Michio Kaku Finds God?

Any event can either be caused by something, or it can randomly happen. Those are all the possibilities, and neither one is acausal (libertarian) free will. Even if you say that there is this immaterial consciousness out there somewhere, those statements would also apply to it.
Well that is true only until it is found to be false! Clearly if consciousness is found to be fundamental, it is likely to turn out to be false. I think consciousness contains the seeds of a variety of revolutions in science precisely because it poses the questions such as whether free will (I am not keen to qualify that phrase) is real or not!

David
 
Isn't it always acausal in some sense? Even if you went back to the Big Bang, you'd have some amount of constants that are simply arbitrary.

And if the "laws of physics" don't change, then every moment they don't is also arbitrary on some level?

Not quite sure I follow you Sci? It's always been a goal to eliminate all the tune-able parameters, or arbitrary constants, in the latest and greatest theory, but instead they often seem to be adding more and more lol.

I think linear causation is just an appearance, myself. I don't know if what is beyond is acausal, but it's at least richer than just A causes B causes C, etc.

Somebody brought this up in the thread talking about LIbet's experiment too. This is Penrose's and Hameroff's answer to not only Libet's but also entanglement, that we're dealing with a richer structure of causation, which includes/subsumes our standard ideas of linear causation, but also a subtle kind of retrocausation.
 
Not quite sure I follow you Sci? It's always been a goal to eliminate all the tune-able parameters, or arbitrary constants, in the latest and greatest theory, but instead they often seem to be adding more and more lol.

I think linear causation is just an appearance, myself. I don't know if what is beyond is acausal, but it's at least richer than just A causes B causes C, etc.

Somebody brought this up in the thread talking about LIbet's experiment too. This is Penrose's and Hameroff's answer to not only Libet's but also entanglement, that we're dealing with a richer structure of causation, which includes/subsumes our standard ideas of linear causation, but also a subtle kind of retrocausation.

I can't remember the scientists or the paper, was it Tolaksen? But they wasn't there going to be something related to the quantum pigeonhole thing?
 
I can't remember the scientists or the paper, was it Tolaksen? But they wasn't there going to be something related to the quantum pigeonhole thing?

It may have been Tollaksen. It's all definitely related to his and Aharanov's flavor of Quantum Mechanics, which has a lot of neat things coming out of it like the quantum pigeon hole. There were also some deeper insights on entanglement, which showed a stronger sense of entanglement than we had ever thought of before, including the idea that particles could be entangled that were never near each other ever, or never within a local influence of each other. That's pretty weird!
 
I met God through a near-death experience. He's real and I can attest to that. After all these years of denying his existence. He still let me see him. I posted about my experience in the introductions.
 
I don't know about Kaku, but I tried to explain the subconscious mind and reincarnation, and, in my attempt to do so, I seem to have found what Kaku calls the mind of God.
Here is my paper: https://www.academia.edu/25366623/A..._social_science_and_physics_with_neuroscience
The mind of God seems to be a hyperdimensional structure containing the memories and skills of all the humans to have ever lived.

PS. My paper may seem incoherent, but do note that I went to psychiatrists and neurologists. I am not schizophrenic. My brain scans are normal. This is just an attempt by me to understand how the world works. I am only 20 years old.
 
I don't know about Kaku, but I tried to explain the subconscious mind and reincarnation, and, in my attempt to do so, I seem to have found what Kaku calls the mind of God.
Here is my paper: https://www.academia.edu/25366623/A..._social_science_and_physics_with_neuroscience
The mind of God seems to be a hyperdimensional structure containing the memories and skills of all the humans to have ever lived.

PS. My paper may seem incoherent, but do note that I went to psychiatrists and neurologists. I am not schizophrenic. My brain scans are normal. This is just an attempt by me to understand how the world works. I am only 20 years old.

One important thing to remember. Don't fall in love with your ideas. In the words of physicist Richard Feynman
It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/r/richardpf160383.html
 
One important thing to remember. Don't fall in love with your ideas. In the words of physicist Richard Feynman
"When Kepler found his long-cherished belief did not agree with the most precise observation, he accepted the uncomfortable fact. He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions, that is the heart of science."
- Carl Sagan
 
I have reviewed a lot of chemical processes over the years - and all had aspects of both deterministic and random variables. The basic idea of multiple chemical relations coming to a state of equilibrium - which can be dynamically balanced having potential for a tipping point in either direction - blows your thinking away.

