Everything's learned, nothing's real.

[rjb]

I seriously doubt you understand Quantum Mechanics without having years of mathematical training and studies in physics. You may have read some popular accounts of wave-particle-duality, the uncertainty principle and so on, but much more than that and you'll have to have years of study. Quantum mechanics is deep, strange and extremely advanced mathematically. The very fact that you say the point remains the same when you wrongly said particles are waves when they are observed, and particles when they are not, attests to that you don't really understand it.

I didn't say I understood all of it, only that I understood a few principles; understanding does not mean agreement, let's be clear about that; I'm not a mathematician or anything of the sorts, but you're free to believe what you want. In my opinion, all I did was honestly inverse some terms. OK, so particles behave like particles when observed, and like waves when not observed. Does that change anything in my understanding? No, because I wasn't attending to the direction of the observation, but the particle. And 2 different states are 2 different states, no matter what the order is. Saying that there's just ONE way to understand something, and that is through math is simply arrogant. The world doesn't need math to work! Math needs the world, as twisted and unexplainable and wrong as it may be.

Furthermore, your personal feelings are really worth jack shit unless you can cough up sound arguments and theoretical justifications for your convictions. Just because it feels right doesn't mean it is. The psychotic person might feel that his water tap is really screaming at him, when in fact it doesn't. It's just water coming out of it. You'll have to better than that if you wish to be intellectually honest with yourself.

So if we can't explain something in the form of a "theoretical justification", it's not a valid experience? Remember the basic principle of science: trial & error. That's how I know what I feel is right. That doesn't need a theoretical justification, does it? No, because such is the nature of life itself: it doesn't need no theory to agree with it, it just is.

There is no evidence for a soul, nothing. De nada. Complete lack. All the things that you talk about, the willingness to accept ideas and further on, can by far be explained by purely material processes in the brain. Considerable evidence exists to support the notion that what we identify as consciousness and mind results from natural mechanisms in the brain. So with respect to our current understanding of the mind, and despite the fact that the ultimate relationship between consciousness and matter has not yet been entirely sealed, we can without much doubt discard any naive conception of a soul on account of the obvious dependency the mind has on the brain. That there exists some immortal soul capable of reasoning, making choices, feeling, love, memory and many of the things we identify with ourselves as conscious beings seems completely untenable.

Then I really need to get it out of my head that I'm someone, and coming to terms to the fact that I'm Robocop. Call me unenlightened, but I choose not to do that. I've chosen once and it has been that choice. Now it's that time when I have chosen again.

Uhm, what are you talking about? There is not at all a 50/50 percent chance of everything happening in quantum mechanics, and again this attests to that you don't understand it. And certainly it is not a 50/50 chance of anything at all happening in general, this is ignorant. Let's take a most trivial example of this; throw a dice, now what is the probability that you will get the number six? It's 1/6, not 1/2. What is the probability of getting either 1,2,3,4 or 5? Well, it's 5/6. Probabilities do not come in 50/50s at all times, in fact it seldom does.

Man, you need to let your creativity go crazy for a little while. Yeah, there's a 1/6 chance there will be a 5, and 1/1.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000+e chance there will be any dice at all in this universe; maybe another 1/500.000 chance that the dice will not be a duck. That's the thinker's game. But there's also the 50% chance that it's going to BE a 5, and another 50% of a chance that it will NOT be a 5. Is this really that hard to grasp? Does this make sense to me only? I didn't say you required the same filters you're already wearing, in fact I didn't say anything about any filter.

It's not even tied to a certain thing, but you choose to see things as such. Every situation has the 50/50 potential. Remember duality? That's the 50/50 "rule", if you'd like. So is meeting somebody, eating, going to work, getting what you want. Even death.

 

[Citta]

I didn't say I understood all of it, only that I understood a few principles

Allright, then I misunderstood, I apologize. Still, it seems your understanding of what you're talking about does not go very deep.

OK, so particles behave like particles when observed, and like waves when not observed.

Particles are always particles, never waves. The wavelike properties are representative only of a large ensemble of particles. I explained this a bit in the other reply.

