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eextreme
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A question that came out spontaneously, what do you think?
robertm said:This is not scientific nor philosophical in the smallest regard.
Crosson said:According to physics our material bodies will never go beyond these limits, but I do not know anyone who can convincingly argue that we are merely material bodies.
JoeDawg said:All thoughts occur in your brain, where is the problem?
Thank you, I have a dictionary. I am interested in the OP context of thoughts.Crosson said:Transcend: to pass beyond the limits of.
No it would not be redundant if you say for instance that space-time emerges from loop quantum gravity, or from twistor space, or from any other mechanism you can mathematically define (or at least describe).The phrase "the fabric" in "the fabric of space and time" is redundant, so we could reformulate this as simply "spacetime."
So this is not a scientific question, since by definition (such as Einstein was describing in great details more than a century ago), space-time should be understood as comprehending the entire Universe, including possible extension we are not yet aware of, and which were later suggested by the flexibility of the equations.Can mankind go beyond the limits of spacetime?
Nobody could possibly convince anybody else either way, provided one has already make up his mind on this question. Once again this is not scientific.I do not know anyone who can convincingly argue that we are merely material bodies.
My abstract thoughts are located in the chemical reactions taking place in the neurons of my brain.Our more abstract thoughts already seem to be beyond space and time, so it seems that without our mundane bodily lives we would all be beyond space and time.
I do not know what book you read, but I can tell you I personally talked to people who measure antineutrons fall. Antimatter does not fly away in a gravitational field, this is an experimental fact. There is no such thing as antigravity. This is science-fiction.aniketp said:using advanced antimatter reactors(which have not been invented yet) you can develop an anti gravity field around a craft
I think the technics you are referring to in your previous post require negative energy density. Basically, there are Hawking theorems which prove you will not be able to do fancy stuff such as time travel and teleportation (or merely over-speeding light) unless you break some energy positivity condition.aniketp said:Anti gravity is not like gravity at all... All i am saying is that energy evolved during annihilation can be used to create a repulsive force field around the desired object, which can be used to counteract effects of gravity.
I think the answer to that one will not satisfy you : gravity is always attractive for the same reason that mass is always positive.aniketp said:But there is no reason for antigravity to not exist. Of all the four fundamental forces other three attract as well as repell.. so why should gravity just attract?
humanino said:My abstract thoughts are located in the chemical reactions taking place in the neurons of my brain.
Crosson said:You can't literally mean that the thoughts are in my brain, the same way that my brain is in my skull. You must mean that you think the chemical reactions somehow give rise to thoughts. But there is no mathematical or scientific formulation of this idea, and so your idea is just as nonsensical as any other.
If I type a thought into the computer, that doesn't mean the thought is in the computer, but only a typed symbolic record of it. In fact it would require thought to interpret the typed symbolic record as a thought. Don't confuse the thing that holds a record of the thoughts (computer memory, the human brain) with the thing that has (feels) thoughts.
By the way, I am a physicist and I also formerly held on to the nonsensical dogmatic belief that "thoughts are identical to the electro-chemical processes of the brain."
aniketp said:But there is no reason for antigravity to not exist. Of all the four fundamental forces other three attract as well as repell.. so why should gravity just attract?
robertm said:I am sorry that you have changed your mind, and am interested to know what could possibly have convinced you.
There is nothing nonsensical about it. No one is confusing the brain with any special magical 'feeling' of thoughts. Your thoughts can not exist without your physical brain.
It is that simple. Just because the human brain has the wonderful ability to experience the senses without physical input dose not mean that there is anything magical going on.
As a physicist, why would you rather assume that an option based on ZERO logical and empirical evidence is in anyway viable? Why would you base a belief, ANY belief on 'feelings' and whimsical ideals? We all know how incredibly subjective 'feelings' can be.
There is however a logical way of describing and quantifying with the scientific method the reasons why 'thoughts' which exist only in the imagination of a brain seem so intangible.
Gravity is not a force. It is a pseudo force that arises from the nature of spacetime.
aniketp said:But there is no reason for antigravity to not exist. Of all the four fundamental forces other three attract as well as repell.. so why should gravity just attract?
shamrock5585 said:ok seeing as einstein was the greatest mind we have ever known and he said that gravity is just mass making a dent in the fabric of space-time which governs everything we have ever experienced, I'd say he was right.
shamrock5585 said:haha so your saying einstein was wrong? ask NASA if they agree! or even people in Hiroshima for that matter haha
I voted no because spacetime encompasses the entire universe, and nothing {at least that we know of} is beyond the universe.eextreme said:A question that came out spontaneously, what do you think?
