Quantum Field Theory: The Woo Stops Here

Ed Glosser said:
Do people here usually quote something from someone's post and then ignore the person who posted it and have conversations with other people over that person's head?
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To be fair, there are some running gags here. Simply start running and jump aboard when your up to speed.

Ed Glosser said:
Also, am I wrong in that the hypothetical concept of an afterlife as generally perceived is based on it existing separately from the physical world, with its own laws and functioning?
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No. That is special pleading. Start here.
 
JoeBentley said:
There's a reason Special Pleading, especially of the level you were doing, is not allowed in intellectual discussions.

"But how do you know this thing that doesn't work in this universe doesn't work in this special other universe that I'm completely making up and providing no evidence for and am only putting in the converstation so I can provide a backdoor justification for Woo" is not a rational, logical argument. It's not a hypothosis. It's just randomly making stuff up. It's invoking magic. It's mental masturbation.
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Don't knock mental masturbation. It's discussing with somebody you love.
 
Ed Glosser said:
But first, what is "is"?
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OK, sorry. [snerk]

I mistook you for someone with a question.

You implied a claim about "life after death". If you choose to attempt to support your idea without resorting to special pleading and circular argument, you need to honestly establish your ground rules, and nail down your goal posts.

To what do you think you are referring, when you use the term, "life"?
 
Ed Glosser said:
I'm just frustrated because I just watched (a few hours ago) a fifty-minute lecture of something I didn't get any of, and then with five minutes left I'm informed that this is how we know there is no life after death. It just seemed to me that there was nothing there in support of that claim.

I'm not saying there is nothing in quantum field theory that supports ruling out astrology, reincarnation and black magic, I just didn't really get how the impossibility of introducing new particles, fields or laws means that the supernatural cannot exist. Exactly why can't it exist within the limits of the Standard Model? That's not a rhetorical question, BTW.
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In a word evidence. Science has it, supernature does not. If you propose any supernatural thing which affects the real world, then it must, by definition, interact with the real world. Since it must affect the real world, we must be able to observe these effects at the very least.
 
Slowvehicle said:
OK. Let's unpack that.

In your opinion, what is "life"?
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To exist as an experiencer regardless of physical form and regardless of the physical form and rules or laws of ones surrounding reality.

If you mean "life" as in the compound "life after death".
 
Ed Glosser said:
Thank you! That makes sense.

Why is that, by the way? Why can't you add a hypothetical "mystic plane" to the discussion, seeing as the video we were asked to watch and that I just spent 49 minutes of my life on ended by explaining why a place like that doesn't exist?
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Because, if such a mystic plane existed, and something of us (our minds, in some form) transferred to it on the death of our bodies, that transfer would be a field interaction in the terms of Quantum Field Theory.

And since it would be happening to us - normal human bodies in the normal world, and not atoms in an exploding star or something of that sort - we can figure out the range of energy levels and distance scales that would be involved.

And owing to the rules that Dr Carroll discusses (the transformation of Feynman diagrams) if there were such a field interaction, there would be a matching subatomic particle, and we would have found it by now.

That's what that diagram means at about the 41:00 mark in the video. The yellow area marked "Ruled Out" is the combination of distances and energies that we have completely explored. We know that there is nothing new to find there. There may be new things to find, but they have to be in the white area - the lower left half of the diagram.

And the yellow "Ruled Out" area includes every situation you will ever encounter in your everyday life.

So while we can't rule out the existence of a "mystic plane", we can say for certain that you can't get there from here.
 
PixyMisa said:
Because, if such a mystic plane existed, and something of us (our minds, in some form) transferred to it on the death of our bodies, that transfer would be a field interaction in the terms of Quantum Field Theory.

And since it would be happening to us - normal human bodies in the normal world, and not atoms in an exploding star or something of that sort - we can figure out the range of energy levels and distance scales that would be involved.

And owing to the rules that Dr Carroll discusses (the transformation of Feynman diagrams) if there were such a field interaction, there would be a matching subatomic particle, and we would have found it by now.

