joigus

You just deny what I say, or express skepticism about it. I don't see many arguments, or counterexamples, or the like. That's just gainsaying. Doubtful, for the reasons I just pointed out. I did want to be more helpful as to the constants of Nature you were talking about, but I'm sorry I didn't understand. I do believe you were trying to make an argument there. Maybe if you care to rephrase...

Illusion of design, as I've argued --only forgetting to explicitly mention evolution, as @Eise reminded me of. Delusion of design is your banner. At this point this is just gainsaying, and I've made my case, so I think I can leave it to rest.

That was exactly the metaphor I was thinking of. Oh, but it was on my mind all the time. Selective pressure is what makes the process drift away from Laplacian probability (which is what most people think of when they say "random"; Laplacian probability = all outcomes are equally likely). And "the process" is, of course, a very slow one of filtering structures that are better adapted to pass on their genes from the ones that are not so efficient. The snippet is from Gödel, Escher, Bach if I'm not mistaken, right? Yes, it does illustrate the illusion-of-design concept very nicely.

This is a straw man, as I didn't claim that something "suddenly appears" at the nth step of induction. (See my words in Italics at the end of paragraph below, or re-read carefully what I said before.) Ergodicity, pressure, temperature, chemical equilibrium, planetary formation, ecosystems, degenerative syndromes, differential cell development, protein synthesis, chaperonin-regulated protein function, embyonic development, feedback mechanisms, viral population dynamics, animal behaviour, population equilibria... and all that. IOW, everything except the raw summary of the fundamental laws of Nature. None of these things can be seen in the raw equations of physics. They appear somewhere along the huge buildup of complexity from the elementary particle to swarms of billions and billions of them. But it's not like: "Now!, the adding of one particle has made it because..." It's gradual, rather. OK. I didn't claim to have answers for everything. Although it's not really so much that I have no answer for it. I never have answers for questions I do not understand. Here I have to put my foot down. Either we agree on what you mean by random, or we stop talking about this. Otherwise I might be talking about an elephant, and you be talking about a mouse --in a manner of speaking. Non-random is just a limit in a sequence of probability distributions of decreasing entropy. A probability distribution with entropy equal to the natural logarithm of the number of states is very random. A probability distribution of 10-100 entropy (just a small fraction of unity) is almost deterministic. Only at zero entropy we are at the non-random (deterministic) realm. So again, what do you mean by random? Living things have somehow "managed" to exploit regions of very, very low entropy (very non-random in that sense). Ok. If you wan to open that can of worms, it's ok. Only be aware it is a can of worms. Scenarios in which constants of physics may be changing in a much, much wider context could make a universe in which life, consciousness, etc can arise actually in an inevitable way. The possibilities are endless. Remember Haldane: IOW: What meta-conditions could make what we see as a formidable coincidence actually inevitable? This should give you pause. One man's coincidence is another (better informed) man's inevitability. If there is no mind (as a thing separate from matter) certainly there can be no mind using my mind. As Schopenhauer said, man can do what he wants, but he cannot want what he wants. Can you choose what mind you will have tomorrow at 10:30? Nah. It doesn't make sense. Mind must arise from something physical. There is enough mathematical leeway for me to think that mind is something that arises physically. The simple-minded mechanistic view of the universe is long dead and gone. Modern science does not claim full understanding. I'm assuming by "materialism" you mean that. "Pattens of behaviour in matter" is vague enough that it can include pretty much everything, so I cannot see how it could be weak. Not precise is OK, but not weak. Let me put it this way: Life (and mind, as a consequence) finds its way by following its grove. Only it is a much more intricate grove than the one found by planets and asteroids. Impossible to see by just solving an equation from any simple statement of principles.

A brain can build purpose. A neuron can't. Purpose = "intention", "aim", "meaning", etc. What you're doing here is stretching the meaning of the ordinary word to take it outside of the specific sense in which scientists and philosophers of science use it. For you it's just a synonym of "function". In that sense, of course neurons have purpose, because you use it to mean "function". No. It's not just a question of power. It'a question of different patterns, laws, and correlations arising, which a bunch of tens of neurons cannot even begin to accomplish. You tell me. I sense a big teleological explanation coming up. Random is not just anything. It has to be consistent with patterns of quantum noise. The die analogy was just that; an analogy. Here I don't understand what you say. Maybe that's why I don't get your point. What does this have to do with purpose in ants? The constants are representations of a material universe? I cannot make sense of that. Dimensionless constants are what they are 1/137 is not a representation of anything. Had it had a very different value, there would be no mind in the sense of a part of the universe trying to make sense of the whole universe. I did: You are a dualist. Your question only makes sense if there are two different realities. Namely: matter and mind. What we call mind comes from patterns of behaviour in matter. I'll answer that when you answer this: When the Earth turns around the Sun, who is doing the computing? How does the Earth know where to go next?

