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The stumbling block for atheists.
- Thread starter dysert
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That´s probably because "I don´t like X, therefore I don´t believe X
exists" is considered fallacious.
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Your opinions don't match my experience and are not relevant to how scientists think about the science they do.I can see for myself that we've wasted billions of dollars on a fruitless dark matter snipe hunt that was never warranted or necessary to start with. I can see for myself that all the null results are never used to "falsify" anything. I can also see for myself how much *misinformation* that the mainstream posts about EU/PC theory. I know how highly controlled the astronomy websites are too. I know *exactly* how "science" is being practiced in the real world as it relates to cosmology, and it's nothing like the brochure.
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Radrook
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I didn't claim that EVERYONE claiming Christianity believes it. But those who do will tell atheists that their god does roast people alive forever and even say that atheists will roast if they don't repent.
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A prediction is a reasonable implication of your hypothesis. We already know the universe interacts with the human brain through EM fields - all our senses depend on electromagnetic effects. Sharing a potential means of communication, of itself, doesn't reasonably imply that communication should be expected, or that some specific outcome of any communication should be expected.
But if you are suggesting that god beliefs arise from the influence on our brains of an undetected electromagnetic field of cosmic origin (despite us being swamped in relatively strong and easily detectable EM fields of our own making that have negligible effect on our brains, because our brains are very well insulated from extraneous electromagnetic fields), how do you propose such a field could target the relevant brain areas in each human brain as it moves around with its body?
Note that brain activity can be modulated by external EM fields; e.g. TMS stimulation using pulsed magnetic fields of 2 or 3 Tesla(!) a few centimetres away. These are extremely intense magnetic fields, and the resulting inhibition or stimulation isn't precisely targetable and typically goes less than 3 centimetres deep.
Is it reasonable to suppose a more targeted and very specific effect could result from an undetectably weak field?
But we already know the EM field is a potential mechanism of communication - we use it all the time; and we actively listen for signals of non-human origin.
But OK, let's run with a more numerical approach to it. If I understand you correctly, your argument is predicated on the concept of a cosmological scale conscious entity that functions via electromagnetic fields, somewhat analogously to a biological brain - and you cite structural similarities between micro-neurological features and cosmological features in support of this functional similarity. Yes?
So, if this entity comprises the observable universe, the patterns of electromagnetic activity that constitute its thoughts or awareness must, to involve the whole entity, traverse tens of billions of light years, therefore taking tens of billions of years.
When a human brain responds to a stimulus above the conscious threshold, activity spreads from the input processing area and spreads out across the brain to activate widely dispersed areas. A simplified and conservative estimate for the distance travelled by these primary activations would be roughly twice the distance between the front and back of the brain.
Let's charitably assume a static universe of 40 billion light years across, and ignore the signal processing time. If the thought-related activity in the cosmic brain is electromagnetic and remotely analogous to biological brain function, a minimum timescale for simple awareness of a supra-threshold stimulus would be roughly twice the distance across - something on the order of 80 billion years.
The current estimate of the age of the universe from the big bang is around 14 billion years, so it would take 5.5 times the current age of the universe for the proposed cosmic entity just to become aware of some stimulus. Average human lifespans are around 80 years, so around a billion human lifetimes would pass in that time. This would seem to make any assumption of communication quite untenable (ISTR explaining this a while ago).
This cosmic entity would be around 1.8×10^−27 times larger than the average human, equivalent to a human individually influencing entities 9 orders of magnitude smaller than a proton.
I've been extremely conservative and charitable with the figures I've used, but by all means correct my interpretation of your concept, and revise the figures as you see fit.
Then explain how the existence of a cosmic-scale conscious entity reasonably implies that humans would have god beliefs.
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Unless you happen to work in astronomy, my criticism wouldn't necessary apply to your field of science. Regardless of your field of expertise, which of our "experiences" has merit, or do they both have merit?
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Since there are more circuits in the solar atmosphere than exist in my entire brain, why would "processing" need to take place over billions of light years?
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I qualified in biological science, but I've subsequently taken an interest in other areas, including cosmology. In none of the areas in which I've had experience of scientists talking about and presenting their ideas do I recognise the views you describe. In my experience, scientists are just people like everyone else, but they also have a strong incentive to question each other's work and expose errors, inaccuracies, mistakes, and frauds. Personal loyalties are more than balanced by competitiveness. I can't comment about your experiences because I know nothing about them.
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My projection was explicitly ignoring signal processing time, and just considering the time for signals to traverse the 'brain' universe: "Let's charitably assume a static universe of 40 billion light years across, and ignore the signal processing time..."
As I said, if you want to revise my interpretation of what you've posted, or be more specific about the function, or change the scales I suggest, please do so. I'm going on what I've gleaned from your posts - I acknowledge it may not be what you meant, so please correct any errors you find.
