On Sep 3, 8:59 am, Stathis Papaioannou <stath...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 8:29 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi <use...@rudnyi.ru> wrote: > > Stathis, > > > I do not understand you. It is not me, it is you who are talking about > > souls. I have just asked you to explain the phenomenon that I observe and > > you have not done it yet. > > Well, either the atoms got into the book by following the rules of > physics or they got there by magic. What other options are there? This > does not mean that the rules of physics are all known, all > deterministic or all computable; but whatever they are, the atoms in > the universe bounce around according to them and end up in books, > stars and people.
Whatever physical phenomena are observed to be doing, the laws of physics are extended to allow for. Quantum mechanics is magic, until physicists call it physics. It's upside down to imagine that our observations need to fit into our existing rule book, especially when those observations (like first person singular subjectivity, free will, qualia, feeling, awareness, perception, etc) both cannot be denied and cannot be explained within the existing rules. If I were more of a materialist, I would say that the odds that we happen to be living in the one era of all of history when our knowledge of physics coincides with objective truth are astronomically unlikely and radically anthropocentric. Given our collective history of willingness to cling to irrational superstition and shortsighted or premature scientific theory, I see no reason to consider our contemporary chapter of science any more sacrosanct than that of centuries past. History has shown that we have always been completely wrong about the universe. Until our explanation of the universe accounts fully for all subjective and objective phenomena in their native presentations, it seems obvious that we have a long long way to go. Right now, particle physics accounts for human experience about as much as the Holy Trinity accounts for quarks. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
