Basic stuff: Brian Cox explains that there’s no physics to support the existence of ghosts, but I’ve also heard Sean Carroll explain the same idea.
Recent polls have found that 42 percent of Americans and 52 percent of people in the UK believe in ghosts – a huge percentage when you consider that no one has ever come up with irrefutable proof that they even exist.
But we might have had proof that they don’t exist all along, because as British theoretical physicist Brian Cox recently pointed out, there’s no room in the Standard Model of Physics for a substance or medium that can carry on our information after death, and yet go undetected in the Large Hadron Collider.
“If we want some sort of pattern that carries information about our living cells to persist, then we must specify precisely what medium carries that pattern, and how it interacts with the matter particles out of which our bodies are made,” Cox, from the University of Manchester, explained in a recent episode of BBC’s The Infinite Monkey Cage.
“We must, in other words, invent an extension to the Standard Model of Particle Physics that has escaped detection at the Large Hadron Collider. That’s almost inconceivable at the energy scales typical of the particle interactions in our bodies.”
I can almost hear the protests already: But that’s mere physics, the afterlife is metaphysical and supernatural
and whatever other meaningless cliches they want to sputter. Read carefully. We, our bodies, are physical and bound by the laws of physics. If you want to claim there is a floofy physics-free metauniverse where your consciousness dwells, you still have to deal with the fact that there must be some kind of bridge or interface between our material forms and that etheric plane you believe must exist. There has to be an interaction, or there is no connection between my worldly identity and self and consciousness and the ghost/soul you claim is the actual me.
To put it in words the New Agers might understand, the vibrations have to resonate with my brain — and we’ve mapped all the frequencies that could do that, and we’re done, there are none left over to accommodate magic. Sorry.
There is also lots of other evidence against an afterlife, like the lack of empirical evidence, the inconsistencies of ghost stories, the necessity of mundane biology to maintain a mind, etc. The evidence for an afterlife consists entirely of wishful thinking.
Even when people drop the notion of eternal life, a persistence of belief remains, because the one truth so many people do not want to face is that death is death, it’s final. No getting to hang around afterwards, just so you can be an evil asshole (ever notice most ‘hauntings’ are malevolent?), no hanging about in a silvery net out in the universe, waiting on your loved ones and all that.
People in general just can’t stand the fact that our specialness is going to go away. In that sense, most everyone is a snowflake.
dare I be the 1st to mention NDEs? oops, I did so so so so aaarrg I’m sorry, not really, just thought it inevitable as prufe afterlife is a thing.
My personal favourite notion in this genre is the idea that you can detect spirits / ghosts / whatever, which are otherwise invisible, by photographing them. Because photography is magic. Presumably the tiny imp that lives in your camera (being a supernatural being itself) can see presences that you can’t.
I’m more than a bit annoyed by the people that believe the nonsense of their church enough to do terrible, terrible things… (witness the last article here,) but don’t believe in it enough to not be scared of death. Just look at the crimes they want their country to commit, in order to buy them a tiny, tiny bit more safety.
I like the lines uttered by Benjamin Linus in Lost when presented with the surprising alive John Locke:
It’s also unpossible to download your mind into a non-meat machine. That’s just another sort of dualism that’s so much wishful thinking.
The mildly deranged penguin once tried to patent a ghostie repellent based on the idea ghosts are just one of the forms of dark matter. The idea was you’d hire an unemployed cosmologist (could be a student), mount her / him on a stick, and wave it around. Dark matter eludes attempts to explain it, ergo, no ghosts in the vicinity.
Next you’ll be telling us that there is no bigfoot.
C’mon now, have those so-called scientists ever brought dying people into the Large Hadron Collider* to detect their departing souls?
Have they even bothered to hold a seance there?!?
* What if souls are made of Small and Medium-sized hadrons, huh?
What if they’re smart enough to avoid collisions?
Unpossible. If there are no bigfoots, then there are no entwives.
Ah, but:
1) Dark matter! If scientists don’t know what 90% of the matter in the galaxy is, then it could be ghosts! Checkmate, scientists!
2) Quantum physics! It’s weird and spooky, therefore all weird and spooky things are scientistical. Why, Deepak Chopra says…..
I don’t believe in ghosts, but this physicist is kinda full of shit too.
He is disproving the existence of something that is REALLY poorly and vaguely defined, by pretending it has clear parameters and then measuring them.
How many squabbulants can dance on the head of a pin? I count exactly zero, as squabbulants always look 10 feet tall in my dreams.
slithey tove@#2:
dare I be the 1st to mention NDEs?
Any of us who’ve undergone anaesthesia may have experienced something that’s indistinguishable from an NDE. One time in the 90s I was tripped out on nitrous oxide and went down the tunnel into the light and at the end of the tunnel there was a Rammstein concert and Amy Lee was on stage with Til. I hurried back to my body. Whew!