This made me laugh. Which goes to prove how weird I am.

Neurons have no purpose. "Supposedly" is a word that doesn't help very much. Supposedly, many things could be true. "Inanimate" is not really a scientific category. It has meaning in common language, but the distinctions are blurred when one gets to the level of individual cells. The point was not that neurons can give rise to power purpose, btw. Rather, it was that billions upon billions can, while only dozens can't. Therefore something qualitatively different arises when really big numbers accrue. Orders of magnitude matter. The very same way that a hundred ants would do nothing like an ant megalopolis. You misunderstand "random". A weighted die is random. It only has a different odds (probability distribution) than a fair one (Laplacian probability). You, as many people, let me say, misunderstand "random". Neurons do not conform to Laplacian probability, they are very particular to special configurations. That's why they can tell one from the other. Otherwise they wouldn't play their role and our ancestors would have been eaten by the lion every single time. Many people talk (very loosely) about "random" meaning "Laplacian probabilities" or "the probability of all outcomes is the same". I suspect you also do. I said "I assume" so I wasn't characterising anything. But point taken. Ok. You disagreed with the question "what do you mean?" Here: Referring to: (My emphasis.) IOW, "makes a universe" not "makes a mind"... IOW, Stephen Hawking meant (very clearly) "make a universe", not "breathe life into inanimate matter", as you seem to suggest by his trope "breath fire" into the equations. No, as I recognize no mind. But your dualism is apparent now. Modern science does more than just evoking emergence. It runs simulations of fungi or ant colonies solving the travelling salesman's problem in real time. There are also explicit theoretical models of it in other contexts.

It's certainly not. But being human is particularly misleading in this respect: How can mind be contingent? It must have been there all along.

Does any one of your neurons have a whole map of your purpose in life? Are 86 billion neurons more than two? Yes? OK, then more than two neurons bumping into each other can give rise to purpose. "Randomly" is just a misinterpretation on your part. Glial growth occurs in correlation to "regularities your neurons bump into" rather than being a one-off event, as you seem to suggest. "Breathe fire into" is just a metaphor. What do you mean? Didn't you understand my qualifications in that sense?: No. I assume --and this is just a wild guess--, that's what you are saying. Actually, that's what you are saying. Here: I'd rather say "the universe is made of matter and mind" is (most likely) just an illusion. Let me be fastidiously clear: What I mean is that ants building a megalopolis display a behaviour that's not programmed in each and every one of their genetic codes separately, or even their brains and the chemicals in their organic fluids. No matter how clever a programmer might be, no matter how subtle and seasoned in reading code, he or she would be totally unable to read into any of those things the elaborate and intricate result of an ant megalopolis, just by reading the code. It's just not coded there. That's emergence for you.

Well, it depends on what it means "to beat". If it means "simpler", it's possible that the program inside an ant's brain and endocrine system can be tackled by just a handful of code lines in the equivalent computer program. I actually don't know, so maybe that's an interesting talking point.

Mindless robots can bring about the illusion of purpose. Stephen Hawking meant what makes the cosmological constant, and other constants of Nature, not behaviour as an emergent pattern: (My emphasis.) IOW, "makes a universe" not "makes a mind"...

Admittedly so. Provided you extend it to quantum-mechanistic, IOW, physical. From, https://scoop.upworthy.com/scientists-excavate-an-underground-ant-city-that-is-equivalent-to-the-great-wall-of-china-nature-590517-590517-590517-590517-590517-590517-590517 Interesting in connection to OP's Brazilian ant megalopolis. Another quote, hopefully interesting to spark some conversation: From, https://www.swarm-intelligence.it/wordpress/what-is-swarm-intelligence/ Perhaps I can interest you in that as a topic of discussion derived from your video, @Night FM?

I just hope the ants had already moved before any excavations took place. I prefer the less-glorified terms of swarm intelligence or behavioural algorithm.

Just confirming what @MigL said: No. It is the same as the so-called Lagrangian formula that @Mordred wrote, but made just a tiny bit more explicit. In fact, I left out a term that Mordred included, which is gravitation. There's a huge amount more information to deploy even to describe the simplest of situations. So a primitive culture could do nothing with it. And that is without even thinking about questions of conventions, notation, etc. This would lead us back to the fascinating topic of what is simple and what isn't. One has to have a considerable preliminary knowledge of what to do with that recipe before any calculation is tackled. In the case of a Lagrangian, I'm afraid nothing would be simple, at any level. It would certainly not be like reading the digits of an irrational number, for which you would gain an important insight if someone revealed where the sequence came from in the form of a simple geometric idea, or a limit. Going back to @MJ kihara's example of the "primitive civilisation", you would have to --among many other things-- telling them about free parameters: The coupling constants (including the Higgs) and the CKM matrix of mixing angles. Provided they understood what we would be telling them, they would naturally ask, "why these numbers, and not others?" To which we would have to look to the skies, searching for their storm god, and shrug in ignorance.

