My Problem with the so-called New Atheism

[Jimmy]

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[Swan]

My Problem with the so-called "New Atheism", or: Why Biologists Ought to Shut the Fuck Up About Quantum Physics

For further reference:
http://topyaps.com/top-10-interesting-facts-about-erwin-schrodinger
http://www.academia.edu/260503/_Mysticism_in_quantum_mechanics_the_forgotten_controversy_

This is basically just a bunch of quotations followed by a rant about biologists who can't solve basic differential equations thinking they're the masters of the universe because some university was stupid enough to give them a Ph.D. It's fairly heated and definitely not a purely logical argument, but I do think there's enough serious substance here to at least begin what could be an intellectual discussion.

All the following is taken from the writings of Erwin Schrodinger, founder of the quantum theory, a cosmologist who wrote a book on general relativity, a philosopher of mind and of science who wrote extensively on the history of Western empiricism as well as the limits and failings of our current models--both physical and psychological, the founder of molecular biology who predicted the existence of DNA and first introduced the idea of a code-script of life, the Director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Dublin for many years, a soldier for Austria-Hungary during World War I who fled from the Nazis after their rise to power in the 1930s, his personal ideology of inner divinity clashing with their belief in eugenics and supposed racial superiority.











And how do Dawkins and Harris deal with Schrodinger and the physical geniuses like him whose world view completely undercuts the nonsense they constantly peddle out? IGNORE. IGNORE. IGNORE.

LALALA, I'm a biologist so I can't hear you physicists with your god-talk...LALALA. This is why mathematicians and physicists laugh at biologists. And why you non-scientists probably should too when they're promoting atheism as somehow "modern" or "hip" or "scientific" or "rational".

If we look at "Waking Up" (2014), Sam Harris's book about "spirituality without religion," his completely materialist picture of the world that he presents without even so much as a hint of the philosophy of science, this from a philosophy major at Stanford!--we see Harris' treatment of quantum mechanics is a single page, parroted from retard ASU philosopher-mathematician-physicist Lawrence Krauss, who I'm sure has never bothered to read Bohr or Schrodinger because he regards the theories they produced, rather than the men themselves, as gods. Because every puny accomplishment Krauss has ever done in quantum physics ("dark energy"...are you fucking kidding me?) is just a re-hashing of Schrodinger's Equation, which he discovered way back in the 1930s.

Nice. Presenting century-old physics (you can solve wave equations really well...do you want a goddamn cookie or something?) and centuries-old mathematics (because being able to solve some differential equations makes you king of the fucking world...no wait, it just makes you a loser who every serious philosopher of science laughs at) as something new--"A Universe From Nothing". That isn't intellectually dishonest or anything.

Bohr would not be impressed. Heisenberg would not be impressed. Einstein would not be impressed. Pauli would not be impressed. Tesla would not be impressed. Oppenheimer would not be impressed.

[YOUTUBE]sbsGYRArH_w[/YOUTUBE]

If Krauss said this sort of nonsense in front of any of these men he idolizes so much back in the 1930s or 1940s at Zurich or Copenhagen--at a serious university back when people still had integrity and intellectual standards, he'd have been laughed off the fucking stage for the moron he is. But because these poor kids today don't know bumb fuck about the quantum theory or relativity or the huge historical mess that birthed Copenhagen as a sort of half-witted mutant child that allows the mathematics to work out, but philosophically doesn't say much of anything at all, they take him seriously.

Pitiful.

TL;DR: "I don't like what these people are saying so I'm going to attempt to ridicule them with ad hominem because I can't actually put forward a decent argument."

The idea of arguing is very primitive anyway; were you to explore the subject with parallel thinking I believe you'd probably reach a far different conclusion. Of course, that necessitates leaving your bias behind you, and you don't really seem the person to do that if this post is anything to go by.

If you look at the adjectives used in your post, most of them are emotional and very few are objective. What this suggests is your points, perceptions and interpretation are based mostly if not entirely on emotion and not on any sort of objective fact. You're also employing a rather damning case of appeal to authority. Here's how it would sound if you were to include one more famous scientist, who invented the MRI machine yet is a young earth creationist (need I say more?): "Raymond Vahan Damadian would not agree with what these people are saying, so naturally they must be false."

[youtube]Ecj5ahO5jS8[/youtube]

Basically you sound like Ken Ham.

 

[Jimmy]

TL;DR: "I don't like what these people are saying so I'm going to attempt to ridicule them with ad hominem because I can't actually put forward a decent argument."

