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What actually do JREF religious believers believe?

RoseMontague said:
I am open to a better interpretation or summary. Waiting.
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Well, my understanding is that according to some theories, time is just another dimension, so could move either forwards or backwards. However, entropy means that it only ever moves forwards.

The point I believe Hans was making about time starting some time after the big bang is just a paradox (I was going to say tautologically incorrect, but I don't think that makes any sense).

My understanding of this is entirely that of a layperson, the SMMT forum is the place to get answers from experts.
 
Mashuna said:
Well, my understanding is that according to some theories, time is just another dimension, so could move either forwards or backwards.
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Yes, physics says it can go both ways, quantum physics equations work the same backwards or forwards.

Mashuna said:
However, entropy means that it only ever moves forwards.
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That pesky 2nd law. However the third law shows the movement either way. We observe time moving forward as we are moving forward in an expanding universe. Hawking uses three arrows for time, one is this psychological or imaginary one, another one goes in the direction of the expanding or collapsing cosmos.

Mashuna said:
The point I believe Hans was making about time starting some time after the big bang is just a paradox (I was going to say tautologically incorrect, but I don't think that makes any sense).

My understanding of this is entirely that of a layperson, the SMMT forum is the place to get answers from experts.
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I searched that forum, very little there and what I did see was not from those that claimed expertise in the field. Time is a tricky subject and my view is that of a non-expert as well. I have read quite a bit on the subject, some of it is beyond me.
 
RoseMontague said:
Hans, do the research if you do not believe me. Google is your friend.
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Err, no. You made a claim, YOU get the burden of proof to support it. Sorry, Google may be my friend, but that's not reversing the rules of elementary logic. You don't get to just make something up and be right unless someone else does the work of disproving it.

RoseMontague said:
Here is a Google search on Quantum physics time moves both ways.

http://www.google.com/search?client...es+both+ways&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
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Again, it's not my job to sort it out for you. It's your claim, your burden of proof. YOU google it and provide the exact link to a peer-reviewed science paper that actually says that.

Still, I'm a nice enough guy I did make the effort to look there myself, and the only thing worth noting is an article by VICTOR J. STENGER published in the Skeptic magazine, which, needless to say, is not a peer-reviewed physics journal. And it's clear that it's just his personal speculations and interpretations, not something that he actually has any evidence for. In fact, he flat out says:

I must comment that while these experiments have received much media
attention, most physicists have generally been underwhelmed. The results always come
out in perfect agreement with quantum mechanics, which has been around now for 75
years.​

I.e., you don't need time travel to explain any of that data. And it's not something "quantum physics says", as something which he tells you up front that most physicists have been underwhelmed with.

Also;:

The continuing
debates over quantum mechanics that one reads about concern its philosophical or
even metaphysical interpretation, not its ability as a mathematical theory to describe
the data. So, speaking metaphysically, to the undoubted disgust of most of my
colleagues​

Read: the existing theory without time travel already describes everything perfectly well, he's only talking metaphysics about it. and (he guesses right) most of his coleagues would be disgusted with his talking metaphysics there. And quite rightfully so, since science is the polar opposite of just making up metaphysics. I.e., again, it's not something science or QM says, but one guy's own speculations that he even tells you it's metaphysics and something most scientists would be disgusted with.

Also, since you mention Feynman:

However, Feynman never pushed the idea
of time reversibility and most physicists preferred the less economical, though
admittedly equivalent, view that two kinds of matter exist, both going forward in time,
rather than one kind that can go either way.​

Yep, Feynman toyed with that idea, but he and most physicists never went with that version that conflicts with the rest of known physics.

So, no, QM as it is accepted in the real science doesn't say time can go both ways, it's just some people's personal confabulations.

Also, to keep it short, I can see how you took the entropy idea from the same article too, and how it confused you. The "cosmological arrow" that he talks is strictly about entropy increasing over time, not about time needing entropy. It's like, dunno, if I said that the number of grey hairs on my head is increasing in time. It does not mean that the time axis is dependent on my having grey hairs.

RoseMontague said:
I am open to a better interpretation or summary. Waiting.
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Patience is a virtue indeed, but that still isn't a blank check to reverse the burden of proof. No matter how much you're willing to wait, you don't get to just postulate something and be right until someone disproves it. The time you wait instead of supporting your claim, is just time when you're by default wrong.