There’s another problem that ghost-believers ignore:
If a ghost is not part of physical reality (it’s something else) then it’s not going to interact with gravitation (or we’d have detected ghosts with the LIGO) – if it doesn’t interact with gravitation then it’d have nothing keeping it stuck to its frame of reference so it’d go whipping off through space. Worse, to “see” a ghost it would have to interact with photons. We know dark matter/energy don’t appear to do that, so there are things that don’t – but we know they exist because they have gravity. So there’s this problem about ghosts: anything that would let them exist enough for us to know they were real, would make them eminently detectable.
“Religion is a tawdry human construction that poisons all our most intimate thoughts about the living and the dead.” Joseph Conrad
blf #11
That was a fine argument then and it still holds water.
multitool: you got the argument backwards I think. Cox is saying we can measure the normal physics to great precision. That leaves only a tiny gap for the paranormal to affect the world.
So you can believe in ghosts, that’s fine — they just can’t affect the normal world in any measurable way. Certainly you can’t take pictures of them or talk to them, even in your dreams. Any definition that has the paranormal interacting with the world in more than a very minor way is proved wrong by modern physics.
It’s also unpossible to download your mind into a non-meat machine.
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Exactly, because a human soul is unique and non-reproducible.
IS A SCIENCE
For atheists, an interesting question may be how far the reductionism ought to go. I mean, it’s definitely not just gods and ghosts….
Any time you come up with a theory/idea/whatever, do you ever ask yourself how it reduces to fundamental physics? If you’re, say, talking about stuff happening in a certain political environment, giving a psychological explanation, or if it’s about any sort of extremely complex systems like those, then do you even attempt figure out how that’s instantiated by bits of matter moving around in some way or another? Or is that not even your radar? Honestly, I’m usually not very focused on the fact that my memories, the value of the dollar, the sound of trombones playing a G#min7, or whatever it may be, involve an incredible number of things moving around in some incredibly complicated way. And indeed, I’m usually not particularly astonished (although it seems like I should be more often) that all of those very different things reduce to the same incredibly simple stuff following all of the same simple rules. That’s fucking mind-blowing, if you ever actually think about it.
Anyway, would you be offended if someone said your biological theory is invalidated, because physicists have no way of reconstructing it using their equations? Or would you want to blithely mumble something about “emergence” or whatever, just to try to get those pesky physicists off your back? Maybe you’re just so damned sure that there must be something to it, so physics will just have to catch up somehow and invent the correct particles/forces/etc. for you. What would you really say, if someone told you that’s simply not happening, because it’s already ruled out? That is, it’s ruled out, no matter how good your idea might look using the concepts and methods of your field, because we don’t need to invesigate or debunk the idea at all, if physics can’t give a physical explanation of it using the objects/interactions/etc. which it already has at its disposal. Because that project basically is done — it took long enough, but we did eventually get there.
I think that makes some people a little uncomfortable, not so much when it’s ghosts, when they don’t already believe in ghosts. But when it’s your pet theory, which on the face of it doesn’t look like it’s assuming anything supernatural? My impression is that many don’t even think about that, not often at least, and they might be a little shocked by which of their favorite and most basic ideas/intuitions/etc. that they’ll have to give up.
But those are much weaker arguments (maybe that’s why it seems like an afterthought). If it’s simply been ruled out, it doesn’t seem like any of this is worth mentioning.
We lack evidence? Okay. We lack it now, we don’t have it yet…. Why should someone go along with us that it will continue to be that way, because in fact we’ve made the right conclusion about the world? They could just tell themselves “alright, then let’s find some evidence.” It’s simply a matter of wasting more and more time/money to look ever harder for it, however much may be needed. There’s no rule out there that anybody should trust that says we’re supposed be done with the project once you personally are satisfied or are too frustrated to continue working on it yourself. Maybe you’re just being lazy or just are not the sort of person who’s very keenly interested in that particular subject, which has no bearing on anyone else. In any case, we have after all been working (at least somewhat productively) on some things for a very long time… maybe this is just another one of those. So let’s be willing to wait arbitrarily long periods of time until that evidence we lack is actually found. We need to be humble and hard-working and so forth, because for all anybody knows it could take many lifetimes to do the job. No big deal. To a lot of people, those kinds of objections are going to be more convincing than the fact that you right now lack something. (Maybe you don’t! Why should they even trust you about this? Did you look very hard? What about anybody else who might have looked, or intends to look, elsewhere?)
The ghost stories are inconsistent? Great! Perhaps ghosts do different things in different circumstances. Who could’ve guessed? It would seem odd and maybe even a little conspiratorial if these stories told by different people in different times/places were agreeing too much about every last detail. Besides, even if you do see this as some kind of a problem, as you probably should depending on the types of inconsistencies, all someone has to do is make new stories or be more selective about which ones to believe are true and which are false: ones that are internally consistent, if that’s all you’re going to mention about it. So, if there’s a single story out there, anywhere at any time, that is consistent with itself but contradicts every other ghost story ever made, then we’ve still got something to address as naturalists. I’m sure there is one out there, for what that’s worth. But you’re essentially offering literary criticism here: you don’t like their stories, because they don’t fit your needs as a story, because you expect those things (stories) to be consistent. Well, fine. So? Maybe you think the characters are stupid too, and maybe you even have great reasons for thinking that. Why care about the stories? That has nothing to do with what actually goes in the real world: there are either ghosts or not, independently of whatever stories we may or may not tell.
