Showing posts with label Science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Science. Show all posts

Sunday, July 30, 2017

Quote Of The Day: Free Will And Eternalism


A friend of mine linked me to a Business Insider video where professor Dean Buonomano at UCLA talks about neuroscience, free will, and eternalism.



Here's a transcript from the video:


It seems that everything in the universe has already happened under eternalism.

In the context of physics, there’s two general views of the nature of time. One we can think of is "presentism," which only the present is real. And the second, we can think of as "eternalism" in which the past, present, future are equally real. And under this view, now is to time as here is to space. In other words, just as I happen to be here now, it’s perfectly acceptable to me that there are other points in space I could be. Similarly, just as I am here now, under eternalism, there’s plenty of other points in time, the past and future, where perhaps other versions of myself or other parts of my world line exist and are as real as I am.

Under eternalism, the question of free will and determinism becomes much less clear because it seems that everything in the universe has already happened under eternalism. It’s called the "block universe" view in physics — in which everything has, in a sense, a manner of speaking, already happened. And this would mean that what we think of as free will is, in a sense, an illusion. But I think part of the challenge there is coming to terms of what free will means. I think in reality from a neuroscience basis, what we should think of free will is simply a subjective feeling of your unconscious brain making decisions. Pain might be a sense of what happens when somebody steps on our toe. Free will is the subjective sense — the feeling we get when the unconscious brain makes the decision giving us the impression that it was the conscious mind that just made that decision. 

Wednesday, July 5, 2017

Is Mental Causation verifiable?


Whenever I debate a theist on the topic of mental causation—which almost every theists believes in—I almost always hear the claim that if mental causation exists you wouldn't be able to tell scientifically; the mind is non-material. This strikes me as odd. Why would this be the case? Anything that can affect physical matter is in principle verifiable and open to science. So I thought of this dialogue to show why this view makes no sense:


Person A: The ghost is moving the cup across the table.

Person B: There's no way to tell if the ghost moved the cup across the table because the ghost is non-material.

Person A: What are you talking about? We can see the cup moving across the table with nothing touching it.

Person B: No, it's impossible to tell if a non-material thing affects a physical thing.

Person A: Are you insane? The cup is moving right now and nothing we can see is moving it.

Person B: No, it's impossible to tell if a non-material thing affects a physical thing.

Person A: It's moving! We can see the ghost affecting physical matter, and we've scientifically ruled out all other possibilities.

Person B: No, it's impossible to tell if a non-material thing affects a physical thing.

Person A:

Friday, June 23, 2017

Quote Of The Day: Gotta Have Faith!


I'm still super busy and have little time to write good detailed blog posts, so here's a quickie. Many theists love to point to god-believing scientists as a way to validate their faith. "Look, here's a super smart scientist who believes in god, this proves religion is compatible with science."

Um, no it doesn't. Case in point: Aron Wall. He's a physicist that many theists have cited before because he is critical of some cosmological models that do not have an absolute beginning. But if you look into the guy, you can see that his belief is really grounded not good science or evidence—but in faith. Read it from his own blog:

Our belief that God is the Creator does not depend on the vicissitudes of scientific progress, the swinging back and forth of the tire swing (or is it accelerating?) It doesn't matter, because in this case we have a more certain source of knowledge than Science.

By faith!

He goes onto define faith as "confidence about what we hope for, but do not see."

That's usually what it comes down to. William Lane Craig comes to the same ultimate conclusion. All this talk of evidence is really just to reinforce his faith, that is to say what he hopes is true. And in case you want to test your faith in the decency of humanity, watch Limp Bizkit cover the George Michael original:

Tuesday, April 25, 2017

Quote Of The Day: How Length Contraction Entails Eternalism


Vesselin Petkov is a philosopher of physics who has written relentlessly on the reality of spacetime. He's one of the founders of the Minkowski Institute, an organization dedicated to (among other things) changing "the present situation in fundamental physics and lead[ing] the research on the major open questions," and is the current director. I emailed him a year ago to comment on my logical argument for eternalism and in response he said it "looks correct" and sent me a link to a short PDF that makes some additional arguments for the same conclusion.