But if you want a better summary here it is: you've read something that is not a science paper, and didn't understand jack. Nor were you qualified to understand, judging by the way you made a hash out of it. (See entropy vs time again.) That's all that happened there.

Next time you want to talk physics, dunno, learn some physics first. Especially if you want to talk QM or GR (a lot of cosmology is GR), which are hard stuff. As John Wheeler once said, "If you are not completely confused by quantum mechanics, you do not understand it." So, you know, it's hard stuff even for the experts in the field. it's not something where you can know by just skimming an article in a non-science magazine and imagining the rest. You have to actually put some study into it. Just an idea.
 
Even if time did go both ways why would it prove the existence of Rose's sky daddy and not, say, Vishnu?
 
Well, that too, but the mis-use of (pseudo)science irks me more than where it goes from there.
 
PhantomWolf said:
I want to explore this a little further.

In early Novemeber of 2008 I was in New York and ate lunch at a Macdonalds in lower Manhatten.

What sort of corroborating evidence would you be willing to accept as proof that this actually occured?
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A lot of people (especially skeptics) repeat the mantra that anecdotes are not evidence. But clearly they are. The problem is the conclusions, not whether or not anecdotes are evidence. The incidents you described may very well have occurred. But the conclusions people draw from such personal experiences are often flawed.

Two things matter here.

One, how do we use anecdotal evidence when drawing valid conclusions? Some things make them more reliable:
multiple anecdotes
systematically collected
use of controls to control for variables

The second thing that is important here is to look at why people draw those conclusions based on single personal anecdotes. We understand a lot about why the brain is misled by such experiences.

Knowing this doesn't necessarily change people's erroneous beliefs, but it goes a tiny bit further than just saying to someone they are wrong.
 
PhantomWolf said:
I want to explore this a little further.

In early Novemeber of 2008 I was in New York and ate lunch at a Macdonalds in lower Manhatten.

What sort of corroborating evidence would you be willing to accept as proof that this actually occured?
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I would have thought it depends on what you intend by your statement. We know from sources other than your statement that there is such a place as New York, and that there is such a business as MacDonald's, and that there is a MacDonald's in New York. Assuming it is not physically impossible for you to have been in New York, and that you're making no other claim but that you went there and ate, the risk of error is far smaller than the likelihood that it's true, and the risk of harm if there is an error is vanishingly small. Trivial evidence suits a trivial claim.

The rules would change dramatically if you were claiming this as an alibi to a crime, or if you were claiming that MacDonald's gave you a bad meal which made you sick, and were suing them. No court would accept your account as sufficient, because your claim is no longer solitary and trivial.
 
PhantomWolf said:
I want to explore this a little further.

In early Novemeber of 2008 I was in New York and ate lunch at a Macdonalds in lower Manhatten.

What sort of corroborating evidence would you be willing to accept as proof that this actually occured?
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Don't assume that just because something is too unimportant to be worth asking for evidence, that there's some exemption from evidence. We let a lot of things slide because they don't matter. In your example, it's not important for anyone if it's true that you were in Manhattan to really ask you for evidence. It doesn't mean some things are proven by just saying so, it just means nobody gives a screw about whether it's actually true.

If it WERE important enough to know whether that's true -- say, if anyone had evidence of you of committing some crime on a cruise ship that was at sea and away from Manhattan the whole month -- then, yes, you'd have to support that alibi.

Or for a better example, consider the following 3 claims:

1. I talked to some random guys in a bar on Saturday evening.

2. I talked to Neil Armstrong in a bar in the nineties.

3. I talked to Neil Armstrong in a bar on 21 July 1969.

Number 2 is a bit more interesting than number 1, but still probably not enough to ask for any affidavits or witnesses or anything. Number 3 would be a slam dunk proof of the moon landing hoax conspiracy, since he wasn't supposed to even be back on Earth until 24 July, so you'd probably want a lot of evidence there.

But if we're talking about what evidence is needed to establish them as true, there is no difference between the three. Number 1 doesn't become supported because I just said so either. If it mattered if number 1 is true, then it too would need a bunch of evidence. You just don't bother checking as long as it doesn't matter, but otherwise if it's just because I said so, it doesn't mean it's true.

