[Aleph Null]

{I haven't read through all of this challenging article yet, but it appears it will be WELL worth the effort. --a0}

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/science/04edgehed.html

January 4, 2005
God (or Not), Physics and, of Course, Love: Scientists Take a Leap

"What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?"
This was the question posed to scientists, futurists and other creative thinkers by John Brockman, a literary agent and publisher of Edge, a Web site devoted to science. The site asks a new question at the end of each year. Here are excerpts from the responses, to be posted Tuesday at www.edge.org.

Roger Schank
Psychologist and computer scientist; author, "Designing World-Class E-Learning"

Irrational choices.

I do not believe that people are capable of rational thought when it comes to making decisions in their own lives. People believe they are behaving rationally and have thought things out, of course, but when major decisions are made - who to marry, where to live, what career to pursue, what college to attend, people's minds simply cannot cope with the complexity. When they try to rationally analyze potential options, their unconscious, emotional thoughts take over and make the choice for them.

Richard Dawkins
Evolutionary biologist, Oxford University; author, "The Ancestor's Tale"

I believe, but I cannot prove, that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all "design" anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.

Judith Rich Harris
Writer and developmental psychologist; author, "The Nurture Assumption"

I believe, though I cannot prove it, that three - not two - selection processes were involved in human evolution.

The first two are familiar: natural selection, which selects for fitness, and sexual selection, which selects for sexiness.

The third process selects for beauty, but not sexual beauty - not adult beauty. The ones doing the selecting weren't potential mates: they were parents. Parental selection, I call it.

Kenneth Ford
Physicist; retired director, American Institute of Physics; author, "The Quantum World"

I believe that microbial life exists elsewhere in our galaxy.

I am not even saying "elsewhere in the universe." If the proposition I believe to be true is to be proved true within a generation or two, I had better limit it to our own galaxy. I will bet on its truth there.

I believe in the existence of life elsewhere because chemistry seems to be so life-striving and because life, once created, propagates itself in every possible direction. Earth's history suggests that chemicals get busy and create life given any old mix of substances that includes a bit of water, and given practically any old source of energy; further, that life, once created, spreads into every nook and cranny over a wide range of temperature, acidity, pressure, light level and so on.

Believing in the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy is another matter.

Joseph LeDoux
Neuroscientist, New York University; author, "The Synaptic Self"

For me, this is an easy question. I believe that animals have feelings and other states of consciousness, but neither I nor anyone else has been able to prove it. We can't even prove that other people are conscious, much less other animals. In the case of other people, though, we at least can have a little confidence since all people have brains with the same basic configurations. But as soon as we turn to other species and start asking questions about feelings and consciousness in general we are in risky territory because the hardware is different.

Because I have reason to think that their feelings might be different than ours, I prefer to study emotional behavior in rats rather than emotional feelings.

There's lots to learn about emotion through rats that can help people with emotional disorders. And there's lots we can learn about feelings from studying humans, especially now that we have powerful function imaging techniques. I'm not a radical behaviorist. I'm just a practical emotionalist.

Lynn Margulis
Biologist, University of Massachusetts; author, "Symbiosis in Cell Evolution"

I feel that I know something that will turn out to be correct and eventually proved to be true beyond doubt.

What?

That our ability to perceive signals in the environment evolved directly from our bacterial ancestors. That is, we, like all other mammals including our apish brothers detect odors, distinguish tastes, hear bird song and drumbeats and we too feel the vibrations of the drums. With our eyes closed we detect the light of the rising sun. These abilities to sense our surroundings are a heritage that preceded the evolution of all primates, all vertebrate animals, indeed all animals.

David Myers
Psychologist, Hope College; author, "Intuition"

As a Christian monotheist, I start with two unproven axioms:

1. There is a God.

2. It's not me (and it's also not you).

Together, these axioms imply my surest conviction: that some of my beliefs (and yours) contain error. We are, from dust to dust, finite and fallible. We have dignity but not deity.

And that is why I further believe that we should

a) hold all our unproven beliefs with a certain tentativeness (except for this one!),

b) assess others' ideas with open-minded skepticism, and

c) freely pursue truth aided by observation and experiment.

This mix of faith-based humility and skepticism helped fuel the beginnings of modern science, and it has informed my own research and science writing. The whole truth cannot be found merely by searching our own minds, for there is not enough there. So we also put our ideas to the test. If they survive, so much the better for them; if not, so much the worse.