The PDF, entitled The Ultimate Judge: Time does not Flow since it is the Fourth Dimension of the Real World, describes how the empirical evidence of time dilation and length contraction necessarily entail eternalism. Unless you want to deny your senses and empirical evidence as if they're an illusion forged on us by some unknown aspect of nature, the conclusion of eternalism necessarily follows. That is the only way to deny it. 

Below is an excerpt from one part of the PDF that makes an argument that the length contraction of a meter stick would be impossible if the meter stick existed only as a three-dimensional body, and not as a worldtube in 4 dimensional spacetime (which is what it is on eternalism).


It should be stressed that if the worldtube of the meter stick were an abstract geometric construction and what existed were a single three-dimensional meter stick (which constitutes a single class of simultaneous events), both observers would measure the same three-dimensional meter stick of the same length, i.e. the same class of simultaneous events, which means that simultaneity would be absolute and there would be no length contraction. So, if the meter stick were a three-dimensional object, neither relativity of simultaneity nor length contraction would exists, which means that all experiments mentioned above (that repeatedly confirmed these relativistic effects) would be impossible. This conclusion can be easily generalized - as a three-dimensional world is defined as everything that exists simultaneously at the present moment (as a single class of simultaneous events), if reality were a three-dimensional world evolving in time, then at every moment all observers would share this single three-dimensional world (since nothing else exists); therefore they would share the same single class of simultaneous events, which means that relativity of simultaneity would be impossible in contradiction with the experimental evidence.

This thought experiment clearly demonstrates that length contraction of a meter stick would be impossible if the meter stick existed as a three-dimensional body (not as a worldtube). An ordinary three-dimensional meter stick at rest with respect to an observer A is shown in fig. 1. What we see in the figure is what we perceive and take for granted that it is what really exists. According to Minkowski, however, the meter stick exists equally at all moments of its history and what is ultimately real is the worldtube of the meter stick as shown in fig. 2 (only part of the worldtube is displayed in the figure).

Assume that another meter stick at rest in another observer’s (observer B’s) reference frame moves relative to the first one at a distance 1 mm above it. Let us assume that at the event M the middle point of B’s meter stick (the mark “50 cm”) is instantaneously above the middle point of A’s meter stick. Lights are installed at every point inside A’s meter stick, which can change their color simultaneously at every instant in A’s frame. At the event of the meeting M all lights are red in A’s frame. At all previous moments all lights were green. At all moments after the meeting all lights will be blue. When A and B meet at event M this and only this event is present for both of them. At that moment all lights of A’s meter stick will be simultaneously red for A. In other words, at M the present meter stick for A is red (that is, all parts of A’s meter stick, which exist simultaneously for A at M, are red). All moments before M, when all lights of the meter were green, are past for A, whereas all moments when the meter stick will be blue are in A’s future. Imagine that B’s meter stick contains cameras, instead of lights, at every point along its length. At the event of the meeting M all cameras take snapshots of the parts of A’s meter stick which the cameras face. At event M all snapshots are taken simultaneously in B’s reference frame. Even without looking at the pictures taken by the cameras it is clear that not all pictures will show a red part of A’s meter stick, because what is simultaneous for A is not simultaneous for B.
When the picture of A’s meter stick is assembled from the pictures of all cameras it would show two things as shown in fig. 3 - (i) A’s meter stick photographed by B is shorter, and (ii) only the middle part of the picture of A’s meter stick (as measured, i.e., photographed by B) is red; half is green and the other half is blue. So what is past (green), present (red), and future (blue) for A, exists simultaneously as present for B. But this is only possible if the meter stick is the worldtube as shown in fig. 4.

