Christianity (and a few other virally transmitted mythologies) abound in "conversion stories". I found Jesus because... I prayed for my goldfish to get better and it did, because I was an alcoholic and then I prayed to Jesus and stopped drinking and my wife came back to me, I was riding down the road to Damascus and He appeared to me and struck me upside the head and blinded me and chewed me out.

On this list in various threads I've heard a few "unconversion stories" -- the tales of people who were brainwas-- I mean "raised in the church" and taught not under any circumstances to question their progra-- I mean "faith".

In the context of the ongoing super-discussion on how ridiculously difficult it is to "unconvert" a believer using reason -- difficulty that is oddly proportional to how insanely irrational the believer's particular variant is, with BICC's almost impossible to convince even of really, really simple things like the idea that five inches or rain a minute for forty days (rate required on every square inch of the planet in order to raise the water level to cover mount everest) is seriously implausible -- I think it would be useful to understand just what sort of experience does finally open up your eyes so that you look at evidence before mythology instead of the other way around.

So please -- if you've got a really good unconversion story, feel free to pop it in here. What were you doing the day you lost your faith entirely and realized that the Bible had too many holes for the most industrious of dutch boys to plug? What was the clincher argument, or what insight led you to actually change your mind?

rgb

I like this thread. Great idea.

Well, when I was a kid, my parents took me to church every Sunday. Much of the time I would just listen to the preacher drone and assume he knew what he was talking about.

A few times I had questions about what I thought simply didn't make sense and asked my mother about them. One question was how it could be possible that someone who never heard of Jesus (in another country for instance) could be sent to Hell. I said, "That doesn't make sense." She said, "You're right. It doesn't."

The rest of my religious life I kept pointing out things in Christianity that didn't make sense to me and my mother always replied in the same manner.

Throughout high school and the beginning of college I believed in God but not religion. Then I took a philosophy class called "Life and Death."

It was a class where we had to argue for or against certain ideas with the premise that there is no afterlife. My teacher said, "We will argue whether or not death is harmful to an individual assuming that there is no afterlife, which clearly there doesn't appear to be."

When he said the last words, my mind flipped. I thought, "He is right. There doesn't appear to be an afterlife so why the hell would I believe one exists?"

After that day, I held some vague guilt related notion that God might exist but I really didn't believe it. I tried to be an agnostic but knew I wasn't being true to myself, so I just said, "I am an atheist and I should just face it."

Then I did. It was great.

For me the process was pretty drawn out. It began in the sixth grade. I was raised Catholic in a pretty hardcore family: church every Sunday, all the sacraments, and all the associated guilt and self-loathing that comes with Catholicism. I even went to Catholic school through fourth grade.

Then, in the sixth grade, in public school (which, for some reason, I imagined would be some sort of madhouse), we studied Greek mythology. I got really into it because I've always loved mythology-type stories (Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, etc.). A few things struck me, though. For one, I couldn't get my eleven-year-old mind around the way these stories came into being. In my mind, if there was a story, that meant that someone sat down and wrote that story. I was pretty sure that there probably wasn't one crazy old Greek living in the mountains, writing stories to trick people, so I had to, for the first time, consider that there was some sort of organic way for a myth to just come into existence.

The other thing that struck me was that the Greeks really believed this stuff. One of the lessons impressed upon us was that the Greeks were basically stupid people who made up stories to explain things they didn't understand. But, of course, these stories weren't speculative. They didn't begin, "Perhaps there's a god called Zeus..." The Greeks were certain. We know now what causes thunder, sunrises, etc., but the Greeks had their gods, and they were damn sure about it. That was the first time I thought, What makes us so different? Doesn't our god also explain things we don't understand, and couldn't we one day come to fill those gaps with knowledge?

That didn't push me directly into atheism, though. It just planted seeds of doubt; introduced the possibility that we could be wrong. In high school I started falling out not so much with God but with the Catholic church. I had to go to human sexuality classes where they tried to scare us out of having sex with bullshit "facts" like "if you have sex with two different people before you get married, you will get AIDS." It became obvious to me that the Church was intolerant, had an agenda, and would brazenly lie to push this agenda.

So I became one of those spiritual-but-not-religious people. I have memories of praying as late as high school, but by the time I was confirmed I didn't give a shit about church anymore. Then I just stopped thinking about religion. When I was in college I simply didn't have to deal with religion at all, so I never thought about it until one day sophomore year when a girl I had started seeing asked me if I believed in God. It was only at that moment that I realized I didn't, but, foolishly I decided to play the odds and told her that I did. Turns out, she didn't. Stupid 19-year-old Dan. And this girl had no roommate. Just saying...

It was only after Bush was elected and America started feeling like a burgeoning Christian Iran that my atheism became less of a characteristic and more of a core value.

I feel left out. I was never religious. Never attended church except for a wedding of a relative, friend, etc, or Mass on Christmas as a favor to my wife (she likes the pageantry). My family never once went to church.

I have never had any belief in any higher power, holy words, or even ESP, ghosts, UFO's.

I have always wondered -- in the eyes of Christianity, should I fake belief? Did anyone fake it for awhile just to make family happy?

I do have a conversion story. A family friend is converting to Christianity because the rest of her family are Christians, and they have been told by their pastor that if the family friend does not convert, her mother (who is very sick) will die.

This has been very difficult for her, because her father recently died, and he was a Hmong shaman (very cool guys, check out the movie Gran Torino if you are not familiar with the importance of the shaman in the Hmong culture).

The pastor has evidently made is his mission to destroy all cultural religion in this family. He has their eternal soul in mind I guess.

So, sorry for the lack of anti-conversion, but maybe my forced conversion story will resonate with someone.

Christianity (and a few other virally transmitted mythologies) abound in "conversion stories". I found Jesus because... I prayed for my goldfish to get better and it did, because I was an alcoholic and then I prayed to Jesus and stopped drinking and my wife came back to me, I was riding down the road to Damascus and He appeared to me and struck me upside the head and blinded me and chewed me out.


Not reading carefully, I thought this was rgb's personal anti-conversion story, and experienced a moment of severe cognitive dissonance!

I haven't posted one, but I suppose I should. My father was raised a Baptist, but as far as I can tell he just paid lip service to it or to Methodism (Mother was the daughter of a Methodist minister). Methodism is a pretty laid back variant of Christianity where good works are way more important than prayer and posturing. More Jesus as Holy Spirit, Jesus is the loving Jesus, not the hellfire and damnation Jesus. In fact, I cannot recall a single sermon where unbelievers or sinners were threatened with hell. Of Christian variants, it was then and is now remarkably non-toxic.

Methodist "missionaries" don't go overseas to convert the masses, they go to help build (secular) schools, teach agriculture, build wells and health clinics (all without a cross in sight), work with people of all faiths or none at all to help each other. Love one another, judge not lest ye be judged.

I grew up (ages 5-12) in India, where my father worked for Ford Foundation on what would come to be known as the Green Revolution. Several million people starved in India in the decades leading up to the 60's. From the end of the 60's to the early 70's, India has been a food exporting nation.

My mother was a perpetual volunteer while we lived there, helping to establish "cottage industries" that even today feed fair market shops all over the country. She was throughout her life a tireless advocate of women's rights -- she actually had a bachelor's degree, was a respectable artist, and although she stayed home and raised five children she was neither stupid nor ill-educated for her era (born in 1911, IIRC). Reborn today she'd become president; she was a "doer". I could name dozens of other projects and things she did, and as far as I know she never, ever tried to "convert" any of the ones that she helped, although she was perfectly happy if they CHOSE to try out Methodism or whatever.

Our driver in India was a Brahmin and a very good friend of mine, at least I would like to think so now that I look back with adult eyes. (Yes, we had to have servants, very much counter to Methodism but part of the spread-the-wealth deal with the Indian government -- we employed and supported some four or five families by our presence the entire time we lived there). Hindus do not (generally) proselytize, but I read constantly -- no TV in India in the 60's, books or nothing -- had a philosophical bent, and we often talked about God, right and wrong. From him I learned that Hinduism looks polytheistic but its Devas are not "God", they are more like cultural archetypes that instruct the masses in the Good, Bad and merely Ugly. Hinduism is monist panendeism to anyone capable of accessing it in that way, and the general religious practice is there to provide the rituals that bind a culture together, provide a not-too-toxic focus for the ignorant and superstitious, provide the illusion at least that even hidden evil acts are "known" and are ultimately balanced/punished, and to provide an upwards path towards the real truth, that each soul is God and God is all things. Amazingly, he communicated this too me without ever saying any of the above. Hinduism also has no problem with Christianity, however much of a problem Christians might have with Hindu "heathens". Anybody, any time, any where, can discover that they are God, even the "untouchables" and non-caste foreigners; a holy person is a holy person, one who has discovered Self-knowledge, and that's that.

I also learned of Buddhism, especially of Ashoka (whose story is well worth learning). Buddha was the original Protestant -- he rejected all of the superstitious part of Hinduism, stopping at the very edge where Atman discovers that it is Brahman, and converted that Enlightenment experience into a more secular (but still slightly supernatural) one of liberation from a supposedly directly perceived wheel of existence that is the common metaphysic between Hinduism and Buddhism. Of course I was still a good little Christian throughout, but even then I was cross-faith ecumenical.

I'd say I was raised to believe in God, but was also taught that good people are good people and that God loves good people, period. Jesus was just the example of a very good person that loved good people, the rest of the rituals very similar to those of Hinduism, there as a lesson and path for the masses that need that sort of thing, sort of one notch Christward of Quakerism but not so far as all that.

Church participation continued through our return to the US and Boy Scouts, but when we moved to northern virginia when I entered 10th grade (Father now worked for World Bank in DC as one of the WGEs on rice production in southeast asia) I did scouts and church for about one more year and then just got too old for the one and tired of the latter and quit both. Viet Nam was in full swing. Nixon was president. Watergate was happening. I was driving, trying to buy beer with my friends from 7-11's known to sell to minors, smoking pot when I could get it (and yeah, getting good grades and more AP credits than anybody else in my school and so on, it did not lead to heroin use or mush-brain, for all that my not getting busted or having a car wreck the many times I drank and drove was just pure dumb luck, kids do not try this at home).

I never stopped believing in God -- I had then and have today some rigorously rational reasons for thinking God is a plausible hypothesis that is rather favored over the alternative -- but somewhere in there, as I read Ayn Rand and started to learn real philosophy and physics, I started to confront the fact that the Bible was a complete piece of ca-ca, not half as good as poetry or mythology as the Mahabharata or Ramayana and filled with repressive sociopolitical bullshit. Genesis stopped being a Moral Tale and became the immoral nightmare it really is. Even so, I didn't actually "reject Jesus" and the New Testament -- it's just that I hadn't prayed "to Jesus" for years, not since I quit with the "Jesus loves me this I know..." song as a kid. I talked to God in my head.

