found it afterwards, mate. Just totally in love with her line style. [quote=“Mankoi, post:18, topic:100042, full:true”]
Not that it matters. What he does to prove you wrong isn’t any worse than what he was going to do to you anyway.
[/quote]
It really is the most refreshing, liberating faith that way. 
Behold our Lord, the Scientist
Who catechism would insist
That electrons and black holes exist
And scoff at those who would resist
Charmed nothingness given a negative spin
Or a hole so deep even time falls in
While on the other side the fence
Relying on uncommon sense
(Just, sadly, lacking evidence)
Are those who speak up in defense
Of Eckankar or the Orders Hermetic,
The Mystic Eye or Psycho cybernetics
But if you ask me how I feel
It’s that neither of these things are real
Not the Book of Lies nor the Word Made Steel
Like the blind man clutching an elephant’s nose
Disputes with another being crushed by it’s toes
Reality is more than we can suppose.
I love his work, but this sounds an awful lot like Chopra. Yeah, quantum physics can be super weird. However, at the level of consciousness - our nerve cells and their gradients, to simplify it hugely - it’s not relevant. Well, maybe we shouldn’t listen to an (admittedly brilliant) comic book author about biology.
He’s admittedly not the most articulate philosopher of science, but I don’t read him as arguing that we should integrate consciousness and subjectivity into science - rather that science, because it must exclude these things, is necessarily an incomplete picture of reality. His argument doesn’t really relate to science at all, but rather to the metaphysical supposition that a scientific description of reality is a complete description of reality (ie materialism or naturalism).
Because he’s entertaining, and deeply weird. But I repeat myself.
He doesn’t. He only seems to be saying that studying consciousness from within our conscious selves is problematic.
He doesn’t reject science or the scientific method, rather he uses mysticism as a way of generating useful ideas about the world where science has yet to probe, which is a big part of the human experience. For example (FTA):
– I would say that the problem could be more sharply defined if we put aside contentious terms like ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’, and instead opted for the less vague but just as scientifically problematic term ‘meaning’. If by coming to know more about the historical or mythological aspects of the places in which we live we make those places more meaningful, to us at least, then I suggest that this will lead to experiencing ourselves as more meaningful in our new, illuminated context.
The big difference between ‘meaning’ and ‘a spirit’ is that where meaning is concerned, we have to do all the necessary hard work in order to invest that place or that person or that object with meaning, whereas spirits just sort of turn up, don’t they? I believe that our world is gloriously haunted with meaning; that it’s we ourselves that are doing the haunting; and that we should be doing more of it, or doing it more strenuously.
I’d like to see the experimtal setup for proving or disproving, say, String Theory. It’s called theoretical physics for a reason.
Seriously, this is one of the funniest things I have ever read. Especially the bit about beating up Satan for his lunch money.
I had forgotten about that! Thanks! I <3 S*P!
If you don’t regularly read the comic, you should. It’s great.
It’s both the webcomic that made me laugh the hardest (once literally making me fall off my chair laughing - granted, not a very good chair), and the one that made me cry the deepest.
There are physicists who do not agree with your statement, or at least aren’t as sure as you imply that “observation” and “consciousness” are unrelated in terms of wave function collapse (another thing we have a label for, but can’t actually describe in any way what it is). Dogma has always held science back, and the greatest discoveries are often made by people willing to push their hypotheses in uncomfortable directions that the scientific mainstream are unable/unwilling to explore. Shooting down hypotheses for things you can’t prove to be incorrect is about as scientific as praying to a statue of a guy hanging off a cross, as far as I’m concerned.
That’s very nice, but as he says, just as scientifically problematic. That doesn’t really help generate a useful hypothesis, nor does it help science in any meaningful way. The strength of science comes from being empirical, and objective. That makes it very, very good at dealing in objective facts, and all but worthless for dealing with meaning. So why talk about meaning in the context of science at all? It isn’t good at it, it’ll never be good at it, and frankly, it shouldn’t ever be good at it. That’s not what it’s for. Art and philosophy are for meaning. Hopefully they don’t ignore the objective facts of science, or misrepresent them in a search for meaning (as damn near any art that deals with quantum physics does), but they are the fields where we look for meaning. Trying to push that over into science is silly.
Hypothetically art and philosophy could bring up meaningful research questions, but when they do, scientists tend to go “Hey, that’s a neat idea, let’s try that!” But more often the questions art and philosophy raise are poor questions for science to tackle, and better questions for art and philosophy to tackle.
No, it’s pretty damn scientific, depending on how you mean it. If you mean “I can’t prove this incorrect right now” sure, it’s an issue. If it’s “This hypothesis is impossible to prove correct” then it’s a bad hypothesis. A scientific hypothesis must be falsifiable. Waveform collapse due to conscious observation is not falsifiable because, obviously, you can’t check if your non-conscious recording device had the same effect without becoming consciously aware of it.
That being said, there’s no reason to think consciousness effects quantum states. There’s no mechanism by which we propose it would happen. Anyone who studies consciousness will tell you there’s nothing special about it that we can find. It’s likely an emergent property of a complex network, and nothing more. Those of us who believe it even exists anyway.
So to sum up: We have no evidence that consciousness alters quantum states. We have no way to test the hypothesis. We have no mechanism of how it might work. There is no good reason to think consciousness causes collapse. Offering up the explanation that consciousness causes collapse answers no questions about collapse or consciousness, but raises a lot of problems by itself. Even the physicist who proposed it, John von Newman, decided he didn’t like it.
This isn’t dogma. It’s a bad hypothesis, not testable, and not supported by the evidence. If someone can fix that, great, we’ll consider it. Until then, there’s no good reason to move forward with this interpenetration. It’s just not useful.
Yeah, well, tell that to the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum theory, String Theory, all varieties of Multiverse Theory, and basically every current scientific theory of cosmogenesis.
That’s why there aren’t any Nobel Prize winners in string theory yet.
Well, let’s just agree to disagree.
Oh and for the record, last time I checked, the “hard problem” had not even come close to being solved. I am not aware of any scientist who has “explained consciousness,” maybe I missed something… You act like because we can see regions of brain activity under an MRI, we “understand” consciousness. Or because we invented a term “engram” we have actually explained memories. You also claim to not be sure consciousness exists. Empirically, I can tell you that it does. I for one do not think consciousness is “produced” by the brain, and I do think some of my wacky ideas will likely be testable by science, at some point. But again, let’s just agree to disagree. I’d argue that you are treating science more like a religion than a process, but what do I know.
Many worlds theory does have falsifiable assumptions, and lack of falsifiable is exactly the problem with string theory. It isn’t falsifiable, does not have falsifiable assumptions, and makes no falsifiable predictions. The reason anyone puts up with string theory at all is because it at least offers up an explanation. Consciousness causing collapse explains nothing, predicts nothing, and is an overall useless model.
Yeah, well, that’s just like your opinion, man.