Lawrence Krauss is one of the progenitors of the idea of dark energy, which he and most other "mainstream cosmologists" claim constitutes 68% of the cosmos...and about which we know not a single thing.

To me, this is not science, it is absolutely theology. Postulating an invisible energy source, a force-field that permeates all of space-time, yet has no known causal connection to the rest of physics and which makes no empirical prediction, is plain and simple curve fitting. It fails as science, it fails as physics, and it fails as philosophy.

To quote Richard, who I think summed up the modern cosmological situation quite well (though in writing about dark matter, he in fact meant dark fluid):

Actually [Occam's Razor] is a good guideline. That you think it isn't is because you are following what is essentially the ptolemaic mainstream of physics -- wherein whenever something breaks they just add a new hypothetical entity to 'fix the problem'. For example now apparently 90% of the universe is intangible untestable untouchable unseeable immutable 'dark matter'. Instead of accounting for their missing force by I don't know, looking at one of the other four fundamental forces, they suppose the universe is full of black icky stuff which adds more gravity. Good idea.

Nature isn't arbitrarily complex. When you propose a hypothesis that assumes numerous unprovable/untestable entities you are engaging in religion, not science.

This is what Krauss does, and it's my opinion as a physicist that he is a moron and deserves to be made fun of for it.

Because he goes to talk about his "passion for reason and science"...and then preaches to the atheist choir about how modern physics PROVES his own theology, that the Universe came from nothing at all!

[YOUTUBE]tBlJ3CrnkAA[/YOUTUBE]

This is simply making a mockery of the English language and does nothing to advance our conceptual understanding of what's going on. Again, Buddhists have written for many thousands about the Universe having come from nothing at all. Simply throwing a few calculations in front of your sheep does not in any way make this a more logically sound or attractive position; Krauss simply changes the goalposts and claims victory over all world religions without having done much of anything at all.

The idea of arguing is very primitive anyway; were you to explore the subject with parallel thinking I believe you'd probably reach a far different conclusion. Of course, that necessitates leaving your bias behind you, and you don't really seem the person to do that if this post is anything to go by.

I came into this discussion at the age of 13, having read and been fairly convinced by Dawkins and Harris and Hitchens--I took the whole New Atheist trip, in other words. Whatever "bias" I seem to have, I promise, is really nothing more than my own flair as a writer, which I think makes the conversation that much more entertaining. (Although I do admittedly go overboard sometimes and ought really tone it down since I do want to remain civil and reasonable.)

Certainly I have explored the topic with enormous parallel thinking, and I have absolutely reached far different conclusions at different times in my life. But I'm not arguing in favor of any of that--I'm arguing that Schrodinger was in fact correct back in the early 1900s with what he taught about the birth of science and technology and that the New Atheists, through their lack of education in both philosophy and physics, simply miss the point of entirely.

I don't think anything I wrote is any less (or more) logical or any less entertaining than the way the New Atheists choose to debate religion, so I do feel I'm in the best of company:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

I find this absolutely hilarious.

If Dawkins can call god a homophobic, racist, I feel that I must surely be allowed to call Krauss a moronic pseudo-philosopher who couldn't do real cosmology even if God himself came down and tried to walk him through it.

Both claims, I feel, have enormous FACTUAL justification.

If you look at the adjectives used in your post, most of them are emotional and very few are objective. What this suggests is your points, perceptions and interpretation are based mostly if not entirely on emotion and not on any sort of objective fact.

Like I said, the post itself contains enormous emotional appeals, but this says nothing of whether the argument is also factually correct or objective--all this establishes is that I believe my claims are more emotionally satisfying that pure atheism.

I do freely admit the "logicality" (I would venture to call it emotional coldness) of atheism at least on the surface appears to give it a more scientific veneer than the sort of pseudo-deistic pantheism Schrodinger is arguing for.

To quote Schrodinger once more:

The world consists of the elements of consciousness--this world within which we have just discovered the emergence of the brain as a highly specialized phenomena, something which might have emerged but which might quite well have remained non-existent and which is, in any case, by no means sui generis. And now we are asked to believe that this special modification of the higher mammals had to happen in order that the world should dawn on itself in the light of consciousness; whereas, if it had not emerged, this world would have remained nothing but a drama plated to an empty house, not present to anyone and hence not in the real sense present at all!

If this is really the ultimate wisdom to which we can attain in this question, then to me it seems to be the utter bankruptcy of our picture of the world. And we ought at least to acknowledge it, and not act as though it did not matter to us, or jeer, in our rationalistic wisdom, at those who try to find a way our, however desperate.

