Creating universes from nothing

I think I will discourse a little on conservation of matter/energy. This is a principle that was only discovered in the nineteenth century, and it was discovered empirically, using induction, not by deduction. Maybe that is why God didn't include it in the Ten Commandments.

Now, it is for sure that when someone looks at the output of a particle collision, and finds the output doesn't total the input, then there is assumed something wrong. Matter/energy is so almost always conserved that the assumption is always that that is the case. This was in fact how neutrinos were predicted, and later found.

However, quantum uncertainty makes it a certainty (now I like that -- uncertainty makes a certainty [grin]) that so-called "virtual" particles pop into and out of existence all the time. This is a misnomer -- while they exist they are real and have demonstrable effects. It is in fact this creation of particles at the event horizon of a black hole that caused the scientific community to realize they eventually evaporate.

What you do, when you want to make a universe, is you make it from nothing. The universe is "the greatest possible free lunch." There is good reason from observation, and excellent reason from theory, to say that all the conserved quantities (mass/energy -- gravitational charge --, electric charge, momentum and angular momentum) when taken for the universe as a whole total nothing. Positive gravitational energy is balanced by negative ("mostly dark") energy, electrons balance locally (positive and negative charge), motion is essentially in all directions, and the cosmos is not observed to rotate. 

However, to get a universe you need do nothing but wait. Quantum uncertainty will see to it that it will happen now and then.

I have posted my understanding of this as best I can: those with knowledge of the area are welcome to nitpick at any mistakes.

Causation is not always so

Something came from nothing. Being an atheist isn't hard when you realize that all creationism depends on are intuitive ideas we picked up as children, such as everything has a prior cause. There is no logical reason for this. It seems to be the case, most of the time, and that really is all that can be said. It also seems the case that anything that goes up must come down, but it isn't always the case.

Something people need to learn is that just because one cannot see how something could be doesn't mean it can't be. It may be just your ego rejecting things not understood because your pride won't allow it.

Guns, guns, guns

I have to comment on the morality of having a gun.

It turns family disputes into murders.
It turns depression into suicide.
It turns child curiosity into dead children.
It turns home "defenders" into either manslaughter prisoners or dead from their own gun.
It turns accidental or confused Alzheimer's or intoxicated people into corpses.
It turns criminals who have done nothing worthy of execution into corpses.
It make mass murderers and the insane much more efficient.

People like to brag about how they are responsible gun owners.  There ain't no such thing -- the very ownership of a gun proves that.

Having a gun around, people, is an invitation to disaster and therefor an evil act.  Please no ""tu quoque" on me here -- two wrongs don't make a right.

Mormons and coffee and tea

When I went through the sessions as a teenager with a couple of Mormon "Elders" (young men on their two-year missionary assignment) I was told that tobacco, alcohol, tea and coffee were prohibited. 

When I asked why, health reasons were cited. I'm pretty sure there is a passage somewhere in the Bible predicting that false profits would come telling people to not eat certain foods.

Well we know that (except in excess) coffee contains all sorts of good things for us, and unfermented tea is wonderful for our health (fermented tea seems to be good too, although not as good). This makes the idea that the ban came from God ridiculous on its face.

At the time I learned of all this, I was a typical teenager given to an occasional beer, and could see no harm except alcoholism, so I thought it should be allowed for anyone without that problem. Of course we now know that even a drink a week is linked to some increase in cancer, so I abstain. This is probably excessive on my part.

I think we have a moral responsibility to take care of ourselves, using reason and moderation, and I do not think it is the business of any church to dictate to anyone on these matters, only to give advice and good example.

The American immigration issue

America needs immigrants, and if you people would get over your prejudices and fears you would see that.  The population is aging and there is not going to be enough workers to pay to give the elderly even a decent life.

Yes it would be really smart to be selective in who comes -- as far as skills and English and health and so on, as countries like Australia do.  Anyone who meets standards along those lines should be encouraged and even subsidized to immigrate. 

Still, it is not possible to keep out people with the initiative and determination to get in.  Hasn't the country by now learned the futility of trying to enforce laws where there are millions who break them?  Be realistic even if you are inhumane and bigoted.

It is just simply not sane to think America could deport all the illegals there now -- twenty million is it? -- That would require a Fascist type of regime and would destroy the US economy and result in all sorts of civil disturbances and be totally inhumane, making the country be seen worldwide as a pariah.