Robert Sapolsky
Neuroscientist, Stanford University, author, "A Primate's Memoir"

Mine would be a fairly simple, straightforward case of an unjustifiable belief, namely that there is no god(s) or such a thing as a soul (whatever the religiously inclined of the right persuasion mean by that word). ...

I'm taken with religious folks who argue that you not only can, but should believe without requiring proof. Mine is to not believe without requiring proof. Mind you, it would be perfectly fine with me if there were a proof that there is no god. Some might view this as a potential public health problem, given the number of people who would then run damagingly amok. But it's obvious that there's no shortage of folks running amok thanks to their belief. So that wouldn't be a problem and, all things considered, such a proof would be a relief - many physicists, especially astrophysicists, seem weirdly willing to go on about their communing with god about the Big Bang, but in my world of biologists, the god concept gets mighty infuriating when you spend your time thinking about, say, untreatably aggressive childhood leukemia.

Donald Hoffman
Cognitive scientist, University of California, Irvine; author, "Visual Intelligence"

I believe that consciousness and its contents are all that exists. Space-time, matter and fields never were the fundamental denizens of the universe but have always been, from their beginning, among the humbler contents of consciousness, dependent on it for their very being.

The world of our daily experience - the world of tables, chairs, stars and people, with their attendant shapes, smells, feels and sounds - is a species-specific user interface to a realm far more complex, a realm whose essential character is conscious. It is unlikely that the contents of our interface in any way resemble that realm.

Indeed the usefulness of an interface requires, in general, that they do not. For the point of an interface, such as the Windows interface on a computer, is simplification and ease of use. We click icons because this is quicker and less prone to error than editing megabytes of software or toggling voltages in circuits.

Evolutionary pressures dictate that our species-specific interface, this world of our daily experience, should itself be a radical simplification, selected not for the exhaustive depiction of truth but for the mutable pragmatics of survival.

If this is right, if consciousness is fundamental, then we should not be surprised that, despite centuries of effort by the most brilliant of minds, there is as yet no physicalist theory of consciousness, no theory that explains how mindless matter or energy or fields could be, or cause, conscious experience.

Nicholas Humphrey
Psychologist, London School of Economics; author,"The Mind Made Flesh"

I believe that human consciousness is a conjuring trick, designed to fool us into thinking we are in the presence of an inexplicable mystery. Who is the conjuror and why is s/he doing it? The conjuror is natural selection, and the purpose has been to bolster human self-confidence and self-importance - so as to increase the value we each place on our own and others' lives.

Philip Zimbardo
Psychologist, emeritus professor, Stanford; author, "Shyness"

I believe that the prison guards at the Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq, who worked the night shift in Tier 1A, where prisoners were physically and psychologically abused, had surrendered their free will and personal responsibility during these episodes of mayhem.

But I could not prove it in a court of law. These eight Army reservists were trapped in a unique situation in which the behavioral context came to dominate individual dispositions, values and morality to such an extent that they were transformed into mindless actors alienated from their normal sense of personal accountability for their actions - at that time and place.

The "group mind" that developed among these soldiers was created by a set of known social psychological conditions, some of which are nicely featured in Golding's "Lord of the Flies." The same processes that I witnessed in my Stanford Prison Experiment were clearly operating in that remote place: deindividuation, dehumanization, boredom, groupthink, role-playing, rule control and more.

Philip W. Anderson
Physicist and Nobel laureate, Princeton

Is string theory a futile exercise as physics, as I believe it to be? It is an interesting mathematical specialty and has produced and will produce mathematics useful in other contexts, but it seems no more vital as mathematics than other areas of very abstract or specialized math, and doesn't on that basis justify the incredible amount of effort expended on it.

My belief is based on the fact that string theory is the first science in hundreds of years to be pursued in pre-Baconian fashion, without any adequate experimental guidance. It proposes that Nature is the way we would like it to be rather than the way we see it to be; and it is improbable that Nature thinks the same way we do.

The sad thing is that, as several young would-be theorists have explained to me, it is so highly developed that it is a full-time job just to keep up with it. That means that other avenues are not being explored by the bright, imaginative young people, and that alternative career paths are blocked.

Alison Gopnik
Psychologist, University of California, Berkeley; co-author, "The Scientist in the Crib"

I believe, but cannot prove, that babies and young children are actually more conscious, more vividly aware of their external world and internal life, than adults are. I believe this because there is strong evidence for a functional trade-off with development. Young children are much better than adults at learning new things and flexibly changing what they think about the world. On the other hand, they are much worse at using their knowledge to act in a swift, efficient and automatic way. They can learn three languages at once but they can't tie their shoelaces.