Are you now suggesting that the signal processing could be performed by individual stars rather than being distributed as patterns of activity across the universe, as in an analog of a biological brain?
This would require the stars involved to be receivers and transmitters of a large amount of information, and significantly reduce the functional analogy with biological brains - and it wouldn't change the timescales I suggested. Do you know of any evidence to support this role for stars?
Any comment on the rest of my analysis?
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I don't have any fundamental problem with biology or how it's practiced probably because it's an empirically oriented branch of science. Much like particle physics (another area of science I embrace), virtually every claim in biology can be "tested" in a conventional empirical manner.
Astrophysics is probably the only branch of physics that excludes itself from experimental support and experimental falsification. Only their DM claim *could* be tested in a typical empirical manner, but it's been an utterly useless theory in terms of making any useful predictions about what we might observe in lab experiments.
I really wouldn't expect you to notice much difference until and unless we're talking about astronomy. When was the last time you saw something biological in the lab being affected by "dark matter' or "dark energy"?
Astronomers do that too, and they often expose errors in previous work. I've cited several paper that show many error in that infamous Bullet Cluster paper, but nothing has changed in terms of "dogma".
That BICEP2 paper was all the rage in the press and it went down in flames so it's obviously not an industry wide "conspiracy" problem. I'm certainly not suggesting "fraud" is even an issue in astronomy.
Not in such a small field where there are only about 8000 jobs available or funded. Not being ostracized by one's peers, and hanging on to your job tends to play a much larger role in astronomy with many fewer jobs available.
So we're both basing our opinions on our own personal experiences. Whereas I can accept that your experiences in biological related sciences is probably pretty much what you'd expect, that certainly has never been my experience of astronomers.
Even entire topics of conversation, like EU/PC theory are not permitted to be discussed on many astronomy forums, even though they are based entirely upon empirical physics. I've had mostly positive experiences in nearly every field of "science' with one specific exception, but I cannot deny that there's a huge problem in astronomy when discussions about empirical physics are forbidden on their websites.
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Why does the "awareness" of something have to "traverse the whole universe" in the first place? Some "signals" would take a great deal of time to traverse great distances, but I have no evidence that such is thing is even necessary as it relates to awareness and even "action" inside of our own solar system.
I'd rather not simply ignore it. Your questions have merit in their own right, and it may indeed take time for various types of information to "spread out" over time and distance.
Since I don't really know what the speed of awareness might be however, I have no confidence it's limited to the speed of light, nor do I have confidence that signals must go *everywhere*.
Ok.
Maybe. I don't know the speed of awareness for a fact, or the limits of solar circuitry, nor would I assume that all information has to be processed over distant structures.
They are certainly transmitters of energy and receivers of energy. I'm not sure how that correlates directly back to "information".
I don't know why you seem to think reduces the functional analogy. Some processing may take place locally, whereas some information might have to travel vast distances. I'm just not prepared to claim to know the circuit design in such intimate detail, or how that applies to "awareness" on a cosmic scale.
Not really. I tried to be specific about the fact that I don't know what the speed of awareness might be, even if it's input and output structures are limited to the speed of light. I don't really know for a fact what type of 'information" has to pass from one location to another either.
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You could only really walk in my shoes, and learn about my experiences with astronomy or replicate them for yourself by being a public skeptic of LCDM for awhile. Although the mainstream tends to deal harshly to all outside theories, I suspect that my experiences are also somewhat "attitude" related. As a result, my experiences might not be identical to your own experiences, but they'll probably be pretty darn close since the mainstream tends to ban anyone and everyone who embraces EU/PC theory, or skeptically questions their beliefs openly.
I'd never even consider discussing Panentheism on an astronomy website. There would simply be no point in doing so until and unless astronomers can embrace circuit theory as Alfven applied it to the plasma of space. The mainstream currently goes ballistic at the mere mention of Alfven's basic circuit oriented cosmology theories.
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That's how human brains work - when a stimulus is below the threshold of conscious awareness patterns of activation are local and short-lived, when it's above the threshold the patterns of activation are widespread and relatively long-lived.
As I've already said, your posts suggested structural and functional similarities between your cosmic brain concept and biological brains. If this is not the case, perhaps you can explain why you drew attention to these claimed similarities.
The 'speed of awareness' I'm using is the time taken for conscious (reportable) experience of a stimulus. The timescales of conscious awareness in biological (human) brains are pretty well established. Supra-threshold stimuli (e.g. auditory or visual) take a minimum 50–80 msec to produce basic conscious sensation, and identifying the nature of the sensation takes up to 500ms. The time varies with the processing delays in each activated area before onward propagation and the distances between activation centres.
