And since its not obviously impossible on any a priori grounds, the matter is to be decided on empirical ones: we look to see if there is any evidence of such causal interactions between God and the observable world (and, finding such evidence to be lacking, decrease our confidence in the truth/probability of theism accordingly). — Seppo

Maybe God shows itself by means of the hidden variables in quantum mechanics.
It's impossible to check all that is happening in the universe. The heavenly happenings are too faraway. Who says they don't show themselves up there? Maybe they show themselves in the shapes of clouds... Or maybe they don't show themselves at all.

Where does the "you" part come in that you were mentioning? — Garrett Travers

Like I said, the you and me are the bodies in between.

You shape the appearance of the outside world? In what manner? You make things change form, color? Telekinesis? Lou Kang style fire balls? Petronus charms? What are we talking about here? — Garrett Travers

No. The brain just shapes the sensory perceptions. Colors, shapes, sounds, motions, etc. The perceptions can also appear on their own, say in thoughts or dreams.

Sorry, I don't remember where I saw that, but photons already seem to get emitted and absorbed without traveling in between — PoeticUniverse

Yes. Photons act instantaneously. Because they have finite velocity though, nothing can happen at once or at the same place. Newton thought action was instantaneous. But this would imply that everything happens at once. Which is prevented by a finite light speed.

No, your brain controls the entire body you see in the mirror. In fact, that which you are seeing in the mirror, is quite literally the sum total of all of your action and thought right then and there. All of which is controlled by the brain. — Garrett Travers

Yes, but I only use these functions. If you consider yourself to be your body, I just exist between the brain and the outside world. The outside world is projected into the brain inside (via the sensory organs) me and the brain actively shapes its appearance.

If the sum total of all your thought and action do not constitute you, then what possibly can? — Garrett Travers

The one I see in the mirror. I operate between my brain and the world.

Then perhaps you are lost? — Banno

Indeed. In between. But that's in the eyes of the beholder only. I dance freely between my brain and the world and thank god that my heart still beats, my dreams still dream, my thoughts still think, and the ground beneath my feet is solid.

Apologies, no idea what you were saying - when 'spacetime' enters a reply I generally experience a collapse of my wave function.. — Tom Storm

Space is exactly what Kant was wrong about. There don't exist left and right handed gloves in an infinite empty space. And they certainly are not the same as he assumes. Space is an objective phainomenon. We are the noumena in it. Wiggling through half lit shadows, trying to balance in vain, and fighting the great Noun to no avail...

I between...

As far as I can see it, the pornography of Tegmark is a perversion. There cannot be copies of you and me because the universe is finite. The closed propagators before inflation contained elementary particles that were in a superposition of all energies and 3-momenta up to the Planck energy, not on mass shell (that's what virtual means). Just like closed photon or electron propagators can be turned into real particles by real electron-positron pairs (pair annihilation), resp. by photon pairs (positron-electron creation), the virtual gauge bubbles and fermion bubbles can get realized by inflation, somewhat reminiscent to the realization of particles in the production of Hawking radiation (though there are negative energies excited to reduce the mass inside of the hole, and these negative energies are not involved here). Cornwell1 seems a fair pornography director.

Except that I consider the neuron processes as well as the processes around me as not being part of me. I have a relation to them but they don't constitute me. The brain world has the same relation to me as the physical world. I can think about the stars or see them.

it's the outside world that the brain is computing data from data presented to it that goes by-by forever, because the brain computing the outside world has been damaged. — Garrett Travers

The brain contains an inside version of the outside world. If the Sun goes red giant your outside world is destroyed. You can't life in it anymore. The brain doesn't compute. Outside physical structures can run around analogous on the neuron network. Space is the medium for physical processes, the neural network for the analogue process. For all physical processes there is a possible process on your neuron network. The number of paths the currents in your brain can run is enormous: about 10exp(10exp20)! A 1 followed by 10exp20 zeroes...

I'm a chicken!

The modern world is not suited for new chickens. I think all chickens should take that into consideration. One egg to breed max! Until people are re-educated.

I don't deny the inside world can get damaged. So can the outside physical world. Just send a huge bubble of wind or water through your house.

Damned! You tell with poetry here something physicists need pages of math for! 5000 calculations were needed to arrive at the simple fact that the black hole interiors radiate their inside information to the outside. Photons will be all that's left! Accelerating into oblivion, a "lucid memoryvof massive past"...

You" are your brain — Garrett Travers

You have a brain, like you have a physical world to live in. You function, walk, do your things, between the world outside and the world inside, which you always carry along with you.

If particles are conscious, I guess that takes care of the observer effect, and physicalism is back on steady ground! Hmmm, maybe there's something to this panpsychism after all ... — Real Gone Cat

Particles love and hate but are shy. Under the save wings of the wavefunction, beneath the hidden variables constituting space, they jump around non-locally. Interacting them forces them to be in a region of space. Without interacting, without a love or hate to answer to they get lost all over space... So yes, it solves the observer effect...

THE NEAR DECLINE OF PHYSICS
DUE TO ITS UNDRESSED TERMS

The quarks, those constituents of the orgy
Playfully bound within the nucleons’ chamber
Are named up, down, strange, charm, bottom and top,
The last two once being called beauty, and truth;

However, when just one of a type was contained
It became referred to, say, as a naked beauty,
And thus nude tops & bottoms their charms revealed—
To ever be in closeness binding, and bonding,

So they even tried just u, d, s, c, b, and t
To prevent some ultimate collapse of physics,
But the truth of the flavors beneath the veils
Remained as the sheerest vision preferred.

So we have these vibrant dancing ladies:
The naked heavyweight top, charming up,
Down, the strange beauty of the raw truth,
And a bare bottom just around and behind.

They gyrate, spinning their charms, twirling
In the universal dance of stunning motion,
The polarity sometimes reversed,
Whirling, their bottoms up and tops down.

And then there are Eden’s many colors,
In this flower garden filled with flavors,
Such as red bottom beauties, blue tops,
And magenta undulations unstopped.

Gluons are the bees of the flower beds,
Carrying pollen back and forth to bond
The many relationships that make
This loved world go ‘round as reality.

Eyed in views that probe the fundamental,
Quarks strangely swirl in and out of sight,
Pulsing, throbbing with elemental delight,
Back and forth—the love-made life of eternity.

These attractions in the altogether denuded
In the buff became the strong force manifest
That these mother-nature-naked terms exposed
To denote the stark beauty of truth — PoeticUniverse

Ha! This is great! Without mushrooms you wrote that up?
The bare bottom...

https://gurushots.com/photo/da4141cfb9957d910dacfff7d44e5d20

https://gurushots.com/photo/21f9290d46c26bba1e8dbc4caf54b2a0

and the other anti-natalists are misfits. They were never going to have children with or without the justifications provided by philosophy. Anti-natalism is just the rationalization that people who don't belong use to dignify their misanthropy. — T Clark

The female species loves me. I'm a good-looking guy. Talkative body. Burning brains. The mere thought of putting children in this world is a frightening one. Poor children! No normal future ahead of them. Prone to depression and nuclear destruction. Forced to play the materialistic capitalistic game. I have all it takes to procreate beautiful children (some girls told me they never saw a more good looking bloke, "le mec plus beau du monde"...), provided with the brains to turn all they touch into gold. But I refuse...

An elementary particle is a phainomenon. Understanding how it is to be one a noumenon. We can describe how it interacts with other particles in spacetime, as a phainomenon, but the particle an Sich can only be known as a noumenon.


I think Kant means something along the following lines. If you put yourself in a particle's shoes it depends on the particles around you how you feel, and basically there is the feeling of to be with them or not to be with them (that's the question...). At the most fundamental level, massless charges feel so attracted by each other that they only can exist in massive triplets, which can have color and electric charge. The further colored triplets (quarks) are apart, the stronger they feel one another pull. Colorless states like protons, neutrons, electrons, and neutrinos are formed. An electron (a triplet of massless particles feeling hyperbolically attracted) has a will, a primordial consciousness, to be with, say, a proton. They reach out to other charged particles, and reaches out to an oppositely charged proton because it wants to be together with it. But how does that feel? An electron feels pure love for the proton and pure hate for another electron. The latter interaction mixes up the identities of both electrons. What love is supposed to do is actually achieved by hate on the fundamental level!
So fundamentally there are love and hate only. Without further embellishments. Love and hate defined as longing to be or not longing to be with other particles. There is no deeper reason for this primordial love affairs. You can describe them by in physical terms, like charge, emission and absorption of virtual particles in spacetime, but in doing so you don't really understand the nature of the fundamental states of (love) affairs. Two oppositely electrically charged particles literally feel attracted. They run towards each other but can't kiss as they combine in a neutral state in which they get close but never touch (real touching is achieved in the depths of black holes, but as soon as zillions of particles kiss simultaneously they get annihilated by negative energy particles, negative love, that is, so the perfect kiss only lasts the blink of an eye...).
The electron hops around the proton nervously, longing for the kiss. The proton watches amused and realizes he needs the electron just as much as she needs him. Only interference by other charges outside can end their happy relation. A rapid evil expansion of the space between them has the same disastrous consequence. So even if one happy pair has survived all universal turmoil, the evil expansion, speeding up and up, will break them up eventually. But... an electron and three quarks (uud) contain unequal amounts of matter and antimatter, so luckily for the electron and proton, this only happens in fairy tales with no happy ending. Imagine a single lonely electron looking for a lonely single proton in a vast inflating space... Reaching out in vain...

So what can we learn from this? Love is a noumenal entity, the expression and description by means of spacetime, charge, mediating fields, etcetera, the phainomenon counterpart. The phainomenon cannot be used to explain the noumenon. Matter cannot explain consciousness.

Glad you like it! Most people consider it nonsense, but if you actually know the physics it makes even more sense! It's fun and gives reality a content that's lacking in most theoretical models in physics. :wink:

Who are Strawson and Goff? Physicists?

I think she means something along the following lines. If you put yourself in a particle's shoes it depends on the particles around you how you feel, and basically there is the feeling of to be with them or not to be with them (that's the question...). At the most fundamental level, massless charges feel so attracted by each other that they only can exist in massive triplets, which can have color and electric charge. The further colored triplets (quarks) are apart, the stronger they feel one another pull. Colorless states like protons, neutrons, electrons, and neutrinos are formed. An electron (a triplet of massless particles feeling hyperbolically attracted) has a will, a primordial consciousness, to be with, say, a proton. They reach out to other charged particles, and reaches out to an oppositely charged proton because it wants to be together with it. But how does that feel? An electron feels pure love for the proton and pure hate for another electron. The latter interaction mixes up the identities of both electrons. What love is supposed to do is actually achieved by hate on the fundamental level!
So fundamentally there are love and hate only. Without further embellishments. Love and hate defined as longing to be or not longing to be with other particles. There is no deeper reason for this primordial love affairs. You can describe them by in physical terms, like charge, emission and absorption of virtual particles in spacetime, but in doing so you don't really understand the nature of the fundamental states of (love) affairs. Two oppositely electrically charged particles literally feel attracted. They run towards each other but can't kiss as they combine in a neutral state in which they get close but never touch (real touching is achieved in the depths of black holes, but as soon as zillions of particles kiss simultaneously they get annihilated by negative energy particles, negative love, that is, so the perfect kiss only lasts the blink of an eye...).
The electron hops around the proton nervously, longing for the kiss. The proton watches amused and realizes he needs the electron just as much as she needs him. Only interference by other charges outside can end their happy relation. A rapid evil expansion of the space between them has the same disastrous consequence. So even if one happy pair has survived all universal turmoil, the evil expansion, speeding up and up, will break them up eventually. But... an electron and three quarks (uud) contain unequal amounts of matter and antimatter, so luckily for the electron and proton, this only happens in fairy tales with no happy ending. Imagine a single lonely electron looking for a lonely single proton in a vast inflating space... Reaching out in vain...