Who decided that? I'm not saying that he wasn't one of the greatest, but who decided he was the greatest...?shamrock5585 said:...ok seeing as Einstein was the greatest mind we have ever known...
Crosson said:By the way, I am a physicist and I also formerly held on to the nonsensical dogmatic belief that "thoughts are identical to the electro-chemical processes of the brain."
.. um .. what..?Crosson said:...Unless you have had brain surgery or an MRI, it is entirely conceivable that upon your death we will open your skull and find it to be empty...
Crosson said:I studied the history of philosophy for a few years. Now it's hard for me to discourse with other physicists, because they are only playing with half a deck.
In logical discourse the standard for claims of impossibility is nothing less than rigorous proof. This means that your claim is unfortunately based only on a feeling that you have. Stories like this are not totally uncommon, I also know of one involving a graduate student in mathematics who was functionally identical to his colleagues:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,290610,00.html
Unless you have had brain surgery or an MRI, it is entirely conceivable that upon your death we will open your skull and find it to be empty.
Physical input is irrelevant to my argument. The plain fact that we have any thoughts, whether based on a physical reality or not, is enough to ask "what's going on?"
When all else fails, use connotations ("feelings") and talk louder ("ZERO"). How about this as empirical evidence: "I see the color red."
According to classical physics the state of my material brain is given by the set of positions and momenta of the various particles in my brain. Tell me, what configuration of these particles could give rise to my experience of the color red? More directly, how could any configuration of these particles give rise to any subjective experience by an individual consciousness whatsoever?
What is this logical way of describing and quantifying thoughts in terms of electro-chemical processes?
I agree, that has been our best model so far. But the questions in this thread go beyond our current physical models. Don't you realize that what you are stating as a universal fact is actually a model that has existed for less than 10^(-18) % of the duration of the universe, and has weakly been confirmed by limited observation of the light that is visible from this solitary planet? Remember that cosmology predicts that up to 98% of the mass in the universe is exotic matter that is not to be found on the periodic table, and so we must admit that we have no idea what forces between these particles must be like. Don't let "the quest for the theory of everything" hype affect your thinking about what is possible, we should be willing to admit how much we don't know.
JoeDawg said:We don't know what thoughts are or how the brain works exactly, but the mind clearly is a process of the brain in some way... sounds like you now hold another nonsensical dogmatic belief about the mind. And how does being a physicist make you an expert in AI and neuroscience, anyway?
6. It is quite evident that the combination of the various facilities of the human brain can give rise to experience. What do you experience when you are un-conscience?? It seems to me that you need to spend more time read a psych 101 book rather than all that philosophy. Do you realize that the human mind is capable of approximately 100 trillion synaptic operations per second?? Does it not seem that a physical system capable of that many complicated operations every second of every day may be capable of giving rise to something like consciousness?
7. The scientific method is the logical argument that uses electro-chemical activity of the brain to attempt to explain the origin of consciousness.
Now, I've worked with some people who {I feel} could possible have an empty cavern instead of a brain, but that comment is ridiculous.
robertm said:1. I fail to see the empiricality of any philosophy involving the workings of the mind. However, nueroscience seems to be doing pretty well...
4. I completely agree with you that we should always ask 'what is going on'. That does not mean that we should assert that there is something magical going on.
Crosson said:No, any logical argument that uses electro-chemical activity of the brain to attempt to explain the origin of consciousness must use mathematics. Anything less is mere hand waving, which doesn't pass the muster in science (except for this one issue, about which I find scientists to be dogmatic).
In other words, show me the mathematical model that allows brain states to be mapped onto thoughts. Let B be the set of brain states, and T be the set of thoughts, then any materialist scientific theory of the brain must construct an operator:
O:B -> T
That maps any brain state b to its corresponding thought t. Now the elements of B could be vectors representing the classical state of the particles in the brain, or they could also be smooth vector fields, or maybe something else. But I don't have a clue what mathematical structure would satisfactorily represent the elements of T, perhaps they are infinite-dimensional vectors?
Anyway, I know there is no such model, and although I must admit that I cannot rule out such a possibility in the future, you must also admit that as long as there is no model of the kind that I described then there is no logical materialist explanation other then hand waving.
I don't know why you think anything that goes outside of current scientific theories is necessarily "magic" or "supernatural." As far as I can tell, this is just name calling, and the same thing was done to Newton over his theory of gravity.