Reading Philosophy

Maybe i will soon

The webpage I referred you to has papers you can access for free. It's free!:)

What comes around goes around.

I often think about schrodingers cat. While we tie ourselves in knots over the possibility matrix within the box the cat probably looks around itself curiously before dying from a decaying atom triggering a fatal gas attack.

Cats are not by definition intelligent, lucky aren't they, they never wonder whether they exist or not.

I thinks therefore I is

I have something to say here. There are some things that I think your misunderstanding. The magic your refering to is actually spelled magik and not magic. The first is accomplished by slight of hand, and the second is accomplished by the simple act of entering a partnership with the energy that exists all around us.

Science in some of it's most basic statements when dealing with quantum mechanics is that all matter and all energy exist. Unless quantum mechanics is no longer built upon other scientific building blocks.

The notion that comes with all religions, and science is the modern day religion that demands that everything be brought under it's scrutiany to be declared valid or invalid, just as the church did just a few centuries ago, is that unless it can be done according to the model that is trying to be proved or disproved and have physical evidence that can be accomplished by doing the same experiement a thousand times, and it is then deemed that it has a high probablity of repeating itself a thouand and one times, it isn't real.

I think you need to watch the movie again and try listening this time.

This movie states plainly that we multi dimensional, and that we don't really understand what drives us, or the possiblities that we are capable of.
It stated that our emotions are chemically based, and they are, so what defines truth about what we feel.
It was saying that we don't really know who we are in truth.

The wonderment of quantium mechanics is that it tells science that more than just what you see with your eyes and can touch and measure is possible.

Leonardo Da Vinci was right. The only way to understand anything is to see the whole, not just the working parts but the whole.
Science and faith or belief or magic or what every you can't explain with a test tube or a beaker or a measuring stick.
Science can't explain the soul.
Does that mean that we are simply biomechanical computer programs wandering around doing stupid things and wonderful things too?

To understand anything about who we are, you have to look at what science can understand and explain and pare it with what belief and practice of that belief can understand and explain and see what it shows you.
The picture comes in a whole lot better if you have all the peices.

Try watching it again, and try listening with the same kind of wonderment that opened the doors of what if possiblities for many of the great minds through human history.

Magic has always been about unexplainable events. As you said yourself, many things which were thought to be magic have been proven to be explainable events thanks to Quantum Theory.

The behavior in Quantum Theory is very much unlike the macro world that has already been said, though I see what you imply when you say that it works in a way much like we would have described 'magic' to work in the days of superstition.

There is a tremendous amount of knowledge yet to accumulate, and by tremendous, I mean a grain of sand on one of the endless beaches on this planet. Quantum Theory, in fact, says very little other than that the behavior of particles on a small scale is very probabilistic and can only be 'guessed' as to where a given particle is at any particular moment with varying probability. Though in a sense, this is not much different than the macro-scale physics theory which says that when you throw a ball up, it must come down. The only difference is that one is far easier to predict.

Though, what is the connection? Why does behavior change when scale changes? The evidence suggests that the only difference is frequency. That is to say, if you flip a coin once, what is the probability it will be 100% tails? You have fairly good odds of having 100% tails. However, if you flip the coin 1,000,000 times and ask the same question, how much less likely are you that you will receive 100% tails? The case is virtually impossible, though not impossible.

Apply that now to a single electron. The chance that a single electron will disappear and reappear 10 meters away is not so unlikely. Now imagine you have all the atoms required to create a glass cue ball and apply the same logic, only this time you're not dealing with a single electron but millions of millions of atoms. What is the probability that that glass cue ball will disappear and reappear 10 meters away?

The answer: Virtually impossible, but not impossible. That is to say technically it is possible, though it has likely never happened in the existence of the universe in its entirety. That is the connection between the macro and micro world. Behavior gets normalized by exponential amounts so that you never see the really improbable cases but only the most frequent cases.

I'll give you another example. Take a glass of water. If you take that glass of water and throw it to the ground, you'd expect it to shatter, wouldn't you? The reality is that you throw a multi-faceted die in which the side which turns up is the state the glass of water that will turn up as as a result of impact with the ground. There are almost an infinite ways in which that glass could shatter based on the direction and force of the glass hitting the ground, though technically, there exists also a handful of ways in which that same glass could bounce off the floor and not shatter at all. Therefore, when you roll the die, statistically you have incredibly high odds that the glass will shatter in some manner and incredibly low odds that it will not shatter at all. Therefore, the glass of water shatters.

If I were to drop that glass of water rather than throw it (less force), there become far more chances in which that glass of water will now shatter, therefore the odds that that glass of water will break is slightly lessened.

It's as if the reason why physical objects exist at all is because the chance of disappearing is incredibly improbable. The moment in which this probability wave fluctuates due to change is the moment in which you see objects change state, since it becomes incredibly improbable that the object would not change state under the application of force to an object (for example if I had hit a cue ball with my cue stick). Though again, Quantum Theory tells us everything is technically possible, albeit very unlikely.

Depends on your point of view, but I'd argue everything in science has its own sense of wonder that I find rather magical. Just because we can predict behavior with a theory doesn't make it any less fascinating for me. So in a sense, everything is magic.

If the world should blow itself up,the last audible voice would be an expert saying it can't be done

This post was edited by Hawkeye on Apr 09, 2008.

The only problem I have with either courses is that they are seperated by people into compartments.
While science teaches that only what can be proved exists, phillosphy teaches that belief in the unseen is what is real.

If kept seperate, the two remain at odds. But when you put the two together, it changes everything.

There are things that quantum mechanics are showing science that it cannot deny.
That's why I do believe that Leonardo was right, and that's why I am very sure that the church which ended up orignally in possession of his work, distroyed about 75% of it.
Because his writings would have shown that the church is by no means the final authority on what is real or not real.
At that time the church, like the world of science today was the be all end all authority that existed.

We've done a flip of the coin, so to speak, and now science is the new religion that is the be all end all authority that exists.

Seems that the two disciplines cannot accept that they need each other to complete themselves.
And that I do think is what that movie was more about, that there are things that exist that cannot be explained simply by the scientific method.
That's where quantum mechanics comes in and says what about this?

Science and phillosophy are like the two sides of a pair of glasses or binocoluars, if you have just one half your view will be rather strange, but when you use both, you get a clear immage. That's what I have thought for a long time.

Your right about science having it's own wonderment, but on it's own it's limited and can only answer things so far.

Phillosophy can't accept many things that science teaches, because it has limited itself in so many ways as well.
Hence the war that exists between them.

Well I agree that science and religion go hand in hand, though I can see why so many would be black and white on the issue, favoring one or the other. In a sense, they're complete opposites, so naturally, to believe in both could be easily viewed as hypocritical.

Though in reality, science needs religion or else no scientist would ever hypothesize unless given direct empirical evidence first, and religion needs science to keep our minds grounded so to speak.

Even though science is the new religion, I'm going to stick by my personal belief that even if science has yet to prove God exists I must realize that one devoted to science would never admit God no matter what empirical evidence you threw at him, as the concept of a god existing is by definition against what science has taught us. Doesn't mean He doesn't exist. Rather, perhaps the only reason science exists at all is because of the world created by a just and reasonable god.

If the world should blow itself up,the last audible voice would be an expert saying it can't be done