David Buss
Psychologist, University of Texas; author, "The Evolution of Desire"

True love.

I've spent two decades of my professional life studying human mating. In that time, I've documented phenomena ranging from what men and women desire in a mate to the most diabolical forms of sexual treachery. I've discovered the astonishingly creative ways in which men and women deceive and manipulate each other. I've studied mate poachers, obsessed stalkers, sexual predators and spouse murderers. But throughout this exploration of the dark dimensions of human mating, I've remained unwavering in my belief in true love.

While love is common, true love is rare, and I believe that few people are fortunate enough to experience it. The roads of regular love are well traveled and their markers are well understood by many - the mesmerizing attraction, the ideational obsession, the sexual afterglow, profound self-sacrifice and the desire to combine DNA. But true love takes its own course through uncharted territory. It knows no fences, has no barriers or boundaries. It's difficult to define, eludes modern measurement and seems scientifically woolly. But I know true love exists. I just can't prove it.

[nanna]

Joseph LeDoux
Neuroscientist, New York University; author, "The Synaptic Self"

For me, this is an easy question. I believe that animals have feelings and other states of consciousness, but neither I nor anyone else has been able to prove it. We can't even prove that other people are conscious, much less other animals. In the case of other people, though, we at least can have a little confidence since all people have brains with the same basic configurations. But as soon as we turn to other species and start asking questions about feelings and consciousness in general we are in risky territory because the hardware is different.

(snip)




This reminds me of this article - seems as good a place to post it as any :)

http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=13675565&BRD=248&PAG=461&dept_id=462341&rfi=8

(under fair use ...)


They practice the arf of communication
By: DIANA LADDEN 01/04/2005

NEW LEBANON-Town resident Mia Feroleto is the proud companion of six dogs- all healthy, happy and responsive, and each rescued from severe abuse, abandonment or neglect.

According to Ms. Feroleto-who, one suspects contributed great quantities of love and patience to the rehabilitation of the dogs-the now-healthy condition of the canines reflects the work not only of veterinarians but of professionals who work with animals in ways less familiar to many animal lovers, among them an animal communicator and an animal healer.
Ms. Ferolito says that once an abused animal has been rescued, given medical attention, food and shelter, the greatest challenge is to convince the animal that life has changed and that food, shelter and love will not disappear. "Rescue animals need a healing place before they can find a home, and psychological wounds must be treated as well as the physical."

David Louis, who describes himself as an animal communicator, and Tomma Von Haeften, an animal healer, recently joined Ms. Feroleto, Andie, Rubie, Sam, Daisy, Max, Dopey and The Independent for a discussion about talking to animals.
Mr. Louis and Ms. Von Haeften help rescued animals that have been abused adjust to their new lives, and they negotiate truces between animals and humans who live and work together.

According to Mr. Louis, a student of Penelope Smith, who was the principle founder of the animal communication movement over 25 years ago, to communicate with any creature, one need only to learn to listen. "It isn't a matter of 'doing' anything. It is learning to allow the natural flow of information to make an impression," he says.
"This has become difficult because we have created so many distractions," says Mr. Louis. "In fact, we have become so adept at creating distractions that we've mostly forgotten how to listen, how to trust, identify and interpret what we receive."

In his opinion, animals now exist for people in a "largely forgotten realm at a great distance from our immediate experience." He says that despite all of the affection and attention humans lavish on their pets, "We rarely truly respect them, or endeavor to understand them. We expect our companion animals to provide us with comfort, companionship and attention, primarily on our terms."

But both Mr. Louis and Ms. Von Haeften believe they bring special talents to the learned skills of listening and paying attention to animals. Both practitioners say that thoughts, feelings, impressions, opinions all come through when they are focused on a specific animal. They say some information comes to them as images, words, sentences, even phrases-conversation, from the animal's point of view.
"I am most often consulted when there is a difficulty-a behavior or health problem that hasn't been solved by conventional methods such as training and veterinary assistance," says Mr. Louis. "I don't have a secret formula, I listen to the animal and find out what is occurring from his or her perspective. This awareness is almost always accompanied by potential solutions. People also call me when the decision has to be made about using extreme measures to keep a pet alive.