It sounds like what you've seen supports what I said - something can be deterministic, or random, or of course something can be combinations of both, but deterministic and random exhaust all the possibilities. What else could there be?


Well that is true only until it is found to be false! Clearly if consciousness is found to be fundamental, it is likely to turn out to be false.

It's not an empirical claim that a test could show to be false, it's just a way to categorize the world. Even if consciousness were found to be fundamental, it would have to operate either by determinism or by randomness. There are no other choices.
 
It sounds like what you've seen supports what I said - something can be deterministic, or random, or of course something can be combinations of both, but deterministic and random exhaust all the possibilities. What else could there be?
.

Something can be knowing, intelligent or even wise in terms of decision making. Making a decision is - by definition - not deterministic and not random. Living things overcome physical entropy utilizing tipping points for actions that bring order, organization and function into their environments.

If you thinks what I am explaining supports your assumption, let me be clear - you did not understand what I wrote. Studying how living things use information to adapt, would detail what is going on in the brain's physical environment. And how the informational output of bioinformatic processes yield decisions that are adaptive.
 
Studying how living things use information to adapt, would detail what is going on in the brain's physical environment. And how the informational output of bioinformatic processes yield decisions that are adaptive.

You're describing cause-and-effect, which is completely within the "deterministic" part of what I was saying. I agree with that - I think intelligence is far and away deterministic, with possibly some small influence that is random due to quantum randomness.
 
EthanT - Wasn't a lot of this stuff regarding retrocausation done using weak measurements.

Not quite sure I follow you Sci? It's always been a goal to eliminate all the tune-able parameters, or arbitrary constants, in the latest and greatest theory, but instead they often seem to be adding more and more lol.

I think linear causation is just an appearance, myself. I don't know if what is beyond is acausal, but it's at least richer than just A causes B causes C, etc.

Somebody brought this up in the thread talking about LIbet's experiment too. This is Penrose's and Hameroff's answer to not only Libet's but also entanglement, that we're dealing with a richer structure of causation, which includes/subsumes our standard ideas of linear causation, but also a subtle kind of retrocausation.

My point was most people don't really think through what they're saying about causation.

Determinism means something happened for a sufficient reason, randomness - in the mechanistic way of thinking - means a miraculous, acausal violation of this chain of cause-effect.

Yet the fact the predictable regularities of physics don't wildly change would also be acausal, by which I mean they hold for no reason at all. Similarly the initial conditions of the Universe would also have to have no reason to them.

The way out of this is to start to talk about external natural laws imposing themselves on matter, but we can ask why those don't change...which leads us to infinite regression. Or we can claim they are Platonic Brute Facts, in which case we hit the problem [of] two fundamentally distinct "substances" - Platonic Reality and matter - having to interact.

Basically if you think the universe is a kind of machine you end up with this indeterminism/determinism divide which, as the physicist Ellis noted, just indicates an unexamined understanding of causation.
 
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EthanT - Wasn't a lot of this stuff regarding retrocausation done using weak measurements.



My point was most people don't really think through what they're saying about causation.

Determinism means something happened for a sufficient reason, randomness - in the mechanistic way of thinking - means a miraculous, acausal violation of this chain of cause-effect.

Yet the fact the predictable regularities of physics don't wildly change would also be acausal, by which I mean they hold for no reason at all. Similarly the initial conditions of the Universe would also have to have no reason to them.

The way out of this is to start to talk about external natural laws imposing themselves on matter, but we can ask why those don't change...which leads us to infinite regression. Or we can claim they are Platonic Brute Facts, in which case we hit the problem [of] two fundamentally distinct "substances" - Platonic Reality and matter - having to interact.

Basically if you think the universe is a kind of machine you end up with this indeterminism/determinism divide which, as the physicist Ellis noted, just indicates an unexamined understanding of causation.