And in fact, it isn't true. I wasn't in any bar on Saturday.
 
eight bits said:
What I believe is that your concscious awareness was not attending to the threat. Some part of your cognitive apparatus became aware of the threat, and of the need to bring the matter to your conscious attention promptly. The thought adopted the form of a crisp instruction spoken in a familiar friendly voice. You then experienced your thought as a sensory event. That has happened often enough to other people (me, for example), so why not you?
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Do you know of any literature on this proposed idea?
 
tsig said:
You have a personal experience, refuse to entertain any rational explanation for it
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I don't "refuse to entertain any rational explaination", but neither will I accept a so called "rational explaination" which is clearly wrong to just satisfy other people's desires.

Consider this. You see a light moving back abd forth across the sky and don't know what it is. So you say, "hey I saw a strange light and I looked into it and it shouldn't have been there, so I think it was a UFO."

Now people use their skeptism and say "it was just Venus and clouds made it look like it was moving." Well that's rational right? But what if your light was to the north and Venus was to the south? Is it still rational? Should you accept it because it's a "rational explaination"?

Now let's take it further. Let's say that you start having more visits, right to the point of actually having a strange vehicle hovering 20m over your house before shooting up into the sky. Well you might have been halucinating, you might have just dreamed it, it might have been a huge helium balloon and yout friends were playing tricks on you. All these are "rational explainations" right? But why should you accept one of them as correct if none actually match your experience? Do you simply say, "Well my memory must be faulty and my brain playing up because rationally I know that Aliens don't exist" or do you accept what your experiences are telling you?

How many experiences do you need to have to go from "I have seen an unidentified Flying Object" to "I have seen an alien space craft"? At what point do you finally say, "hey perhaps I don't know everything and can't rationalise it all away afterall"? This is the thing, I haven't come to the conclusions I have based on a single event, but rather many, many events throughout my life.

and then conclude that the world is irrational.
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Why do you assume that I think the world is irrational? Just because I believe that there are forces at work that we can't perceive doesn't mean that I believe that those forces are irrational or don't have to obey laws of their own.

Consider this. If you have a puck on an air table and you push it, it will glide over the table at a constant speed and direction, basic Newton's Laws of motion. Now say that I am standing beside the table, but you can't see me (perhaps I stole Harry Potter's cloak. ;)) Halfway around the table I push the puck and change its direction. What do you see? From your point of view have the laws of physics just changed? It's clear that the puck no longer obeyed the laws of physics, from your point of view. In reality it did. everything that occured was rational because an outside force that you could not perceive interfered and changed the puck's direction.

I see the same thing as far as a greater being is concerned. One that can and does interact with our universe, basically pushing the puck while remaining hidden. We can perceive him in the way he affects the world, a little like finding planets by how their gravity affects the star that they orbit.

I don't see that this makes the world any more irrational than claiming that because balls don't move, if one does because someone picked it up and throws it, that this makes the world irrational.
 
RoseMontague said:
There are two answers given now. Anyone else?
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Hi Rose, your comments have a calming depth and grace. They effortlessly cut a swathe through the skeptical white noise on these boards. Don't worry about this QM haze. I will truss up Hans in strings later if it doesn't clear.


I will give a third answer; a gift.

Humanity has reached a pinnacle in evolutionary development from which it can view the (metaphorical/causal) horizon and perceive some of the reality and truth in nature on our globe.

With this hindsight humanity is in a position to improve the lot of life or diminish it. To improve it is a gift and religions are systems of teaching this gift.

I cannot say through intellect that a god exists or not. But it is a gift from me to act as though one does. Pascals gift, not wager.

In my small way through this gift I have improved the lot of life and over eons these gifts will accumulate until the perfect day.
 
Phantom Wolf

Do you know of any literature on this proposed idea?
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If you're looking for an interesting read, then dive into the vast literature surrounding Julian Jaynes' "Bicameral mind" theory, both pro and con. If you just need to establish that people sometimes experience their thoughts as sensory events, then the shortest path is probably to tell you that there is a community of people who share their experiences (and educate against the amateur medical prejudice that hearing incorporeal voices is itself a mental illness). Try:

http://www.intervoiceonline.org/

It is a mixed community, and does, of course, include mentally ill individuals. The point of citing them is to establish that the experience is common, and they serve as a data source of convenience. I am not trying to persuade you that the organization's policy positions are correct.