Sunday, April 23, 2017

Here's What You Have To Believe In Order To Deny Eternalism


I've recently gotten marred down in another debate over eternalism vs presentism via private email. It's a debate I generally like having because it's one I know I can win. Plus it's a great way to get to know Special Relativity, one of the coolest and most fascinating scientific theories. What I want to emphasize here is what one has to deny in order to deny eternalism and hold to either presentism or possibilism, because it's not always apparent to those who do so.

In order to deny eternalism, one has to deny one or both of the following. They have to either:
  1. Deny that the speed of light travels at constant speed regardless of the speed of the light source.
  2. Deny that we can accurately measure two non-parallel distances as being of equal length with any physical instrument, such as a ruler or tape measurer, or even sense in any way that they are equal or unequal.
The denier of eternalism must accept one or both; there is no logical way to deny at least one and still deny eternalism.

The reason why is because logic demands it.

If... 
(1) the speed of light is constant for all observers and isn't changed depending on whether or not the light source is moving,
And...
(2) we are able to physically measure two perpendicular distances accurately using any device such as a ruler or tape measurer,
Then...
(3) if two beams of light travel an equal distance to a single point and arrive at the same time, they must have been emitted at the same time and the events that emitted them must have been ontologically simultaneous. 
And...
(4) if two beams of light travel an equal distance to a single point and arrive at different times, they must have been emitted at different times and the events that emitted them must have not been ontologically simultaneous.
In order to deny (3) and (4) you must deny either (1) or (2) or both (1) and (2). There is no other logically possible way to do so.

Sunday, April 9, 2017

Quote Of The Day: Hitchens On The Fine Tuning Argument


As I've said before, I don't look to Christopher Hitchens if I want to hear the most sophisticated arguments for or against god, but he did have a snappy comeback in a debate about the apparent fine tuning of the universe with Rabbi Wolpe years ago. Wolpe challenges Hitchens, saying, "The odds that the universe would actually be constituted are .0000 to the billion power, because all these various astronomical constants have to be exactly right, balanced on a knife edge in order for there to be a world. So that's the first piece of evidence that the world knew we were coming."



Unimpressed, Hitch responds,

Now to this knife edge point, why are people so impressed that it so nearly didn't happen? Some designer. I might mention on the knife edge point, knife edge is exactly the right metaphor as it turns out, just in the little far off suburban slum of our tiny solar system—that's a detail in the cosmos—just the one we know, we know the following: that of the other planets, all of them are either much too hot or much too cold to support any kind of life at all. If they ever did they don't any longer and will never do so again. And that is true a very large tracts of our own planet. They're either the too hot or too cold and it's on a climatic knife edge as it is and is waiting for the Sun swell up into a red dwarf, boil the oceans, and have done with the whole business, and we even know roughly the date on which that will occur. That's just in our suburb; it's in our hood. So we may have a lot of a little bit of something this now but there's a great deal of nothingness headed our way. Some design, huh?

He continues, showing the absurdity of thinking the whole of the cosmos, including all of its mass extinctions, was all a preparation for us.

They were waiting for us? It was waiting for us to occur? For you and me to arrive? 98.9 percent of every species has ever been on earth has already become extinct. So if there's a creator or designer—and I can't prove there isn't—who wanted that, this designer must be either very capricious, very cruel, very incompetent, or very indifferent. Grant him and you must grant all that. You can't say "Ah, what a welcome. What a table was spread for us to dine on." 

And then of course the crowd laughs and claps.

Thursday, March 30, 2017

Atheism In A Nutshell? Wrong


This is what the majority of theists think atheism requires you to believe:


There was nothing, and then, *poof* there was something. This gets the atheist view completely wrong. Well, I hate to say there is an "atheist view" on cosmogony, but no atheist has to accept this gross misconception that most theists think we have to adhere to.

