Le 17-nov.-06, à 20:35, Brent Meeker a écrit :
> I don't agree that scientists are letting only the religious address
> the fundamental life/death questions. That was the approach of
> Stephen J. Gould and it amounts to appeasement. But more and more
> scientists like Dawkins, Dennett, Stenger, Pinker, and Harris are
> challenging the moral monopoloy of religion.
For reason of busyness I did not have the time to comment this last
paragraph in my previous answer.
As I have already said I do appreciate Dennet's "mindstorms" and his
"mind's I" book with Hofstadter, but then in "consciousness explained"
he put both the matter problem and the mind problem under the rug. I
have explained why in length on this list, and it should be obvious
from the UD Argument, etc.
Stenger"s book "the comprehensible cosmos" is lovely as far as you take
it as an introduction to modern descriptive physics, but it is rather
weak on the foundation of QM. Actually he dares to use the
"perturbation by observation" explanation for the Heisenberg
uncertainty relations, something which even Bohr stopped doing after
his reading of the EPR paper. Clearly Stenger is not interested in the
mind body problem, qualia, etc. His book ends where the everything list
discussion begins. (To be fair Stenger refers to other books which I
have not read).
Its mathematical supplement are quite interesting though. True: it
provides a nice explanation how most of physics can be derived from
point of view invariance, something which is extended non trivially
once you take the comp hyp seriously enough: all hypostases (acomp's
point of views) have invariant discourse defining respectively a
multiverse (I will probably come back on this when people understands
better the whole UD Argument, and when they will be ready to invest a
bit in mathematical logic).
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Received on Mon Nov 20 2006 - 07:39:32 PST