Does that change anything in my understanding? No, because I wasn't attending to the direction of the observation, but the particle. And 2 different states are 2 different states, no matter what the order is

Yes, it does change your understanding. As said, all point-like particles such as the electron, the photon and what have you are localizable particles and their wavelike effects refers to the statistical behavior of a large number of them. When people say "an electron is either a wave or a particle" they are using sloppy, inaccurate language. An electron is always a particle while a large number of them are treated as a wave. Fundamentally, the two pictures describe the same thing; particles.

So if we can't explain something in the form of a "theoretical justification", it's not a valid experience? Remember the basic principle of science: trial & error. That's how I know what I feel is right. That doesn't need a theoretical justification, does it? No, because such is the nature of life itself: it doesn't need no theory to agree with it, it just is.

You can't really know that what you feel about the interpretations of quantum mechanics as pointing to us affecting reality with our thoughts or whatever is right. There is little to no sound justification for this except for your own personal convictions and feelings. In another thread you said that biases needs to go away, yet you are obviously biased to a great extent by what you personally feel must be right, despite the fact that you can't give credible reasons for why you must be right. You can't offer evidence, neither can you offer theoretical sound justifications for it so that others can take a look at it, see it is consistent and perhaps confirm with observations at another time (you might still be wrong, but having a sound theoretical basis is a good start, at least). So yes, when it comes to establishing facts that we can agree upon, more than your own personal conviction is needed, thus they are worth nothing unless you can come up with more than "it feels right to me".

No scientific principle or theory, no established knowledge about this universe has simply been accepted by the virtue of someone feeling it is right, more is always needed. If not we would have all kinds of claims flowing around and we would have little agreement. We couldn't judge what is obviously false from what is right, because everyone would be right because they felt they were. Sadly, this is not the state of real life.

Then I really need to get it out of my head that I'm someone, and coming to terms to the fact that I'm Robocop. Call me unenlightened, but I choose not to do that. I've chosen once and it has been that choice. Now it's that time when I have chosen again.

Of course you are someone. You are a unique individual, defined by your genes, your life experiences, your biology, your immediate surroundings throughout life and so on and so forth. But no soul is needed to be an individual, to be someone. I am still just as much me even though I don't believe the existence of a soul is tenable.

Man, you need to let your creativity go crazy for a little while. Yeah, there's a 1/6 chance there will be a 5, and 1/1.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000+e chance there will be any dice at all in this universe; maybe another 1/500.000 chance that the dice will not be a duck. That's the thinker's game. But there's also the 50% chance that it's going to BE a 5, and another 50% of a chance that it will NOT be a 5. Is this really that hard to grasp? Does this make sense to me only? I didn't say you required the same filters you're already wearing, in fact I didn't say anything about any filter.

There is nothing wrong with my creativity regarding this, but there is something wrong with your understanding of probabilities. There is not a 50% chance that it is going to be a 5 and a 50% chance it is not going to be, because these are not the only outcomes of the event. If there are only two outcomes to a stochastic process, then the chance is 50/50, but not otherwise. Perhaps you skipped probability class in school?

It's not even tied to a certain thing, but you choose to see things as such. Every situation has the 50/50 potential. Remember duality? That's the 50/50 "rule", if you'd like. So is meeting somebody, eating, going to work, getting what you want. Even death.

No, every event does not have a 50/50 potential of happening.

 

[rjb]

Hey Citta, look man, it's obvious our views don't converge, let's just leave it at that. Hopefully one day it will be possible to share one's whole mindstate and that will make matters easier for us. The fact that I can replicate results in my own personal life based on the information I have, no matter how wrong or unexplainable it is, still counts for something to me. It's my own interpretation. No one says you got to use theories exactly as you receive them. We each have our own imagination to help us out. Or, delude us. Maybe that's my case. Maybe that's everyone's.

I don't consider that to be biased in any way, this interpretation is just a shortcoming of chatting over a forum board. I just consider it "stuff that works in a certain way and doesn't in others". But in another sense, we're all biased because if we constantly doubted what we were doing, what ever that would be, we wouldn't be able to function.