"People also contact me when their animals have trouble getting along with each other, or respond negatively to a particular member of the household. I often find that there is sadness underneath a frightened animal. My work involves clearing away this sadness, so they can be relaxed or happy," he says.


(snip)


nanna

[HeadachesAbound]

So would this be a good place to ask if we might actually be in the Matrix? Is there really an agent Smith? And where is Zion?

I believe that there is a God. I can't prove it, but I have supporting evidence.

I survived being hit by a car when I was 3 with no lasting effects. Car was going approx. 30 mph. I was thrown through the air approx. 50 ft. and landed on the road. The road was paved and well maintained. I laid in the road for more than 20 minutes before medical services could be rendered.

The extensive damange done to my body by said accident should have rendered me dead. I survived. Statistically, I shouldn't have.

I believe that said God has given me free will and choice. It is my choice to do, say, think whatever I want. This choice allows me to also believe that there is a scientific explanation for everything. I also believe that it is impossible for us to comprehend said explanations due to our limited usage of our own brain. I believe that full usage of our own brain would lead to a complete understanding of everything and for most people be too much.

I believe that we are irrational, emotional lifeforms who rely on instict when faced with other irrational, emotional lifeforms. Ths instict allows us to survive and propogate.

[lars]

"I believe for every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows"

--Elvis Pressley

[SmartAZ]

Roger Schank
Psychologist and computer scientist; author, "Designing World-Class E-Learning"

Irrational choices.

I do not believe that people are capable of rational thought when it comes to making decisions in their own lives. People believe they are behaving rationally and have thought things out, of course, but when major decisions are made - who to marry, where to live, what career to pursue, what college to attend, people's minds simply cannot cope with the complexity. When they try to rationally analyze potential options, their unconscious, emotional thoughts take over and make the choice for them.
I would categorize most of that as deficient upbringing. It is the responsibility of parents to prepare their children for major decisions by teaching them what is important, such as choosing a good spouse. In some cultures parents are even expected to do the choosing for their (grown) child (with the child's input, to be sure).

As for careers, some people can't explain what career they ended up in, so how would anybody choose one? You get a job, you advance, and if you're any good at it you are soon doing a job that doesn't have a name. (A lot of people call themselves astronomers because they can't easily explain what they actually do. And most jobs in business are only vaguely described by their titles.)

[HeadachesAbound]

(A lot of people call themselves astronomers because they can't easily explain what they actually do. And most jobs in business are only vaguely described by their titles.)

I'm the computer guy and then some. My official title is Operations Assistant if I remember correctly. I was hired on as an operations assistant and my talents were soon taken advantage of. Being as there is only 2 of us in the IT group it makes it a requirement. I keep the web server, vpn, mail server, database server(s), dialer, and central business systems operational. I am underpaid and overworked, but I am respected by my boss which is a very unique situation and is very much appreciated.

My actual title should be more like...Web Services Manager / Assistant Operations Manager...but that probably describes my actual job a little too well.

[nanna]

http://www.angelfire.com/oh2/peterr/hologram/objectivereality.html


(snip)

In addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected.The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky. Everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the universe, all apportionments are of necessity artificial and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web.

In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order. At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past.


nanna

[SmartAZ]

Nanna, this site (http://members.tripod.com/%7Emwolff/) relates to the concept, although I haven't sorted out all the material yet. See what you think.

[nanna]

SmartAZ, I am no physicist, what I understand of quantum mechanics is in terms of my own observations/experiences. (Else, I'd think myself crazy for being in multiple 'locations' at the same timemit, heh.)

I do like that waveform illustration, though - when a wave is met by an identical, offset in frequency wave, of the same magnitude, they cancel each other out (see "noise cancellation technology"). They both exist, and do not, at the same time. The sound exists, in my example, but produces no 'noise'.

That soundless point/wavecrest/infinite noise ... that is where one can approach the experience of Oneness, IMO.


nanna

[SmartAZ]

I studied physics until I caught the teacher with five different Ks in one equation. He had k, and K, and K, and k, and K, and I thought that was just too much to handle at one time!

[nanna]

I studied physics until I caught the teacher with five different Ks in one equation. He had k, and K, and K, and k, and K, and I thought that was just too much to handle at one time!


:eek:


Hehe, yep. It was only after I had an application of interest that any of it made sense to me.

They used to think I was pretty strange checking out 6 books on linear algebras at a time, when I was in grad school. I just read them for the concepts :D




nanna

[Robert]

A0- I especially liked the last paragraph.