It wasn't until I noticed (and this is a true story, no lie) that all of my friends in college who did large quantities of LSD ended up as Jesus Freaks (yes, it was THAT era), and that JFs were apeshit crazy that I started to get tired of Christianity per se. I got married in a church, our oldest son was actually baptized (the other two are alas official heathens and all three are hell-bound:-) but we attended a wedding where -- no shit -- the bride promised to obey her husband and the born again minister quoted all sorts of Paul-derived crap that it occurred to me that maybe I should actually read the New Testament too. I mean, who actually reads it? It's boring! Most Christians to this very day, I am firmly convinced, have never read any significant portion of the Bible and know it only from what they are told in sermons. What they do read, they do in a monitored group so that it can be properly "translated" via the right "hermeneutics" by people who can believe impossible things before breakfast.

So I read it, piecewise, over the next few decades. But it didn't really take decades. I was already an apostate; just reading a tiny bit of Paul's misogynistic bile and the actual linkages of NT beliefs back to Genesis and obvious mythology was enough to make me into an anti-theist.

However, I am not an atheist. Perhaps my experience wasn't so negative that I was reacting "against" my upbringing, only making rational choices. I am a rational deist, and I still talk to God in my head, and identify my Atman with Brahman, for that matter.

rgb

Methodism is a pretty laid back variant of Christianity where good works are way more important than prayer and posturing.

My parents were Methodist and that is the church I went to growing up. The only time I ever heard that people who didn't believe in Christ were going to Hell was from congregants. The minister certainly never said it nor do I think he thought it.

I will credit Methodism with being pretty "you go your way and I'll go mine." It isn't too intellectually honest, but the Methodist Church pretty much says, "We believe this to be true, but whatever you think is true is cool with us. I'm sure it's good too."

As a kid I went to Church of England Sunday School for a while. Then I switched to the Methodist Sunday School down the road. It was more interesting and less severe, we had more fun there.

One day, perhaps a year later (I was about 11 I think), I happened to be near the original church and the vicar was talking to another adult about something. When he saw me he turned to this other guy and said in a loud voice with the obvious intent of embarrassing me “Stephen used to be a good little boy, he used to come to Sunday School every week.”

“But I still do!” I blurted out. He went bright red and didn’t know what to say. (Obviously he couldn’t outright criticise another faith, even though he thought his was the right one and the other one was wrong, but I didn’t realise that then of course).

That was the first time I remember any conflict between faiths and it started me thinking, I haven’t looked back since...

Ooo, I'm seeing an ugly trend emerging here.

Methodism seems to be a stepping stone to atheism.

See what happens when you don't threaten people with burning in hell?

rgb

See what happens when you don't threaten people with burning in hell?

Great point! When one isn't terrified of Hell, one is free to question.

Yeah, but it gives a relatively benign church a good reason to mutate and pick up a hellfire gene from one of its neighbors in order to survive.

What we should all do is rejoin the Methodist church and proselytize heavily. Membership rises, and in ten years falls again with a new batch of atheists.

Or maybe the sample space is too small. I'll wait.

rgb

Methodism seems to be a stepping stone to atheism.


But atheism does not have the great pot lucks.

But atheism does not have the great pot lucks.

It also doesn't have the really tasty bread and grape juice we had for Methodist communion.

The bread really was good, so I always tried to steal an extra piece or two from the tray.

And Methodist churches are usually fairly plain -- not the most expensive ones in the universe (although Duke's chapel and a couple of other churches in durham are pretty big -- the Dukes were Methodist and gave big. When I was in the MYF we used to do lots of community service things and go on cool retreats (with well-chaperoned GIRLS around about the time I started to care:-).

I have no beef with Methodism. My niece is a Duke divinity school graduate and a methodist minister. She makes yearly trips to Israel not to go pray but to go work, work for peace. She spends as much or more time with Muslim Palestinians as with Christians. Her pay sucks -- she isn't in it for the money. She gets a certain amount of abuse as a female minister. Not a lot, just a bit from the mostly male old-guy church establishment, just a bit from older members of some of her congregations. She speaks about 8 languages. Her family has friends all over the middle east -- my brother went to school in Beirut back in the 60's and taught English in Libya during the prime Ghaddafi years (late 60's early 70's).

She's one reason I don't like to knee-jerk abuse Christians. Christian is not the same things as stupid. Some stupid Christians, sure. Some smart ones. I don't think most of the Bible is either true or defensible, and at this point a lot of Christians would probably agree. They simply hold on to a core of things that are beautiful in Christianity; basically rewrite it in their heads into what they think Jesus, even as a metaphor for a perfect human, would say or do, and blank out the rest.

Ultimately it all comes down to whether or not you believe that the core myth is true. Because it all occurred in the fairly distant past, nobody can KNOW that it is true or not true. They want very much to believe that it is true for dozens of reasons -- their upbringing, the beauty of the rituals (sometimes), the generally positive message (love your brother, do unto others, help other people -- boy scout stuff), the hope for some sort of cosmic balance for all the injustice they see and they suffer.

You balance any such desire you might feel or once have felt against the simple observation that it is extremely implausible that the story is true, miracles and all. Sure, that's what the word "miracle" means, implausible, but this is implausible in the extreme and in competition in its implausibility with a number of other equally impossible theisms, reducing the plausibility still further (how can one choose?).

Also, if it is true, there are a ton of things that make absolutely no sense. What is this Universe, then? An enormous mmrpg? Are we all gamers in another plane altogether, playing "Waiting for the Apocalypse" in VR regalia? Is this really World of World of Warcraft, where the only way out is to quit playing the game? Buddha seemed to think so (and it works for the eternal cycle in World of Warcraft proper:-). If so, though, why would the software author check in on the game in this particular way, in avatar, when they have complete control over the world and could just send "play fair" messages to players who break the rules (or kick them out of the game altogether)?

They don't think that much; they don't want to think or worry about it at all, just trust, hope, pray that it will all work out for the best. Or maybe they do think it is all pretty crazy, but hope that if they stay tight with the developer they get to be a level 80 warrior next time around instead of a dweeby little goblin. One way or another, their unreasoned belief is a kind of gambler's syndrome, a Pascalian wager. They really wish that it were true, so they choose to believe that it is true simply because it can't be proven not to be true. Nathan likes giving them grief for taking their long-shot bet because it is fun and pretty safe now that he's unlikely to be hung or drawn and quartered or burned for it.

They like taking the bet even though their odds are better of winning fifty million at Powerball (and are sometimes the same people that play Powerball -- I don't because I can compute expectation value, but they can't and don't care).

If it is true and they "win", they end up important in their current insignificance; the meek are promised the world, the proud their comeuppance. If it is true, they are wiser in their ignorance and foolishness than the wise in their intelligence and knowledge -- it's the only chance they have in this life for it to work out that way. If it is true they are luckier in their misfortune than the most fortunate unbeliever.

If it is false, who are they? What does it matter? Why do they exist? What's the point of living a drab, dull existence, where one is the bug more often in than the windshield and where you eventually die to vanish as if you'd never been, the momentary flash of your vision and awareness returned to an infinite night that swallows up that light as if it had never been before, never would be again. Why bother?

I'm fond of Plato's Cave. Everybody's trapped in the cave with a flashlight. As long as its battery lasts, you can see, dimly the shadows that it throws. From these shadows you must infer everything that you will ever know.

The shadows are frightening, and often dark. One by one, the lights of those around you go out. Voices promise to let you out of the cave and into the real world, but only if you say the right words (and they're always different words, and you have no reason to believe the cave has an outside.

Of course you really don't have any reason to believe that it doesn't, either. You can't really tell what the things are that cast the shadows, if it comes that that -- all you see is shadows, not the things that cast them.

The optimist says "I know this cave has an outside, and I'll just say these chants so I get to go out there where the cave's owner will treat me like a prince because I chant so sweetly and follow the cave's commandments truly!" The pessimist says "I know this cave has no outside, because no matter how I shine my light it casts no shadow. I have no reason to believe that anything without a shadow exists. I'll just sit here until my light goes out."

The Buddha sits in between them, nodding with delight at the chants of the neighbor on the one side, filled with wonder by the certainty and reason of the neighbor on the other side. His flashlight burns no brighter than theirs, the shadows are no less ephemeral and confusing. He simply enjoys the play of darkness and light. Sometimes he tells a funny story to cheer up the one neighbor, sometimes he chants along with the other neighbor when their flashlight flickers and their prayers falter. He does not wait for the night. He does not wait for the day.

rgb

See what happens when you don't threaten people with burning in hell?

For me, a fallen Catholic, the fear of eternal suffering in Hell was the only thing that for years kept me from admitting to myself that I didn't believe in God anymore. Every time I would begin down that road of thought, I would get a lot of anxiety about the possibility of making a huge mistake and paying for it eternally. Hell is some powerful shit.

It is indeed, which is why Pascal's wager became an actual argument of apologists. It was also a large part of the justification for executing blasphemers.

A blasphemer or heretic, you see, could influence others within the fold to share the heretical viewpoint, to blaspheme against God, and thereby to suffer not the mere momentary annoyance of being beaten or robbed or even murdered, but an eternity of hellfire! This was a crime worse than murder (and still is, I'm sorry to say) to a True Believer. How could it be otherwise? To them Hell is real.

This in a nutshell is one half of the argument of radical Muslims (the other half is the usual mix of political power, greed, anger at tribal enemies, and entitlement). It is one half of the argument of the radical (BICC) Christians -- if they permit e.g. the teaching of evolution in the schools as fact, they run a substantial risk of losing their own children to hellfire and damnation! The other half is political power yadda yadda.

These are the only two scriptural theisms with a strong Hellfire meme, which explains in part why Hindus and Jews and modern pagans and spiritualists are not as aggressive either socially or politically, although in parts of India a form of jingoistic Hinduism is re-emerging, usually directed against Muslims, that encourages retribution against e.g. Muslim men who seek to marry Hindu women etc.

It's one of the main things to attack whenever discussing Christianity or Islam in any forum. If the person you are conversing with does not believe in Hell, you will find them open minded and reasonably tolerant of at least mildly heterodox variations in belief -- they may think their flavor of Christianity is best, but they are tolerant of others and maybe even not too quick to judge Muslims or Hindus or Buddhists. If they truly believe in BICC-Hell, then not only are they invulnerable to any argument, but they are invariably willing to exercise political power to enforce their beliefs and especially to prevent any influence that might weaken their own children's belief and expose them to Hell.

Note that this is reasonable, from their perspective! The unreasonable part is the belief in Hell, but their arguments will be about something else, their rationalizations of other beliefs, whatever. Really, though, it boils down to fear of God not in the sense of respect but rather as in God is an F-ing Lunatic who is easily enraged and capable of exacting infinitely sadistic revenge for any slight, including the insult of even thinking that such extravagent punishments are not just and proper Because God Says They Are (through the prophets, the scriptures, and divine revelation).

Remember the good old Son 'o' God Comics spoofed by National Lampoon in some memorable issues -- they were based on real comics that are even now freely available on the web. The real deal used to sit around on the coffee tables of my second order relatives (by marriage only, and not mine, thankfully) where their kids obviously read them as they weren't permitted anything else to read. Typical plot: Timmy and Susie go on a date. Timmy and Susie neck and get into some heavy petting. In the middle of it, a tractor trailer driven by a drunk slams into the side of their car on lover's lane, killing all three instantly. Final panel -- Timmy and Susie, facing a snarling Satan as they died in sin, then being herded off by lesser demons and cast into a flaming pit of screaming sinners.