The activations don't occur *everywhere*, but conscious awareness of a stimulus is characterised by activity in widely separated areas. I simplified by taking a rough estimate of the distance a signal might propagate in moving between those widely separated areas. Multiplying by the maximum propagation velocity gives a very crude minimum time from stimulus to conscious awareness of it. In practice, the time would be considerably longer, due to processing delays and variable propagation rates.
There is no reason to suppose any signal transmission can be faster than light, and several good reasons not to. In any case, if your cosmic brain functions via electromagnetic phenomena, as you suggested, its function will be subject to the velocity constraints of electromagnetic phenomena.
I'm not clear what you mean by that - you talk as if awareness was some kind of stuff or signal, rather than a description of a brain process.
It sounds like you're dropping the structural and functional analogy with biological brains, in which case my analysis is moot.
If you propose that solar 'circuits' are involved in signal processing, that implies input signals to process and resultant signals to output; i.e. information. If not, why mention them?
Because it's not analogous to the function of biological brains, as previously described.
It doesn't really matter; whatever information passes from one location to another - as it must for information processing to occur - it will take time and travel no faster than c.
It seems clear to me that your cosmic brain is untenable as any reasonable analogue to biological brains, and even more so under the known laws of physics in general and electromagnetism in particular.
If you want to claim it may be possible by invoking some unevidenced FTL influence, that's your prerogative, but it's also special pleading of the highest order.
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That's absurd - practically everything we know about astrophysics is amenable to verification and falsification.
When did you last see something biological in the lab being affected by neutrinos, or tidal forces, or anything else that doesn't detectably affect biological material in the lab? That's a very limited criterion.
As I said, my qualification is biological, but I've had experience of most other sciences, and taking an interest in cosmology, that includes astronomers. I find it quite implausible that one subgroup of scientists should behave radically differently from others. The fact that neither I nor any other interested observers of the field I know have noted it, but that it is clear and marked to someone with a clear bias against the mainstream in favour of a rejected model, speaks for itself.
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How? We've already spent *billions* of dollars looking for DM, and yet no evidence to support any form of exotic matter has come from that huge financial investment. What "predictive" value did it have? How do we falsify it? The term and the concept of "space expansion" could *never* be "tested" in a lab on Earth, inside our solar system, inside our galaxy, or even inside our galaxy cluster and supercluster, so how would we go about falsifying that particular claim? Dark energy? The last SN1A study put the likelihood of acceleration at *less* than five sigma, so how would I falsify that idea now? Penrose actually mathematically demonstrated that it's 10 to the 100th power *less* likely that a flat universe would result from inflation rather than without it, and hemispheric variations in Planck data sets *defy* inflation theory. How does one falsify that metaphysical bad boy?
I can certainly point you to several laboratory neutrino experiments that have been successful, and which have directly detected neutrinos, complete with control mechanisms and everything. Compare and contrast that with the last decade's worth of various DM experiments.
You know perfectly well what I'm getting at. Virtually all biological concepts enjoy empirical laboratory support, or they are likely to remain 'unpopular'. In astronomy, it's exactly the opposite. There's a bias *against* empirical physical explanations, and bias towards the introduction of hypothetical forms of matter and energy.
Biologists are not required to "hold faith" in their belief systems in the absence of empirical cause/effect laboratory support. Biologists have many more job opportunities than astrophysicists since there are only about 8000 professional (paid) astrophysicists on planet Earth today. Those are two very different scenarios. I don't see a lot of scientific boards and websites related to biology or any other branch of science I can think of, which simply *forbid* the discussion of a purely empirical concept, popular or unpopular. It's commonplace at astronomy websites however to simply *forbid* the discussion of EU/PC concepts.
Pretty much every EU/PC advocate would be an interested observer (or a professional) who rejects current cosmology theory.
First of all, I have no particular "bias" against the mainstream as a whole, nor do I have a personal bias against any specific cosmology theory. I do indeed hold a strong bias in favor of empirical physical explanations over supernatural constructs however, which does in fact cause me to favor one specific type of empirical cosmology theory, specifically EU/PC theory. That doesn't mean that I hold a bias toward the entire mainstream or hold a bias against any one specific cosmology theory either. It's nothing personal. It's just a bias in favor of empirical physical explanations, which is actually the 'norm' in every *other* area of science. Cosmology theory happens to be the rare exception at the moment in terms of their preference for non-empirical solutions to problems, but I have a great deal of confidence that will change over time.
When you use the term "rejected model", all you really mean is that EU/PC theory is currently less popular at the moment. If we look at the *publicly stated reasons* as to why various mainstream astronomers have publicly claimed to 'reject' EU/PC theory, their explanations and rejections are always based on a false belief about EU/PC theory. One astrophysicist publicly claimed to reject EU/PC solar theory, and EU theory as a whole because he claimed that EU solar models 'predict no neutrinos'. There is in fact *no* EU/PC solar model which predicts such a ridiculous thing however, so his explanation for his "rejection" of EU/PC theory has nothing to do with the actual theory itself, his rejection really just speaks to his own ignorance. Another astronomer publicly claimed to reject Birkeland's solar model on his blog due to a completely messed up particle flow diagram and a rambling tirade about Birkeland promoting three different solar models, when in fact Birkeland only ever promoted a *single* cathode solar model and his solar wind predictions were completely different than described by the astronomer on his blog. Again, the astronomers rejection of Birkeland's solar model had everything to do with his own ignorance, and absolutely nothing to do with Birkeland's actual writings or his published model.
In my experience, astronomers not only lack a full understanding of 95 percent of their own theory, they know little or nothing at all about EU/PC theory. In fact, most of what they publicly claim to "know" about EU/PC theory seems to be completely wrong. The mainstream has a big time problem with pure ignorance as far as I can tell, and that certainly is true as it relates to EU/PC theory. Most astronomers have probably never even read Cosmic Plasma by Alfven, or Birkeland's work for themselves. Most of what they think they know about EU/PC theory comes from unpublished websites which typically contain misinformation about EU/PC theory, like the aforementioned scenarios. I've yet to see a legitimate scientific argument against the EU/PC cosmology model in fact, just nonsensical rejections based on misinformation galore. Whatever the mainstream might actually "reject" has nothing to do with EU/PC theory. The only public 'rejections' that I've seen to date seem to be completely related to their own ignorance, not the theory itself.
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Well, it could work the same way at larger scales provided that the "awareness" begins locally and simply spreads out over spacetime over time. I really can't claim to know that 'awareness' is limited by the speed of light however, even if various sensory inputs to awareness are limited by particle speeds.
I believe they are similar. The scales however are quite different, as would be true with pretty much any cosmology theory we might discuss.
I'd certainly buy the idea that the *inputs* and *outputs* to awareness might be limited by the speed limits of various particles, and the circuitry used by awareness might be well understood in terms of speed, but awareness itself isn't necessarily limited by C unless you can show that it's got a carrier particle that has mass.
I wouldn't question the fact that you can watch the *effects* of awareness light up various circuits, and there is a "processing of information' going on, but as I pointed out the sun has more circuits in it's atmosphere than I have in my entire body. I don't know why you assume that all information has to travel everywhere in the universe in order for persistent macroscopic awareness to exist.
Even in physics there are hypothetical particles that can travel faster than light. According to BB theory, the universe has "expanding" faster than C too. You seem to turn a blind eye to that "exception" to your rule, so why impose such a limit on awareness?
Even it that's the case, the circuity of the universe is a lot more massive than what I might find in any lifeform on Earth, and even if it takes awhile for some types of processing to occur, and for some information to spread throughout the universe, it's going to happen sooner or later, and and a living universe might have the whole of eternity to process data from various locations.
I can't claim to know exactly what awareness is. It's associated with brain processes, chemistry and EM fields, but I'm not convinced that chemistry and EM fields are the 'cause" of awareness. For all I know awareness might be a quantum process of some sort.
I'm not dropping it at all, I"m simply noting that some types of information may not have to travel throughout the entire cosmos for further "processing" as you seem to imagine.
Solar circuits certainly emit light and magnetic fields. In EU/PC theory suns and galaxies are even "wired together" so information can traverse long distances if necessary.
It doesn't have to be 100 percent analogous does it, particularly at it relates to scales.
Well, even if there is some speed limit associated with awareness, I wouldn't preclude the process from taking place albeit over longer timelines. I also see no logic behind your assumption that all information has to be processed everywhere in the universe for "thought" to occur.
Not really. The worst you could try to imply is that the "thought process" must be much slower in some way, but only if you *assume* that all processing has to take place on a macroscopic scale rather than locally.
How would that even be any worse that any of the *four* such special pleading arguments of LCDM? The worst you could accuse me of is introducing *one* special pleading claim, whereas there are four such constructs in the cosmology model you're defending. Care to explain that rationalization for us?
Even if I introduce just one FTL communication method that's not easy to 'test' in the lab, it's still three fewer special pleading claims than LCDM. Why don't you apply that same "special pleading" argument to reject LCDM?
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Nihilist Virus
Infectious idea
What a bizarre assumption to make. 99.9% of the universe is either dark matter or dark energy, neither of which can be detected by one's senses. And it is reasonable to speculate that there may be many other weakly interacting things which we have yet to detect and/or can not ever detect.
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FYI, while the author of a recent paper uses a different term to describe a cosmic scale conscious, the concept is pretty much the same:
Scientists Now Believe the Universe Itself May Be Conscious
Scientists Now Believe the Universe Itself May Be Conscious
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It that is your position on the topics of exotic matter and exotic energy, why are you an atheist again?
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