[MD] Mystics and Brains

[Case]

> [Case]
> I see no contradiction at all. Relationships exist in nature whether we
see then or not.

[Platt]
How do we know what we can't "see?" A matter of faith?

[Case]
I do not have a problem with the term faith so that is fine with me. I also
like the idea of Kant's TiTs. 

[Platt]
The question is: Why are relationships (nature's laws) that occurred by
chance responsive to an intelligence expressed in mathematics?

[Case]
John Barrow discusses this in a book call "The World Within the World" I
have it but did not make it very far. I have a couple of Barrow books but
just can't seem to get through them. I first encounter a related idea years
ago in Vonnegutt's "Cat's Cradle" he was talking about making a stack of
cannon balls. He said that if you wanted to make such a stack, the shape of
the whole stack would be limited and determined by the shape of the first
layer of balls that you put down. So that for the first layer your choices
were virtually limitless but each layer after was determined by the first.

Keeping in mind that physicists can present a fairly complete account of why
things have happened like they have, up until one to the negative 42nd of a
second after the big bang. That unit of time is the smallest that it is
possible to measure. It is something like the length of time it would take a
light wave to cross the radius of a hydrogen atom. And what they say is that
there was no space and no time before that. What is troubling about this is
that we can not conceive of no space or no time. However, that is where the
first layer of cannon balls was laid down.
 
[Platt]
I see no reason why knowledge should be restricted to what is mathematically
possible.

[Case]
Who said it should be? I would say that anything that pretends to be
knowledge and runs counter to what science and mathematics tells us is just
wrong. But that's just me. And there is sufficient ambiguity that to allow
for all sorts of interpretations.

[Platt]
I don't believe it's possible to foretell the future, including the effects
of the weather, i.e., global warming.

[Case]
Having said that it is in principle impossible to specify the future let me
clarify. We can not predict the exact average temperature a week from now or
track the exact path of a storm or exactly how many rain drops with fall
where. But we can make general statements like, it will rain and storms will
move. We can predict trends and we can be fairly confident that we can
specify a range of probable temperatures and storm paths. We can construct
models of the future and those models are pretty accurate for today, less so
for tomorrow and less so for the next day. It becomes a matter of
probability and we do have mathematical laws of probability.

But Platt, you keep scoffing at chance and talking about "oops" and such.
Have you read Gleick's book "Chaos"? Or anything similar to it? If Darwin's
ideas were dangerous because anyone can understand them I have a feeling
that Chaos is a dangerous idea as well. People pretty much get the Butterfly
Effect after all.

I read very slowly and am determine to finish Prigogine before moving on but
here is a bit from the next book on my reading list. I pretty much bought
the book based on this quote.

"An ecosystem is a tangle of a thousand lives, each tracing an intricate
path sometimes around, sometimes through the paths of others. A creature's
every move is dependant on the behavior of those around it - those who would
eat it, those who would eat its food, and those who want to mate with it.
This behavior in turn depends on other behavior in other creatures, and so
on, with general disorderliness of weather and the rest of the world adding
further convolutions. All together, these knotted histories and future
histories make up a fantastically irregular filigree of life trajectories.

Now stand back. Individual paths blur each into the other until all that can
be resolved are the gross patterns of existence, the ups and downs of
population and little else. At this level of observation, something quite
new emerges: simplicity. The sudden twists and turns of individual lives
fall away, leaving only - in many cases - a pattern of stable or gently
cyclic population flow

Why? ..."

Michael Strevens "Bigger than Chaos"

Cheesy title but a fairly academic book by a philosopher from New York
University. He has some of his other papers and the like on his website
http://www.strevens.org/