Anyway, I could point to numerous cases of scientists telling “stories” to the public about their work, sometimes misrepresenting their work or the evidence in horrifyingly misleading ways (confused language, stupidly cartoonish graphics, fake or irrelevant equations, tortured logic or almost completely absent reasoning, everything but the kitchen sink). They apparently do that because they think things need to be dumbed down for others, they’re short on time, they don’t want to get bogged down in details that they think will distract from the main message they want to communicate…. Or who knows/cares why they do it? Should we conclude the same things about all sorts of science itself, because a few people are terrible about communicating it effectively to the public? I would hope not.
It’s not even clear what you mean by “the necessity of mundane biology to maintain a mind.” Do you mean that if you damage a brain, a person can die? The whole issue with mind-body dualism is that it’s not actually a logical necessity that a mind depends on having a body. To just assert that it is a necessity, if that’s what you’re doing… well, I don’t think that’s an impressive argument either.
CR,
There are two problems I have with mind-body dualism. First, it posits a second realm that cannot be measured to explain phenomena that can be explained just fine without leaving the material realm.
Second, unless you subscribe to the helpless observer theory of existence, the “soul” must be able to influence the material world, and yet because it is “dual,” the material world cannot influence the soul.
There are lots of other things–if you look at brain scans of people who are deciding to press a button, say, and ask them at what time they decided to press the button, invariably the “decision” comes after the activation of the motor regions involved in the action.
And then there is all the stupid that seems to result from a belief in a soul–starting with the idea that a fertilized egg is somehow a person.
First off, never mind the “supernatural” bollocks. Here are what I consider to be reasonable statements;
1) There is no evidence of after-life.
2) I can think of no way in which the Standard Model or any higher-level theories could accommodate such a thing. Note that this is a statement about me, not any theory.
3) The pleading on behalf of such things appears to be a hangover from beliefs based on superstition and wishful thinking.
For me, that’s pretty much it. Nothing to see. You might as well claim there’s a teapot orbiting Alpha Centauri.
Problem is, Cox and Carroll make that extra leap to “theory rules out X”. When you say that, you have to actually show your work. What Cox (a high-energy particle physicist) and Carroll (a cosmologist) seem to be saying is that we understand low-energy physics and chemistry and biology and everything else so well that we would already have detected “something” if it were there. That looks like handwaving to me.
I love Rowlings’ ghosts. They are not capable of interacting with matter, ie molecules: they can’t eat, can’t taste, float through walls. Except that they can talk – ie interact with ….. molecules.
It’s interesting to note the greater level of ghost belief in the supposedly secular UK, than in the US. Unfortunately, I suspect this is precisely because of the weakened hold of traditional religion in the UK, with a greater percentage of Americans regarding the existence of ghosts as contrary to their religion, rather than rejecting it out of rational skepticism.
Well, I would agree with Carroll and now Cox that there’s one more basic problem. Physics has no room for those things. With that, it’s pretty simple, and there’s basically no wiggle room for a person who isn’t already inclined to agree with you but wants to appear like they can have beliefs that are consistent with physics. We’re not getting involved in many of those complicated discussions, about what kind of epistemic or methodological or aesthetic criteria we ought to have as reasonable people. We’re not asking whether or not you subscribe to one theory of personal identity or another. We’re not assuming anything about the nature of a soul (where did you get your information about whether or not one could influence the material world?). There’s no question about whether you’ve looked hard enough or closely enough, etc. Why stake your claims on stuff like that, or dive deep into all of those murky waters, if you don’t have to?
Instead, you just directly address the fact that, because of what our bodies are (very well known to be) made of and because of how that stuff works, nothing is ever going to be found which does the job of an immaterial mind/soul. Therefore, we don’t have immaterial minds/souls, although we clearly do have material minds of some sort, which of course are still very far from being completely understood. I don’t see anything substantial in that which anybody could try to dispute.
I don’t know what you think any of that’s supposed to demonstrate. But I’m sure it can’t be that there are no ghosts or souls or supernatural beings of any other variety, since everything reduces to physics.
Rob:
I would say that the point is that we understand physics well enough. (The low-energy qualifier is what makes it well enough for the purpose of explaining things like humans, or various other stuff that ordinarily happens on Earth, instead of understanding it completely in every regime. I remember Carroll mentioning obvious items like Dark Energy™ and Dark Matter™ which are not relevant to souls, ghosts, out-of-body experiences, psychics, healing crystals, homeopathy, or numerous assorted things from religions or pseudosciences. Refuting all of them, more and more as they’re invented all of the time, doesn’t look so bad when you can do it all in one fairly simple stroke.)
The claim is not that “everything else” is well understood. Those aren’t (or shouldn’t be) pretending to be fundamental, universal theories about the entire universe, as physics is. You do have to buy into reductionism, obviously, which you may not want to do. But if you’re buying into that, I don’t think I get what your point is. Will chemistry/biology/etc. ever give us a reason to think there’s a new particle or a new fundamental force or anything like that? How would that work?
@consciousness razor #19:
It’s a lot more than that — it’s not merely life and death. You can alter personality, permanently or temporarily; you can change a person’s mood or abilities, all by making physical changes to the brain. Moreover, this is commonplace experience, not just the realm of exotic research. Test it for yourself — get drunk.
numerobis: Ah, but who is to say that ghosts aren’t made of sound waves?
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Or some other complex interaction in the physical world, as we ourselves are?
cr @24:
What is the technical meaning of “well enough”? This is just more handwaving. And more avoiding the problem; when you say “theory rules out X” you have to demonstrate it.
It’s not too long ago that people would have said “there is no room for quantum coherence in biological systems”. Seems reasonable, because biological systems are hot, dense, and noisy. No self-respecting coherent wave function should last anywhere near as long as the dynamical time scales of the organism. Yet now it seems that QM may well have a role in some biological processes (photosynthesis, bird navigation). Under certain special circumstances, quantum coherence may be able to persist over biological time scales. So, oops. Didn’t we understand the physics “well enough”?
And because this is Pharyngula, I feel obliged to point out that the previous paragraph is not about “quantum consciousness” or “quantum soul” or any such rot. It’s about being careful about what you think your theories say and don’t say. And this comment is not about leaving the door open for after-life, or Non-Overlapping Magisteria, or any of that crap. It’s about scientists making silly claims for science.
mnb0 @22
Except they don’t. Those are metaphotons that bypass the retina and the associated brain pathways and go directly to the soul
I’d add something about quantum vibrations but Reepakt Opra has copyright on those.
Alright. I don’t see any “necessity” there, and I don’t think that forces very many interesting conclusions about the existence of souls, what they must be like if they were real, etc.
People who are dualists (not me, obviously) know perfectly well that there are bodies, with various properties and behaviors and so forth. After all, according to their own view, that’s one of the two things they consist of. And the fact that certain things can happen to bodies, which affect their personalities, moods, abilities, etc…. Why should they have to dispute any of that, or why should they be worried about it?
What I’m not very fond of saying is that there are two things, and the one somehow “depends” on the other, or one is “necessary” for the other. There aren’t two things, both a soul and a body, just one. So we don’t strictly need to put it that way, although it may be a convenient way to talk sometimes. The root of the problem, what you really want to get across to dualists, is not that your body interacts with other parts of the material world in certain predictable ways, like when you become intoxicated or incapacitated, and that you expect them to be puzzled by that because you think you know how their theory is supposed to work, or you think you know the only logically possible way it could work (which usually isn’t actually the only one).
What you want to get across to them is that there aren’t any other things that the physical world does, like interacting with a soul for example. All of the relevant physical situations have been studied extensively, not just in the context of human beings but in the context of the entire observable physical universe. So you really do have to toss out a lot if you’re going to reject this. And what we’ve found already is that their theory must not work, no matter what it looks like if you pick away at the details, because the physical world doesn’t have any stuff that will satisfy the basic requirement that it responds somehow to a non-physical thing like a soul. Whatever those might be like, even if they actually exist in some sense in some other realm or whatever you like, they can’t do anything or be anything that has any significant effect on our bodies which are physical.
So it seems beside the point to me, to say that our bodies respond to certain other stuff that happens in the physical world. Of course they do, and basically everybody agrees with that. (If you’re some kind of wacky idealist, then I suppose we have to start the conversation in a very different place.) The question is instead whether or not our bodies are responding to or interacting with anything that’s not physical, such as soul. The answer is “no,” but there are more or less efficient ways of getting there.
Heh, well now you tell me. I’ve done a lot more “exotic research” anyway, mostly when I was still in college. That may have to count as a fairly commonplace experience.
Well, I assume that Carroll and Cox (I can at least speak for myself) would claim that quantum mechanics is an integral part of the “everyday life” which they think is totally explained with current physics.
But the quote above seems like a very different kind of claim. I guess it sounds fairly reasonable, but for what it’s worth I wouldn’t have bet any money on it being true. Anyway, that’s still physics, and what I’m taking away from that is that a certain physical phenomenon that some people (who?) didn’t expect to be especially important in a certain cases (biological systems) turn out to be important after all.
So which parts of physics did Carroll or Cox (or me, although I haven’t narrowed it down explicitly) leave out of the picture, something we don’t yet understand very well, which also might someday be found to have some significant effect on our everyday lives? (The kind of significance that would lead us to seriously reconsider ghosts, psychic powers, or anything as Earth-shattering to the basic picture that modern physics gives us.) Dark matter/energy are not candidates, I assume. And whatever theory of quantum gravity anybody invents will not be. So what’s left? Other than a few items like that, by the sound of it, they were pretty generous about which parts of physics they were including as stuff that’s both well-understood and relevant.
Well, I suppose it’s possible that ghosts exist in a separate universe that can observe this one. Such observation would be subject to Ghostworld physics which is not limited by any observed laws of our physics.