Testability as a scientific standard

The fact is that science is what scientists do, and to be a scientist one must be objective, smart, trained in a scientific discipline, and not rely on supernatural or magical concepts. Science has produced a lot and made our world, while most people go through life ignorant and even disparaging it.

The requirement that scientific ideas must be testable to be scientific is often used, I think wrongly. Obviously tests and the ability to make predictions improve the likelihood that an idea will be incorporated into the body of scientific theory, but testability is not by itself grounds for rejection, maybe just grounds for putting it on the shelf to wait until tests become available.

Suffering and God

Suffering is of course one of the root problems of theology. A fundamental principal of ethics is that if one has the ability and opportunity to intervene to stop an evil, one is morally obliged to do so. 

No one claims the Abrahamic god lacks either the ability or the opportunity, yet suffering goes on and on and on. The cases where insect larvae eat their victim from the inside out are a good example.

It doesn't do to say we earn what happens to us -- too much suffering is just bad luck, such as earthquakes.

This was one of the appeals during the Enlightenment of the Deist god who created the world and then went away. Of course with the advent of evolutionary theory, the reason for the suffering (survival of the fittest) became apparent as nothing more than natural, so Deism lost its appeal.

The Christian theory of course paints God as a monster who allows all the suffering and so on for his personal glory.

The religion of atheism

To my thinking atheism just does not qualify as a religion. It has no god or supernaturalism or ritual or prayer or miracles or any of that stuff.

Further, the atheist has gotten that way through thought about the nature of the universe we are in, rather than by being indoctrinated as a child or accepting some authority blindly.

Mormon rules

Mormons prohibit coffee and tea, both of which are known to be good for you, but don't prohibit colas and other soft drinks, which are bad.  As for gambling, I think it is foolish, and don't do it except in social situations where a game doesn't have much fun to it unless at least some money (with limits) is involved.  These rules religions place are another example of silly human ideas put into God's mouth by silly humans.

We are alone

Be careful to not wax too poetic about our wonderful words and ability to communicate.  It is only partly true and even though you think what I am saying, you don't get the half of it.  You can't, since you can't know the subtleties of meaning of each word I use, derived from my experience and not yours.

We are all alone in the cosmos.  We are the proverbial ships passing in the night with nothing but beacon lights to use to communicate.  The vast, overwhelming majority, of our thoughts and feelings and experiences are ours alone, almost impossible to share.

I remember standing at the edge of a precipice, seeing a beautiful valley down below, and enjoying the panorama, which included a quaint winding dirt road and a couple of old sheds barely visible.  When I remarked to my partner what a view it was, he responded that it was beautiful, but too bad mankind had spoiled it by building the road and the sheds.

Obviously we were seeing the same picture but not seeing the same thing.

Aborting children

I am reminded that an aborted baby may be a child.  It may be a child. Killing is not itself a fundamental prohibition of my ethics. I kill flies and mosquitoes, kill a chicken when it is ready to eat, am willing to go to war and kill others for my country, even if I disagree with much of what it stands for, believe in the right of people to end their own lives, and even in limited situations endorse the execution of vile criminals.

In short no ethical rule is absolute. It must be judged in the broader context. There are a couple of factors when there is a pregnant woman not wanting the child. Which does the most harm -- forcing the birth anyway and having an unwanted child grow up miserable, ill treated and ending up a criminal, or allowing the abortion? What if the reason is that the pregnancy was from a rape? Again, the mother does not want and will detest the child.

Adoption is not a good solution, as study after study has shown, for such children. The genetic nature of the parents will tell out, regardless of how loving the adoptive parents may be, and these children rarely actually get adopted by good families.

In short, it is never simple. Compassion and asking yourself what is for the best has to be looked at, and government is not capable of such flexibility. As far as I can tell only the mother is best placed, hopefully with loving and not inflexible, ideological, counsel, to make such a decision.

None of this should be distorted to assert that in general I favor murder.  Only specific and very limited situations that I don't think most people would define as murder.  Certainly the harm that happens to a person when they did vastly exceeds any harm that might happen were they to go on living.

Jesus is a myth

I think one would be hard pressed to produce credible evidence Jesus ever actually existed, something much easier to do with most historical figures of the time.

In short, I think they are myths.

http://www.nobeliefs.com/exist.htm 
http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/nazareth.htm...