It's almost funny, if it weren't so God-damned sick and twisted. I can only say if there is a God whose awareness participates along with ours in the unfolding of the Universe, this sort of thing can only make God sad. All the sadder given Christ's actual message (extractable with some difficulty once you strip away the hellfire meme, turning instead back to some of the purged gnostic gospels from the early church), which was very much a Boddhisatva message -- "redemption" is universal, and his purpose was to reveal the truth that God really is love, and that it isn't really possible to lose that love any more than it is possible for a parent to stop loving a child, however sad that child's actions might make them.

rgb

Very nice imagery rgb...

“The optimist says "I know this cave has an outside, and I'll just say these chants so I get to go out there where the cave's owner will treat me like a prince because I chant so sweetly and follow the cave's commandments truly!" The pessimist says "I know this cave has no outside, because no matter how I shine my light it casts no shadow. I have no reason to believe that anything without a shadow exists. I'll just sit here until my light goes out."

The Buddha sits in between them, nodding with delight at the chants of the neighbor on the one side, filled with wonder by the certainty and reason of the neighbor on the other side. His flashlight burns no brighter than theirs, the shadows are no less ephemeral and confusing. He simply enjoys the play of darkness and light. Sometimes he tells a funny story to cheer up the one neighbor, sometimes he chants along with the other neighbor when their flashlight flickers and their prayers falter. He does not wait for the night. He does not wait for the day.”

Mixing Buddhism with Plato, lovely.

Of course Plato made a fairly elementary error with his cave analogy. He thought the shadows were inferior forms of real things and extended that to postulating ideal objects that exist somewhere of which the things we see in the world are inferior images, ourselves included. So there must be an ideal dog somewhere or an ideal human.

This is the linguistic problem with ‘universals’, dog is a universal concept we use as a sort of useful shorthand but Plato elevated this to something more, something ideal but real in some sense, of which my pet called Fido here is an inferior image.

Russell says “I can say ‘Socrates is human,’ ‘Plato is human,’ and so on. In all these statements, it may be assumed that the word ‘human’ has exactly the same meaning. But whatever it means, it means something which is not of the same kind as Socrates, Plato, and the rest of the individuals who compose the human race. ‘Human’ in an adjective; it would be nonsense to say ‘human is human.’

We see further if we stand on the shoulders of giants, and Russell was such a one.

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From a different thread (beauty) rgb, you asked for memes to be thrown at you but haven’t responded. Maybe you just agreed with my post... Don’t let me force you however if you haven’t the time, I know I often wish for more time for many things. :o)

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When I was around 15-16 I had one particular old teacher who was very very strict. By this time I didn’t believe in god, however, when this teacher died, it was a number of years before I got over the strong impression that he was watching everything I did - from some undefined place or other.

This resonates with Freud of course, his theory of id, ego and superego. As part of growing up the ego first replaces the basic id but then the superego internalises authority and puts constraints on the ego as you learn self control.

Dearest Stephen,

I agree entirely about the sillieness of Platonic ideals -- after all Plato was an ANCIENT philosopher and either he or Socrates or Parmenides before both of them had some really stupid ideas mixed in with some fairly clever ones. For all of that, I (and Russell) kind of like Plato and his Socratic sock puppet where both of us think that Aristotle was a bloomin' idiot.

If Plato has a fault, it is that he was trapped by the lack of anything like a theory of semantics. Korzybski (among others, e.g. Sapir and Whorf and Lee) more or less invented a theory of general semantics that I find moderately appealing although the IGS skates the thin edge of flakiness. Their little aphorism: The map is not the territory -- is IMO quite apropos.

But I learned of the Cave from George Roberts, one of Russell's "disciples" (he organized the big meeting in Russell's honor back in the 70's). Roberts taught the Cave not "just" as Plato presented it but with his own little flourishes as he was both brilliant and bizarre as hell in his own right. Taught "correctly" as a metaphor for what goes on inside our heads, where all of our sensory input is indirect information extracted as shadows cast on the walls of our personal caves, it becomes a verbally expressed analogy of the Generalized Master Equation in physics, one that incorporates perfectly the progression from ignorance to knowledge while recognizing that everything we see is a projection.

String theory, for example, hypothesizes large numbers of "hidden dimensions" that might underlie actual dynamics; what we perceive of as interactions in space-time are quite literally projective shadows of interactions that are actually occurring in the hidden dimensions.

Of course we don't "believe" in these hidden dimensions yet -- not until we have some reason to believe, some congruence between these general theories and what we observe that is compelling. On the other hand neither do we disbelieve in them to the degree that we might disbelieve in invisible fairies, even though in some sense there is more anecdotal evidence for fairies than there is physical evidence for 2044 or so hidden dimensions.

The point being that not even in science do we really believe in logical positivism. We believed in the dark side of the moon before we saw it. Even though your event horizon and my event horizon (way out there very very far away) don't coincide, I don't believe that the part in the non-intersecting set belonging to you but not me has no reality or is meaningless. We all believe deeply in the unseen, because so much of what we believe in is invisible and cannot be seen even in principle by us within the highly transient portion of our organization as a braid of world lines.

Here's where there are those on the skeptics list that I disagree with. I think that it is essential to keep an extremely open mind with regard to what might be outside of our personal caves. Sure, there are infinitely many possibilities for what might lie outside. Sure, we quickly filter that set down into a much smaller (but still infinite) set of notions that are not contradictory and that organize as a body of knowledge consistent with our experience, but no matter what we face the dartboard paradox. Forget the "probability" of the existence of the Universe in the first place -- as a unitary object statistics and notions of causality cannot apply to it as it is the space from which all statistical samples derive. However, one can legitimately ask: What is the probability of the state of the Universe, based on a priori complete ignorance (maximum entropy). The answer is fairly obvious 1 over aleph one infinity, a number I'd call "zero". And yet we exist.

If you reflect just a moment, you will conclude that any musing about the state of the Universe (including infinite outer products of space-time continua in arbitrary dimensions spanning the infinite set of possible initial conditions is -- if the continuum hypothesis is correct -- equally unlikely. They are all the inverse of the infinite cardinality of the continuum unlikely. Obviously these infinitely unlikely chances can occur -- the existence of my Self demonstrates that. I can see no really good way for reason to impose any limits whatsoever on the unseen possibilities save by noting that we can compute improved probabilities for a limited projective view of what is very probably a tiny, tiny bit of all that is by requiring algebraic ordinal consistency (common sense) with our limited experience and knowledge -- so far.

That's why Buddha just enjoys the show. Sure, there are inferred rules and knowledge that works pretty well to describe the here-and-now we are experiencing, but every instant brings in new data! Every instant our beliefs are changing (usually in small ways as we add memory, sometimes in giant leaps when we finally "get" Maxwell's equations). If there is an outside to the cave, we'll believe it when we see it -- how could we do otherwise? If there isn't, we'll not believe it when we never see it (so to speak). In the meantime it seems silly to fight over its existence, given that any trees on the mountain that might or might not be raised over our heads cannot cast shadows that reach our personal wall.

Leaves plenty of room for God -- an infinite amount of room, in fact. One can precisely partition the space of possibilities in two with a binary choice -- in half of them God exists, in half God does not exist. One can easily see that both halves must be identical in every detail except for this one detail (I love infinity) just as between any two rational numbers there is a string of digits that can precisely define the initial state of the Universe (again, subject to the continuum hypothesis -- aleph one is aleph one). There are the same number of points in any volume in any (countable) number of dimensions as there are in between those two countably separated points on a line.

Here's one of my favorite questions for passing the time of day. What does an electron ``see'' in its own rest frame? It is coupled via at least electromagnetism to every other charge in the Universe -- it is in contact with "everything". Yet it is a pointlike object with zero dimensionality and no internal structure, an in its own rest frame it does not move.

This makes my head ache. The electron sees nothing even as it is coupled to everything. It has zero capability of information storage beyond the information associated with its own existence. However "concrete" the electron itself might be, everything important about the electron is derived from its external coordinates, and coordinates are "just numbers" (the problem is recursive -- make them something other than numbers and you can apply the same argument to whatever they are, and conclude that they are still just numbers).

I'm not arguing for idealism vs materialism, merely pointing out that at its heart is a recursive puzzle where ideal or material, the Universe is information, information that has a representation in real numbers. If it is material, then the material encodes the ideal, perfectly. If it is ideal, the ideal describes the material, perfectly.

Working on all this in my book.

As for memes, I think I pretty much agreed with you at some point in there, but I'll look back and perhaps comment -- when next I have time.

rgb

"What is the probability of the state of the Universe, based on a priori complete ignorance (maximum entropy). The answer is fairly obvious 1 over aleph one infinity, a number I'd call "zero". And yet we exist."

I don't find this obvious at all. I consider it the lottery fallacy. Since we are engaging in clever statements about probability:

How many ways can nothing exists? One. How many ways can something exist? Infinite. So which is more probable, nothing or something?

rgb --

"Leaves plenty of room for God -- an infinite amount of room, in fact. One can precisely partition the space of possibilities in two with a binary choice -- in half of them God exists, in half God does not exist"

God proven using a variation on Zeno's paradox. Suggesting that human logic governs the natural world rather than approximating it is a fool's game.

RC -- you're missing the point, twice. I already stated that probability theory cannot be applied to Universes because there is no space to sample Universes from. I said IF one examines its information content -- the size of its phase space -- then even if you use a reasonable measure you conclude that is current state is vanishingly unlikely. Or if you prefer, the size of the ensemble of states permitted by the OBSERVED laws of nature is infinite, or if you like it in terms of boundary values, the boundary value problem represented by the Universe has an inifinite set of possible values that could have been imposed on the boundary.

One cannot speak of the probability of the Universe existing without at the very least self-consistently bending the meaning of the word probability or violating the meaning of the word Universe, sure. But one can absolutely and trivially compute the relative volume of the complete phase space and compare it to the volume of the occupied set. The latter is infinitely unlikely in precisely the same sense that the number \pi is unlikely. \pi isn't unlikely at all, \pi is \pi. But IF one drew a sample from the real number line, \pi is infinitely unlikely.

I have no idea what you are thinking about with the lottery fallacy reference. I test random number generators and have done a decade's worth of numerical simulations exploring much smaller (but still enormously large) parts of phase space with an importance sampling Markov process and I promise, I understand random processes. Well enough, in fact, to state the zero yet another way so that it is easy to understand.

When I simulate (say) a molecular dynamics model, I have to assign initial conditions to the system -- start all the molecules in the sample in some definite state. Normally I'd start them all in a RANDOM state -- random but drawn from some ensemble or subject to some global constraint (like a fixed known total energy). One then turns the molecules loose and lets them evolve forward in time in a completely deterministic way via couple ordinary differential equations. These equations usually exhibit deterministic chaos; the phase space occupied by closely neighboring initial conditions diverges in volume exponentially. After running the model for a time, if I examine the actual state of the system I find that it is microscopically very, very different from the state that I reach from any other initial condition, even one that differs in a single DISCRETIZED digit in its initial conditions. In fact, I find that the probability of obtaining any particular state is "zero" (one over a very large number that tends to infinity as one either increases the number of particles or decreases the granularity of the digitization).

