AXIVANTOTO IS THE CAUSE OF THE WORLD

Axivantoto is a schoolboy. What "we" think "we" perceive as "the world" is a sim he build for a computer science project. "We" are Axivantoto's homework. "We're" running on his laptop.

I hope young Axivantoto is not using Windows Vista. If he is "we're" all about to see the blue screen of death.

"YOU" THINK I'M GIBBERING?

Prove it.

Prove "we're" not living in a sim.

See:

http://www.nickbostrom.com/

One of the world'd most influential men according to the influential Foreign Policy magazine thinks "we" may be living in a sim. (He stole the idea from me)

Oliver,
>> if science can demonstrate matter “pops” into existence and becomes stable, the finding would be important.<<

Vacuum fluctuations, that you obviously refer to, are important but they do not mean “popping into existence” from NOTHING (a philosophical, not scientific, term). That is just another belief in “Creatio ex nihilo” more precisely, not in creation but in self-creation. You can believe that, like you can believe the Big Bang - or some other "event" investigated by science - was God’s action of creation (as some naive theists do), or that it was just a self-creating “popping into existence”, but these are not scientific propositions, i.e. to be verified or rejected by science.

As I wrote before, “there were times when the role of religion as ersatz-science was needed and justified. Those times are (or should be) over.” And I believe that the tendency by some of us to use science as a sort of ersatz-religion is based on similar misunderstandings.

One sentence like “God lives in heaven” cannot have anything to do with “logical correctness”. Its trueness depends on how you define “God”, “lives” and “heaven”. On the other hand, the syllogism:

“God lives in heaven.
XY does not live in heaven.
Hence XY is not God”

is logically correct irrespective of how you define the terms involved.

Belief in reductionism - that thoughts, cultures, the vast variety of human mental achievements in humanities, art, science, philosophy etc., are all reducible and can be explained merely as a working of the brain - is part of a legitimate belief system that I referred to as the Sagan option. An explicit acknowledgement of this reductionism is sociobiology, perhaps best defended by E.O. Wilson in his Consilience (Abacus, 1998).

I do not want to take away your (or anybody’s) belief in reductionism (of all reality to physical reality). Actually, I see many arguments in favour of it, e.g. by E.O. Wilson, as enriching also my alternative presupposition about the nature of reality.

George,

Thank you for your reply. I will return to it soon. Busy, again. In the meantime:

When Russell uses the words like "God," he does so in a manner deliberately inconsistent with those syllogism exercise in many Philosophy 101 texts. He takes issue with the subject-predicate form of some words.

You make some interesting points. Especially, the risk of Science assuming the role of a Clayton's God. I think some popular Science writers prime this belief, perhaps, to sell books.

Yes, I was referring to vacuum fluctuations. My lay understanding is that if the Higgs Field is in the correct state that an otherwise transient particle is captured and its existence prolonged. It is this process or something like it that is being tested to be confirmed or refuted(?)in accelerator experiments.

Regards.

Steven,

No, no. It was Axivandodo, Axivantoto's elder brother, whom became exitinct in his realm long ago. Axivantoto only runs the simulation created by his brother. I know this because I received a message from the other realm and messages from the other realm are infallible.

Oliver
Here is an article on the LHC that might interest you (and others:)...in reference to your comment about the Higgs field and bosun. Not being a particle physicist I found this article quite informative and easy to understand, ah such exciting times we live in!

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/01/hadron-collider-201001?currentPage=1

(snip)
"In other words, the L.H.C. is a machine that will really justify itself only if it enables paradigm-shifting breakthroughs. “I hope there will be many eureka moments,” says Fabiola Gianotti, a physicist from Milan who heads the L.H.C.’s big atlas experiment. (That strenuously reverse-engineered acronym stands for “A Toroidal L.h.c. ApparatuS.”) “Whatever else,” says John Ellis, a British theoretical physicist at cern, “we should get Higgs and supersymmetry. Higgs is the bread and butter. That’s our core business.” The Higgs boson, named after the British physicist Peter Higgs, who predicted its existence in the 1960s, is the one particle predicted by the Standard Model that hasn’t yet been found. And it’s not just some stray, inconsequential leftover piece but a keystone of the whole structure: the Higgs field, associated with Higgs bosons, is imagined to be a kind of subatomic “molasses” that imparts mass to other particles passing through it. The consensus at cern is that it will probably take a few years to find the Higgs."

trikkerdee,

Thanks. Interesting article. Breaking new frontiers is error prone and costly. I do hope it doesn't become necessary to "descope" the project, so the CERN LHC isn't used as originally intended.

I wonder, if, in the future, "time" and "casuality" will be so well understood, it becomes possible to know, whether or not, the universe is a closed to system and in a sense the notion of "a beginning" in the normal meaning of the word, becomes obsolete.