There is something far grander, far more in accord with a clear recognition of what it is all about, in the ideas of Schopenhauer or Fechner. For Spinoza, the human body is a "modification of the infinite substance (God), in so far as it is expressed in the attribute of extension," and the human mind is that same modification, but expressed in the attribute of thought.

You're also employing a rather damning case of appeal to authority. Here's how it would sound if you were to include one more famous scientist, who invented the MRI machine yet is a young earth creationist (need I say more?): "Raymond Vahan Damadian would not agree with what these people are saying, so naturally they must be false."

[youtube]Ecj5ahO5jS8[/youtube]

Basically you sound like Ken Ham.

I'd hate to sound like Ken Ham, so you might have me there.

At the same time, Schrodinger was a Nobel Prize winning physicist and cosmologist and expert in general relativity, the quantum theory, theoretical biology, and even cognitive science before cognitive science even really existed as an academic discipline within psychology...

He was a good friend to and collaborator with Albert Einstein, whose own words at times echo very similar religious sentiments, and Schrodinger believed that he saw "eye to eye...on certain essential points, with Max Planck and Ernst Cassirer."

So it's not that we're talking about some lone quantum physicists here--we are in fact discussing the very men who created the whole of modern physics in the first place.

And I'm not so much appealing to Schrodinger's authority as a scientist as I am unashamedly stealing his argument for myself. Make of that what you will.

Schrodinger himself saw the hand of God in the quantum mechanics of DNA, which was discovered by Crick and Watson thanks to his 1944 book, What is Life?:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/sci...6329/Do-our-genes-reveal-the-hand-of-God.html
http://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2013/feb/07/wonders-life-physicist-revolution-biology

From What is Life? (1944):
http://whatislife.stanford.edu/LoCo_files/What-is-Life.pdf

[Among] the most striking features [of the cell] are...the fact that the single cog is not of coarse human make, but is the finest masterpiece ever achieved along the lines of the Lord's quantum mechanics....

So let us see whether we cannot draw the correct, non-contradictory conclusion from the following two premises:
(i) My body functions as a pure mechanism according to the Laws of Nature.
(ii) Yet I know, by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing its motions, of which I foresee the effects, that may be fateful and all-important, in which case I feel and take full responsibility for them.

The only possible inference from these two facts is, I think, that I--I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt 'I'--am the person, if any, who controls the 'motion of
the atoms' according to the Laws of Nature.

Within a cultural milieu (Kulturkreis) where certain conceptions (which once had or still have a wider meaning amongst other peoples) have been limited and specialized, it is daring to give to this conclusion the simple wording that it requires.

In Christian terminology to say: 'Hence I am God Almighty' sounds both blasphemous and lunatic. But please disregard these connotations for the moment and consider whether the above inference is not the closest a biologist can get to proving also their God and immortality at one stroke.

In itself, the insight is not new. The earliest records to my knowledge date back some 2,500 years or more. From the early great Upanishads the recognition ATHMAN = BRAHMAN upheld in (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self) was in Indian thought considered, far from being blasphemous, to represent the quintessence of deepest insight into the happenings of the world.

Francis Collins, the head of the Human Genome Project, views DNA similarly (although admittedly, I haven't actually read his book on the subject):
http://www.amazon.com/The-Language-God-Scientist-Presents/dp/1416542744

The history of QM, the end result being Schrodinger's book Mind and Matter (1958), unabashedly pro-immortality from the standpoint of Boltzmann's statistical mechanics, the defining work of cognitive science:
http://www.academia.edu/260503/_Mysticism_in_quantum_mechanics_the_forgotten_controversy_

 

[Xier0]

To me, this is not science, it is absolutely theology.

Understandable, since his theory is not testable.

I'm arguing that Schrodinger was in fact correct back in the early 1900s with what he taught about the birth of science and technology and that the New Atheists, through their lack of education in both philosophy and physics, simply miss the point of entirely.

Correct about what? Bashing dark energy as being unfounded assertion then proclaiming Schrodinger is correct about... karma?

The goal of man is to preserve his Karma and to develop it further. When man dies his Karma lives and creates for itself another carrier.

I do freely admit the "logicality" (I would venture to call it emotional coldness) of atheism at least on the surface appears to give it a more scientific veneer than the sort of pseudo-deistic pantheism Schrodinger is arguing for.

Of course it does. Science is concerned with matters of fact. It knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity, as Schrodinger says, but the scientific method does not try to solve for these, because it will fail.

