BBella\'s Universe (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, December 02, 2011, 17:31 (4741 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

Dhw: I wrote that once you take into account the unanswerable questions, “there is NO fixable pattern.” Perhaps I should have written “no FIXABLE pattern”. There are lots of patterns, and no-one knows which is the right one. The closer you look at the points to be joined, the more flexible the patterns become.

TONY: Not sure what you mean by fixable in this context, honestly. I don't honestly think that there is more than one pattern to any given thing. I think we SEE different patterns because we can not separate the subsequent influences from the root.

You also wrote, in your response to Matt concerning the weather, “We COULD predict the weather if we had perfect knowledge of the system, which we obviously don’t.”

That is like saying if we knew all the answers, we would know all the answers. We don’t have perfect knowledge, and so I repeat: “there are lots of patterns, and no-one knows which is the right one.” But I’m only talking of open situations. Maths is probably the least relevant field, since we humans have created systems in which there are no unanswerable questions: x + 3 = 4, therefore X = 1. (That's about the limit of my proficiency in mathematics.) I’m thinking of problems like the origin of life. At this moment in time, we have some fixed points, e.g. there is life on Earth; humans still haven’t managed to create life; we don’t know of any other form of intelligence beyond our own. Now form a pattern with those. There has to be one that is authentic – God created life; life arose by chance – but the moment we impose either of those, we find ourselves asking: what is “God” and where did it come from? How did unconscious chance create life, let alone the mechanisms for evolution? We have no conclusive answers, and so the pattern cannot be fixed. Any situation with unknown factors will be subject to the same process. That’s why we have prosecution and defence, Democrats and Republicans, controversies over climate change, how to get out of the economic mess, the nature of consciousness etc. In some cases, we may be able to fix the pattern (e.g. if the accused confesses and tells all), or there may not even be a one-for-all pattern (e.g. the “correct” diagnosis and cure of the economic mess). There has to be a true explanation for the origin of life. But unless there’s a God who tells us, none of our own patterns can be fixed – i.e. no-one knows which is the right one.