The logic is completely wrong. Think about it. If there was nothing, how could you then have a moment later? It presupposes time exists, since you have before and after notions. But time is something—it's not nothing. Many atheists unfortunately fail to understand this, including Lawrence Krauss, who constantly refers to something as nothing, conflating the two, and bringing upon himself much justified criticism.

The fact of the matter is there never was nothing. The philosopher's "nothing" of the total and complete absence of any thing is a concept in our minds, but not something that has ever existed. Therefore we don't go from "nothing" to "something," you start with something. This meme seems to get that near the bottom. The big bang theory indeed doesn't say the universe came from nothing, because, again, nothing never existed. It says the universe came from a singularity, a point of spacetime of infinite density and energy. There may be more spacetime before the singularity, or it may be literally the first moment of all of spacetime. Either way there never was nothing, and the universe doesn't "come from" nothing. The universe has always existed—every moment—past, present, and future, in one giant spacetime block universe. The burden of proof of the existence of nothingness is on the person making the claim.

I've written a screenplay for a web series on atheism that covers this very important aspect of the origin of the universe that I hope to begin filming next month and have completed editing by the end of spring. It will cover the origin of the universe, morality, and secularism. Oh, and I will be acting in it! A million things can go wrong with it however, so I'm scared this will not ever happen. There are many points of failure, including the other actors, the cameraman, the sound guy, and our schedules. So we'll see.

But the bottom line is this: there was always something. No need for a creator.

Sunday, March 26, 2017

Reality Comes In Layers And Containers


I just saw Lawrence Krauss speak about his new book, The Greatest Story Every Told — So Far, with Alan Alda at the New York Public Library. And during the event Krauss reiterated a point I want to drive home here because I think it's really important.

It has to do with how we understand scientific theories and their relationship with one another. Many people have the mistaken impression that each new scientific idea disproves all the previous ideas of a particular area. For example, before Einstein we had Newtonian physics where we had Newton's laws of motion. However, Einstein's Special and General Theory of Relativity superseded Newton's laws of motion, giving us a more accurate mathematical description of the way large objects behave.

But Einstein didn't disprove Newtonian physics, as if to say, Newton's equations fail to give us any predictive power. Newton's equations got us to the moon after all. Einstein's equations just show us where Newton's equations break down. That is, Newton's equations are a close approximation to the more accurate equations Einstein gave us, and they're accurate in a certain regime, but they break down dramatically at really fast speeds, like near the speed of light.

And where Special Relativity breaks down, General Relativity takes over. Special Relativity doesn't take into account accelerating reference frames, nor does it take into account gravity. But General Relativity didn't falsify Special Relativity. Special Relativity is still accurate in it's regime — that is to say, in it's domain of applicability. It's a description of reality at a certain level, within a certain range of circumstances. In other words, we need to think of scientific explanations as containers within other containers. Each theory or explanation is accurate within its container but not accurate outside of it. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the internal containers are false or disproven because a wider ranging theory eclipsed it.

Monday, March 20, 2017

Neil deGrasse Tyson Admits We Have No Free Will


I've been a fan of Neil deGrasse Tyson for years now and had the chance to meet him a few years ago at a bar. One thing I didn't like about him was his ambiguity towards the issue of free will. It wasn't clear that he acknowledged that we don't have it in his many talks. But recently he did acknowledge that we don't have free will and that it's an illusion when talking about time in a video by Vsause3. And he acknowledges the illusion of free will due to eternalism by recognizing that our worldtubes are complete and locked into the block universe! He says this towards the end of the video below. It's definitely worth a watch.



Saturday, March 18, 2017

Does Government Have A Duty To Educate Its Citizens? Part 2


This is a follow up response to my original post a week ago on whether or not government has a duty to educate its citizens. I originally wrote a critique of the speech made by the first speaker, Chuck Braman, and now I'm going to write a line-by-line critique of the arguments the second speaker gave, Roberto Guzman. He writes at the blog Capitalism and Ideas and his blog post, written here, is inspired by his arguments in the debate. So without further ado:

Larry Elder makes the point that government education is similar to an item on a restaurant menu that not even the waitress would order.