At the same time, Schrodinger was a Nobel Prize winning physicist and cosmologist and expert in general relativity, the quantum theory, theoretical biology, and even cognitive science before cognitive science even really existed as an academic discipline within psychology...

He was a good friend to and collaborator with Albert Einstein, whose own words at times echo very similar religious sentiments, and Schrodinger believed that he saw "eye to eye...on certain essential points, with Max Planck and Ernst Cassirer."

So it's not that we're talking about some lone quantum physicists here--we are in fact discussing the very men who created the whole of modern physics in the first place.

Yes, they are learned men, but I don't even see an argument for your point, only ad hom against Krauss and praise for the already esteemed pioneers of modern science.

____________________

There's not much pleasure in taking a nihilistic worldview, but knowing what DNA is doesn't lead to conclusions about god. Science can only explain the biology of consciousness, not the meaning of it.

 

[Jimmy]

Correct about what? Bashing dark energy as being unfounded assertion then proclaiming Schrodinger is correct about... karma?

Correct about the metaphysics of mind, whereas Krauss is nothing but a preacher.

Here is how Schrodinger summarizes the physical situation for us:

The structure of what I call my higher spiritual self is indeed essentially the direct consequence of ancestral events, but not exclusively not principally within the limits of my physical ancestors.

No Self stands alone. Behind it stretches an immense chain of physical and—as a special class within the whole—mental events, to which it belongs as a reacting member and which it carries on. The Self is not so much linked with what happened to its ancestors, it is not so much the product, and merely the product, of all that, but rather, in the strictest sense of the word, the SAME THING as that: the strict, direct continuation of it, just as the Self aged fifty is the continuation of the Self aged forty.

It is rather remarkable that whereas western philosophy has almost universally accepted the idea that the death of the individual does not put an end to anything that is the essence of life, it has (with the exception of Plato and Schopenhauer) bestowed hardly a thought on the other idea, much deeper and more intimately joyful, which logically goes almost hand in hand with it: the idea that the same thing applies to individual birth, at which what happens is not that I am created for the first time but that I slowly awaken as though from a deep sleep. Then I can see my hopes and strivings, my fears and cares as the same as those of thousands who have lived before me, and I may hope that future centuries may bring fulfillment to my yearnings of centuries ago. No seed of thought can germinate in me except as the continuation of some forebear; not really a new seed but the predetermined unfolding of a bud on the ancient, sacred tree of life.

Again, this is hardly different from the Spinozist view advocated by Einstein throughout his life: "I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind."

Of course it does. Science is concerned with matters of fact. It knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity, as Schrodinger says, but the scientific method does not try to solve for these, because it will fail.

This is not what cosmologists like Krauss or Hawking claim: They say that we have no need for God anymore because modern cosmology PROVES the universe "can and will come from nothing."

You say "of course it does", but this is a statement in direct opposition to the thesis of New Atheism, that God is essentially a scientific hypothesis that we no longer have a use for.

Compare physicist Sean Carroll:

[YOUTUBE]TFp5PPSTiDc[/YOUTUBE]

Carroll clearly doesn't understand Planck or Schrodinger's neo-pantheistic God, so his statements are indeed wildly uncharacteristic of the actual findings of modern science--but just listening to his talk, you would never know any of this, and would perhaps be persuaded that to be a modern physicist is to be an atheist, which is not the case.

Yes, they are learned men, but I don't even see an argument for your point, only ad hom against Krauss and praise for the already esteemed pioneers of modern science.

My point is that "cosmologists" like Krauss use the methods established by Planck and Schrodinger without understanding the epistemological significance behind them, and this leads to them misunderstanding the significance of their own work. A philosophically illiterate nitwit does not a good physicist make.

There's not much pleasure in taking a nihilistic worldview, but knowing what DNA is doesn't lead to conclusions about god. Science can only explain the biology of consciousness, not the meaning of it.

And yet, we have done virtually nothing to explain the biology of consciousness since Schrodinger's time, despite enormous advances in physics, neuroscience, technology, and economic conditions.

The idea that consciousness will be explained by more reductionist science is precisely the idea that Schrodinger is attacking, in line with the views of Maxwell Planck. Consciousness according to Schrodinger is our world picture itself, so our world picture naturally cannot contain its own maker.

From Planck:

I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.

Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.

And again:

Both religion and science require a belief in God. For believers, God is in the beginning, and for physicists He is at the end of all considerations... To the former He is the foundation, to the latter, the crown of the edifice of every generalized world view.

Again, this is completely incongruous with everything I've ever read Dawkins write about the nature of the scientific method. Yet it was spoken by the man who singlehandedly launched us into the quantum age--a man far more "turned on" than some Oxford biology professor.

It is my claim that men as Dawkins and Krauss and Carroll have completely misunderstood the epistemology behind modern genetics and physics, all of which relies on the quantum theory for validation.

 

[Dracon]

And how do Dawkins and Harris deal with Schrodinger and the physical geniuses like him whose world view completely undercuts the nonsense they constantly peddle out? IGNORE. IGNORE. IGNORE.

LALALA, I'm a biologist so I can't hear you physicists with your god-talk...LALALA. This is why mathematicians and physicists laugh at biologists. And why you non-scientists probably should too when they're promoting atheism as somehow "modern" or "hip" or "scientific" or "rational".

I apologize for not responding to your whole post, but I think that this is the heart of your argument. Are you saying that the work of Schrodinger et al. undercuts atheism? If so, can you explain why?

 

[Jimmy]

I apologize for not responding to your whole post, but I think that this is the heart of your argument. Are you saying that the work of Schrodinger et al. undercuts atheism? If so, can you explain why?

Partially, but Schrodinger referred to himself as both an atheist as well as a Vedantist (Indian philosopher). My point is that Schrodinger's atheism is a poetical kind that acknowledges the reality of beauty, of purpose, and of God:

By the way, I never realized that to be nonbelieving, to be an atheist, was a thing to be proud of. It went without saying as it were.

AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD!?

Yes. This is the sort of forward-thinking and nuance that men like Dawkins and Harris simply do not understand or (as I believe more likely--Harris cites Schrodinger's book My View of the World, showing incontrovertibly that he actually makes a conscious choice and effort to intentionally ignore the entire content) do not care to understand.

He was born in a religious household and his parents were Protestants but from an early age he was an atheist and a philosopher. He was influenced greatly by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. He read Schopenhauer’s works extensively and believed in the mind over matter philosophy through out his life.

Through out his life his inclination towards philosophy was strong. He understood that the purpose of science is to try to reach the metaphorical godhead. He was particularly interested in the eastern spiritual traditions and believed in the Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism that there was a universal consciousness that gave birth to the individual consciousness.

Dawkins certainly never produced any mathematics of worth in his entire life, nor has Sam Harris. So when they venture to talk of the quantum theory or of modern physics at all, they are completely incompetent laypeople whose opinions carry no more weight than, say, those of a homeless man wandering the streets...

From the Nobel Prize winning physicist and founder of quantum chemistry Wolfgang Pauli, quoting astronomer Johannes Kepler:

The geometrical figures are eternal; and in the Mind of God it has been true from all eternity that, for example, the square of the side of a square equals half the square of the diagonal. Therefore, the quantities are the archetypes of the world. The Mind of God, whose copy is here [on earth] the human mind that from its archetypes retains the imprint of the geometrical data from the very beginnings of mankind.

And again,

Mathematical reasoning is "inborn in the human soul" (eius inerant animae).

Well, now Dawkins is a biologist and so generally has no use of understanding of mathematics at all...

It's a damn shame, but reading Kepler really makes you question Dawkins's and Harris's competency as scientists specifically and as thinkers generally.

Antony Flew, perhaps the world's most notorious atheist philosopher to recant his position--after many, many years--cites Schrodinger in his book There is a God, in large part a challenge to Dawkins' The God Delusion. Naturally, Dawkins addresses the God of the Enlightened Physicist only in the first chapter of his God Delusion, and only extraordinarily superficially. Schrodinger is unfortunately never mentioned... only Stephen Hawking who quite honestly doesn't have a care in the world about any of this.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/00...rd_t=36701&pf_rd_p=2079475242&pf_rd_i=desktop

But Dawkins equivocates Hawking's belief with Einstein's belief with the belief of physicists generally... in other words, the entire premise of his book and thesis on God is a transparently obvious logical fallacy once you know what to look for.
http://www.amazon.com/God-New-Physi...53827&sr=1-1&keywords=God+and+the+New+Physics

The question can itself perhaps better be termed in the language of Free Will and of Materialism.

From Sir James Jeans's Physics and Philosophy:

Attempts have been made to find an alternative to determinism in what is described as ‘teleological causation’, according to which the future determines the present, or at least influences it, like the legendary carrot held in front of the donkey’s nose...to some extent, the whole matter is one of juggling with words, but in whatever sense words are used, ideas such as teleological causation can throw no new light on the ultimate problem.

Thus in his book, Where is science going? Planck, the founder of the quantum theory writes: "No biographer will attempt to solve the question of the motives that govern the acts of his her by attributing these to mere chance."

Thus free-will is only our name for unconscious determinism. But Kant would presumably have argued that all this does not prove that we are devoid of freedom, so much as that a deterministic way of looking at things is ingrained in our minds; it is our way of interpreting the temporal sequence of events...

At least the new physics has shown that the problems of causality and free-will are in need of a new formulation. If those who believe in freedom of the will could explain what they mean by freedom, and could show precisely where it differs from what we have called unconscious determinism, it is at least conceivable that what they want would be found in modern physics.

The new physics shows us a universe which looks as though it might conceivably form a suitable dwelling-place for free men, and not a mere shelter for brutes--a home in which it may at least be possible for us to mould events to our desires and live lives of endeavor and achievement.

Just because of this, we cannot state any positive conclusions of any kind, as for instance that materialism is dead, or that a deterministic interpretation of the world is obsolete, but we can say that determinism and freedom, matter and materialism need to be redefined in the light of our new scientific knowledge. When this has been done, the materialist must decide for himself whether the only kind of materialism which science now permits can be suitably labelled materialism, and whether the ghostly remains of matter should be labelled as matter or as something else; it is mainly a question of terminology.

Schrodinger himself hated materialism:

The idea which we are discussing--and which, as we have said, it would not occur to us to deny--includes my own body, despite that extra word "external" which is customarily introduced when describing it. From this we see--just by the way--the inadvisability of locating a man's thoughts and ideas in his head.

The doctrine of identity requires some very penetrating thinking to make these distinctions [between individuals] plausible, thinking which has never yet, perhaps, been properly done. But this seems to me to be a minor defect beside the incomparably higher ethical content and the deep religious consolation afforded us in our ephemeral life by the doctrine of identity. Materialism offers neither; though there are many people who convince themselves that the idea which astronomy gives us of myriads of suns with, perhaps, inhabitable planets, and of a multitude of galaxies, each with myriads of suns, and ultimately of a probably finite universe, affords us a sort of ethical and religiously consoling vision, mediated to our senses by the indescribable panorama of the starry heavens on a clear night.

If the men who gave us our ENTIRE SCIENTIFIC PICTURE of the world themselves detested materialism...then I simply have no choice but to laugh when a biologist like Dawkins or Harris goes on to pronounce God dead because of how far our materialist science has progressed. It's enormously dishonest and it quite frankly ignores the whole of modern science--the New Atheists seem to inhabit a post-Darwinian world, yet are still caught in the paradigm of the classical physics: They are arguing as Victorian scientists, in other words. And we all know how beyond words stupid those people were.

Lord Kelvin on the "two dark clouds" of physics...he was still thinking in terms of ether!
http://ether-wind.narod.ru/Kelvin_1901/006.html

The beauty and clearness of the dynamical theory, which asserts heat and light to be modes of motion, is at present obscured by two clouds.

Here is how Schrodinger saw the PHYSICAL situation in 1958:

To my view the ‘statistical theory of time’ has an even stronger bearing on the philosophy of time than the theory of relativity. The latter, however revolutionary, leaves untouched the undirectional flow of time, which it presupposes, while the statistical theory constructs it from the order of events. This means a liberation from the tyranny of old Chronos. What we in our minds construct ourselves cannot, so I feel, have dictatorial power over our mind, neither the power of bringing it to the fore nor the power of annihilating it. But some of you, I am sure, will call this mysticism. So with all due acknowledgement to the fact that physical theory is at all times relative, in that it depends on certain basic assumptions, we may, or so I believe, assert that physical theory in its present stage strongly suggests the indestructibility of Mind by Time.

Schrodinger tells us that Boltzmann's view of Time as a statistical occurrence makes it an epiphenomena of Mind and of Consciousness. And if Mind creates Time, it sure as hell can't be limited by its own conceptual creation.

That is a fairly logical argument for immortality. How do Dawkins or Harris respond? I don't believe they ever have.

Read Jeans again. The New Physics affords us a Cosmos infinitely greater than "a mere shelter for brutes." It "form a suitable dwelling-place for free men."

But Sam Harris says he has no Free Will and is therefore not a free man.
http://www.amazon.com/Free-Will-Sam...UTF8&qid=1432454021&sr=1-1&keywords=free+will

But Harris is a "deep thinker"! He went to Stanford to study philosophy as an undergrad, has a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA, and spent years in India meditating under gurus!