As far as Zeno is concerned, again highly irrelevant to my point but great fun in and of itself. First of all, I'm rather fond of Parmenides and rather like his original conclusion (which isn't original and indeed is rather common in philosophical systems). I do think that its semantic content is easily misinterpreted. All isn't One in the sense that your left foot and my right ear are described by the same coordinates. One very definitely IS all in the sense that Universe (one) contains All, including left foot and right ear.

The really, really interesting question is whether or not the Universe is a stationary object. Bear with me while I describe what I mean. Return again to my molecular dynamic system. It is straightforward to show that the trajectories of all of the particles are (classically) deterministic and time symmetric for most sensible choices for microscopic interactions between the pointlike/elementary particles in our imagined "universe". From a knowledge of the state of all particle positions and fields on the boundary of any world-sheet that encloses a four-volume, the complete space-time evolution is fixed and appears as a particular braiding of the worldlines of all of the particles.

If one steps OUT of the picture (where one has to be mentally to think about 4-volumes anyway) these trajectories are no longer dynamic! They just are. The are internally consistent with a certain differential description but time is just another dimension in a single "solid" stationary object that we can imagine watching in some five or six or eight dimensional space with its own "time axis".

Possibly easier to visualize in a 2+1 dimensional space -- pages of a book. Every sheet has dots on it representing particles. The dots on every sheet are correlated with the sheets above and below it according to a certain rule. Only one pattern of dots can stretch from any specified pattern on the first page to a pattern specified on the last page. The book can be "read" by flipping through the sheets forward, backwards, in any order or permutation, but the book itself is static and it requires a "reader" in a higher dimensionality to be able to flip the pages in some order.

Or consider a DVD. It contains a movie. Its internal information content suffices to make the movie happen as a set of 2D images complete with an inferrable underlying "physics" when the movie is played in time. To the watcher of the movie, it looks like Wile-y coyote is falling under the influence of Gravity and then splatting out on a landscape, and one can even make observations and make deductions about the apparent structure of Road Runner Universe from watching it. The real dynamical basis is totally different and totally hidden from the person watching the DVD, and the actual information content is completely static and can be carried around on a single object encoded in many possible ways!

So to get a lot more concrete -- so that you fully understand where I'm coming from -- one possible view of the Universe is that it is just like one of those DVDs. It is a big, utterly stationary pile of information. This is the inexorable conclusion of physics alone. The whole POINT of physics is to be able to completely predict the deterministic relationships that govern the symmetric time evolution of the state of the system, effectively reducing the whole thing to a stationary parametric model. In another language, the actual entropy content of the Universe is zero, because it is in a definite state and that (pure) state is stationary. So while you may think that you are experiencing the now in a time-sequential manner, from the point of view of physics you're already dead in the future, are still unborn in the past, and every sheet that slices through the spatial pattern of elementary particles that make you up is the same as any other -- linked forwards and backwards with neither freedom nor a preferred moment of time that can be identified with now.

Now is experiencable because of what happens when one partitions that Universe into pieces such that one piece can have entropy relative to others. Our awareness rides at the cusp of an entropy-driven integrodifferential processs where information is constantly carried in and compared to echoes of previous nows encoded in a very complex internal substate.

That is, one part of the information encoded on the "DVD" of the Universe can actually experience a sequence of nows "looking" at other parts of the same DVD that are absolutely not there when one looks at the DVD as a unitary object. Now, you tell me where the natural world begins and ends. Is it a single, fixed, DVD, with awareness a rather compelling illusion? Or is it an infinite library of infinite DVDs, where any one part of the enormous recursive structure can experience an awareness of "now" as the discovery of information encoded in all the rest.

Obviously you can never know -- you are yourself a tiny part of just one DVD and even though you are stationary in fact in 4 dimensions, you cannot help living on a time-asymmetric cusp of now.

rgb

rgb--

"I test random number generators and have done a decade's worth of numerical simulations exploring much smaller (but still enormously large) parts of phase space with an importance sampling Markov process and I promise, I understand random processes."

Ok, an argument from authority. You an understand if in this specific instance I am unimpressed.

"RC -- you're missing the point, twice"

I think it remains to be seen, since you did not address my points, only take off on another journey through the universe of your admittedly very sophisticated arguments, but never addressing the point at hand.

At the moment I am awaiting:

1. The paradox.
2. The solution.
3. The abstract.
4. The publication.

Otherwise, I have a good basis for ignoring the "entropy-driven integrodifferential processs where information is constantly carried in and compared to echoes of previous nows encoded in a very complex internal substate."

I say this because I don't know what you mean (I lack the background?). But more importantly, you are presenting these statements here, instead of a forum of experts that do possess such a background, that I can then rely on for a judgment on its validity.

I am not saying that your points are not valid. What I am saying is that your ideas in this forum appear to be only obfuscation, an unnecessary use of obscure terminology (for this audience), without any justification (that has been given).

You of course are under no obligation to frame your discussions for my sake. Others here may be following your thoughts in detail (I have not seen evidence of that), and please understand, some of what you have said has been very, very helpful to me, and I would hope that it will continue.

But a rebuttal needs to be rebuttal, given in a way the audience can understand.

"Now, you tell me where the natural world begins and ends"

Are you really asking me this? Or being rhetorical? When a theist asks me what happened before the singularity, I shrug my shoulders. This extends the theistic argument in no way whatsoever.

I remain interested and impressed, but skeptical.

Fine, you're unimpressed.

The lottery fallacy is completely irrelevant because it describes the fact that gamblers think that certain numbers are more likely to come up than others in a time history, because chances are "self-avoidant" where as far as statistics is concerned all independent samples are just that -- independent. My discussion of the entropy of a system described by a certain amount of information is stationary and symmetric and in no place discusses sample to sample correlations or a sampling procedure and therefore has absolutely nothing to do with the lottery fallacy. I'd prefer not to think of it as a straw man you introduced to weaken my argument deliberately but as a simple mistake on your part, but suit yourself. As far as my "authority" is concerned, I was simply trying to convince you that I am relatively unlike to make an elementary mistake in a discussion of probability, not convince you that I'm right because I'm an authority, and that you should reexamine your understanding of what I said as you were making irrelevant straw observations about it.

This is a simple matter of fact. Read about what the lottery fallacy is and then demonstrate to me how it has any bearing whatsoever on an estimate of probability in the phase space that is a standard part of stat mech in physics. Then we can even return to empiricism where I'll point out that the lottery fallacy is itself a double fallacy. We cannot know a priori that any given sampling process is in fact unbiased and time decorrelated (unless we fully understand and trust the shuffling mechanism). Hence the notion of "testing random number generators" according to a null hypothesis. Hence also "measuring second order correlation functions" because in MOST Monte Carlo methods and sampling processes there is a nonzero correlation time and/or length and sequential samples ARE in fact correlated so that the lottery fallacy is no fallacy. In reality, the lottery "fallacy" is a posterior conclusion of a sampling process that concludes that the sampled sequence possesses all the properties, within the expected bounds of statistical uncertainty subject to the null hypothesis, of an uncorrelated sequence.

Do you understand that? I'll explain it again if I need to.

Now, regarding Zeno, once again there is nothing to rebut. What, exactly does Zeno's silly achilles and tortoise arguments have to do with an outer product process on the one hand, or arguments on the continuum on the other hand? It isn't just a straw man or mistake, it is a category error mistake -- you are accusing me of making Zeno's false arguments that are linked to aleph-null infinity (a countable infinity) when my argument explicitly consisted of discussion of the aleph-one continuum which is what DISPROVES Zeno's conclusions. Again I have no idea what you are thinking here, which is what I said before I tried to re-explain. Zeno constructed e.g. sequences of rational numbers without any notion of convergence or an understanding of irrational numbers, real numbers, or the continuum. Are you suggesting that I don't understand these? That I'm representing them incorrectly? That I have an inadequate understanding of the paradoxes associated with real numbers with respect to the rationals?

As far as logic compares to experience, I'm not suggesting any such thing. Knowledge comes out of both. And a whole lot of knowledge comes out of imagining a Universe of possibilities that is bigger than what everybody sees and knows just now. Everybody KNOWS the world is flat, of course it is flat. Walk outside and look at it. Flat.

Until the day you a) imagine that it might be round or curved and THEN b) figure out what the consequences of that might be and THEN c) perform experiments to differentiate flat from nonflat, which might be very difficult. (And no, this isn't the only pattern to knowledge, there are other iterations of observation and reason that work too).

rgb

rgb

rgb said:


"I was simply trying to convince you that I am relatively unlike to make an elementary mistake in a discussion of probability..."


Can't help but think of another physicist:


The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein... I am at a loss to understand biologists' widespread compulsion to deny what seems to me to be obvious."
-- Sir Fred Hoyle

I still disagree, respectfully now, due to the low probability of your infallibility, on the lottery fallacy. You said (I repeat, since you seem bent on addressing my points by rebutting points not in quuestion):


What is the probability of the state of the Universe, based on a priori complete ignorance (maximum entropy). The answer is fairly obvious 1 over aleph one infinity, a number I'd call "zero". And yet we exist."


The key phrase is the last one. "and yet we exist". That is the lottery fallacy -- that the probability that we exist is the same probability that "something exists". And I do not see anyway to determine any probability on "existence" unless one can also make some statement on the probability of "non-existence". It is the same mistake the esteemed Mr. Hoyle stubbornly maintained.


Do you understand that? I'll explain it again if I need to.


If you want to continue with jargon obscure in meaning (to me, and I would suspect most in this discussion group), further explanation will not help. As I tried to explain, you will need to present your thoughts in an academic manner to those expert, and then I can grasp your meaning through their subsequent interpretations (should they find it meaningful). Otherwise, I must hope you can explain your theories in a more common way, for the educated layman.


And a whole lot of knowledge comes out of imagining a Universe of possibilities that is bigger than what everybody sees and knows just now:


Are you suggesting you have a testable theory here? If not, then I am not convinced on scientific grounds. Or are you suggesting you have solved a paradox? If not, then I am not convinced on philosophical grounds either.

As to Zeno's paradox. What you said (repeated):

"Leaves plenty of room for God -- an infinite amount of room, in fact. One can precisely partition the space of possibilities in two with a binary choice -- in half of them God exists, in half God does not exist"

Zeno makes an argument that is logically perfect, and yet is not an adequate model for the behavior of the natural world. My objection is that you are doing the same, and it demonstrates nothing.


Fine, you're unimpressed.


I ended though with saying overall I am impressed. So maybe they cancel out.

I wonder though, rgb. When you visit a foreign country, whose language you do not speak, do you repeatedly yell louder and louder at the natives because they don't grasp your meaning?

You mean speaking slooow-ly and louuud-ly doesn't work?

