On 10/3/2014 10:20 AM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote:
>>A lot of evidence for some God (like the god Matter), is not a proof of its existence,
still less so in front of complex open problems.
I have been having a very long argument -- on another list -- with a man whose intellect
and mind I very much respect, but who is irrationally attached to the notion of the god
Matter. It has gone on for over fifty back and forth posts and this person -- who is
intelligent and very aware of events in the world and in the mind... a man who has had
deep spiritual experiences and is someone I generally respect.
But my questioning of the "need" for actual real stuff in the universe and my pointing
out that fundamentally all we know about the universe is information we can measure
about it and that it is information itself (and information processes -- i.e.
computation) that seems to be -- and arguably could be -- fundamental... it hit a brick
wall in his brain. There is just no budging him on it and he has become quite heated in
his insistence on the existence of -- as you put it god Matter. It keeps creeping up in
the arguments he puts forth as a given.
It is a difficult problem to even get someone to question whether or not this "god
Matter" is even necessary for the formulation of an explanation for reality.
Matter is something not very well defined, even in physics. It's roughly fermions. But
fermions are thought to be excitations of a more fundamental field. That's why physicists
like Max Tegmark are led to propose it's math all the way down.
But it's pejorative to refer to it as "god". Nobody worships matter. Physics textbooks
don't have moral prescriptions derived from QED. To call it "god" is to give into Bruno's
desire to make all fundamental science "theology".
Brent
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