[YOUTUBE]t8U5J_LV3UI[/YOUTUBE]

But Schrodinger himself does not give a flying fuck about one's ability to read ancient Indian texts or one's ability to meditate as a means to acquire some "deeper understanding" as Harris touts his his personal experiences as evidence of:

As presented in the Vedas, this idea [of inner divinity] is thickly overgrown with references to bizarre Brahmanic sacrificial rites and foolish superstitions, as anyone can see who has recourse to what are the best sources available in German.

In other words, when the young Sam Harris had to convince his mother to pay for his ~10 year trip to India, Schrodinger's soul--still alive--thought he was acting like an absolute child and retard. But Harris thought it was a good idea that would bring him insight and inner peace--surely, meditation can't be a bad thing, can it?

The mystical-metaphysical doctrine of the Upanishads [is] itself: the plurality of sensitive beings is mere appearance (maya); in reality they are all only aspects of one being. The eschatology, which is really disturbing, is in the second half [of a previously cited Vedic poem]: the indispensable condition for liberation, that is, the ending of the eternal cycle of birth and death, is that one should geniunely appropriate this doctrine [of unity] as one's own, understand it, and assent to it not only with one's lips but with one's whole soul.

This is disturbing indeed. It is "salvation by knowledge." It is even worse than, or quite as bad as, Luther's "salvation by faith" (faith not being subject to the will) or Augustine's "salvation by divine grace," in which, equally, the person can do nothing about it one way or the other. Salvation by knowledge in the Vedanta is closely related to both of them. From the standpoint of one who himself accepts the doctrine of the Upanishads, salvation by knowledge is almost the worst of them, in as much as knowledge requires not only intelligence but also leisure for meditation. I say that this is almost worse than the sheer lottery of Augustinian election or Lutheran salvation by faith, which is much the same thing, since faith springs not from one's own merits but from divine grace.

So Schrodinger openly calls Harris's nihilistic Buddhist philosophy a "bankruptcy of a world view" and "really disturbing," "worse than...Augustinian election or Lutheran salvation by faith."

No wonder Harris was scared shitless to cite the guy! Again, Jeans tells us that the classical world that Harris and Dawkins still inhabit is nothing more than "a mere shelter for brutes." Brutes indeed!

Meditation may well be an interesting technique to be appropriated for improved mental health...I meditate every now and then, and I do enjoy it. But it is just as well, according to Schrodinger, a "foolish superstition" that nobody need indulge in.

In other words, Schrodinger makes the positive claim that Sam Harris flat out wasted 10 years of his life, doing nothing at all, learning not a single thing. It's too bad Harris didn't take the guy seriously back in his 20s, or he could have just gone right into his Ph.D. program and would probably be a whole lot wealthier, having written several additional books. (And probably more thoughtful ones too.)

But the New Atheists respect Harris as some sort of genius or "deep thinker," responsible for sharing his meditative Eastern insights with all the rest of us lowly Westerners.

But Schrodinger thinks all these human beings--especially the New Atheists who have fallen prey to this faux-Eastern spirituality--are in fact little more than borderline retarded.

 

[Dracon]

Partially, but Schrodinger referred to himself as both an atheist as well as a Vedantist (Indian philosopher). My point is that Schrodinger's atheism is a poetical kind that acknowledges the reality of beauty, of purpose, and of God:



AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD!?

Yes. This is the sort of forward-thinking and nuance that men like Dawkins and Harris simply do not understand or (as I believe more likely--Harris cites Schrodinger's book My View of the World, showing incontrovertibly that he actually makes a conscious choice and effort to intentionally ignore the entire content) do not care to understand.





Dawkins certainly never produced any mathematics of worth in his entire life, nor has Sam Harris. So when they venture to talk of the quantum theory or of modern physics at all, they are completely incompetent laypeople whose opinions carry no more weight than, say, those of a homeless man wandering the streets...

From the Nobel Prize winning physicist and founder of quantum chemistry Wolfgang Pauli, quoting astronomer Johannes Kepler:



And again,



Well, now Dawkins is a biologist and so generally has no use of understanding of mathematics at all...

It's a damn shame, but reading Kepler really makes you question Dawkins's and Harris's competency as scientists specifically and as thinkers generally.