;-)

OK, I understand your observation now, although the first still has nothing to do with the lottery fallacy. After somebody has won the lottery, do you assert that the probability of their winning is unity (since they actually won it and that's a unitary event)? The posterior probability is certainly unity. The number one should sensibly compute for the probability is 1 over the number of possible equally likely outcomes. Lottery fallacy implies a different answer from the latter, the former is completely useless for any purpose other than to observe that number xyx won. I don't think there is anything odd about describing the odds of winning a lottery with an continuum infinite number of balls as being a number that is good friends with zero, even though yes, as you noted, somebody won.

You reference to Zeno I also understand . It nothing to do with the Zeno paradox, you're simply asserting that logical arguments however perfect are not a model for the natural world. Didn't I just say that myself on another thread without bringing Zeno into it?

I'm not asserting that the real Universe is infinite spacetime dimensional. I'm asserting that a proper analysis of what the Universe MIGHT be should not exclude the possibility, and should be very open minded concerning the occurrence of "awareness" in that model.

And here, I'll be impressed that you were impressed but undaunted by the error I didn't make in probability estimation. Or something;-)

rgb

I have not had a chance to post my anti-conversion story, so here goes.

I had the ill luck to be born to a family of Jehovah's Witnesses, and I literally almost died as an infant because of the blood transfusion issue (my mother, now a non-JW, told about this when I was in my 30s). I also had a very unpleasant childhood of Kingdom Hall (that is JW-speak for church) three times a week, door-to-door every Saturday AM, restrictions on friends, and the pariah status of an oddball at school because I could not say The Pledge, or celebrate holidays, etc.

My folks divorced when I was twelve and that put an end to going to that damned Hall. It was then when I fell in love with Astronomy. I joined the Salt Lake Astronomical Society and learned the joy of hanging out with adults that actually KNEW something and loved studying nature.

But in a few years I became a typical teen, and my interests turned to drugs, music, and other things. I dropped out of high school and played in a garage band and worked as a short-order cook. That was enough to convince me, at 18, that I needed to get back to my love for science, so sans high-school diploma, I snuck into the University of Utah, and ten years later, had my Ph.D. in physics. Along the way, I too came across Ayn Rand, and while I disagree with much of her philosophy, she steered me sharply away from religious thinking, for which I thank her. Pretty much in my early 20s I was aware that I didn't believe in any superstitious hooey, and the older I get the more I see I made the right choice.

I did have a brief flirtation years ago with "philosophical theism" but that didn't last. I had come across a wonderful book by Martin Gardner called The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener. Martin Gardner is no dummy, he is a famous skeptic and debunker of paranormal scams, and yet he is a theist. In that book he sets out why. He subscribes to fideism and the "credo consolans" - he chooses to believe because it makes him feel better. I tried to do the same thing, but it just felt wrong. Like playacting.

When I met my wife, in grad school, she was studying biology. I asked her what she was reading at the time "The Bible" she said. My heart sunk. She went on, "Yes, I was told all these years that this book has all the answers, so I am reading it, and you know what? Jesus was an asshole!" I was in love!

rgb said:

</i>
After somebody has won the lottery, do you assert that the probability of their winning is unity (since they actually won it and that's a unitary event)
</i>

No, I assert that if the lottery rules are such that a winner is guaranteed, then the probability that someone will win is "unity". But the probability of any particular person one is whatever the odds were.

That is the lottery fallacy. It is the most common mistake in understanding evolution, and insurmountable for some.


Didn't I just say that myself on another thread without bringing Zeno into it?


Yes, but my concern is whether you are following your own good advice. It may just be a matter of clarification, the only thing I ask from any objections I ever make.


I'm asserting that a proper analysis of what the Universe MIGHT be should not exclude the possibility, and should be very open minded concerning the occurrence of "awareness" in that model.


It you talking about the issues of the human mind, I agree. If you are saying the universe cares what I (or any life form thinks) I disagree.

"Yes, I was told all these years that this book has all the answers, so I am reading it, and you know what? Jesus was an asshole!"

Shaitte,

Does your wife have a sister by any chance? Ha ha!

Hey RC, be gentle with him, :o)

There are some jewels in amongst the jargon...

e.g. “Roberts taught the Cave not "just" as Plato presented it but with his own little flourishes as he was both brilliant and bizarre as hell in his own right. Taught "correctly" as a metaphor for what goes on inside our heads, where all of our sensory input is indirect information extracted as shadows cast on the walls of our personal caves”

Also it took three attempts for you to explain what you meant by the lottery fallacy. We all use jargon without thinking... communication is so difficult...!

I like this one too... “I'm not arguing for idealism vs materialism, merely pointing out that at its heart is a recursive puzzle where ideal or material, the Universe is information, information that has a representation in real numbers. If it is material, then the material encodes the ideal, perfectly. If it is ideal, the ideal describes the material, perfectly.”

RC said “if the lottery rules are such that a winner is guaranteed, then the probability that someone will win is "unity".”

Not a lot of people know that!

To nitpick, the lottery also has to actually take place.

Shaitte, it often amazes me people survive childhood. We are so resilient as a species.

After leaving school, however, that is where learning begins and we can direct it ourselves.

Jumping in late...

Jumping in late...

My anticonversion story is remarkably similar to a combination of others mentioned here. I would have to say that my immediate family (mother/father) weren't particularly religious. My mother only went to church on Easter, and my father never went at all, though he still fancied himself a Baptist (albeit one who danced, drank, and lived a life quite the opposite of true Baptists). I've always been inquisitive, and insatiably curious about nearly everything. Apparently more than my parents could handle, too. My father was always giving me BS answers to my questions, either because he didn't know, or wasn't very interested, as he was always indulging his own interests. (We have a much better relationship now, FTR.) My mother would always tell me to "go look it up" since we had this great set of encyclopedias they bought from a door-to-door salesman. So I spent a lot of time with those encyclopedias, my favorite being the giant medical encyclopedia.

No one on my father's side of the family were very religious, other than my uncle I mentioned in another post, who had converted to his wife's Adventist faith. But I had more contact with my mother's side of the family. My mother's father and stepmother were more religious. Whenever we'd visit them in rural Alabama where they lived, going to church was compulsory. Not just on Sundays either. But they hardly lived by Southern Baptist principles for the most part, except when they got a bug up their ass about something.

My grandmother (mother's stepmother) encouraged me to read the bible when I was around 15, because she couldn't answer my skeptical questions (similar to Dan's), so I did. By this time I was also going to church weekly as required by my father's new wife, the epitome of wicked stepmother. My main reason for willfully going along with it was for the free coffee and donuts at fellowship afterwards, and made a game of asking skeptical questions and seeing how long it took before I was told to "look it up" or "talk to the preacher" or something inane like that, which always ended with something even more inane like "it is not our place to question - blah blah blah."

Reading the bible probably did it for me. I hadn't been through half of it before I realized it was a huge crock of shit. By this time I had read the Declaration of Independence, had topically covered the Constitution, and even read (the Cliff Notes of) the Federalist Papers, and those made a lot of sense. The bible, in comparison, was ridiculous.

Towards the end of high school, I had basically forgotten about religion, the church, the bible, etc. About this time I had moved away from my wicked stepmother, only to live with my mother and her super-evil husband. Without going into that, I'll just say that even if there was a god, he was nowhere to be found then. My mother, who did believe, and who did pray an awful lot, sure didn't have any prayers answered then.

I hadn't thought of religion really in any way until I was in the military and had to fill out the form for my dog tags that asked what my religious preference was. Even though I didn't think much about religion, nor did I think that I was really atheist. To be truthful, I don't think I encountered that term a whole lot except for hearing it in a derogatory sense. So on my dog tags it just says Rel: None. I don't even recall "Atheist" being an option, but that was a long time ago.

I meandered a bit through that fog of spiritual-but-not-religious, dabbled in some New Age thinking (before realizing that was way more daffy than Christianity), and then being agnostic because it would tend to be less off-putting than atheist to others. Then I got a little more serious and began studying religion and philosophy (still doing that actually), and decided one day that I was so incredibly sick of the wishy-washyness of agnosticism and began to defiantly call myself an atheist. It was during the Bush years that I started getting a bit militant about it, or at least very hostile towards religion. So that's my anticonversion story in a nutshell.

rgb...

I kind of knew I was quoting Russell to a Russellian. A bit like quoting the bible to a Christian, except most of them haven’t read it! ;o)

I just thought it might be of interest to the thread.

Stephen,

Yeah, one of my favorite all time books of philosophy is Russell's little Problems in Philosophy. Brilliant. But Roberts was even more fun than Russell. The Duke Philosophy department hated him, because he was so outre. He was a big, fat guy, with bug eyes and a thick neck -- in retrospect I'm guessing he was hyperthyroid/graves. He was beloved by all the jocks on campus because he gave no grades lower than a B if you actually handed in the required papers (whoever might have written them) and didn't grade attendance at all.

Roberts would stand at the front of the classroom and "declaim" parts of philosophy, with his eyes wildly bugged out, a cigarette in his hands that he puffed but wouldn't inhale (inhaling was bad for you), with his shirt unbuttoned at the bottom so his belly was bulging through with black curly hair all over (all unconscious, I'm sure). Periodically his finger would stab out and skewer a student and he'd say, and Mr. Brown, what do you think of that. As the semester proceeded, he only skewered students that played the game and had fun with it -- the somnolents in the back he simply ignored. Even large group classes were basically seminars with four to seven students (and forty more desks that were occupied with something, but it wasn't students.

His best two stories (insofar as I still remember them) were very definitely his version of the Cave and his related story of Adam on the first day of creation.

God has created Adam, and left him under a tree in Eden. Adam has not yet opened his eyes, though, to look around him? What can Adam (equipped, we imagine, with perfect logic, a language, whatever he needs to reason) know about his new world before he opens his eyes?

One of my very favorite questions.

As far as the much belabored Lottery Paradox is concerned, we don't know whether or not the lottery in question "has to have a winner". All we know is posterior, not a priori. I repeat, even in cases like "dice" or "coin flips" where we have mechanical reasons to suppose equal a priori probabilities, our best possible estimate of the actual probabilities comes from analyzing a series of coin flips (there's a lovely Urn argument by Polya that illustrates this point that is in many statistics books if anybody cares). If I give you an object and tell you that it has two sides, or give you an urn and tell you that it contains black and white balls, before you draw any balls your best estimate of the probability of 0 vs 1, heads vs tails, black vs right, is 50:50.

After you draw a single sample whatever the result might be, the best possible estimate based on complete ignorance of the urn and its preparation is not 50:50.

As I said, even the lottery fallacy makes use of Bayesian priors. It requires Bayesian priors. In the absence of such priors one should make the maximum entropy estimate.

Which takes us once again back to whether or not my observation (it isn't even an argument) is fallacious. I carefully stated that it did not apply to the fact that the Universe exists. I also carefully stated how I formed the estimate of the probability of the observed state as something that is interesting to think about. Perhaps you don't think it is interesting, RC. That's your prerogative. I think it is pretty amazing! There is nothing fallacious in my observation of the entropy of the Universe -- it is for all practical purposes infinite, and at the same time (as I already said) it is zero. That's the interesting, puzzling, thing.