Of course, it would rule out ghosts being observable to us or interacting with the real world in any capacity, so I doubt the ghost-believers would be satisfied with a Theory of Ghosts that rules out hauntings, manifestations, or any evidence in favor of an unfalsifiable mess that wouldn’t convince a skeptic anyway.
That’s the trouble with supernatural— if something is supernatural, it’s irrelevant because the minute it has even the slightest impact on anything it’s subject to physics and falsification and therefore natural by definition.
I’ve known for a long time that ghosts don’t exist, and for a simple reason, too: there are grandmothers.
To consciousness razor
There’s a huge difference between:
1- Cannot construct the theories of biology from the Standard Model of physics, and
2- The theory of biology is logically and mathematically inconsistent with Standard Model of physics.
Stop attacking a strawman of the position. You’re usually much better than this.
To consciousness razor
Nevermind. It seems that you were setting up a hypothetical argument to attack? You seem to contradict that position in later posts. Nevermind.
…
To Rob Grigjanis
Argument by analogy. In effect, your argument amounts to “because someone was wrong one time, Sean Carroll might be wrong this time!”. To quote one of my favorite people, proofs by analogy are fraud – Bjarne Stroustrup.
http://www.stroustrup.com/bs_faq.html
In this case, the proper thing to do is to examine the particular claim under examination, and examine the reasoning behind it, and come to a proper reasoned conclusion.
To your question “what is the technical meaning of ‘well enough’?”, the answer is: It’s not being used in a technical sense. It’s being used in a non-technical sense. Yes, the conclusion will not be as well supported by a 5-sigma discovery in a peer reviewed physics article, but no one was claiming that level of confidence in the first place. We do not and cannot live our lives only on propositions that have this huge substantial burden of proof. Very often, we settle for lesser standards of proof. Sean Carroll is publishing a piece in a popular magazine article (or thereabouts). He’s not claiming that his piece is backed by a peer reviewed paper from a proper physics journal.
EnlightenmentLiberal:
Well, I agree with that. I probably shouldn’t have used the word “reconstruct” as I did (assuming that’s what your objection is about), because what I certainly did not mean is that we can count on fundamental physics to actually make our biological theories (or whatever) for us, so there’s no point in doing any other kind of science.
Physicists have to be able to explain physical things using physical theories. If it consists of physical stuff, no matter what it is or where it is or however many of them there are or whatever else you might say about it, then under all circumstances physics can be used to explain that. But that may not be the kind of explanation you’re looking for sometimes. Yes, you know the physics of having a conversation with someone over dinner, but you still want to understand it using other conceptual schemes that are specific to your inquiry, from the relevant special sciences, like biology or psychology or sociology or whatever it may be. Physics isn’t well suited to helping you understand many things like that, and it doesn’t need to be because those special sciences can handle them just fine… as the term suggests, that’s what their specialty is.
However, if your whatever-theory involves something other than physical things, then in that sense there aren’t physical things that physicists could (in principle) use to do a “reconstruction” of it which makes the same predictions and could (in principle) be interpreted as an equivalent (but totally impractical) version of that theory, because as I said they’re non-physical or don’t supervene on anything physical. What I’m claiming is essentially that no well-established/legitimate/reliable/true scientific theories are in a position like this, so you have no reason to worry here. But lots of garbage “theories” from religions and folk beliefs and so forth are in that position, which is too bad for them.
As it is, things like evolutionary theory can’t of course be reconstructed by physics, and there is no reason to hope anybody will ever be able to do anything like that — not because it invokes non-physical entities/processes but because the systems are so enormously complicated that doing it physically, “from the bottom up” as it were, is always going to be completely out of the question as a practical matter. That isn’t a genuine problem for either biology or physics, and I didn’t mean to suggest that should be the point of “reducing” everything.
To consciousness razor
Sounds good.
cr @30:
who? For photosynthesis, I’d say pretty much everyone before about 2008. Sadly, I doubt wikipedia has a page titled “list of scientists who were gobsmacked by quantum biology”. You have to wade through some literature to get a sense of that.
Ordinary, everyday, “well-understood” physics. You seem to think I’m talking about new physics, but I’m not. I’m saying that “ordinary” physics can bite you in the arse. That’s what Cox and Carroll aren’t telling you, and my cynical side says that’s what celeb pop-scientists do; leave out the complicating bits.
To Rob Grigjanis
Is your entire hangup that you (wrongly) believe that the other side is claiming absolute, or scientific 5 sigma certainty? We’re not. We’re just claiming moderate certainty – certainty enough to act on, and to correct others in their misconceptions.
EL @34:
Jesus wept. I already made the argument that Carroll is wrong. He said “theory rules out X” without demonstrating it. The analogy was an analogy, not a fucking argument.
Hm, the article linked to in the OP is “A Physicist Just Explained Why the Large Hadron Collider Disproves the Existence of Ghosts”. And a lot of people accept that, and mindlessly pass it on. You’re OK with that?
I think he does demonstrate it. Thus, we disagree.
For emphasis, of course Sean Carroll doesn’t demonstrate it to a level that would satisfy peer review in a formal physics journal, but that doesn’t mean absolutely zero amounts of demonstration. Again, we deal with different levels of “proof” / “demonstration” all the time. We all make important decisions in our lives on far less certainty than this, and we have a rather surprisingly high level of confidence compared when you really look at it.
Yes. Because I believe that it’s been demonstrated well enough. I dispute the “mindless” aspect as well, although passing along information from trusted and respectable authorities is not necessarily bad either.
EL @38: I had a bellyful of your weaselly crap and strawman bullshit in a thread at Mano’s place. Fuck off.
Ok, well, here, I stand in good company, including PZ Myers and consciousness razor (I think, right?). So, I might stay a while.
Rob:
Well, I’ve been bitten there before, and I can attest that it’s always been a physical event. I guess I have to admit that’s anecdotal, but it’s a start. And if you’re saying physics biting us in the arse is what you’re worried about…. then you don’t seem too worried about what they’re actually saying.
The claim is that we won’t need to appeal to non-physical stuff to explain anything, because we have great reasons to be very sure that physics will have it covered — “it” being anything in the world you like, which is real and warrants an explanation. But one can specify very precisely what the claim means, what it does/doesn’t entail, and how the argument is justified by what we’ve learned about physics. So what’s your problem with that? Or do you not have a problem with that? If you can convince me that I should be worried that non-physical things may someday bite me in the ass, then that would be a properly-formed complaint about the claim that’s actually being made. Can you think of any coherent reason to be worried about that?
The claim is not that physical stuff is so perfectly well understood that it “won’t bite us in the arse” somehow, whatever that is supposed to mean if you feel like being a bit less cryptic. Are there extremely complex or chaotic systems, which are extremely hard to model physically or with any other scientific methods? Or are there any which haven’t (so far) been modeled very accurately yet, ones that people haven’t been interested in enough to spend a lot of time/money/resources on studying it for example? Of course there are tons of things like that. How’s that supposed to be relevant?
cr @43:
How the fuck would I know? I’m not the one making claims. If you say stuff has been ruled out, show it. What is it that you’re having difficulty with? Both you and EL have used “well enough” as a qualifier. Back it up. Why is that so hard for you?
To continue with what consciousness razor said:
Either the mechanism of the “soul” happens entirely in the Standard Model, or it doesn’t. If we limit ourselves to the Standard Model, I’m pretty sure that “continued conscious experience, aka qualia, after clinical brain death is impossible” e.g. “life after death”.
I’m also pretty sure that any as-of-yet undiscovered physics is going to be roughly compatible with the Standard Model, which means it practically does not affect the relevant behavior of my brain, which means that you cannot find a soul there either.
That leaves a soul in physics that would drastically violate the Standard Model. I’m also pretty sure that there is no such physics.
Thus, I’m pretty sure that there is no soul that accomplishes “life after death”.
This is an argument that could have been made 300 years ago, with just Newtonian physics. This argument was made about 300 years ago, with just Newtonian physics, by one of the first famous published atheists of the modern era, Baron d’Halbach. It was properly reasoned then; the evidence was more than good enough then. Now we have even more evidence, and it’s perverse to deny the obvious conclusions of materialism and naturalism.
Spelling correction: Baron d’Holbach.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baron_d'HolbachI refer specifically to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_System_of_Nature(Of course determinism is on shaky ground today, but that does nothing to contradict the central premise of the book: that everything is explainable in principle by simple, materialistic, reductionistic laws, and that there is no supernatural, there are no souls, there is no afterlife, etc.)
As I explained in the other thread, I prefer a more general, layman argument:
To back up my claims, I cite every single scientific experiment ever reported and published. In not one case was a supernatural explanation upheld, and in uncountable cases, supernatural explanations were shot down in favor of confirmed natural explanations. On this basis, I conclude with high confidence that the supernatural does not exist. Thus, personality, thought, cognition, emotion, etc., all exist in the material, natural brain. For further argument, see:
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2013/03/03/thor/
I also suggest the seminal work on garage dragons by Carl Sagan.
Given the knowledge of the material and natural processes of death, esp brain death, it seems rather obvious that this pattern of information of a living person in the living person’s brain is not just going to reform somewhere else after brain death (barring perhaps Boltzman brains, which is a discussion for another time). Do you really need some citations for the points of this paragraph? Is this the point that you’re disputing?
Thus, brain death is a one-way process, and therefore there is no Christian afterlife.
Rob:
You seem to think I wanted an answer from you about that, even though I immediately answered it and immediately questioned its relevance.
Will non-physical things bite me in the ass, or will they do anything else? Can I be extremely confident (more confident than I probably should be about lots of well-supported and apparently reliable scientific theories) that nothing like that will happen to anybody, ever?
The phrase “well enough” doesn’t appear in the following claim, so you’ll have to start fretting about something else:
Well, not everything has been found from the current energy levels being used at the LHC, there are still some unanswered answers in physics to be uncovered.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_physics
Interestingly, spirituality isn’t on the list, as there is no known pathway that consciousness could be stored after the biological processes that create it cease.
