RestoringGuy

But you can't "work with" a pure abstraction. There is always a physical model or artifact during a proof. I use the word "verify" to say the physical model, even if it is dots of ink on paper, satisfy a verifiable condition -- a thing is objective when my mind doesn't need to be there to do the verification (anybody can do it or even a machine could but it still has to be demonstrated physically). If you say an abstraction (greenness,etc.) doesn't exist, then what about a term like "dog"? Could we not say dogs do not exist, as the term may apply to a class of animal (wolf hybrids) that some would say qualifies as dog and some say it does not? We always turn an abstraction into something physical when verifying a mathematical proof. Sometimes it is electrical impulses on a computer, and sometimes it is pencil marks. A number DOES describes behavior, it describes what will happen to that number (and its ink/chalk representation) during the physical act of doing mathematical proof.

I don't know that religion is generally responsible for evil, but evil people will embrace whatever ideology provides social approval to cloak their actions. If most people thought hockey players, without proof, have superior ethics, suddently evil people would choose to play hockey. That does not make hockey responsible for evil. I do not understand the connection to determinism. I will accept liberty is the antithesis of religion, but there seems to be atheists who subscribe to determinism, and monotheists who say God provides humans a "choice" whether to sin or not.

How is gravity movement of stuff that is tangible when we apply the term gravity to stuff far away that we cannot touch and we never will go near? Does it not seem that we apply a principle that falling objects could be touched and/or measured by some apparatus of our construction subject to careful design and objective criteria? For example a robotic probe that measures gravity on planet Mars, is it subject to the idea that the people of Earth must momentarily agree that it is beautiful work of art prior to its launch to Mars, or is it subject to the idea that its gravitational sensors are reproducibly objective and reliable? If we apply the reproducibility and reliability conditions to the probe and gravity, why not use the same conditions for mathematics? When you say existence of numbers is absent, that is like saying gravity is absent when you don't witness it. Numbers and gravity both describe the behavior of matter. Gravitational law is a tool that predicts the curvature of space and the acceleration of let's say a comet. Numbers are a tool to predict how many particles (or goats or seashells) you will have when you place two and two together. Both of these things describe what the universe does and how it behaves, and neither thing itself seems tangible. We say they are real only by looking a physical samples of how well they predict and explain things. A comet affected by gravity can be moving differently than a straight line, and it is "in our heads" that we extend our notion of gravity to explain such behavior. But we seem to agree the universe itself behaves this way and our mental idea of gravity corresponds with physical behavior that can be tested and there are experiments that can be reproduced. In that way gravity is said to be real. But why discriminate against the objects of mathematics, such as numbers, which also consist of ideas and are similarly useful to explain physical behavior? It seems to me we extend mathematics to be not just mental, but always subject to at least something physical. I am not clear on how mathematics is proven by mere agreement with a presentation. An agreement alone is a result that is not reproducible, different people (or the same people) will change their minds and we have no external testing method. A computer can also generate (and verify) mathematical results. It seems to me there is more than simple agreement, but a requirement that a deduction is objectively sound. If a computer is built that discovers and proves a conjecture, and different computers and human pencil-and-paper proofs all confirm the result is inescapable, why should this reproducible result be any less real than the gravity-test results of a probe on Mars?

As I understand it, if the observation device is so lightweight as to not disturb the wave, it too will become uncertain like a wave until it is observed by something else (like our eyes) that is big and heavy enough to collapse the waves.

I doubt anybody believes "reality=the senses", for it would leave one in the position of denying all things until they are sensed and only then do they become real. The coming and going of reality (the moon is unreal after you look away from it) goes against I think every definition. If you mean that which can in principle be sensed, then I would agree. But you still have to deal with highly indirect observations, through lenses and digital imagery and sensors of a very abstract nature to decide if you count this as "sensation". I am thinking the imperfections in our eyes and getting a stuffy nose changes our direct senses, but would you say reality morphs itself based on your personal health conditions? If I hear a story told by some guy about what he sees on the bus, I extend my senses. He is a tool, like eyeglasses but perhaps much more unreliable, allowing me to see more than I can personally see. I do not get how I can classify his story as unreal just because I have no first hand visual.

I use the words in the sense that verification requires physical reality. But truth does not, because we all seem to accept a truth even after the verification experiment has been destroyed (otherwise how can you say that things are real once they become momentarily unobserved, you have now lost the physical link you have to them). For a thing to be "real", must it not reproducibly persist in order to demonstrate it is not simply a mental construct? That is a good way to phrase it. Conclusions are relative to the premises. But whether or not that is true is the mathematical fact that is being uncovered. If mathematics shows "A implies B", I am not saying B is inherently true or real. I am saying that the full sentence "A implies B" is true and real. No, you can't call pretty much anything "true", because the negative claim is false. If you concede that mathematics can prove "A implies B", then it is a reproducible truth and further the negation "A and not B" can never be true, it is universally falsifiable. Reality is not exclusively that which is physically tangible; one cannot touch gravity yet most people describe gravity as real. A thing can be said to be "real" so long as it's testable/provable, and whether it is made of solid matter at a given moment does not seem relevant. By checking whether something "actually matches reality", what are the things you are comparing? Your belief is compared to some observation, and to weed out errors that test must be repeatable, correct? Furthermore, whether or not that belief leads to predictable future events, that also lends credibility to that belief. Yet when we make a mathematical proof, we present a physical artifact (a "proof") that our conjecture is true, verifiable by other mathematicians. It predicts future events, because we now know which side of the fence (true/false) the conjecture must fall for all mathematicians in all of time. I think this is relevant because the claims about quantum mechanics and consciousness are plagued with strange conclusions about psychic powers, or the alternate view that somehow QM is irrelevant because our minds are thought to be deterministic pinball machines and that we cannot "know" anything unless the atoms of our brain are externally forced into doing so. By emphasizing mathematics, I am saying there is a mathematical world that is verifiable. It is testable. You can build a bunch of computers and they will all behave the same general way. We need not test every object to say gravity is real and predicts future events. But we believe a gravitational law is likely to be true on a new planet never visited. Mathematics is perhaps more real, holding everywhere. To explain how we can know about this kind of truth (rather than call math an imaginary construct), our brains require a way to discover such things (QM), and a way to subject them to physical verification (experiments with computers and various stochastic and deterministic methods).

