i cant believe i'm writing on a religious subject however it crossed my mind so i'm sharing it for the benefit of others. the question of whether humans have free will is a very old one for the Christian community. Theologians might say humans have free will because God wanted it that way - you know you can choose good or evil & God will treat you accordingly.
but smart people have a problem with that. Assuming God is all-knowing & all powerful , then you dont have free-will afterall. you see Newton and Galileo, hundreds of years ago, discovered that all matter is composed of atoms & the universe runs on very predictable rules. soon it dawned on Newton that if God created the universe & He gave the initial atoms there position & momentum, then he could predict their future movements until the end of time. Hence when God set the initial conditions of the universe(perhaps at the big bang), then He was dictating every action that was to take place until the end of time. So we dont have a choice? this was a problem for Newton & Galileo cuz they lived in medieval Europe & if they did not believe in God then they would be roasted along with their chestnuts in an open fire!
Fortunately for us, modern science has provided us with a way out of that dilemma. When quantum mechanics came along in the 1920 & 1930s it was discovered that the real world at the smallest of distances is probablistic. One cant know both the position and the momentum of a particle at the same time. when you measure your take your pick. before you measure, its not a particle at all but a probablistic wave. So there you have it: God couldnt know the outcome of his initial actions, only the probability of each of an enormous number of possible outcomes.
Can God still be all knowing? Sure, if He exists in every place & time then He already knows the future, He's been there or is there in addition to being here, take your pick.
all-knowing, all powerful,yes but Einstein was wrong, God does roll dice.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Sunday, January 10, 2010
politics & the Prefrontal cortex
in my recent study of neurobiology i learned that the prefrontal cortex is primarily what distinguishs humans from other animals. well, bipedalism helps cuz we can carry a child or food in our arms while running great distances, and the opposable thumb & manual dexterity helps cuz we can sew a thread, throw an spear or text on our blackberry. but i think the PFC is most important cuz with that we calculate and use logic & can therefore make superior decisions.
When a child sits & does his geometry homework he is using his PFC. but i learned from a wonderful book, "the Science of Fear" by Dan Gardner that we don't make most of our decisions that way - in fact i would say normally we rarely use it!
when you are walking down a path in the outback & you detect a "wiggle" in the path in front of you, you jump, fast! deep in your brain, memory recognized a snake & you moved long before your pfc deliberated 'what was that' same if while while on that path you detected the gleem of a preditors tooth in the bush, you acted! no pfc there. later at the campfire is time enough to reflect if it was a cat or a bear or a moose. we learned this a million years ago & we still do most of our thinking that way. when you're are driving a car on the freeway & the car in front of you has a blowout... you get the picture. but our pfc enables us to build a skyscraper or buy a stock.
well the before mentioned book discribes how we all make bad decisions by doing it the way we did 100,000 years ago instead of thinking rationally. example. we spent a trillion dollars on security cuz 3000 people died in 09/11 when 40000 Americans die each year in their cars.
we are all worried about the underwear bomber who might have killed 2 or 3 hundred people but we dont get our flu shot which also kills 50000people every season. in other words our decisions are not made rationally based on actual risks but emotionally base on fear.
which brings me to my satire of the day. you can tell Republicans from Democrats based on there brain mri alone. The Repubs are the ones whose MRI shows no activity in the pre-frontal cortex.
When a child sits & does his geometry homework he is using his PFC. but i learned from a wonderful book, "the Science of Fear" by Dan Gardner that we don't make most of our decisions that way - in fact i would say normally we rarely use it!
when you are walking down a path in the outback & you detect a "wiggle" in the path in front of you, you jump, fast! deep in your brain, memory recognized a snake & you moved long before your pfc deliberated 'what was that' same if while while on that path you detected the gleem of a preditors tooth in the bush, you acted! no pfc there. later at the campfire is time enough to reflect if it was a cat or a bear or a moose. we learned this a million years ago & we still do most of our thinking that way. when you're are driving a car on the freeway & the car in front of you has a blowout... you get the picture. but our pfc enables us to build a skyscraper or buy a stock.
well the before mentioned book discribes how we all make bad decisions by doing it the way we did 100,000 years ago instead of thinking rationally. example. we spent a trillion dollars on security cuz 3000 people died in 09/11 when 40000 Americans die each year in their cars.
we are all worried about the underwear bomber who might have killed 2 or 3 hundred people but we dont get our flu shot which also kills 50000people every season. in other words our decisions are not made rationally based on actual risks but emotionally base on fear.
which brings me to my satire of the day. you can tell Republicans from Democrats based on there brain mri alone. The Repubs are the ones whose MRI shows no activity in the pre-frontal cortex.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
1st blog
there are 2 areas of intellectual curiousity which i wish to pursue. one is the nature of physical reality. its substance. what is it? what does it consist of? The 2nd is the nature of consciousness. its substance or what does it consist of? (i realise English dictates 'of what does it consist', but that is awkward .
the first problem is pretty much solved by physicists. i would say 95 % solved. i have books that can give a good answer in lay terms. for a mathmatical understanding one needs a degree in math & a few years of post grad studies
as to the 2nd question, the fabric of consciousness, very little is known. i have read a half-dozen books on neuroscience & all they know is what neurons fire under what situations. now there is research out on what glia do, the other 85% of brain tissue. what they do when they are excited and working. and i have heard lectures on the nature of consciousness, but they merely provide discriptions of normal or abnormal behavior & perhaps which neurons are involved.
you see everything that is physical in this world is either matter or energy (actually the matter can be said as deduced from the energy) or the fabric of space-time and as energy is produced by randon fluxations of the space-time continuum (see relativity & quantum mechanics), then reality is merely the hologram produced by warping if space-time.
There, we know what phycical reality is but that is not what consciousness consist of, so what is it? Any thoughts?
the first problem is pretty much solved by physicists. i would say 95 % solved. i have books that can give a good answer in lay terms. for a mathmatical understanding one needs a degree in math & a few years of post grad studies
as to the 2nd question, the fabric of consciousness, very little is known. i have read a half-dozen books on neuroscience & all they know is what neurons fire under what situations. now there is research out on what glia do, the other 85% of brain tissue. what they do when they are excited and working. and i have heard lectures on the nature of consciousness, but they merely provide discriptions of normal or abnormal behavior & perhaps which neurons are involved.
you see everything that is physical in this world is either matter or energy (actually the matter can be said as deduced from the energy) or the fabric of space-time and as energy is produced by randon fluxations of the space-time continuum (see relativity & quantum mechanics), then reality is merely the hologram produced by warping if space-time.
There, we know what phycical reality is but that is not what consciousness consist of, so what is it? Any thoughts?
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