@noname 328071 wrote:
Are we talking some new form of religious belief (or lack thereof) that I am unaware of here, or by “pagan” do you mean Wiccan? As in the somewhat confused attempts to revive the “old religion”. I say confused because for the most part the practice of Wicca is based on a fairly unfocussed hippy idea of what they think the old religion was…
Ye – I was under the impression you had given up any hope of science ever having those answers (which I thought a little odd given your education). As for science being able to explain our universe I agree totally that it isn’t all encompassing (although there are scientists who seem to believe it is – people being people, there is as much dogma in science as you’ll find in any religion :wink:. Fortunately, unlike most religions, the scientific view is changing constantly so the dogma and entrenched belief’s only last as long as it takes the next paradigm shift to hove into view :love: )
Don’t get me wrong here – I’m not saying science and logic are only tools to use (because logic will only get you so far. Then you have to get out and push :alien_abd.)
We have many more tools that are just as useful – things like intuition, imagination, or the ability to try and understand things by relating them to abstracts are just as important as being able to think logically, although I do think we still lack the tools that will be needed to find an answer to the important questions. I think that we have an awful lot more evolving to do before we can hope to get answers.
I don’t consider myself an atheist btw (although most religious people would probably say that I’m not only an atheist, but a heathen and a heretic to boot :laugh_at:). When the question about believing in god crops up people seem to get all carried away with the theist (definetly believe :angel_fly), atheist (definetly don’t believe:rant:) or agnostic (am not sure, but if there is I don’t want to burn with all those atheists, so am sitting firmly on the fence here:scared:)… The arguments assume you have to be in one of the categories, but they miss out the one I would put myself in – dunno if there is a word, but I’ll use apatheist (basically couldn’t care less if there is or not :bored:. As far as I’m concerned the universe is here, and we live in it. It’s a spectacularly interesting place to live, and there are far more important questions to be answered – finding out if there is someone to worship/blame for it all seems to me to be a total waste of time…)
OK – not come across this one before (the term Goldilocks enigma I mean, not the various anthropic principles). The debate over the different arguments of the anthropic principle has always seemed rather a strange one to me (although this could well be a failure in my ability to understand the arguments properly).
When asked the question of how the universe came to be the way it is, and wether intelligent life was accidental or inevitable, I always feel that the different answers rely on the premise that the scientific ideal of the detached observer is true. None of them really seem to address the point that the act of observation changes the thing being observed (and also changes the observer). We’re not separate from the universe, we’re part of it, and it’s an emergent system. Our existence and behaviour affect the way the universe behaves (we are in a very real sense making it up as we go along), so the answer to wether intelligence is accidental or inevitable the answer would seem to be both. It’s accidental because there were many happy coincidences that led up to this point, but it’s also inevitable because the parameters necessary for the emergence of intelligence were part of the make up of the whole (they must be or it couldn’t have happened. The question that really sends the logical approach off to sob quietly in a corner though, is wether the parameters had always been there (from day 0 as it were), or did the emergence of intelligence result in a rewriting so it had always ben like that?
Edit: Just went and read the Wiki article on the anthropic principle, and it has a bit about that book – sounds like an interesting read – think I might add it to my list :crazy_fre
Ah well I guess we actually see fairly eye to eye on all this then! I wouldnt call myself an apathist as such cos I generally spend most of my time thinking about this sort of thing, but I’m generally of the belief that everyone is probably wrong and the final truth if we ever get there will be more crazy than we could ever have imagined :crazy_diz
Its funny you should say about science and the detached observer, and how the observer is part of the emergent universe, as its an area ive been reading about recently. the subject-object view of the world is something unique to western philosophy, and things make more sense when you look at things in terms of dynamic and statis quality (an eastern approach, where an observer is a fundamental part).
Also one of the chapters at the end of the goldilocks enigma book I mentioned (its an awesome book btw) is about how the conscious observer shapes reality (quantum effects etc, even backwards in time) and one theory coming out of this is how as consciousness spreads throughout the universe and starts to saturate reality with knowledge, the collective consciousness of the universe will effectively become omniscient and eventually become the shaping force that causes the universe to have come to be in the first place.. crazy theory but I like at :weee:
