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Alan,
Please forgive me for stating what bothers me in your argument. It is not that you have made any mistakes. It is that your thinking is entirely based, it seems, on the relationships of words.
Logic without substance is not attractive. Your logic is fine. I am bothered by your premises.
For example, you say that Wolfram predicts that once scientists get to basic reality, I'm paraphrasing, it will all be very simple. Now you take his prediction and turn it into a premise and come to conclusions that at best are as good as the premise.
But Wolfram was uttering more like a hope than a prediction, because he offered no premises or logic to support his prediction. Gut feelings are fine, but they should not be elaborated on.
From my perspective, God or whatever has made the physical world, the only world scientists can experiment in, so elusive that theories in it are very complicated and contradictory. Why should quantum mechanics and General Relativity be so contradictory? The String Theory, or brane theory as it is now called, is so emmensely complicated that nobody can now claim to know it all. Loop quantum gravity (LQG) is as yet sufficiently simple that it seems that a few gifted scientists actually understand its whole: Ashtaker, Smolin, Rovelli, Theimann, Bojowald come to mind.
Yet science for them is not just words. They base that field on very well defined premises. Theimann in particular then proceeds with rigor whereas some of the others are more like modelers. But everything is derived with mathematics. The only use of words alone is to form hypotheses.
Smolin is the best example of the hypothesis approach. He says that lets suppose that black holes can create baby universes. This would replace the anthropic principle which is not falsifiable. His hypothesis is falsifiable in that if brown dwarfs are found above a certain mass threshold, then his hypothesis in incorrect.
That is not to say that the hypothesis has been proved to be correct. I am not sure that Popper addressed the requirements for proof of correctness. He just claimed that a theory or hypothesis mut be falsifiable or it is not scientific.
OK. So let's address my hypothesis that souls or some level of consciousness can exist in axions.
Here is how you address that:
"I figured out a model of axions that may explain why you might come up with that idea.
Don't have it here; but from recall it was something about: if you take TWO views of TWO concepts: example: two views of apples, and two views of oranges; and consider that apples and oranges overlap as category "fruit".
By taking TWO views of apples, and two views of oranges; "fruit" is kind of blurred in itself; kind of as if conscious of itself? "
OK. Here is how I came up with that idea. From reports of out-of-body experience and other such phenomena, I conclude that for such to be true, there must be an invisible medium in which consciousness can exist. That immediately leads to the idea of afterlife. Premise- conclusion- corrolary.
But from then on I sought a medium that could support consciousness an yet be invisible. Dark matter is such a medium. And the likelihood that it is composed of nearly massless particles like axions means that it is frictionless and quantum coherent, which leads to mt hypothesis that the soul exists in an axion medium.
Your rendition of how I came to this hypothesis is based on words- semantics, like apples, oranges and fruit. It seems, if you will pardon my saying so, that you believe that ultimately only words exist. You as much said so when you say that sciemce is getting more and more like LOGIC.
Well words are just the veneer. We need them to express meaning. But they are a human invention. And as much as words influence the way we think, they do not influence the way the world is made. The physics of the world is not simple, despite anyone's wishful thinking, even Wolfrom's.
Richard |