Yeah, unless they can't afford private education, especially if a "free market" Republican governor like Scott Walker tries to destroy the teacher's unions.

Roughly 11% of Americans send their kids to private school, but nearly 30% of parents who work in public schools do so. In urban areas such as Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Cincinnati it hovers closer to 40%. To reiterate, these are government education providers choosing to send their kids to the competing private schools.

I couldn't corroborate that 30% claim and Roberto does not include a source. The number I see is 19% of public school teachers send their kids of private schools, though 28% have tried alternatives to public schools at some point. This is definitely higher than the national average, but why are so many public educators sending their kids to private schools, especially in urban centers? Well, it's because many urban schools suck and teachers who work there know this. So if they can afford to send their kids to private schools, they will. The median high school teacher salary is $57,200, for middle school it's $55,860, and for elementary school it's $54,890. But the vast majority of Americans won't be able to afford this option, not when the national average for private school tuition is $10,003 a year. Even if it was half that, most Americans still wouldn't be able to afford it, not with 50% of Americans making less than $30,000 a year.

What about the government officials themselves? 37% of Representatives send their kids to private school. For US senators, that number is a staggering 45%. President Obama, himself a product of private education, made a big show of vetting DC public schools when he was elected. After all of the hullabaloo, he sent his daughters to the most elite private school in the capital. If government education is so great, why do its biggest advocates avoid it like tap water in Mexico?

Most members of congress are far wealthier than your average American. In 2012 the base salary for all members of the US House and Senate was $174,000 a year. Few than 3% of Americans earn that much. And this doesn't even count additional income from book selling, speeches, and gifts from lobbyists. People will always be able to pay for better private education than what the public system can offer. Nobody denies that. But this is not an argument to privatize all public education.

Friday, February 24, 2017

Visualization Of Quantum Physics (Quantum Mechanics)


I've been busy lately recording projects, and finishing up on a script for a web series on atheism I hope to complete by summer. So I haven't had much time to blog. In the meantime, for you science lovers out there still perplexed by quantum mechanics (as most of us are), here's a nice video I came across that nicely visualizes many of its main components.

Thursday, February 16, 2017

Make Atheism Great Again!



As I spend more and more time in the atheist community I've been beginning to notice a fairly common and recurring theme. And that is, sadly, that atheists can be just as close-minded, and dogmatic, and tribalistic, and ignorant on the issues as almost any religious person can.

Atheists have a reputation for being rational, free thinkers—more knowledgeable on religion than the religious are, and more knowledgeable on science than the general public is. There is certainly some truth to that. But there is also certainly some truth to the notion that being an atheist doesn't automatically make you rational. And it should be patently obvious to all that atheism is by no means an inoculation against irrational views.

As someone who's a very thoughtful and intellectual atheist and who's deeply familiar with most of the subjects relevant to atheism, I can say for sure that I encounter irrational views all the time among my fellow atheists, ranging from politics, to science, to a whole spectrum of social issues—and it pains me when I hear atheists say incredibly stupid things. So I'm going to outline a few problems I see in the atheist community and offer some remedies on how atheists can fix them.

1) Stop saying philosophy is dead. The one thing that pisses me off the most that I keep hearing atheists say over and over is that "philosophy is dead because hey, we've got science now!" This is a very popular view among atheists that is also ceaselessly reiterated by some of the most high profile people in the community, most notably Stephen Hawkins and Lawrence Krauss. But they're completely wrong and here's why.

Science can never replace philosophy because they do too different things. Science is an epistemology, it's a series of methods for understanding the world we experience that uses hypotheses, repeatable experiments, and formulating theories that explain facts. But not every fact is best obtained through science, and indeed, science itself has to make philosophical assumptions that it cannot prove. For example, what the scientific method should be  and what science is (and there are disagreements) cannot be resolved by science, it has to be resolved by philosophy. And this means philosophy is more fundamental to science, and covers a wider range of topics.

Tuesday, January 24, 2017

Quote Of The Day: The Psychological Effects Compulsive Liars Have On Us


It's day four of the Trump regime and the post-truth era. Trump has spent his first few days issuing executive orders reversing Obama's policies, and blatantly lying to the world about the size of his inauguration crowd and that millions of illegals voting cost him the popular vote. It's clear that we're going to have a president completely detached from factual reality who has absolutely no shame lying whatsoever. But what kind of psychological effect can this have on people? Politico has a scary answer:

When we are in an environment headed by someone who lies, so often, something frightening happens: We stop reacting to the liar as a liar. His lying becomes normalized. We might even become more likely to lie ourselves. Trump is creating a highly politicized landscape where everyone is on the defensive: You’re either for me, or against me; if you win, I lose, and vice versa. Fiery Cushman, a moral psychologist at Harvard University, put it this way when I asked him about Trump: “Our moral intuitions are warped by the games we play.” Place us in an environment where it’s zero-sum, dog-eat-dog, party-eats-party, and we become, in game theory terms, “intuitive defectors,” meaning our first instinct is not to cooperate with others but to act in our own self-interest—which could mean disseminating lies ourselves.

Welcome to the post-truth era! Facts, it's been nice knowing ya!

Saturday, January 7, 2017

The Importance Of Understanding Weak Emergence In Moral Ontology


I've been somewhat obsessed recently over the idea of weak emergence in understanding how all the layers of ontology fit into one another. This is an area that I think trips up so many people, both atheist and theist alike.

One reason why is that many people will think that naturalism entails that only the most fundamental layer of ontology has an sort of real status of existence. This view is known as eliminative materialism. Alex Rosenberg, a prominent atheist philosopher, told me back in 2015 that he thinks eliminative materialism is the logical and inevitable outcome of a naturalistic ontology. On this view only the most fundamental constituents that science tells us exist are real. Everything else is an illusion. That means people don't exist, color doesn't exist, solidity doesn't exist, and consciousness doesn't exist. In other words, all higher level phenomena has no ontological status whatsoever. If it isn't fundamental, it's an illusion.

Contrast that with the view that physicist Sean Carroll proposes, which he calls poetic naturalism. It's poetic because there are "many ways of talking about the world." We can talk about the universe in terms of fermions and bosons or we can talk about it in terms of people and societies. In other words, the emergent world of people, plants, animals, color, solidity, consciousness, countries, and economies—all the higher level phenomena—exist, at least in a certain sense. They don't "exist" in exactly in the same way that fermions and bosons exist. They exist as higher level emergent phenomena. However, some things really are illusions. Free will, souls, and the flow of time really are illusions, because they require certain things to exist fundamentally that don't; they can't truly be said to have any kind of real ontological status. Compatibilistic free will, which acknowledges that there isn't any real libertarian free will, is another matter. Bottom line, one has to understand how and why some emergent phenomena are or aren't illusions.

The major problems with this arise from our innate inability at understanding emergence; it's not at all intuitive and it's also extremely complex, generally requiring exceptional knowledge in both science and philosophy, which, let's be honest, most people don't have. And that's why so many people, both atheists and theists, even those reasonably knowledgeable in either science or philosophy, come to the conclusion that naturalism entails eliminative materialism.

Richard Dawkins echos this sentiment in one famous quote from his 1995 book River Out of Eden, saying, "In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” (p. 133)

Monday, January 2, 2017

My Blog Posts On Special Relativity


Here a quick link page to all my posts on special relativity. Some are educational, some are used in arguments, but all can be used to help you understand the theory better.

Sunday, January 1, 2017

How Would A Soul Interact With Regular Matter?



Given the argument from Core Theory that I just wrote, those who wish to deny its conclusion will have to consider answering the following questions that are honestly aimed at understanding how a world with souls makes sense with what we already know to be true.

  • There needs to be a way that "soul stuff" interacts with the fields of which we are made-with elections, or photons, or something. Do those interactions satisfy conservation of energy, momentum, and electric charge?
  • Does matter interact back on the soul, or is the principle of action and reaction violated?
  • Is there "virtual soul stuff" as well as "real soul stuff," and do quantum fluctuations of soul stuff affect the measurable properties of ordinary particles?
  • Or does the soul stuff not interact directly with particles, and merely affect the quantum probabilities associated with measurement outcomes?
  • Is the soul a kind of "hidden variable" playing an important role in quantum ontology?

This are all the questions asked by Sean Carroll in chapter 27 his book The Big Picture. This is in addition to my previous post If You Believe In A Soul That Gives You Free Will, I Have Some Questions For You.

Saturday, December 31, 2016

The Argument From Core Theory


The most successful scientific theory ever that gives us the most accurate predictions in all of science is quantum field theory. It says that particles and forces arise out of fields. When the fields vibrate, we observe those vibrations in the form of particles. Particles are made up of two kinds of fields, fermions and bosons. Bosons make up force fields. An example would be the Higgs field, which gives particles matter. Fermions make up the objects of matter that you and I are made of.

There are basically only three kinds of matter particles and three forces that you and I are made up of. Protons and neutrons, which make up the nucleus of atoms, and orbiting electrons, are the three matter particles. Then there are the three forces in the Standard Model: the strong and the weak nuclear force and electromagnetism. The strong force binds the nucleus of atoms together (and the quarks that make up protons and neutrons), the weak force allows interaction with neutrinos and are carried by W and Z bosons, and electromagnetism binds electrons with the nucleus.

Then there's gravity, for which we use the General Theory of Relativity to describe. Gravity is a very weak force and is very simple: everything pulls on everything else. It could be said that gravity isn't really a force per se, but is rather the curvature of spacetime. Regardless, it's just easier to describe it as a force. There are two other generations of fermions but they decay rather quickly and aren't particularly relevant for describing the stuff that you and I are made of and interact with.

So that makes up everything you experience in your everyday lives, without exception. When we combine all this knowledge into a single theory, we get what is called Core Theory. It was developed and named by Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek. And there's an equation that describes Core Theory:


Within this equation lies the physics of everyday human experience: eating, exercising, sleeping, dreaming, using a computer, driving a car, flying an airplane, reproducing, making decisions, meditating — everything you've ever done, ever seen, or ever will do (so long as you don't travel into a black hole), and every scientific experiment that has been performed is fundamentally described by, and compatible with, this equation. There are no exceptions.

The key word above is fundamentally. That means that whatever you experience yourself doing or seeing in your everyday life is going to be either reduced to and explained by, or emerges from, the fermions and bosons described by this equation. But this means there are consequences to this equation. As all-encompassing as Core Theory is, what it restricts is perhaps the most important.

One of its consequences is that psychic phenomena like telekinesis is ruled out. There are no forces or particles that your mind can produce that can bend spoons or move objects. In other words, we don't need to test the claims of every self-proclaimed psychic and mentalist. Core Theory unambiguously rules out such abilities. There's no way for there to be forces that can produce the kinds of effects mentalists claim they can cause. There's no room with in Core Theory to allow that. It isn't that we don't know of possible forces that might still exist "out there" waiting to be discovered that can allow spoon bending with one's mind, rather it's that we know all the relevant particles and forces and how they interact that are involved with the physics of everyday human experience, which telekinesis would be a part of. Any new force or particle that exists would be far too weakly interacting with the atoms that make up spoons or you and I to be able to effect them in any way like the mentalists claim they can do. This is why no psychic phenomena has ever been able to be demonstrated under any competent scientific scrutiny.

Monday, December 26, 2016

Watch PBS Space Time


I'm a big fan of the PBS Digital Studios series Space Time. If you're a physics geek like me you catch pretty much every episode that's come out. And if you aren't, you should. The series covers the numerous areas of physics from classical mechanics, to special and general relativity, to quantum mechanics and its various interpretations. Some episodes get a little deep into the equations, but that's the good part. It's fun to challenge yourself a bit. It's a great educational video series. This episode covers a bit of special relativity, which is my favorite scientific theory. Watch it. Enjoy. Get addicted.

A Critique Of "Why I Am Not an Atheist Anymore"


I came across a recent blog post called Why I Am Not an Atheist Anymore and I decided to write a critique of it here since the site it's on doesn't allow comments. It's interesting to see where and how an atheist becomes convinced that god exists. Since I've written before on Why I'm An Atheist and I know the arguments for and against god very well, I can see where this post goes wrong. What I'm going to do is just take certain quotes from the piece and offer my thoughts and criticisms, exactly as if I was leaving a comment. So here we go. It starts out with criticism of atheists themselves:

One of the first things that bothered me about Atheists is how they would often act like they had proven something, when all they can and have ever done is try to do dismantle arguments and discredit evidence for Theism. A classic question is, ‘What proof or evidence can one give for Atheism?’. Seriously, try to think of one and you’ll be stuck.

I can think of one. It's not true that you can't prove a negative, although most people don't realize this. There is at least one way to prove a negative: demonstrate that the idea or thing is self-contradictory. I attempted to do just that in my piece Why I'm An Atheist with god. I don't think god is a fully coherent concept. Not many atheists are aware of such an argument. But an atheist is just someone who at the bare minimum lacks belief in any gods. It's what I call "bare minimum atheism." Once you meet that classification, you're an atheist. So an atheist doesn't have to prove god doesn't exist. An atheist merely has to say at a bare minimum, "The existence of god is unlikely, so I'm willing to say I don't believe in god," whereas the agnostic says, "I have no idea if god exists. It is unknowable." In other words, atheism is a claim to belief, agnosticism is a claim to knowledge.

As Neil Degrasse Tyson said, “There is no Anti-Golf… why is there Anti-God?” He’s an agnostic, which is really what most Atheists really mean when they say they don’t believe in God.

No, Tyson is technically an atheist, not an agnostic. Tyson has repeatedly said he remains "unconvinced" there is any god, and lacking belief in a god is the very definition of an atheist. He calls himself an agnostic but that's because he doesn't like the label "atheist" due to its perceived negative connotations. You see, agnostics are actually atheists. Since agnostics do not positively believe in a god, they lack belief, and lacking belief in a god is atheism. Agnosticism is really a form of weak atheism. See Agnosticism vs Atheism for more information and this scale of belief:


Saturday, December 3, 2016

If You Believe In A Soul That Gives You Free Will, I Have Some Questions For You



I'm going to be writing an argument that uses core theory to argue against free will, souls, and for materialism. In the mean time, here are some prerequisite questions to the person who would attempt to deny physics has any ability to give us decisive answers to questions about free will and the existence of souls and who thinks these things exist beyond science.

1. If we have a soul, and that soul gives us free will, wouldn't it have to be the case that this soul has a force that has a causal effect on the physical matter that makes up your body that overrides the existing natural forces known in physics? Yes or no? 
2. If yes, that soul-force is either accounted for in the laws of physics or it is not, true or false? 
3. If it is accounted for, where in the equations of physics is this found? 
4. If it isn't, then where is the evidence of a 5th force overriding the natural forces governing your body? This should have been discovered since this 5th force must be affecting the atoms in your body every second you exercise free will and make a choice. 
5. If this force is not part of the existing forces, wouldn't it be injecting new energy into the universe violating the law of the conservation of energy? Yes or no? If no, why not?

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