I don't see how the word "is" can mean more than what can be subjected to a testable description. A thing momentarily unaccompanied by a form of movement is unobservable. I thnk that is why energy of interaction is important in QM. We need movement to test theories. The objects of mathematics are verifiiable, but non-physical. You could build three computers out of silicon, spinning gears, and pure energy, and if they start out with some basic axioms, they would produce the same mathematical results. Physicality is required to do the mathematical verification, but the endurance of the (non-physical) truths they prove remains because you can isolate the machines or destroy them and later repeat the experiment.

I think we objectively transition between physical and nonphysical all the time. If I touch a rock and you touch the same rock, we are contacting the same object. Physicality is present and the only way we can know about the "same" rock. Mathematics provides another method of contact. A theorem can be proven independently by two people. They each contact the same "object". Now the mathematical objects are not things we can touch. But they exist because the patterns we see in our minds can be reproduced just as scientific experiments can be reproduced. It is never the case that some mathematician wakes up and finds the Pythagorean Theorem to suddenly be false. But things like unicorns and gods depend on our imagination -- they are mentally optional and manifest themselves physically on insofar as people act on their belief. By contact with mathematics I am saying we and whomever else in the universe who stumbles across the same mathematical objects and proofs are transitioning between something physical and nonphysical. Otherwise if mathematics is "purely mental" and conjured up by the mathematician, we would have a hard time explaining how such mental patterns travel the first time a proof is done.

Can you clarify your position? The theory of Objective Reduction is described at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction To my knowledge, it is the only theory that holds that wavefunctions collapse objectively and holds that consciousness (free will) is not dependent on algorithms (classical physical determinism). I find it compelling because it avoids the logical paradoxes of the determinists, while at the same time refuting the crackpot quantum spoonbenders.

I don't believe Young's experiment is in any way related to these ramblings. I'm by no means a scientist, but I have searched the Wikipedia page for words like "conscious" and "aware" and found nothing. So I highly suspect that this is another case of fallacy from quantum physics: I accept the "objective reduction" theory, which says there is interaction with the environment (usually by way of gravity) that forces the wavefunction to collapse. Consciousness has never been shown to be necessary for wavefunction collapse, although I don't deny that consciousness is related to quantum mechanics in the same way nearly all chaotic phenomena are sensitive to it. But just from a gut level, it seems strange to me that some physicists will accept that gravity connects every particle to every other particle, but at the same time they believe some particles are isolated enough that they can pretend to be unaffected until the trajectory is examined twelve minutes later by some dude glancing at a computer printout.

It is a good idea. Although we are censored by the Internet like no time before. If there were to emerge an idea that threatens the status quo in some real way, the government already knows where the idea comes from and exactly who is promoting it. Consumer apathy, forced automatic updates and App stores are the weapons, and the PC is said to be "dead". More and more, people will keep ideas to themselves except at those times their ideas are either neutral or appear to aid the establishment. I don't have specific recommendations, just worries about how accessible all ideas will be.

Is he against forced cirumcision on principle, or for health reasons? If he opposes it on principle (infringement of invidual liberty), then it's hard to understand how, at the same time, he supports forced fluoridation. If he opposes forced circumcision due to health reasons, then it means he would accept forced circumcision if someone convinced him it iis ndeed the healthier option? Both reasons. I think he is a courageous voice surviving in America's tornado of ignorance. if a few children drink flouride it is bad but I believe he is moving in the right ethical direction. On the ethical question, I found the following quote: http://www.drmomma.org/2010/02/dr-dean-edell-statement-on-circumcision.html

In a discussion, it seems that a way to filter out women with an anti-male agenda is to ask them about circumcision of male babies and what force they would employ to prevent it.In the same way, feminists have used rape as a wedge issue to filter out anti-woman males. I have witnessed many surveys about "how many men on university campus would intervene if they saw a woman being assaulted". The implication is not just that rape is wrong, but that every man has a duty to expose himself to risk. By the same token, it is widely believed a woman has a duty defend her child. Yet in most of the US, an "advanced" nation, her belief suddenly reverses itself when her child's genitals are discovered to be male.Some people will use cultural norms and preferences to excuse her behavior. But feminists say old-fashioned cultural norms and preferences are wrong and crippling to women. Yet they cling to such violence when male children are the target. Most people do not spontaneously discover that anti-male contradiction in their thinking, but they feel prompted to answer the question one way or the other. If they still do not see the problem with the status quo, their empathy fuse has been blown.

From my understanding, Edell is one of the few who speak out against the forced circumcision routine most American boys are subject to in our hospitals. I can forgive drinking fluoride in my childhood.