As far as the Universe being aware or not, it is empirically true that at least one small part of the Universe is, and is typing this (presumptively) to another. You are welcome to form your own estimate of the probabilities of (or interpretations of) the complexity of the Universe itself and to determine whether or not that complexity is adequate to support any form of awareness beyond yours and mine and any other presumptive ones.

rgb

My anti-conversion story is pretty weak but here goes…

I was brought up in a Pentecostal household. My mother didn’t attend church regularly but we were definitely Christian. Not only did my mom believe in god but she also believed in almost every other woo-woo thing out there; auras, astrology and psychics to name a few. To this day she’s a big fan of people like Edgar Cayce and Deepak Chopra. My beliefs, I suppose, were sort of a diluted version of hers.

I didn’t think much about being religious until I started attending youth services in high school with a friend of mine. It was mostly just a place to hang out, but then I realized how very cliquey it was. If you weren’t completely absorbed in the church then you weren’t worthy of very much attention. It’s also where I noticed that many Christians are extremely condescending and unforgiving when it comes to anything secular (music, schools, people, etc.). That was probably my biggest turn-off. I really disliked the idea of judging others and putting blinders on to everything that exists outside the church. Not to mention that there was no way I was giving up Metallica. So I quit the youth group, but not with the intention of becoming an atheist. That was a much longer process.

I can’t say when I completely switched over. I just know that Christian negativity, the lack of any sort of logic in the religion, and the feeling that I was always pretending to believe instead of truly believing led me down this path. In a sense, it was the religion itself that pushed me into atheism.


By the way, great thread so far. I wish we had more people telling their stories.

I think like many "unconversion" stories ..Or stories of "when I dropped voodoo and got my reason back" , my story is one of someone who "escaped early brainwashing"by dint of having parents who did not insist on adherence to a particular religion and church attendence etc., was exposed to books and good free-ranging conversations on alternative realities/worlds (like for me..that was science-fiction to which I was addicted as teen), myths ,comparative religion or critiques of religion/the holy books...which provoked thought and opened the door to the respectability and acceptability of treating religious statements, beliefs, dogmas to the same rigors as anything else. I am not aware of any evidence of theistic beliefs that my father may have had. My mother was neurotic and narcissitic but was more interested in our secular education and being "good" than inculcating any religious beliefs though she did make us go to the nearest protestant church (happened to be Presbyterian) for a relatively short time though SHE did not bother to go herself.
All I got out of that brief church Sunday school stint was a wooden piggy bank in the shape of a church that one was supposed to fill with money and bring back to donate. An early doubter in the reasonableness of such commands, I kept the piggybank.
Occasionally, a classmate would invite me to attend her church services . I went out of curiosity and was mainly bored. One time, however, I did go up to offer to be "saved" at such a service (Baptist) and when I told my mother afterwards, she wrinkled her nose at such behavior so I got the message that it was unseemly somehow. Her mother was Congregational and kept a bible and being good/respectable (to my mother) obviously meant being appropriately Christian.(She vaguely believed she had certain obligations as a good mother which led to her sending us to church when convenient. She made it clear that we were Protestants not Catholics though it was not clear to me what, outside of long services and some belief in the Pope ..was different about Catholicism. We were not to use "bad words" or swear or be overtly irreligious but neither were we lectured on faith or dogma. I did say prayers at night ..a ritual which was to be "good" and for "self-protection" somehow.

I played with a lovely large ceramic headed baby doll with blue eyes that opened and pretended he was the baby Jesus. I had absorbed the manger story and believed in it and God etc ...especially around Christmas. I absorbed the traditional myths thru Christmas carols, and what not.

My parents divorce and our relocating to another city was wrenching and contributed to my growing awareness of the "unfairnesses" visited on individuals that could not be "prayed away". Religion seemed divorced from me as well since I could not connect it with efficacy in my life.

As a high school student, I resisted recruitment into "Youth for Christ" and my skepticism and curiousity grew about religion. I joined with other bookish and bright friends for a study group run by a minister of the local Congregational church to read and discuss ...Thomas Paine's the Age of Reason. Turns out the minister was actually a Unitarian filling in at the Congregational post,(there was no Unitarian church in town then) ..and was also a lawyer! That study-group was pivotal for me in that I thought Paine's critique of the Bible..was dramatic, and dispositive in terms of exposing it as flawed , full of error, contradiction, fable, illogic, and immoral barbaric acts unworthy of a God to worship.. Of course Paine was a Deist and was not saying God did not exist but removing the Bible as some kind of "proof" or holy creation or underpinning for dogma was a major step in freeing me from any danger of unquestioning faith in such claptrap and making a distinction between organized religions/churches and holy books on the one hand and personal relation/understanding or experience of the divine, ineffable etc. . I read Sir James Frazier's The Golden Bough which traced mythologies and religions and elements of belief suggestive of common roots and uses of religion by man..to explain the natural world etc. I benefited from an excellent class on Logic by a teacher who was a physicist who taught a few select "honors student" classes at our high school for a few years. I would place me firmly in the agnostic camp by hs. graduation. It was,
a "much longer process" as Chantel put it, to move on into atheism.

I learned of suffering, of the fickleness of fate consigning so many to lives of poverty, illness, starvation etc. thru reading literature..as well as the news and school. I was immersed in reading and in writing as a refuge, hobby, activity and love of books and wide reading continues to be central in my life.

In college and after,I did explore a variety of spiritual paths,mystic and magical, by various means .. and my explorations led to some incredibly interesting and still inexplicable (for me) experiences which remind me that there is much we do not understand about the nature of our own perception, the limiting and shaping of of it by particular linguistic frames and culture, the power of the human mind..so much untapped, and the oddness of
synchonicities, fateful meetings or events, or intuitive aspects which enrich our lives..My deliberate decision to attempt to leave my cultural and linguistic box to see what I could see in the world led me to largely solitary travel thru 18 countries in 7 months..after I graduated from college.

It was indeed life-altering and freeing though dangerous at times. I felt, saw, learned much that was new to me. I will never forget a mysterious vision in Greece (shared by other travelers ) for example. However much remains unexplainable, it is not explained by or even contingent on the existence of a God.
I am now an atheist. I have arrived at tenets to live by. I believe in various causes and have a strong sense of what is just and right and have passions. I am also a seeker, a wonderer, an explorer and love life, not yearning nor expecting any particular sensient existence.
(It would be more interesting to speculate on the "before-life" than the "after-life"... and perhaps its time to create entertaining descriptions and stories for that. Why is there so little mythmaking about whether there was anything for our "souls" before we were conceived? ..Of course its hard to beat the Reincarnation theory eh? We should start another thread)

In college and after,I did explore a variety of spiritual paths,mystic and magical, by various means .. and my explorations led to some incredibly interesting and still inexplicable (for me) experiences which remind me that there is much we do not understand about the nature of our own perception, the limiting and shaping of of it by particular linguistic frames and culture, the power of the human mind..so much untapped, and the oddness of
synchronicities, fateful meetings or events, or intuitive aspects which enrich our lives.

Yes, I agree, Wendy. Our difficulty is that we lack a persuasive theory of cognitive awareness on the one hand (and that this is a "hard" problem, one as difficult as any physics problem, although one that I think may at last prove to be solvable over the next couple of decades) and on the other there are some extremely interesting sychronicities in human experiences, at least in mine.

These two observations taken together are the main reason I keep an open mind about God and think God rather more likely than not. "I" am more than the sum of the microscopic processes that give rise to my awareness, or at the very least represent a kind of order that is not at all visible at the microscale. I too read a lot of SF as a kid -- e.g. Frank Herbert's Whipping Star, Asimov's The Gods Themselves, and of course Heinlein's amazing Pan-Solipsism series.

One's beliefs should correctly be derived from one's experience. Every living human has many experiences that are well explained by science based models. Things "make sense". Most humans have at least some experiences that are not so well explained, experiences that it is difficult to make sense of within the framework of a simple scientific theory.

What is one to do with these "uncomfortable" experiences, the ones that don't fit? Places where million to one chances come up nine out of ten times (Pratchett fans, anyone)? Some people use them as a -- not necessarily unreasonable -- excuse to believe in God, or at least in some sort of organizing principle that keeps things from being quite as random as one might expect. Some people try to ignore them and pretend that they don't exist or that they really aren't as unlikely as they seem to be, to (literally) rationalize them.

After all, sometimes when somebody has a panicked moment of sudden certainty that a loved one has died far away it has to turn out to be true that they did, in fact, just die at that very moment far away. It's just billions to one against it happening and yet it does, nine out of ten times (or so it seems from anecdotal evidence).

When you get right down to it, there are things I believe in and disbelieve in just because I want to. I believe in a closed Universe, and believed it back when the evidence in physics seemed to point to an open one. My reason was basically a religious one -- I can sort-of cope with the Universe truly being an infinite time series of expansions and compressions, no beginning and no ending. In that case all points are in the middle of an infinite line, so my being here, now, is "unlikely" but not unreasonable in a posterior analysis.

If it were a SINGLE pass Universe -- with an infinite amount of time spent in a state indistinguishable from non-existence, followed at some specific time (related somehow to infinity by processes in a medium that had no structure or possibility of change) by change -- expansion into a bunch of "stuff" that just happens to have the properties required so that a bunch of this stuff can eventually look out at the rest and go "Wow, what cool stuff" for a brief moment before all the stuff spreads out and cools down to where there is nothing interest left and nothing to watch it, for eternity -- that would be horribly asymmetric, and it would be very, very odd. The human mind cannot help but wonder why, and of course there could not ever be any answer.

An oscillatory Universe, OTOH, makes more metaphysical sense. One still cannot answer the why question, but now there isn't quite the burning need. The Universe no longer picks out any particular time as "special" in a nearly impossible way.

Similarly I find it rather difficult to believe in just one space-time continuum. Why one? One is so "unlikely", so asymmetric. Why two? Why ten? The only two numbers that make the slightest bit of sense are zero or infinity. No space-time at all, perfect nonexistence, or an infinite number of spacetime continua. Just one seems like an absurdity to me, even though "science" can hardly justify such a belief one way or the other at least at this time.

(Note that an infinite cyclic Universe achieves the infinite number a different way, but it is the same symmetry issue.)

These aren't very strong beliefs -- they could be knocked over my a strong wind, if you like. By their very nature they aren't easy to validate, although a more careful analysis of evidence seems to be increasing the plausibility of the former steady state model as people start looking for Dark Matter, or Energy, or invisible rubber bands or pesky fairies adding on to the apparent force we can attribute to gravity alone.

My belief in a panendeist God is rather like these beliefs. Sure, I could be wrong. And the Universe may well turn out to be open. And it could (I suppose) be True that there is precisely one spacetime continuum with a definite initial starting time that is that particular time for no particular reason and that will continue to expand, slowly, forever, until the energy density of that space-time approaches a limit of zero for an infinite amount of time following. It could all be that way for no reason, random, chaotic, unpredictable, the ultimate refutation of the question why for eternity and beyond (with nearly all of that time spent without any aware mind being aware of anything at all.

The tree falling in the forest may or may not make any sound if nobody is there to hear it, but without anyone to ask the question the answer either way appears to be an infinity of nullity, existence indistinguishable from nonexistence, a somewhere that might as well be nowhere.