Antony Flew, perhaps the world's most notorious atheist philosopher to recant his position--after many, many years--cites Schrodinger in his book There is a God, in large part a challenge to Dawkins' The God Delusion. Naturally, Dawkins addresses the God of the Enlightened Physicist only in the first chapter of his God Delusion, and only extraordinarily superficially. Schrodinger is unfortunately never mentioned... only Stephen Hawking who quite honestly doesn't have a care in the world about any of this.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/00...rd_t=36701&pf_rd_p=2079475242&pf_rd_i=desktop

But Dawkins equivocates Hawking's belief with Einstein's belief with the belief of physicists generally... in other words, the entire premise of his book and thesis on God is a transparently obvious logical fallacy once you know what to look for.
http://www.amazon.com/God-New-Physi...53827&sr=1-1&keywords=God+and+the+New+Physics

The question can itself perhaps better be termed in the language of Free Will and of Materialism.

From Sir James Jeans's Physics and Philosophy:



Schrodinger himself hated materialism:





If the men who gave us our ENTIRE SCIENTIFIC PICTURE of the world themselves detested materialism...then I simply have no choice but to laugh when a biologist like Dawkins or Harris goes on to pronounce God dead because of how far our materialist science has progressed. It's enormously dishonest and it quite frankly ignores the whole of modern science--the New Atheists seem to inhabit a post-Darwinian world, yet are still caught in the paradigm of the classical physics: They are arguing as Victorian scientists, in other words. And we all know how beyond words stupid those people were.

The work of Schrodinger and company solely dealt with the behavior of small objects. To the best of my knowledge (and I may be wrong!), it never discusses God, spirituality, etc. Intelligent men these founders of modern physics were, surely, but coming up with a theory that describes a particular set of circumstances does not grant that all of their beliefs are true. Correct me if I'm wrong, but are you using the appeal to authority logical fallacy.

Lord Kelvin on the "two dark clouds" of physics...he was still thinking in terms of ether!
http://ether-wind.narod.ru/Kelvin_1901/006.html


Here is how Schrodinger saw the PHYSICAL situation in 1958:



Schrodinger tells us that Boltzmann's view of Time as a statistical occurrence makes it an epiphenomena of Mind and of Consciousness. And if Mind creates Time, it sure as hell can't be limited by its own conceptual creation.

That is a fairly logical argument for immortality. How do Dawkins or Harris respond? I don't believe they ever have.

I'm not sure that I follow the argument. Is he saying that because time is a statistical occurrence, we still exist in the past?

But Schrodinger thinks all these human beings--especially the New Atheists who have fallen prey to this faux-Eastern spirituality--are in fact little more than borderline retarded.

HA! Agreed.

 

[Jimmy]

The work of Schrodinger and company solely dealt with the behavior of small objects. To the best of my knowledge (and I may be wrong!), it never discusses God, spirituality, etc. Intelligent men these founders of modern physics were, surely, but coming up with a theory that describes a particular set of circumstances does not grant that all of their beliefs are true. Correct me if I'm wrong, but are you using the appeal to authority logical fallacy.

Not an argument from authority...I'm just stealing Schrödinger's argument for myself.

Back in the early 1900s, scientists--and particularly physicists--were not encouraged to be so one-sided in their personalities and professional interests as today. Schrödinger spent much of his youth reading Indian poetry, German Idealist philosophers (e.g., Schopenhauer), religious esotericism (e.g., Spinoza), works of biology, and just all sorts of other interesting and historically relevant pieces of data that modern physicists simply miss out on.

Regardless, Schrödinger was an expert on thermodynamics (information), quantum mechanics (small things), general relativity (big things), quantum biology--a field he founded (living things), cosmology and unified field theory (everything), and he was an atheist philosopher from a very young age.

I'm not sure that I follow the argument. Is he saying that because time is a statistical occurrence, we still exist in the past?

He is saying that entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics are what define the Arrow of Time (Eddington's phrase) according to Boltzmann, and that because entropy is a statistical occurrence within brain and biology and Mind at Large, "What we in our minds construct ourselves cannot, so I feel, have dictatorial power over our mind, neither the power of bringing it to the fore nor the power of annihilating it."

This is somewhat reminiscent of that line Oppenheimer quoted from the Bhagavad Gita at the Trinity atomic test: "Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds." If man can master time itself, as it certainly seems we ought be able to do, then we create Death within our Mind just as surely as we create our own Life. "But some of you, I am sure, will call this mysticism."

 

[Jimmy]

Relevant video on the nature and philosophy of consciousness, "On Schrödinger and Nietzsche on life"

http://digital.library.fordham.edu/cdm/ref/collection/BabBabich/id/12