Le 13-janv.-06, à 18:51, Brent Meeker a écrit :
> Bruno Marchal wrote:
>> Le 13-janv.-06, à 04:56, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit :
>>> I sympathise with the conclusions of the young Danny, but there is a
>>> philosophical non sequitur here. The fact that I would like
>>> something to be true, or not to be true, has no bearing on whether
>>> it is in fact true. I don't like what happened in Germany under the
>>> Nazis, but that doesn't mean I should believe the Nazis did not
>>> exist, so why should my revulsion at the thought of infidels burning
>>> in Hell lead me to believe that God and Hell do not exist? It might
>>> make me reluctant to worship such a God, but that is not the same as
>>> believing he does not exist.
>> Totally agree.
>>> But if it's scientific, it's not religion, is it? Religion means
>>> believing something in the absence of sufficient evidence.
>> But here the word "evidence" is too large. Imagine two seconds that
>> Christian religion is true and you face God after your earthly
>> existence. In that case you would have evidence for the existence of
>> God. Would it be a reason to stop believing in religion?
>> At the same time, operationally I do somehow agree with you, but then
>> you should accept the idea that many scientist are religious in the
>> sense that many scientist believe in the existence of a stuffy or
>> substancial primitive physical reality, but obviously there are no
>> evidence at all for this.
>
> Surely you don't mean there's no evidence for tables, chairs, atoms,
> etc...? Are you using "primitive" in some special philosophical sense?
You are right. we have evidence for chairs, galaxies, bosons and
fermions and even anyons, and all that. But we have no evidence that
this is eventually made up of substances capable of closing the
"physical worlds". Like Plato guessed it could be the "shadow" or "the
border" of something bigger. Like the sharable and unsharable part of
the machine "ignorance" as I hope to show we get into, once we take
some comp hyp. or weaker seriously enough.
>
>> No physicists does even postulate it in scientific paper.
>
> Sure they do - the most commonly postulated primitive stuff is a
> quantum field.
This is a wonderful mathematical construct, but I don't think wise to
believe no one really knows how to interpret it really, despite Everett
MWI which I think is a key progress, but not necessarily towards
physical primitivity (giving that Everett postulated a mechanical
observer trigging the UDA "paradoxe").
>
>> (People confuse often the belief in a reality and a belief in a
>> physical reality).
>
> What's your definition of "reality"?
It is whatever it is.
It should be the roots of our knowledge and beliefs. It is what makes
us bet on the physical realities, on the psychological realities, on
the arithmetical realities and many other related realities, ...
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Received on Sat Jan 14 2006 - 09:05:16 PST