Israel killing=serial killing=serial lilking... It's all in the name...

I don't get it. They do the same to Palestinians as what was done to their antecedents in nazi Germany, so it seems.

Of course, you could argue that we created these technologies — L'éléphant

And that's supposed to be a sign of intelligence? Why not call that stupidity?

From the third article:

"Over the past two decades, neuroscientists have increasingly turned their attention to the question of how the brain implements decisions between differently valued options. This emerging field, called neuroeconomics, has made quick progress in identifying a plethora of brain areas that track or are modulated by reward value."

This applies to dogs maybe. Obey the master and get a reward. Not to humans.

Nevertheless, interesting.

After a few days, the field around the corner at the end of the street got engraved into the brain of our dog. She knows a lot of its peculiarities. If I'm on the phone, she wants me to pay attention. She barks with crying voice. There is a continuous interacting between parallel incoming processes, via eyes and ears, and these processes running around in her brain. She sees her favorite treetrunk, the image falls in the memory trail it made earlier (strengthened connection between the neurons involved in earlier playing), she recognizes it, she remembers she can play with it (bite in it, carry it away, make me run after her...), and wants to run to it. It is time to go home though... I constrain her will. The processes in our brains never stop. If we dream neurons fire faster than in wake state. Same experience takes less time.

I'm sorry, dude — Garrett Travers

Don't be sorry... I know what I'm talking about,...dude.

but it is informed by memory, sensory receptive field expansion — Garrett Travers

Here I disagree. Memories are just patterns of broadened synapses (connection strengths). Most thoughts follow these patterns, like all brain activities. There is a constant parallel sensory input, the world is projected into our brain world, but we can't control the new thoughts, though we can influence them. I don't consider my brain part of me, though useful.

Those internal voices are your voices — Garrett Travers

I don't think so. Just like the Moon isn't mine, neither are the thoughts I experience or the dreams I have. The inner world is as distant from me as the world around me.

I don't know what to say to this. — Garrett Travers

It's you who uses the brain. You can move yourself because of it, think thoughts and feel feelings, or perceive the world in sound and vision. It controls bodily functions for you, but how can you control a thought? You cannot think what you want, because the moment you know what you wanna think you already think it.

You will only jump into the fire if you see absolutely no alternative, then and only then, if you value your life. — Garrett Travers

If they push me I don't have a free will. Likewise, I can be obsessed by internal voices who make me do things against my will. If I jump but don't want to it's by definition against my free will.

It's the same as someone forcing me. I don't want to jump in the fire, but if they make, there is little I can do. They can be them or myself. I jump against my will without any need to demonstrate, as you claim I do.

Particles' are directly field quanta, so they move along the fields like kinks in a rope. — PoeticUniverse

But the you presume them to be in some state. A kink in a rope has defined positions.

And in which case you will not be oppressing your will, but fulfilling it. — Garrett Travers

Of course not. If I want to go left and force myself not to go left but go right, I fulfill my free will-not. I don't want to go right. I go though. The fact that I go right doesn't mean I want to.

And where as thought and action are controlled by the brain — Garrett Travers

The brain controls nothing. Thoughts just appear. You can't control your thoughts.

No, you can't — Garrett Travers

If I want to go left I can say no and go right. I can even build a wall to keep myself from entering left in my noctambule nights.

Because quantum fields are Fundamental. — PoeticUniverse

The fields operate in spacetime, as far as I know. They don't constitute spacetime, as far as I can see. Particles move in spacetime, don't they?

Um... Anyone who understands how the physical phenomenon of lightning works? — Seppo

Exactly!

The reason we avoid death is because of our selfish genes, same reason we reproduce — Down The Rabbit Hole

Are we ordered by our selfish genes? I think it's the other way round.