Oh, I got ya! Yeah, I pretty much agree. Seems like a lot of these positions aren't thought through all the way. Like, the view claiming consciousness is either deterministic, or random, or a mix of both, like in this thread above. That basically means you can not trust your own knowledge, and we can't trust our results from science. At best, it's a partial picture. At worst, it's false. But, we would have no way of knowing, either way. This would also mean you can't even trust the original claim of consciousness being deterministic/random! Yet, in the same breath, we're told free will is an incoherent idea ... Free will is the one thing that rescues us from this mess, and physicists know it, that's why they would love to close the free will loop hole in quantum foundations!
 
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You're describing cause-and-effect, which is completely within the "deterministic" part of what I was saying. I agree with that - I think intelligence is far and away deterministic, with possibly some small influence that is random due to quantum randomness.
You don't think that any living thing makes choices based on feed-back from its senses? Pragmatically, as someone modestly exposed to research in Decision Theory, I think your metaphysics gets in the way of sound natural science. Bayesian math is very useful in parsing how living things behave, based not on mechanism, but on cunning and creativity in rational output.

Let us conclude by summarising the main reasons why decision theory, as described above, is of philosophical interest. First, normative decision theory is clearly a (minimal) theory of practicalrationality. The aim is to characterise the attitudes of agents who are practically rational, and various (static and sequential) arguments are typically made to show that certain practical catastrophes befall agents who do not satisfy standard decision-theoretic constraints. Second, many of these constraints concern the agents’ beliefs. In particular, normative decision theory requires that agents’ degrees of beliefs satisfy the probability axioms and that they respond to new information by conditionalisation. Therefore, decision theory has great implications for debates in epistemology and philosophy of science; that is, for theories of epistemic rationality.

Finally, decision theory should be of great interest to philosophers of mind and psychology, and others who are interested in how people can understand the behaviour and intentions of others; and, more generally, how we can interpret what goes on in other people’s minds. Decision theorists typically assume that a person’s behaviour can be fully explained in terms of her beliefs and desires. -- SEP on Decision Theory
bolding mine
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/decision-theory/

Here is Sean Carroll and David Deutsch trying to save MWI using the math of Decision Theory and a pragmatic stance.
Now, notice this result by itself doesn’t contain the word “probability.” It’s simply a fairly formal manipulation, taking advantage of the additivity of values in decision theory and the linearity of quantum mechanics. But Deutsch argues — and on this I think he’s correct — that this result implies we should act as if the Born Rule is true if we are rational decision-makers. We’ve shown that the value of a game described by an equal quantum superposition of states |x1> and |x2> is equal to the value of a game where we have a 50% chance of gaining value x1 and a 50% chance of gaining x2. (In other words, if we acted as if the Born Rule were not true, someone else could make money off us by challenging us to such games, and that would be bad.) As someone who is sympathetic to pragmatism, I think that “we should always act as ifA is true” is the same as “A is true.” So the Born Rule emerges from the MWI plus some seemingly-innocent axioms of decision theory. - Sean Carroll
http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2012/04/16/quantum-mechanics-and-decision-theory/
 
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You don't think that any living thing makes choices based on feed-back from its senses?/

What are you talking about? Of course I do think that living things make choices based on sensory inputs. Have I ever said anything that would make you think I don't?

Those sensory inputs are part of the inputs to the deterministic stuff the brain does.
 
Oh, I got ya! Yeah, I pretty much agree. Seems like a lot of these positions aren't thought through all the way. Like, the view claiming consciousness is either deterministic, or random, or a mix of both, like in this thread above. That basically means you can not trust your own knowledge, and we can't trust our results from science. At best, it's a partial picture. At worst, it's false. But, we would have no way of knowing, either way. This would also mean you can't even trust the original claim of consciousness being deterministic/random! Yet, in the same breath, we're told free will is an incoherent idea ... Free will is the one thing that rescues us from this mess, and physicists know it, that's why they would love to close the free will loop hole in quantum foundations!

One of the interesting theories about causation is put forth by Gregg Rosenberg - that consciousness is the carrier of causation.

More info on that collected in the Limitations of Mechanistic Thinking thread.
 
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