Well, no ID, no post mortem survival. No survival means death anxiety perpetually.I just thought that Tipler sort of buttressed your opinion on things not based on observation and measurement. 'How we gonna measure a multiverse, anyways, etc?' For the ID thing, I am easy going on this because of Shermer's Last Law (as a response against AC Clarke's 3rd law), which, humorously, is: "Any sufficiently advanced alien is indistinguishable from God."
-----Original Message----- From: Philip Thrift <cloudver...@gmail.com> To: Everything List <everything-list@googlegroups.com> Sent: Mon, Oct 7, 2019 3:44 pm Subject: Re: The multiverse is dangerous to science Creepy watching the Tipler video on the Intelligent Design channel: Discovery Science, of the Discovery Institute in Seattle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_Institute One of the fads created in the past few decades is for scientists to make up multiverse theories to solve :"fine-tuning". But they don't think enough to see that it could be addressed in other ways, with basically one universe, and without invoking Intelligent Design. @philipthrift On Monday, October 7, 2019 at 2:12:22 PM UTC-5, spudb...@aol.com wrote: So, PH, I believe, that Frank Tipler the Omega Point dude, agrees with you on this one issue. He seems to be a stickler for everything in physics to be neat and tidy and conformal. This, of course, will cause you and the rest here, to convulse with nausea on this here mailing list. But from what I was able to follow on his vid, he agrees with your contention. For me, I follow Tipler because I loved his reasoning, and an afterlife even after 10 trillion years of dust, I find irresistible. He doesn't speak of this on this vid-so you're Good to View.https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=jFpbngtvWD8&t=15s -----Original Message----- From: Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> To: Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups. com> Sent: Mon, Oct 7, 2019 2:49 pm Subject: The multiverse is dangerous to science https://aeon.co/essays/post- empirical-science-is-an- oxymoron-and-it-is-dangerous Theoretical physicists who say the multiverse exists set a dangerous precedent: science based on zero empirical evidence Jim Baggott@JimBaggott ... Sean Carroll, a vocal advocate for the Many-Worlds interpretation, prefers abduction, or what he calls ‘inference to the best explanation’, which leaves us with theories that are merely ‘parsimonious’, a matter of judgment, and ‘still might reasonably be true’. But whose judgment? In the absence of facts, what constitutes ‘the best explanation’? Carroll seeks to dress his notion of inference in the cloth of respectability provided by something called Bayesian probability theory, happily overlooking its entirely subjective nature. It’s a short step from here to the theorist-turned-philosopher Richard Dawid’s efforts to justify the string theory programme in terms of ‘theoretically confirmed theory’ and ‘non-empirical theory assessment’. The ‘best explanation’ is then based on a choice between purely metaphysical constructs, without reference to empirical evidence, based on the application of a probability theory that can be readily engineered to suit personal prejudices. Welcome to the oxymoron that is post-empirical science. ... Still, what’s the big deal? So what if a handful of theoretical physicists want to indulge their inner metaphysician and publish papers that few outside their small academic circle will ever read? But look back to the beginning of this essay. Whether they intend it or not (and trust me, they intend it), this stuff has a habit of leaking into the public domain, dripping like acid into the very foundations of science. The publication of Carroll’s book Something Deeply Hidden, about the Many-Worlds interpretation, has been accompanied by an astonishing publicity blitz, including an essay on Aeon last month. A recent PBS News Hour piece led with the observation that: ‘The “Many-Worlds” theory in quantum mechanics suggests that, with every decision you make, a new universe springs into existence containing what amounts to a new version of you.’ ... Perhaps we should begin with a small first step. Let’s acknowledge that theoretical physicists are perfectly entitled to believe, write and say whatever they want, within reason. But is it asking too much that they make their assertions with some honesty? Instead of ‘the multiverse exists’ and ‘it might be true’, is it really so difficult to say something like ‘the multiverse has some philosophical attractions, but it is highly speculative and controversial, and there is no evidence for it’? I appreciate that such caveats get lost or become mangled when transferred into a popular media obsessed with sensation, but this would then be a failure of journalism or science writing, rather than a failure of scientific integrity. @philipthrift -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/184adc7f-f342-4e69-98e5-a998e5523406%40googlegroups.com. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/24133972.5080177.1570481737964%40mail.yahoo.com.
