14-15 Sep 2010
I woke up around 3:00 PM, and took 1 piracetam and choline at 7:00 PM, 11:00 PM and 3:00 AM. I'm feeling remarkably good today, much better in terms of mood, emotional control, alertness and productivity. (I was a mess yesterday in comparison.) I think falling back into my regular sleep cycle really helped to push everything into a more normal state. I managed to finish writing my next video during the evening, and I hope to record it tomorrow (today). It was very easy to develop it, almost as if it effortlessly fell out of my head. Like a sneeze, but more elegant and orderly.
I've also been reading Greg Egan's Zendegi, which I got yesterday. In case I haven't made this clear on numerous occasions, I'm an incurable Egan fan and I've read most of his novels. I actually pre-ordered it back in May, and it was supposed to be published in June, yet it was inexplicably pushed back to September. (Apparently his US publisher is somewhat shady.) By the time I got it yesterday, I had managed to forget that I had ordered it in the first place, so it was a bit surprising to receive an unexpected package. I almost thought someone had taken the time to craft me an exquisite mail bomb. Anyway, I immediately jumped into it, and it's been pretty entertaining so far. I'm still waiting to see where he takes this before I can issue any kind of recommendation, though. But his stories do tend to be very good.
I decided to order a new Kindle tonight after hearing it was only $139 (without 3G). A friend who has one strongly recommended it; apparently the screen isn't so much a screen, but a material with a similar appearance to paper. I have a bit of a problem in that there's really no open area in my room to comfortably set down a book and read it, and I also have plenty of pirated book scans that are still somewhat tiring to read at length on a monitor, so I currently don't read as much as I otherwise might. I think having a small handheld book-device could be an ideal solution here. It supposedly accepts PDF files (which OpenOffice.org can export), so this seems like a good option for my currently unread e-books, and a better choice for any future books I might buy. That and it's just a pretty cool little thing to have. It's out of stock right now, but they say it'll be shipped some time next week, so I'm guessing I'll probably have it by the end of the month. A review will be forthcoming.
Your feedback and ideas about yesterday's proposed video topic were very helpful - I'll have to be sure to credit the Queen's Court once it's finalized. Right now, I feel I still need to make some conceptual progress on this, before I can move on to explaining it all. One of you offered the question of whether there are any things without evidence that do exist - things that exist, but for which there is no evidence of their existence. I passed this on to Twitter, and these were some of the responses I received: Love. Trillions of subatomic particles for which there is no direct evidence. Anything that has not yet been observed. Dark matter and dark energy. The Higgs boson.
The question I'd like to explore now is, how is it that we know these things exist if there is no evidence of them? Some possible answers:
- We do not actually know they exist
- Our belief that they exist actually is based on evidence that predicts their existence
- If we haven't yet observed something, then we don't know it exists, meaning we don't know it exists for us to observe
Those are just some initial responses that came to mind. Once again, I'd love to hear what you think of this.
would you review the Kindle when you get it? i'm in the same boat, having GBs of PDFs and wanting some way to read them that doesn't necessitate sitting at the desk for additional hours on end.
"Things that exist, but for which there is no evidence of their existence" - of the responses you posted, only "anything that has not yet been observed" has no evidence for its existence. Physicists only propose the existence of sub-atomic particles when there is sufficient evidence for their existence. Love is a human behavior/feeling, and we can experience the feeling and observe the behavior as evidence of its existence. As to "anything that has not yet been observed," we know we have only observed a small portion of the universe, so obviously there are things out there we have never encountered. But no reasonable person would make specific claims regarding the properties of things yet to be encountered without some sort of evidence or reasoning to back them up. Concerning my belief, the default position is "off." There are an infinite amount of things for which we could posit existence, but rather than just believing in anything I make up, I prefer to wait for evidence, because I like being right.
"# Our belief that they exist actually is based on evidence that predicts their existence
# If we haven't yet observed something, then we don't know it exists, meaning we don't know it exists for us to observe"
(if the second one also has a theory predicting it) I would say those are actually the same category just divided by a different level of certainty (on a scale not as digital "yes or no").
Atoms for example although (to my knowledge)never been observed come with a high certainty of existing(because there is so much evidence for the model predicting their existence), dark matter with a low certainty(because there are still conflicting models about its existence and its not even clear which kind of matter this "dark matter" should be)
Actually, ZJ, this entire issue, re: the atheist position, is just an extension of your "Mt. Carmel Thought Experiment" video. The "christians" build an altar (the atheists wouldn't have to build anything...:) and Beck could cry for like 8 hours to get God to light the fire.
What would it prove if Yahwah showed up? Pretty much everything that needed to be proved.
What would it prove if nothing happened? Pretty much nothing, although Yahwah maybe takes a hit in street cred.
This is the difference between epistemology and ontology, and atheists need to not get caught up in such fruitless pursuits. After all, the double-slit experiment invalidated (refudiated?) any call to ontological meaning for anything except "amorphous blobs of probability." Forget the concept of God--fight the anthropomorphized portrait of culture that the aggrieved call "god."
"This is the difference between epistemology and ontology," I dont see any difference there IMHO epi. is a (nice) addition to (analytical)ont. which helps to clarify the estimation how exactly the description actually matches the reality(to use a metaphor epi would be the refinement of our instruments to measure the entity's in the world while (anal)ont provides the "math" to put those measurements in order).
"After all, the double-slit experiment invalidated (refuted?) any call to ontological meaning for anything except "amorphous blobs of probability." " not to my knowledge, could you clarify how they did that? (I assume you mean experiments concerning wave-particle-dualism)
How did any double-slit-experiment negate the emerged complexity(and therefor need for categorization) stemming from the interactions of those "amorphous blobs of probability"?
My double-slit reference was a poor attempt to introduce quantum physics into the issue. Since you wonder why modern physics would "...negate the emerged complexity..." I clearly have not made my point. Perhaps you'll feel more comfortable with this: all extant things have a set of properties; some of these are inherent (existential) properties, and some are emergent properties.
Anselm of Canterbury's ontological argument for a god does not explain to his readers why they shouldn't eat meat on Fridays--and quantum physics also fails to adequately explain this behavior. That's because neither Anselm nor physics are even talking about "emerged complexity." Rather, they're discussing the fundamental (inherent/ontological) nature of existence and don't give a rat's ass about emergent properties. It's a whole different level of meaning, you see.
As for your lack of knowledge of modern physics and how quantum mechanics has obliterated any form of ontological argument--to the point of no one, not even one physicist, any longer willing to attempt the simplest explanation of reality--I recommend going to the main YouTube site and typing "quantum physics" into the search bar...