I’m actually quite happy that we do have many unsolved problems in science, as I personally think things would be quite boring if we knew everything about nature!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_unsolved_problems
For each field of study, there are unsolved problems. When one problem is solved, we learn ever so much more about our world.
cr @48:
From my #21:
Maybe I should have said “non-physical”.
Anyway, it’s obvious that neither you nor EL are willing to address what I actually said, and instead resort to my “hangups” and what I might be “fretting about”. Birds of a feather. Carry on.
To Rob Grigjanis
I still genuinely don’t understand your complaint. I like my argument, and I prefer it to Sean Carroll’s variant, but in the end they make much the same points using much the same evidence and reasoning.
I asked earlier, and you didn’t answer, so let me ask again: What points do you think are not properly demonstrated, and which need to be demonstrated? I guess one of the following.
1- Physics of the Standard Model does not allow the re-creation of the pattern of information of the brain to reform after braindeath (except perhaps Boltzman brains).
2- Any possible new physics that is an extension or slight refinement of the Standard Model will not allow it either (except perhaps Boltzman brains).
3- New physics that grossly violates the Standard Model is very unlikely to exist.
4- Numbers 1 through 3 are an exhaustive listing of the ways that the pattern of information of the brain can reform after braindeath. Thus, the “afterlife” of Christianity does not exist.
EL @51:
I’m sure you do.
Show how it is not allowed! Fuck, that’s been my point all along. Have you not been paying attention? All you’ve done is say “Carroll says so, so it must be” and “I believe that it’s been demonstrated well enough”. Can you actually back up anything you say?
As I’ve often said to those around me: Write it all down. Once you are gone that’s all that will remain of who you were, what you thought, what kind of person you were, asshole or saint, millionaire or mendicant, loving spouse or sleazy incorrigible. Even then the media always degrades. Paper, tape, discs, hard drives, the internet, the cloud (nothing but a server someplace), tombstones, all slowly disintegrate and disappear. No matter how powerful (Hitler, Stalin), how rich (Carnegie, Trump), how intelligent (Einstein, Myers), how beautiful (my wife and kids), all will be forgotten in due time. Only the DNA will carry on. And it doesn’t care a whit about where it came from.
There’s only one space left for ghosts to occupy, and that means if you believe in ghosts, you believe we’re in the matrix. The only way for ghosts to exist is as a data backup done on the “backend” behind the scenes of the simulation.
Argument from Authority.
To Rob Grigjanis
Well, thanks for clarifying that.
So, umm… After I burn a piece of wood, all I have left is ashes. It would be a supremely monumental task to put that wood back together again. I’m also pretty sure that the wood is not going to reform somewhere else that is identical down to the molecular level. I’d like to think that I know enough about the natural processes at work in combustion to know that there is no something that is going to go into the air, and come together somewhere else, to re-create the block of wood identical down to the molecular level. Can I take this as given? Or do I need to show my work here too? ~confused~
EL above:
It may be intractable, but… in this case, you’re not asserting there no room in the Standard Model of Physics for such a feat — which is the claim you’re attempting to support.
I put it to you that your claim is equivalent to claiming that once any sufficiently complex arrangement of matter is sufficiently rearranged then that particular arrangement can never be recreated sufficiently close to the previous arrangement.
—
Note the careful language in the OP:
Clearly, that there is no physics to support X is a much weaker claim than that physics rules out X.
(Which, in passing, is basically also what Rob is telling you)
“the afterlife is metaphysical and supernatural”
In other words, magical, despite any evidence that magic has ever worked. Supernatural is just the religious way of avoiding saying superstitious.
No ghosts, eh?
As a particle physicist, I beg to differ.
John Morales:
And whether or not it’s asserted, that is in fact the kind of bizarre, extremely improbable stuff the Standard Model allows. Or whatever historical version of fundamental physics you care to name. None of them suggest it’s impossible or “not allowed.” It’s certainly reasonable not to worry about it or neglect it in all of your plans or whatever, because that kind of stuff is so unlikely, but that’s not at all the same thing as something that violates physics (much less something that’s logically impossible). All you’d have would be stuff evolving according to normal dynamical laws, which happens to be in some wildly unlikely (but completely physically “allowed”) state.
EnlightenmentLiberal:
I consider Boltzmann brains more or less a non-problem. But if somewhere in the universe an identical “pattern of information” of your brain fluctuated into existence, as a Boltzmann brain, I don’t see how it follows that that thing would be you or your brain. There would be another person who happens to have your identical brain state.
So if you had died and it came to exist, you would not therefore exist again; and you would not have some sort of a naturalistic afterlife whenever/wherever it is, not in any sense of the word. It would have a life of its own (a very short one, presumably, if it’s just a brain floating around in outer space), and you would still be dead. Because you are two different objects, with no physical processes establishing any sort of continuity between them. (Star Trek style “transporters,” which would make a clone and kill you, and “uploading” your consciousness into a computer, also cloning/killing you, suffer from many of the same basic conceptual problems about the nature of personal identity.)