Hans

I would say the differences among your examples reflect the distinct roles that a priori considerations and evidence play in belief formation, change and transmission.

There is a another thread currently about Sagan's "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," where still other considerations, like the consequences of accepting a proposition, are being discussed. However, the current topic just asks what certain people believe, not what they do about it (not even "doing about it" by trying to persuade somebody else).

If you tell me you had drinks in a bar, or met a celebrity in a bar, then these are a priori credible things to report. There is nothing much for evidence to do in these cases. I already pretty much believe them. Even in cases where the issue is "important," the focus of interest usually isn't something like whether you were in a bar, but rather, which bar, what day and when did you leave - things that I have no a priori basis to judge confidently.

Your third example, where my prior beliefs give me high confidence that the celebrity you said you met was somewhere else at the time, is only going to be resolved by evidence. It's going to have to be pretty good evidence, because my background information is flatly unequivocal that the guy was somewhere else. The specific issue, though, isn't all that "important" to me. Nevertheless, you have your work cut out for you.

In Phantom Wolf's case, we share the prior belief that disembodied voices can be heard to impart timely reliable information crisply. There is very little for evidence to do, for me, about whether the event happened.

For the interpretation, of course, we differ. For me, the same body of background information that leads me to believe the report also leads me to believe that the explanation for it is natural. (No less "important" or wonderful for that, but then, what's so bad about natural?) Apparently, Wolf has some background beliefs that lead to a different explanation being credible, for Wolf.

Since there is a difference in prior belief, there is something for evidence to do. Wolf asked me for some evidence, and I provided some. We'll see whether it brings our beliefs closer together or not. But we haven't reached the question of whether the disputed issue is "important" or what consequences resolving our disagreement one way or the other might have.

In the meantime, whatever Wolf believes is fine with me, so long as I'm not asked to agree, and so far I haven't been. Wolf just answered a question that was broadcast to the community at large. That was a nice thing to do. Thank you, Wolf. Thank you to the others who answered, too.
 
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PhantomWolf said:
I don't "refuse to entertain any rational explaination", but neither will I accept a so called "rational explaination" which is clearly wrong to just satisfy other people's desires.

Consider this. You see a light moving back abd forth across the sky and don't know what it is. So you say, "hey I saw a strange light and I looked into it and it shouldn't have been there, so I think it was a UFO."

Now people use their skeptism and say "it was just Venus and clouds made it look like it was moving." Well that's rational right? But what if your light was to the north and Venus was to the south? Is it still rational? Should you accept it because it's a "rational explaination"?
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Well, the explanation does have to explain the actual data, or it's not an explanation at all.

BUT... it still doesn't mean you can just take the least supportable woowoo instead. Even if someone's refutation is wrong, doesn't mean you can make any ol' claim and be right by default. That would be the argument from ignorance fallacy. Even if the other guy has no idea whatsoever about what you saw, it doesn't mean you can just turn a light into an UFO.

And, of course, the question is not whether you'll accept something rational. Nobody's can force you to stop being delusional. The question is whether your claim, whatever it may be, is supportable, not what would make you give up unsupportable beliefs.

In your example so far, a light in the sky could still be an illusion, or a hallucination, or the lights on a helicopter, or several different things. The details could be retrofitted afterwards, sometimes precisely because you still want to believe it's some woowoo and not the rational explanation. (Nobody has photographic memory, sorry.) The whole thing could be a false memory. (Yes, it happens that you remember someone else's story or something that happened in a movie or in a dream.) The whole thing could be a confabulation. (People are good at fitting missing details into a story, or a whole story in an interval they don't remember anything about, and so on.) Etc.