I prefer a Hilbert Grand Hotel Universe. There's always a party going on in an infinite number of its rooms, so there's nothing all that surprising about the one we're celebrating now. Step out of one door and into another picked at random, and you can even imagine finding therein a perfect cigar, or yell down the hall for one and have one delivered from a room where there are two.

Romantic? Absolutely. Supported by evidence? Yes, and no. We're in a room now, which is very sound evidence for a hotel for at least one room. How far can the evidence be extrapolated? Everywhere! And Nowhere! In finite time one can only<i/> experience one suite of this particular hotel; the other rooms will always be known only by rumor, by insight, by (maybe) visits from other guests that have been in some of them.

Which reminds me of one of my favorite physics jokes, one that truly illustrates several lovely things. I've got to get Sam at school; when I get back I'll relate it.

rgb

Another, very strong, element of the growth of my disbelief, it must be said, was and still is books!

Initially I became hooked on science fiction, especially the masters like Asimov, Clark, Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Larry Niven and others (none of your fantasy stuff – all hard core). And I interspersed that with the New Scientist magazine.

As I got older I started reading real science, especially Gould and Dawkins – the epitome of good science writing. More recently I have moved on to Russell, Hume and the like.

Without books disbelief would probably not be possible!

Stephen, Science-fiction reading midwifed many a creative skeptical mind. If we can dream implausible things and multiple worlds lit by alien moons, we can recognize implausibile beliefs...and make choices. I read all the greats too..of that time. Not the fantasy stuff either... Remember a Canticle for Leibowitz?
I particularly remember an SF story (author I do not recall) of a man who is wandering in a forest and keeps coming to a clearing where a lovely woman and her father live..but each encounter with them is strangely incongruent with what he experienced before..including one time where he is in love with and loved by the woman and another where he realizes that they want to kill him.. Gradually one realizes that there are many identical clearings in this forest and the visually identical pair of inhabitants are really different and distinct pairs of people.. the hero's interaction with them is necessarily different though often predicated on assumptions based on his prior encounters in other clearings...As I recall, he feels as if he is going mad.

A Canticle for Leibowitz was and is one of my favorite stories, although I like fantasy as well as SF and everything in between:-) And it encourages both an open mind and a skeptical one. One has to be able to suspend disbelief to a greater or lesser extent to enjoy the story, but some stories are more believable than others. E. E. Smith's stories have terrible science -- really awful -- but are great fun! Greg Bear's stories have much better science and bore me. Larry Niven, David Brin, Robert Forward all have good to great science, and tell a good yarn as well (the latter two being astrophysicists helps:-).

Anyway, my joke.

An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician are all on a train going to a conference in Scotland. None of them have been to Scotland before, and are all watching the landscape through the windows of their shared car.

Through the windows they all see a lovely hillside, dotted with sheep. All of the sheep are white but one, which is black.

The engineer points at the lone black sheep and says "Look there, they have black sheep in Scotland!"

The physicist gives a bit of a sniff and says, "You mean there is at least one black sheep in Scotland."

The mathematician quietly removes his spectacles to give them a good clean, and as he does so he muses, "Or rather, there is at least one sheep in Scotland that is black on at least one side.

This story has many morals that can be derived from it. Many of our discussions on this list can easily come to resemble one or another of the points of view represented. So ask yourself: Who has made the most correct statement? Who is the most reasonable in their observation? Why? What kind of prior knowledge do you use in making your choice(s)?

rgb

I've discovered from these posts that there are two ways to atheism.

The first is a priori, like RC, never having had religion to begin with, and a posteriori, as in most of the rest of us who had religion, were exposed to new data, and made a series of rational decisions.

;)

This post is in no logical order...

I like the physicist; the mathematician as usual is taking things to extremes and postulating the unlikely as if it was a possibility! Multiple universes anyone? Eleven dimensions? ;O)

Feynman, who worked in the same university as the people developing string theory, would often come into the common room and say “and how many dimensions does the universe have today?”

Wendy, your “man who is wandering in a forest and keeps coming to a clearing where a lovely woman and her father” but where it’s many clearings and many people, reminds me of the notion that we have/present a different personality to each person we meet. We are a multitude of selves.

I remember that I liked “a Canticle for Leibowitz” when I read it, many years ago, but I can’t really remember it now. I will have to read it again. So many books to read... So many I’ve read and forgotten... I think I may lose my mind, if only I could remember where I put it!

I love Robert Forward too rgb.

Now, re your different scenario for the timeline of the universe rgb. Haven’t you omitted the one where time itself was created in the big bang? Then it would be meaningless to ask about prior to the big bang. We are trying to understand such weird and unearthly configurations of space/time/matter with our common sense modelling of chasing food on the plains of Africa.

Dear Stephen,

I think that it is incorrect to state that time was created in the big bang. Was space created in the big bang? If so, "when" did it occur?

Without time, change in time cannot occur. Without space, there's nowhere for it to occur.

We have no way of extrapolating either observation or theory to the moment of the big bang. Our knowledge of the underlying physics is partial, because (Feynman's wry comments aside:-) it may well turn OUT to be string theory in 2048 dimensions as our next approximation to the way things work. We still cannot rationalize Einstein's version of gravity and quantum theory, and string theory at least provides a possible way to make the two compatible.

To put it another way, there are a number of ways it can be meaningless to ask what happened before the big bang. One is the logical positivist way (that is to say, the stupid way). We can't measure it, so it is meaningless. The other is to ask "if we track backwards in the proper time of e.g. particles or the field, can we in principle go back before the time of the big bang?" Or to ask "If we stepped outside of spacetime altogether, into a higher dimensional space, what would we see?"

I personally don't think that most physicists truly believe that there "was no time" before the big bang or that the idea of a persistent state before the BB is somehow contradictory. There is evidence that the universe was not a point-like object at the time of the BB. Nor was it a homogeneous object -- its initial state structure is still visible in the sky overhead. From whence inhomogeneity? From whence the particular inhomogeneity that was the "initial state" on some timelike hypersurface? Why was that initial state unstable, and what can the term "unstable" mean if not "unstable in time"?

As I said, the argument from symmetry alone is a powerful one. Sure, arguments based on symmetry are sometimes wrong. Sure, Hoyle had a lovely theory too, only it turned out to be wrong. Or did it? Perhaps he just missed the right SCALE.

Perhaps the right time scale for Hoyle's vision is trillions of years, trillions of space-time continunua themselves, all oscillating with periods of tens of billions of years?

Perhaps -- just perhaps -- openly believing in things one cannot see and have not verified or which don't gain support from a strong Bayesian argument is unwise. However, by the same token, disbelieving in things just because you can't see them now has been proven repeatedly by experience to be just as unwise.

Heck, I'll even believe that it is possible that one day I'll win the lottery, or that one of the many emails I receive every day offering me riches (I think I average 20-30 million dollars a day, easy) if only I would reply to claim them will turn out to be REAL and somebody will turn up at my door with a check!

I'll even acknowledge the possibility of Santa Claus, and I really do believe in Oz. Dorothy is real, I know it, and one day Ozma will see me through her magic mirror and will use the Gnome King's belt to bring be through. It is possible that reality is large enough to embrace all of this -- a certainty, even, if we include the reality of our imaginations.

I myself think that the wisest of the three of them is the engineer. Of course there are black sheep in Scotland. If I had prior knowledge that there were black sheep anywhere I would have guessed that there were black sheep in Scotland sight unseen -- good sheep country, bound to be some black ones there. The physicist is just being a show-off and reminding us "we should doubt until we see with our own eyes". The mathematician is even worse -- why not doubt that you are seeing sheep at all; perhaps they are sheep cut-outs sitting up on the hillside. After all, unless you see it how can you even be sure the sheep have another side (there was a Heinlein story where that wry observation was made by some character's father, only it was with reference to the back side of the moon, which at that time no human had ever seen).

The easy way to find out who is rightest is to offer to make a bet. Will the mathematician bet that the other side of the sheep isn't black? Even odds? Unlikely. How about the physicist, will he bet that there is exactly one black sheep in Scotland (having seen one already in a single short train ride)? Only if he's insane or very, very stupid.

The engineer's remark is practical and embraces the only probable conclusion from the observation that can reasonably be given weight. The others were "more correct" in their wording but so what? They themselves know perfectly well that the engineer was (almost certainly) correct, and neither of them would have taken a bet at 100:1 odds that that was the only black sheep in the country.

rgb

Hooray. Love it, rgb.

I too have a story...

Three umpires were discussing their roles in the game of baseball. The first umpire asserted, “I calls ‘em the way I sees ‘em.” The next umpire, with even more confidence, and a more metaphysical turn of mind said, “I calls ‘em the way they are!” But the third umpire, displaying a familiarity with twentieth century physics, concluded the discussion with, “They ain’t nothin’ until I calls ‘em!”

The players and fans have no doubt that the ball was either over the plate or it was not over the plate, but the umpire’s call, and not any “fact of the matter,” creates a ball or a strike. Without the ball and the plate there would be no baseball, and without the world there would be no physics; but physicists, like umpires, “call the game” and in the process tell us how the world is “really” put together.

This was taken from a lovely book call ‘Inventing Reality’ subtitled ‘Physics as language’ by Bruce Gregory.

Rbg said “I think that it is incorrect to state that time was created in the big bang.

A rather bold statement (if I may be so bold!) Your examples are no less weird e.g. 2048 dimensions! And if there was a ‘before’ the big bang then we are back to versions of the ‘steady state’ theory which have their own philosophical dilemmas. Such as where did it come from and why is it there?

There are some good cases to be made for time itself being created in the big bang – along with space. To Einstein, space and time were a single entity. It is possible, I believe, that the time dimension can, in another part of the universe say, be swapped with one of the three space dimensions – and the equations would still work. We also know that ‘space/time’ can be curved, so why can’t it be curved right back on itself in some manner? We also know time is dependent on speed and on gravity. If you fell into a black hole (apart from being strung out like spaghetti) you would slow down and fall forever as measured by us on the planet you left from.

Hawkins gives the example of moving north on a planet: if you keep going you will end up travelling south again, hence it is meaningless to ask what is north of the north pole. If say time was created in the big bang and if you could travel back in time, you might well end up travelling forwards again, hence it would be meaningless to ask what came before the big bang.

We live in a very small and localised area, 3d space works and time flows slowly forward. We have evolved to survive well in this environment and the models our minds make of the environment are limited to it. We find it very hard, therefore, to visualise other configurations of space and time.

Another way of looking at it I found in an entrancing book called ‘Deep Time’ by David Darling. This follows (in beautifully lyrical language) the journey of a single sub-atomic particle from the moment of creation to the death of the universe. An idea here was that time only makes sense as a measure of things changing or moving. (I’m not sure if I’ve remembered this correctly but you will get a feel for it.) As you go back in time the universe becomes hotter and hotter, particles move faster and faster, they have much more energy. What matters is not the size of the time interval but what happens in it, during the first tenth of a second more took place than in and similar length period that followed. Time as we know it is abandoned as we set up instead an exponential scale. As much could happen between 10 to the minus 36 and 10 to the minus 35 as happens in say three billion years of our time. But placing the whole of cosmic timescape within a fresh frame in no way alters time’s basic nature.