Gay compassion

My approach, as a gay man who has experienced prejudice and meanness and often even being beaten up, is that heterosexuality is statistically normal, but not a sign of moral goodness. I think maybe my experiences made me more aware of real right and wrong and of the importance of compassion.

Internet truth and lies

The internet is not hard. If I agree with it, it's the truth: if I don't it's a lie.

We have to think for ourselves and not blindly accept authority. That said, if it comes from a University source and is about scientific studies that are fully described, then I tend to accept their conclusions, even though I probably don't understand much of it. In other words, accepting authority is what we have to do, just be sure the authority is credible.

One good test is whether or not they make claims to truth. If so, they are lying (maybe not consciously because they believe it, but still there is no such thing as truth). There are just close approximations to truth, or, put another way, the truth as far as we can, in good conscience, determine, based on the evidence.

As far as right and wrong go, this has to be deduced, not taken from authority (although one doesn't go far wrong following Kant). I think conscience is often wrong. It amazes me how much it is that people go through life hurting others, being stingy, voting their personal interest, violating traffic laws and so on, without giving the ethical aspect a second thought. It is that conscience is culturally set, and therefore only mostly right. We have to consider the benefits and harms, the compassion or its lack, the freedom we allow others, and so on, in a rational balance without taking absolutist positions.

The reality of qualia

When I say neuronal activity I may be less than exactly correct. There are probably other brain things involved beyond just neurons. That this sort of activity can be said to be real is on the same order as the movement of a flock of birds or a wave on the water can be said to be real. It is process, and process is a sort of reality.

What is "out there" in the world is not what we think, but it correlates with what we think. We learn of it through our senses, and our senses are processed in our brain in all sorts of ways to help us handle the influx of data. Sometimes it even lies, as attested by optical illusions.

Consider, for example, the color something is. You look at a banana tree (as I'm doing right now outside my window) and you see mostly green. Is that tree green? Actually quite the opposite -- what you see are the colors (wavelengths) the leaf rejects. Those it absorbs are the other wavelengths, so it doesn't look white.

The real mystery (often by neurologists and others referred to as the "deep problem") is how these things the brain produces become our experiences. They use the word "qualia" to describe the specific different experiences we experience. Note the word "experience." The word should convey something more than just things that are there, but things that we incorporate. 

Maybe this will help: there are two closely related meaning to the word "color." One is the experience or qualia of the color, the other is the electromagnetic photons with the specific energy of the color. One is psychological, the other physical.

Truthfulness

Well, yes, of course, truth is the best policy (and it doesn't require quite as good a memory).  When caught lying for some selfish or otherwise unethical reason, trust is lost.  I have no problem with that, and did not say or imply that people are never truthful.  All I said is that truth is not a fundamental principle of my ethical system.

When it comes to lying by advocates of religions and ideologies, it is rampant.  These systems are at foundation irrational, so to hold them the advocates have to lie, both to themselves, to deal with cognitive dissonance, and hence to others to be consistent and not make the dissonance worse.

Take a look at Christianity.  The idea is that Jesus died on the cross "for our sins." How did that work?  How does his death have anything to do with our sins?  It is a magical death sacrifice to take away a curse.  Put that way, its absurdity and primitive nature should be obvious, but people refuse to see it with real rationality.  They are indoctrinated, probably as children, and hence "believe" rather than hold it as an opinion.  We have instincts of group cohesion that can be linked with this tenacity of belief in spite of good sense.

Why we lie

People lie all the time, and only sometimes is it to conceal misbehavior.  I lie when telling the truth will do no good and may harm or hurt someone, and I lie when it is to my benefit to lie in situations where the asker has no right to the truth but my refusing to answer will be taken badly.

People also lie to "one-up" someone -- the bigger fish business.  On message boards it is often just to get attention.

Indeed, your "not wanting to tell your experience" strikes me as of that species.

There is also a huge phenomenon not much recognized of pious fraud.  This is where convincing another of what you believe is more important than honesty.

I practice a tripartite ethics -- mindful compassion, helpfulness, and not using people as a means to an end.  This is different from our cultural ethics we call conscience, which says all lies are wrong.  What I say is we have to balance compassion with being helpful with never using someone for our own ends.  Sometimes the balance is difficult to see, and sometimes we make mistakes, but that applies to all ethical systems.  We have to be rational about it.