I read the first 15-20 Posts to this Thread & never saw the equations claimed to exist. I do not intend to read the rest of the Posts, but am curious. Has any one read a Post which includes the equations. Is there a link to the equations? I strongly suspect that the Poster who claimed existence of said equations was lying & such equations either do not exist or are so silly that advocates are unwilling to Post them.
The individual who started that thread was banned for being a sock of another banned individual. He hadn't posted the "equations" or explained how they "proved" the existence of God when he disappeared for good. I personally think that the first few pages of that thread were troubled by what appeared to me to be psychiatric illness and consisted of little besides bullshit. Then the thread was dominated by Spellbound and his weirdness for a while. At that point it became interesting for a few pages as Sarkus and others argued with Write4U about mathematics, reality and Tegmark's Platonic metaphysics. At about Post #500, Jan Ardena became the center of attention and the thread went off the rails again.
That's a good point. Since the OP is banned, the premise that there is proof of God by equations has been taken off the table. IMO, the thread should be closed. Someone could always start a new thread, with a new assertion.
Quantum Physics makes no beliefs or assumptions. So until we perceive each other we cannot be absolutely sure that everyone else exists or is conscious. Yet, we may assume that everyone else exists or is conscious. Only they would know. So the consciousness itself must be the one. Thus all conscious beings are one conscious being living in parallel.
Sure, because mental constructions do not think. But the people who do quantum physics have a lot of beliefs and make a lot of assumptions. Without some serious assumptions, there can be no quantum physics. I'm not saying that these assumptions are unwarranted, but it is not helpful at all to ignore the assumptions that go into scientific endeavors. Well, that's a bad argument. First, we can be pretty sure that the people around us are conscious. Second, just because the different consciousnesses around us share a certain property does not mean that they share all properties and thus are the same thing.
Who said "prove"? Besides, it is foolish to say that we have no perception of people or of the actions that they take due to consciousness. After all, people use the word, "consciousness". I would prefer that people took drugs rather than tried to get a giddy feeling from thinking of things that are "deep".
The question of whether everybody else in the world (but me) is conscious is a purely philospohical one. Its veracity or falsiness makes no material difference in how we go about our lives and try to learn about the universe around us. Whether the world around us, and the people in it, are objectively real or part of some elaborate dream does not change the fact that, by defintion, all we can reflect upon is what we perceive. If it troubles anyone, simply assume that every sentence you speak is preceded (implicitly!) by "I perceive with my senses that..." We build a model of the world. Things that are inconsistent (for some of us, that's God) are weak models, and therefore are of little use in helping us build that model. The model I have built works extremely well if I assume that other beings like me also have thought processes like me. It would take a lot more rationalization - and raise more questions than it would answer - for me to build a world wherein I am the only conscious being. So, the conclusion - that we are all conscious - is a purely pragmatic one. I wouldn't get a lot done sitting on the ground in the middle of a (fictional) courtyard gibbering to myself about the strange moving shapes and intricate sounds that my eyes and ears fool me into thinking are all around me.
Proving God's existence is like knowing everything already. You have to seek, explore and discover. You are not born knowing it.
This is clearly false, since it has a wide range of applications. What you mean by "purely philosophical" is that you have answered the question to your standards, so you are going to use this opportunity to disparage philosophy and others who consider the question in a manner other than you do.
What has a wide range of applications? And how does the usage make the notion DaveC put forth false, especially if those applications are merely extending the pragmatic position?
On the contrary it does. For example it postulates that for every observable there is a corresponding Hermitian operator. And that the state of a system is completely described by a mathematical entity called its state function, or wave function. These are assumptions on which the whole of QM rests. There are some others too, but they are more detailed and mean less to a layman.
Whether or not the beings around us have consciousness should have a lot to do with how we treat these beings. I consider that a wide set of applications that are not "purely philosophical" because they are part of our everyday lives.
OK well, you're talking about something very different. I'd appreciate it next time if you didn't vent spleen when you have a different viewpoint.
DaveC, I think he is still misunderstanding your point: PhysBang's comments merely confirm your same view, that it is purely a matter of what we perceive that determines our actions: we perceive them as being conscious and thus we treat them as though they are. But how we perceive them does not necessarily correlate with the actuality - which is your point, DaveC - that the actuality of whether others are conscious is indeed a purely philosophical matter. We can only go by what we perceive: we perceive them as being conscious (irrespective of whether they are or not) and thus treat them as though they are.
I would appreciate if you didn't equate "purely philosophical" with "of no consequence". I would also appreciate it if you wouldn't simply say that something was not worth considering just because you happened to have an opinion on the matter. I would also appreciate it is you don't try to dismiss every time someone points out your error as "venting spleen". I understand that you are defensive about being shown to be wrong, but your attitude does not help.
We're talking about people here. I don't know what you're talking about, unless you're alluding to sociopathy. Please stay on-topic. I didn't. So that's twice you've re-interpreted my words. You've done your credibility a great disservice. 1 ] You declare that there is a Wrong in such a discussion, whereas you believe you have the Right answer. 2] You mention being defensive, yet it was my contribution that was impersonal and directed at no one, whereas yours was a direct counterattack, as if you invented philosophy and needed to defend it. You've directly contradicted yourself with your comment about
He's made it pretty clear he objects to other viewpoints. He had a knee-jerk reaction to a perceived sleight about philosophy, and only saw red after that. That's OK; he's only one of many voices in this discussion. As you said, we learn more about our world by assuming everyone else is as conscious as we are. In the same way, we proceed as if we are not brains in a vat, or programs in a simulation. Society would proceed at a snail's pace if, everytime we communicated with someone, we had to ask if their words were merely the product of a complex chatbot.
I have yet to find any definition of this " god " . Define what god actually entails. Is this god female or male ? Does it matter? If so why ? Is this god real ; and if so in what way ? Many questions