I’m not advocating one position over another. I’m just pointing out another possibility for the universe, i.e. that time, like space, was created in the big bang and hence the question of what came before is meaningless.

(Actually, I find it fascinating one can construct a sentence in English that is grammatically correct but is in fact meaningless or wrong or nonsense... but that’s another story!)

A rather bold statement (if I may be so bold!) Your examples are no less weird e.g. 2048 dimensions! And if there was a ‘before’ the big bang then we are back to versions of the ‘steady state’ theory which have their own philosophical dilemmas. Such as where did it come from and why is it there?

Yes, this is a fundamental, irreducible, philosophical existential dilemma that is made no more palatable by asserting "because God made it so" or "for no reason". All things considered, nothing seems far more reasonable than something, and once you've got something (for no reason, something being fundamentally unreasonable) you're further stuck with "OK, so something exists. Why this?"

If one defines God to be that which is self-sufficient existence, that which is for no reason but that it is, one is no better or worse off than if you call the Universe that which is self-sufficent existence, that which is for no reason but that it is.

As far as steady state is concerned -- if there is something I have a bigger problem with than something vs nothing, it is first having nothing and then something. Sequence with nothing to serve as the origin of something. Before and after with (as you say) no time to create an ordinal relationship. Pure discontinuity. Physicists hate that.

Infinite existence, on the other hand, is no problem. No beginning, no end. No need to think of what came before, or what will come after. All points in the middle of an infinite line, but a half infinite line, that's a bit of a problem...

rgb

p.s. -- I'll address other points later, but this is the essence of it.

p.p.s. -- time makes sense two ways, and physics has a problem with them. Yes, time is measured by clocks, clocks are associated with change, change with dynamics, so the frozen is "timeless". But there is also dimensional time, time as in space. Space-time. Space-time does not overtly rely on dynamics. I don't think physicists fully understand the nature between space-time and dynamics as in quantum mechanics and space-time granulated at the Planck scale. That's why string theory is so important. That's why when I go and talk about 4096 dimensional spaces, you shouldn't dismiss them with a sniff or a shake of your head. That's exactly what people did when Einstein, Lorentz, Riemmann, Gauss, and so many others postulated "ridiculous" extensions of common sense that turned out to be right. Not to mention quantum theory itself.

The book I mentioned called ‘Inventing Reality’ and subtitled ‘Physics as language’ by Bruce Gregory is a fascinating read and I can strongly recommend it.

It takes you through the history of physics but from the perspective of language defining how we view reality... so physicists in a way create reality for us. Hence the story of the umpires above.

I'm not certain that I agree that physicists create reality for us; one of those prime meta-axioms of most aware souls is that there exists an objective external reality that is self-defined as a set of information; it (and we) have a state (which you can think of as a complete set of coordinates required to precisely specify that state, on top of a fixed ontology that can be thought of quite generally as a vector space, with every unique coordinate part of the general coordinate description vector for the complete system.

Our labelling of our partial understanding of this objective reality does not in any way affect that reality. So back when Newton invented (one view of) classical physics, it did not affect the way that nature worked, it only improved the correspondence between our internal ontological semantic map and the terrain it sought to describe. The map is not the territory (although the human brain in which the map lives is part of the territory, which is one thing that makes it all so very interesting).

I do hope that Gregory doesn't go around asserting that we create reality quantum mechanically by observing things; that's a nearly universal fallacy that derives from a poor understanding of the nature of the measuring apparatus relative to the system being measured. It disappears when one starts at the top with a unified system consisting of both measuring apparatus and measured subsystem -- at that point there is clearly no such thing as "quantum collapse" and hence there is no such thing as quantum collapse. It is an illusion brought about by the aforementioned split and our ignorance, in this case ignorance concerning the phases of all the quantum elements in the measuring apparatus, which forces us to use a projection onto a classical (or semiclassical) state description for that apparatus.

Doing it "correctly" leads from the density matrix "for the Universe" to the Nakajima-Zwanzig generalized master equation, which is IMO the most important piece of physics that almost never gets taught even to physicists, literally the golden key to the understanding of nearly every aspect of the entropically driven time evolution of partitioned systems. We are little Nakajima-Zwanzig subsystems, evolving according to an non-Markovian integrodifferential equation (one with a memory kernel) in interaction with "everything else".

You might have to google a bit to find a good paper on NZEs and the Wikipedia article on GMEs still sucks, although the article on the (related) Langevin equation isn't terrible. The fundamental connection between information theory and quantum theory, if you like.

If Gregory is just referring to Sapir-Whorf for physicists (where there IS a really excellent Wikipedia article on Sapir-Whorf) then I agree without seeing it -- coming up with the right "language" (or coordinatization) is over half the battle when it comes to formulating a consistent worldview, with the inference of the rules and grammar that permits the consistent manipulation of the symbols in ways that achieve maximal correspondence with observational reality the other half.

rgb

I'll jump in and admit that I too suffer from Ontological Wonder Sickness. The question of "why is there something instead of Nothing?" has bothered me for as long as I can remember.

Here is a related question. Given that some things exist and other things don't, how did that demarcation line get drawn? If there is going to be stuff that exists, isn't it simpler if everything exists?

Sure, but everything is precisely what exists, by definition. If you mean "everything that could possibly exist exists, well, there are infinities and there are infinities, but that is essentially the concept of Hilbert's Grand Hotel, and the kind of thing people mislabel when they talk about multiple Universes (which is a rather obvious oxymoron, they "mean" multiple spacetime continua because there can only be one Uni-verse).

If you read the Wikipedia article on it, you'll note that it contains a reference to a silly "cosmological argument" against infinity or a steady state/cyclic Universe that goes back to Thomas Aquinas's the Universe had a definite beginning and must have had a cause, and that cause must be God. Which (as has been noted many times) begs many questions and once AGAIN violates the definition of Universe, as the Universe is everything that has objective existence and hence must INCLUDE God (if God has objective existence).

God could at most "create" a spacetime continuum, but as I noted above, "creation" is a dynamical act that itself can only occur in "time", so it presupposes a covering geometry with timelike and spacelike coordinates in which differential relations exist that can describe "dynamics" -- the dynamics of God thinking in meta-time, for example, about creating space and time. One still has the problem of something from nothing if God "creates" the Universe out of nothingness. One also has a serious problem with free will -- the free will of God. It is rather obvious that free will (or the illusion of free will) is related to entropy, or partial knowledge. An "omniscient" being cannot have will at all, let alone free will, because complete knowledge of the state of the Universe is static -- "dynamics" merely describes relationships between quantities within that state.

Anyway, your question ultimately addresses one of the most interesting questions studied in physics and mathematics -- self-organizing systems and systems that spontaneously/dynamically break symmetry. We manifestly live in a state of seriously broken symmetry, but believe that the underlying field theory is itself intrinsically symmetric.

I reserve judgement on the idea of everything that could possibly exist existing, primarily because I think that the concept itself is inconsistent due to Godel's theorem. Reality is clearly complex and self-referential enough for Godel's theorems to apply, and hence a) We cannot prove the consistency of any theory of everything, ever -- if we could it would in fact prove the inconsistency of our model; and b) if we wish our model to be consistent as far as we've been able to define it, that model must be incomplete and Godel proves that sufficiently complex theories can be complete or consistent but not both.

This is one of the things I'm working to describe in my book, as it is fundamental "prior knowledge" of the metaphysical sort applying not to any particular worldview but to worldviews in general. The "best" worldview accessible to a finite being in a much larger Universe is one that is known to be incomplete, that is consistent so far as it is known, and that lacks axioms that permit one to "prove" its consistency. Odd, but there it is.

Fortunately, this perfectly describes science. Nobody would argue that science is capable of achieving complete knowledge of the possibly-infinite Universe, and our knowledge of quantum theory and information theory so far makes it theoretically impossible for one portion of the Universe to achieve "perfect knowledge" of the rest in any non-trivial situation. Science itself is all about building the best possible consistent description of everything based on the partial and filtered and projective exchange of information between the subsystem seeking to "know" the rest and the rest. It would be stupid to assert that science and/or mathematics working together or alone could ever achieve perfect, provable, consistency -- there are intrinsic "paradoxes" such as the existential/ontological wonder sickness paradox that science cannot consistently describe. Science is great at telling us how a force acts on a baseball to produce its trajectory in a way that roughly corresponds to our observations of the trajectories of many similar baseballs. Science cannot consistently answer the question "why the baseball" (it can only go so far back and cannot address the super-ultimate-why question because it is essentially descriptive and evidence based and the "whys" it can explain are all internal to stuff that exists, not why existence).

Two last observations. One is that this last statement leaves us free to assert God or not assert God as a self-sufficient answer to the SUWhy question. This answer cannot be proven -- it would violate Godel's theorem and is itself a Godelian self-referential loop either way one chooses to assert it. The Universe Is. Behold it. If there is no God, the Universe is for no reason. If there is God, the Universe (including God) is for no reason. If there is God, the Universe is God and God is the Universe or God fails to possess all the attributes we wish to assign to the term "God". If there is no God, the Universe possess exactly the same attributes.

For God (postulated) to possess free will, God must be bound to time, and non-coordinate time -- experiential time -- is bound to entropy. Entropy is missing information, which requires a partitioning of the Universe into subsystems a la NZGMEs and statistical averaging of the exterior portion so that there can be "discovery" and "choice" for information processing systems that possess a memory and the right integrodifferential self-organized structure. We are all, therefore, fragments of God, and only through our eyes can God (the Universe) see itself (the Universe) in a state that is not static and timeless.

This is all, by the way, in The Book of Lilith; it is a significant portion of what God as Innana communicates to Lilith in the first chapters of the story and consistently reveals as the rest unfolds. It is a mythopoeic truth, and does not have to be literally true to be useful to us as we seek to make sense and answer the unanswerable questions that our inquiring minds are led to contemplate even as we can see that they are unanswerable.

The second observation is that if one judges religious scripture on the basis of how accurately its "divinely inspired" writings describe observational reality (leaving aside entirely whether divine inspiration is anything more than intuitive reasoning mixed with symbolic reasoning in the ontological semantic available to the inspired brain that produces it), Vedic Hinduism wins hands down, with no other religion coming even close. Nobody (in the US) ever actually studies it (or rather, they study it badly, as a polytheistic hodge-podge of myths and legends regarding the devas and their human avatars) but it arguably describes the Universe as a series of expansions and collapses -- Yugas -- wherein Brahman/Universe splits itself into many and binds itself to the illusion of time so that it can experience it as Atman -- both the suffering and the pleasure -- before recoalescing into a timeless state of unity and then doing it all again, differently.

Rather beautiful, from a mythopoeic point of view, and of course within it there is perfect justice. All things are God, all actions are God's actions, in all events one is both windshield and bug and in just the right frame of timeless mind one has perfect knowledge of both. Most of the actual religious practice is devoted to achieving an approximation of that Mind, to Know yourself as God knowing God.

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