Omniverse (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Religion (Score:3, Insightful)
The proper version of that argument is: Even if we have free will, an all-knowing God already knows the outcome, so from God's point of view, we do not have free will.
As an example, say God creates a man (via the usual method, installing a soul into a zygote, and letting it be born). Over the man's life, he makes various choices (let's say he becomes an atheist and then, at age 86, dies of cancer). After death, God punishes the soul by sending it to hell. Traditionally, punishment is meted out as a response to voluntary actions. However, God knew when he created it that the soul would end up being an atheist and dying of cancer. So for God to be angry at or upset with the soul for its "choices" seems hypocritical, since God created the soul knowing what its choices would be. If God had wanted the soul to do otherwise, He would have created it differently.
So assuming that the creationg-life-death-sentence to Hell or Heaven method is accurate, we are left with the following possibilities (all assuming God exists):
1. God is too stupid to understand the hypocrisy.
2. God understands the hypocrisy, but is a jerk.
3. God *isn't* omniscient, and doesn't know what will happen, hence the "experiment" of ensouling billions, then seeing which ones are most fit for the environment (i.e. end up worshiping Him).
If I were inclined to believe in God (I do not, as there are no valid reasons to do so), I would have to conclude that he is running a rather cruel experiment.
A "Simple" Disproof (Score:2, Insightful)
I think the flaw in the logic here is that just because there is an infinite amount of space, there must be an infinite amount of "stuff" in that space. Maybe it's just empty, or nearly empty, or whatever. In terms of your "boolean" analogy, maybe everything past a certain point is a "zero" (nothing there).
Re:Multiverse to Nadaverse to Omniverse (Score:3, Insightful)
That's BS, quite frankly. Ancient man didn't have the science we do, so their theories about a flat earth and such are certainly questionable--even discarded at this point. But much of the Bible, for example, are stories of what ancient people lived, saw and, in some cases, supposedly received directly from God.
In the case of the Old Testament, the stories were passed down for generations before they were ever put in writing. Furthermore, every story in the Old Testament has much older variants in other civilizations. The Egyptians have stories of magicians (followers of a pantheon of gods, not one "true" god) walking on water, parting the seas, and so forth. One in particular has a pharoah having a magician part the sees so that he can retrieve a ring dropped by a slave. All stories that predate the Old Testament. Mind you, the Old Testament (with the exception of Genesis) takes place during the height/fall of the Egyptian empire.
Anyway, those stories are almost certainly warped with the passing of time, and the oral traditions involved.
In the case of the New Testament, many of those were indeed penned (quilled?) before Jesus' death. However, it's only 2000 years old, roundabout, and there's no archaeological evidence to support it. IIRC, there's no Roman record of a governor (or whatever the title is) named "Pontius Pilate". The Romans were very thorough about their documentation. We have Julius Caesar's autobiography, that of Brutus, and another biography written about Caesar, and those men lived several centuries before Jesus. But we have no record of Jesus, save the New Testament.
To buy into what you're saying you have to essentially believe that all the people that witnessed Biblical events, wrote them down, or received them from God, were outright liars. You can believe what you want, but there isn't any evidence (that I know of) that indicates that they were liars.
You're right, there's no evidence to believe they were outright liars, and believing so of these people isn't a requirement. We've seen people duped over plenty of other things, historically. Hitler duped his people to some extent (although the story isn't as clear cut as my one sentence summary). Lenin was able to rally a great deal of support for the Communist revolution. In more mundane areas, many people believed that the Titanic was unsinkable. We don't have to accuse anyone in biblical times of lying or believing in a hoax, we know that the psychology of people allows for such believe whether it's true or not. Widespread belief doesn't make something real, but it can provide the illusion of reality. In spite of widespread belief, though, we find communism failing or regressing into totalitarian dictatorships (rather than rule by the people, which it's supposed to be). We find that Hitler was in fact an evil man doing evil things. And, of course, the Titanic sunk. And it doesn't make a damn bit of difference how many people believed otherwise in any of these cases.
They saw, they lived, they wrote it down. It's history.
Don't you know that eyewitnesses are the worst form of testimony? Eyewitnesses see something, and when they recount it later it's filled with bias and prejudice. Lawyers (good ones) can manipulate or discredit the testimony of eyewitnesses in an interactive fashion. Of course, the eyewitnesses in the Bible are no longer here for interactive discussion. However, it's a pretty good bet that if you showed one of them a flashlight, they'd think it was magic and would either decide you were evil, or would believe anything you said. Regardless of that little facet of the psychology in the biblical time, it's also important to note that many of Jesus' contemporaries, as presented in the bible, did not agree with him. Christianity was a persecuted minority for many centuries. Thanks to the Dark Ages, the church was able to assert a great deal of control over the population, and Christianity finally rose up to be the dominant re