Imagine this thing is outside your lightcone, if that helps you see the problem, because its relation to you is totally arbitrary. All you have, according to this scenario, is a formal property that two brains are in the same state, the same information would describe them, or however you’d like to put it. That doesn’t establish that you are in both of those places, but that a second thing is thinking like you are (or like you were, if you’re dead), remembering what you remembered and so forth. Note that your brain does not remain in the same state from moment to moment, the same information does not describe it throughout your life, so there’s no reason to think that could be the sort of thing which establishes continuity for you as a person, in your ordinary life from one moment to the next.
alkisvonidas, #59
Ooh, and he just died a couple of days before you said that.
Spooky.
Not an afterlife, but a “living Hell”.
(*this* is what happened in Sweden yesterday!) https://satwcomic.com/living-hell
alkisvonidas @59: Have you seen Faddeev’s article on scholarpedia? Nicely written, with some history thrown in. He had a good innings.
As a complete outsider, I’d like to see Rob either clean up his mouth or be banned. But let me comment on how S. C. and B. C. KNOW that blah is ruled out. IF blah existed, we would have detected evidence of it in current physics experiments. We have not, so it doesn’t exist.
One can’t really truly prove something does not exist (S. C. admits this), but it is easy to prove it, if it does. Example, Santa Claus: it is highly doubtful someone could have a workshop at the north pole, especially in December, it is highly doubtful that someone could deliver presents to over a billion children on just one night. But if you want me to believe in Santa Claus, just show him to me. And not the seedy character in the local mall.
Rare phenomena sometimes do really exist, but the key factor is, evidence grows better over time. At one time, astronomers claimed rocks can NOT fall out of the sky – water, maybe, but not rocks. Then, in 1838 there was a spectacular meteor fall over Paris, which thousands saw, and the rocks were picked up, still warm. But the evidence for ghosts, afterlife, flying saucers, Bigfoot, Nessie, and a myriad other ‘rare’ phenomena hasn’t changed in a century. There might be more of it, but the quality is the same. Until it does improve, there’s not much we can do to study such things.
You people are all morons!
It’s a holy ghost, for god sake!
It lives in the holes in your arguments and escapes when you die to dwell in someone else’s holes.
This is all basic stuff you should have learned in Sunday Bible School.
To consciousness razor
Regarding Boltzman brains. I did not mean to suggest that a recreation of my brain would be “me”. I was simply covering my bases because Rob seems to be in extreme pedant mode.
Having said that, I don’t have very clear ideas and beliefs on this topic. I’ve looked at certain thought experiments, and I only came up more confused. Thankfully, because we don’t have the scifi tech necessary to investigate such things (yet), and we’re nowhere close, I don’t have to worry about such things (yet).
To Rob
Has there ever been a single incident in history where a tree-sized piece of wood has been burned, and afterwards a (new(?)) piece of wood has come together, by whatever process, which matches the original configuration of the wood, exactly, at a molecular level? I presume no. Will such a thing ever happen in the future (excluding Boltzman scenarios)? Almost certainly not. Why not? How do we know that such things have not happened, do not happen, and will not happen? I argue that we know this based on our knowledge of the laws of physics, and especially thermodynamics and entropy? Presumably yes.
So again, I must repeat a question that I asked before, and I hope for an answer to this one: If you’re with me thus far, is your entire hangup about absolute certainty? It seems to me that you would agree with my first paragraph of this post. Yet, it also seems that you disagree with the statement “the laws of physics disallow a piece of wood being recreated exactly the same at the molecular level after being burned”. So, would you be satisfied if I explicitly added some uncertainty into the statement, ala the following? “Based on our knowledge of the laws of physics, it’s extremely, extremely unlikely that a piece of wood could be recreated exactly the same at the molecular level after being burned.” Because if that’s your hangup, then I’m totally ok with correcting myself. I think it’s needlessly pedantic, and I probably will use the shorter version in other conversation because I think you would be being unreasonable, but I still like to know what my conversational opponent is thinking.
For another comparison, I can also say that the laws of physics require the sun to rise tomorrow. Of course, there’s also extremely unlikely scenarios where the sun will not rise tomorrow, and the laws of physics would be intact, but such scenarios are so extremely unlikely that it’s below the threshold of noteworthiness for everyday speech. When I say “I am certain that the sun will rise tomorrow (because of my knowledge of physics)”, I am not claiming absolute certainty, nor am I claiming that physics absolutely forbids such a thing. Further, the odds that the sun will not rise tomorrow are vastly higher than the probability that the “soul” survives the death of the material brain, and yet you complain about my lack of technical precision about the soul, but I doubt you would complain about my lack of technical precision concerning a hypothetical claim “the sun will rise tomorrow (and I know this is true because of my knowledge of physics)”.
Again, you’re attacking our arguments, and the arguments of Sean Carroll, assuming the wrong context and thus a wrong terminology. This is not a peer reviewed paper in an academic, peer reviewed physics journal. This is a discussion, on popular non-technical blogs concerning a topic that is barely physics proper; the discussion belongs more to a “department of philosophy” because the exact form of the physics is irrelevant. I could, and do, make the same argument based on mere Newtonian physics.