I've thought exactly the same.

Something like this?: https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/the-deconstructed-standard-model-equation

It would have to explain all the coupling parameters and all the mixing angles of the standard model. It would have to explain why there are exactly 3 families of fermions, (electron, tau, mu) and corresponding quarks (u,d; c,s; t,b) --families of particles. It would have to explain not-so-well understood components of gravity (vacuum energy and dark matter) There is a swathe of accidental events that would not necessarily have to be included. Example: Why did a Mars-sized planetoid collide with Earth circa 3.9* billion years ago? Why did the Permian, Cretaceous, etc, extintions take place? Why am I here, drinking some wine, talking to you? (that's certainly part of everything), etc. Those are considered historical contingencies. Other cosmological problems you would be forgiven for not being able to explain, like matter-antimatter asymmetry, details on CMB etc. * 4.5? I don't remember. I almost forgot: It wouldn't hurt to know (if possible) why all dimensions are unobservable except for 4. All in all, that's a decent summary of what scientists understand by "theory of everything".

I always try to look at as many basic issues as possible before I get involved with the finer details. The finer details don't require as much attention if the basic issues haven't been properly dealt with. Once they have... well, let's have it. Polar coordinates are particularly useful when you have to deal with problems that are spherically symmetric. If I had to deal with the EM field created by a straight wire, I wouln't use spherical coordinates. I would use cilindrical coordinates instead. Why? Because the charge-current distribution of a straight wire has cilindrical symmetry, not spherical one.

r, the way you have defined it, should be dimensionless (provided cosine is cosine, of course). By dimensional analysis alone, provided r is some kind of distance parameter and cosine is... well... cosine, your Bas forces the use of some characteristic (fundamental distance, \( \cos\left(r\theta/r_{0}\right) \). \( r_0 \) would play the role of that fundamental distance. This is not necessarily a crazy idea, but you would have to justify it by drawing different consequences, etc. One immediate one I can think of would be renormalisation, the cosmological constant, etc.

That's actually what I first thought, because I'd noticed that glitch long ago, but I tried forcing plain text and it still produced a compilation error... 🤷‍♂️ I do know LaTeX gives you problem if you don't nest your braces {} for some sequences. So who knows...

Golden rule comes from a fundamental awareness of understanding reciprocity. A mandate from heaven, I'm sure, is the poor-man's version of ethics.

My point on this thread was made. Anyway, I didn't say schyzotypism is limited to religions. I said the occurrence of religious visionaries through history are likely to be related to schyzotipism, and the fact that genes related to them might not have disappeared from the gene pool on account of those genes not being detrimental, but quite the contrary, is some special cases. As to reductionism of ilness, don't oversimplify what an ilness probably is in many cases, and more in particular for mental ilness: A consequence of many factors, many of them environmental. It's not like a line of code in the software telling the hardware to do something. I did say that.

Exactly. That too. But a scalar relation makes it so obvious, as scalar = same in all reference frames/coordinate systems. I also had problems with cos(r·theta) if r is the polar distance and cos is the trigonometric cosine function we know and love, but one thing at a time...

Your equations do not display correctly. Please, review your LateX code. Give it a try on The Sandbox, eg, Often you can run your code piecewise there and usually you can isolate the part of the code that's making it fail to compile. Nevertheless, I see matters of basic concepts/principle etc that tell me your idea cannot possibly be right. Introducing a particular set of coordinates to tag space-time points should not affect any calculations in any sensible physical theory. When, eg, you write the Lagrangian piece, \[ \frac{1}{2}(\partial_{\mu}\phi)_{\text{Bas}}(\partial^{\mu}\phi)_{\text{Bas}}-V_{\text{Bas}}(\phi) \] functions such as a scalar field or a Higgs-like potential should not depend on the particular coordinate choice, on account of both being scalars. Sub-indexing "Bas" meaning "evaluated in my coordinates" should not make any difference. So nothing you propose seems very sound as per the formalism. I hope that's clear and was helpful.

Theories of everything are ten a penny lately. When you look more closely, they don't even attempt to do what the term TOE actually means. Namely, explaining the whole spectrum of bosons and fermions, as Mordred pointed out. In this case, they want to supersede a theory of the hydrogen atom that was considered obsolete already in the 1920s!!!