That's what that diagram means at about the 41:00 mark in the video. The yellow area marked "Ruled Out" is the combination of distances and energies that we have completely explored. We know that there is nothing new to find there. There may be new things to find, but they have to be in the white area - the lower left half of the diagram.

And the yellow "Ruled Out" area includes every situation you will ever encounter in your everyday life.

So while we can't rule out the existence of a "mystic plane", we can say for certain that you can't get there from here.
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First of all, glad you're back!

Second, what if it's not our minds that "transfer" to a mystic plane, but a duplicate that doesn't leave an imprint in the physical universe? Our life experiences would then still be governed by the laws of physics, but a "backup" version of us would retain the memories and then be able to exist in a different reality with completely different laws, if any.
 
abaddon said:
In a word evidence. Science has it, supernature does not. If you propose any supernatural thing which affects the real world, then it must, by definition, interact with the real world. Since it must affect the real world, we must be able to observe these effects at the very least.
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But if there is only one objective reality, then the laws of nature and the practical, actual state of the universe from the Big Bang and onward may just seem to be random. If that randomness is, instead, a "supernatural thing which affects the real world", then we are observing these effects every day. We are the experiment, in a sense.
 
Ed Glosser said:
To exist as an experiencer regardless of physical form and regardless of the physical form and rules or laws of ones surrounding reality.

If you mean "life" as in the compound "life after death".
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Alright. one answer in, and you are already implying that you will depend upon special pleading.

You introduced the idea of " 'life' after 'death' ". If, before the first fence, you are going to claim that what you mean by "life" is something other than the biological definition, because without resort to your "other" definition it can be fairly conclusively demonstrated that "life" comes to an end with the end of the biological processes associated with "life"; then you are defining "life" in a way that is not consonant with any biological definition. That is special pleading.

Here, you have introduced a concept of an "experiencer", and you have front-loaded that concept to be defined as being independent of fields-&-particles reality. That is special pleading.

In fact, you are not defining "life", but a "soul" or a "spirit". Fine. Calling your concept of a "soul", or a "spirit", or "an immaterial entity not subject to physical laws and processes; "life", is equivocation.

I accept that you are talking about a "soul" or a "spirit". What evidence (and you will recognize the litany: practical, concrete, empirical,non-anecdotal, objective, congruent, fruitful, and luminous evidence) do you offer in support of your concept of "life" (that actually describes a "soul", or some other word for an "immaterial entity independent of physical laws and processes"?
 
PixyMisa said:
Because, if such a mystic plane existed, and something of us (our minds, in some form) transferred to it on the death of our bodies, that transfer would be a field interaction in the terms of Quantum Field Theory.

And since it would be happening to us - normal human bodies in the normal world, and not atoms in an exploding star or something of that sort - we can figure out the range of energy levels and distance scales that would be involved.

And owing to the rules that Dr Carroll discusses (the transformation of Feynman diagrams) if there were such a field interaction, there would be a matching subatomic particle, and we would have found it by now.

That's what that diagram means at about the 41:00 mark in the video. The yellow area marked "Ruled Out" is the combination of distances and energies that we have completely explored. We know that there is nothing new to find there. There may be new things to find, but they have to be in the white area - the lower left half of the diagram.

And the yellow "Ruled Out" area includes every situation you will ever encounter in your everyday life.

So while we can't rule out the existence of a "mystic plane", we can say for certain that you can't get there from here.
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:bigclap

You do that so well...
 
How does the duplicate get made?

Put it this way, if it's a Xerox, there had to be a Xerox machine which we'd detect.
 
Ed Glosser said:
I'm just frustrated because I just watched (a few hours ago) a fifty-minute lecture of something I didn't get any of, and then with five minutes left I'm informed that this is how we know there is no life after death. It just seemed to me that there was nothing there in support of that claim.
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I'll answer any questions as best I can, but please bear in mind that I took one semester of this stuff, and that was 28 years ago. So while I'm familiar with the terminology, I only have a layman's understanding of any research in the last 30+ years. (Since the course I took wasn't completely up to date even at the time.)

I'm not saying there is nothing in quantum field theory that supports ruling out astrology, reincarnation and black magic, I just didn't really get how the impossibility of introducing new particles, fields or laws means that the supernatural cannot exist. Exactly why can't it exist within the limits of the Standard Model? That's not a rhetorical question, BTW.
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Okay, let's take astrology as an example. Supposedly the position of the planets at the time of our birth influences the course of our lives in ways that can be predicted using pretty simple mathematics.

Is this possible, using what we know of physics?

Well, the only two forces that work over that sort of distance are the electromagnetic force and gravity. We know immediately that it's not the electromagnetic force, because that's light, and if you live in a big city you don't see that planets much.

That leaves gravity. The force of gravity goes by the inverse-square law, which means that when you double your distance from an object, the gravity goes down by a factor of four.

The planet Mars has a mass of about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons and at its closest approach to Earth is about 50 million kilometres away. If we do the calculations we work out that the influence of Mars on you is about the same as any passing car when you're standing at the crosswalk waiting for the lights to change.

So that means that any effect Mars might potentially have would be totally randomised by the world around you.

What the result Dr Carroll discusses means is that this is the end of the discussion. There are no undiscovered laws of physics that can change this. Astrology is simply wrong.

The same thing goes for homeopathy, for reincarnation, magic, psychic powers, and so on. Once we show that they contradict the laws of physics, that is it. If any of these things were real, even if we hadn't worked it all out yet, we would have found a subatomic particle that we hadn't expected.

There may be subatomic particles we haven't found yet, but they're in the other part of the diagram - the part that corresponds to galaxies, exploding stars, and atomic nuclei. The part where we spend our lives has been fully mapped out.

As an analogy - there are almost certainly creatures in the depths of the ocean that we didn't expect and have yet to discover. But there aren't any living in your bathtub.
 
Slowvehicle said:
Alright. one answer in, and you are already implying that you will depend upon special pleading.

You introduced the idea of " 'life' after 'death' ". If, before the first fence, you are going to claim that what you mean by "life" is something other than the biological definition, because without resort to your "other" definition it can be fairly conclusively demonstrated that "life" comes to an end with the end of the biological processes associated with "life"; then you are defining "life" in a way that is not consonant with any biological definition. That is special pleading.

Here, you have introduced a concept of an "experiencer", and you have front-loaded that concept to be defined as being independent of fields-&-particles reality. That is special pleading.

In fact, you are not defining "life", but a "soul" or a "spirit". Fine. Calling your concept of a "soul", or a "spirit", or "an immaterial entity not subject to physical laws and processes; "life", is equivocation.

I accept that you are talking about a "soul" or a "spirit". What evidence (and you will recognize the litany: practical, concrete, empirical,non-anecdotal, objective, congruent, fruitful, and luminous evidence) do you offer in support of your concept of "life" (that actually describes a "soul", or some other word for an "immaterial entity independent of physical laws and processes"?
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I'm sorry about the special pleading. My bad. Here's some more.

To state that what we experience while alive comes to an end when we die is a huge assumption for which there is no evidence. There is evidence that lack of brain activity and heart activity eventually leads to someone having to call someone because it's starting to smell, but since we cannot tell what is going on with what used to be a person, we just assume that they are not experiencing anything. Sure, they no longer move their body around, but we don't know that they're not experiencing something.
 
Ed Glosser said:
First of all, glad you're back!

Second, what if it's not our minds that "transfer" to a mystic plane, but a duplicate that doesn't leave an imprint in the physical universe?
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The duplication process would also be a field interaction under Quantum Field Theory, and we'd see the corresponding particle.

The point here is, our brains and bodies and senses are made up of normal matter. Whatever you think the mind or soul might be, it has to interact with our bodies, and that interaction would show up as a particle. This is the hypothetical "Xilbot" particle that Dr Carroll discusses. If Xilbots existed, we would have found them. We haven't, so they don't. (By the same token that there are no krakens lurking in your bath.)
 
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