The problem with the above is that invariably it triggers an "I'm not crazy, I know what I saw" reaction, which just triggers a cognitive dissonance to keep the woowoo rather than 'be crazy'. Well, I find it more crazy to insist that one's brain totally doesn't work like a normal human brain and isn't subject to the same normal effects, functions and occasionally malfunctions. Unless one can actually show he's Mr Data and has a totally non-human brain, it's actually crazier to believe essentially that. I don't see a difference between someone believing that and, say, believing that their skin is so different that it can stop bullets, as crazy ideas go.

PhantomWolf said:
Now let's take it further. Let's say that you start having more visits, right to the point of actually having a strange vehicle hovering 20m over your house before shooting up into the sky. Well you might have been halucinating, you might have just dreamed it, it might have been a huge helium balloon and yout friends were playing tricks on you. All these are "rational explainations" right? But why should you accept one of them as correct if none actually match your experience? Do you simply say, "Well my memory must be faulty and my brain playing up because rationally I know that Aliens don't exist" or do you accept what your experiences are telling you?
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Well, you have to ask yourself: what is more likely? That there are some UFOs that come 20m from the ground, and NOBODY ELSE CAN SEE; MUCH LESS PHOTOGRAPH, AND NO RADAR PICKED UP, out of the literally thousands of people who'd be within visual range, or that you're hallucinating?

You can even go Bayes on its ass, and get actual probabilities. We have about 100,000,000 schizophrenics world-wide (only order of magnitude accuracy), and some half of those are hallucinating things that nobody else sees. And that's not even all the hallucinations and delusions and illusions. They you have to add stuff like alcohol withdrawal, or just being very tired, or epilepsy, or just the normal brain function of fitting a shape around some lights.

But ultimately the Bayes version boils down to this: which is higher between P(E|H)*P(H) and P(E|~H)*P(~H)

Where
E = the evidence presented (E.g., a guy says he saw a big non-earthly thing up close that nobody else around saw)
H = the hypothesis proposed (E.g., he actually did see exactly that)
P(H) = probability of that actually happening
P(~H) = 1-P(H)
P(E|H) = probability that you'd have that evidence, if H were true
P(E|~H) = probability that you'd have that evidence, if H were not true

And of course, the background knowledge is factored in all of that.

Well, we'll never have exact numbers, but we can take good, defensible guesses at their upper and lower limits.

So, P(H) = how often do people see UFOs up close and detailed. Well, not only it doesn't happen much, but even in most such stories there are hundreds of people in the area, radars, airplanes, etc, which should have seen even that specific one but never actually did. So it must be very low. A realistic estimate would be probably more like zero as far as we know (there are no known actual UFOs ever seen), but even in each story there's something like 1 in 100 or even 1 in 1000 right in the very story. Let's say 0.001.

P(~H) then is 0.999

P(E|H) is basically what is the probability that if an UFO or some other unbelievable thing were there, you'd have that kind of evidence, i.e., that just one guy would see it and all the others, including all the NORAD radars and all, would not. Well, pretty damn low. But again, let's be generous and say 0.001.

P(E|~H) is basically how often you'd get reports of some non-earthly thing that only one person can see, if there weren't any such thing there. Well, just the hallucinations alone probably account for more than 0.01, in the general population, or more like 0.999 among those reporting such things, and that's being generous. Let's go with 0.01.

So once you do the products it's 0.001 * 0.001 vs 0.999 * 0.01, or 0.000001 vs 0.009990. The latter is nearly ten thousand times higher. I.e., the money is on it being not real.

The question isn't as much how do you rationalize that it's not real, but how the heck do you rationalize that you're still right in spite of even maths. At what point does it seem more likely that even maths is wrong if it lets you keep a delusion?

PhantomWolf said:
How many experiences do you need to have to go from "I have seen an unidentified Flying Object" to "I have seen an alien space craft"? At what point do you finally say, "hey perhaps I don't know everything and can't rationalise it all away afterall"? This is the thing, I haven't come to the conclusions I have based on a single event, but rather many, many events throughout my life.
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The question is more like how many does one need before one gets the hint and see a pyschiatrist. If one regularly sees things nobody else saw, no radar picked up, left no traces, etc, then that would be reason to worry. Because there's a chance they're schizophrenic, and untreated schizophrenia only goes worse over time. So I'm not even saying it as an insult or anything, but because seriously, anyone in that situation needs help ASAP or they might end up eventually drooling in a corner.
 
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