While quoting here, I found this a very interesting write and analyzed it, it is intriguing but very wrong, you will understand, especially at the last part.
"Quantum mechanics has already proven the concept that reality is altered by our very perception of it. It may not even truly exist when we aren't observing. That could mean that we project the physical world through our very consciousness. If it takes consciousness for reality to exist, what conscious being could have existed before reality exploded into existence? What caused it to explode into existence, before time itself existed?
There is also the concept that reality is just too complex and sophisticated in it's design to be random. The smartest engineers will eventually create unimaginably smart AI. We will use that AI to create better AI. Once we create an AI that out performs our wildest dreams, not even it will be capable of designing something as sophisticated as this universe. To an engineer, it is the finest engineering that will ever be. We live in a mathematical existence. Special values define our reality, not randomness. It only seems random at times like fractals.
Or like numbers are being crunched behind the scenes like software. The third concept is that we are in a simulation type of reality. That the instability of the quantum realm is because reality is similar to how a computer works. Where everything is just data, but reality is projected from the constant calculations when it is observed, like in a video game. Kind of like the Matrix, only we never existed on the outside (higher dimension), we were created in here. It still requires a highly advanced creator though. It could be true while not making our reality any less fascinating. It would explain things like quantum entanglement, and dark matter.
All of these things are hunches based off of science, and all need a creator. To me it shows that god has to exist. Scientifically, I can't accept the idea that before the big bang there was a super dense particle that just existed, and it exploded for no reason forming all of the complexities of reality,( randomly?). To me that is way more far fetched.
Believe what you want though. I'm not trying to convert, I'm just explaining why I'm no longer atheist. They are just things to think about and to decide for yourself. I don't claim to know the answers. Just remember that believing in god doesn't mean that you must follow a specific religion, or like the churches. The churches are run by man, and therefor can be just as good or evil as any man."
Your thoughts of course are what I'm looking for here, as I don't know much (I could understand what he was trying to explain), I think you could form a better response to him.
As to what I replied to him is this:
You cannot prove that God exists, not in the way Religion makes it seem, and you can't call "God" the being that created this, because in the same way one cannot explain how the big bang happened, you cannot claim or explain how there is a God. Because "God" lies beyond "reason and logic", while in reality, nothing lies beyond "reason and logic". While our Existence is a mystery, it still has a Cause and it can be explained
"Scientifically, I can't accept the idea that before the big bang there was a super dense particle that just existed, and it exploded for no reason forming all of the complexities of reality,( randomly?)." - No one said nothing came from nothing, we just don't know yet, something that you are clearly confusing intentionally.
The Big Bang, or whatever caused the creation of the Existence as we know it, can be explained, through time and certain devotion to the discovery, but "God" cannot. It's not applicable to claim that certain things need to have a Creator, they are a cause, they come from something, and that something does not act the same way as a sentient being does.
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His idea that objects change because a conscious observer looks at them is common in the popular press, but it is misguided. To look at an object you need to scatter (English translation: bounce) photons (English translation: light) off the object. I don't think it should surprise anyone that hitting an object changes it. Remove the conscious observer but keep the photons (keep hitting the object) and you get the same effect.
First, I have strong doubts this person was really "atheist" to begin with. I have seen lots of people claim on atheist debate boards say something along the lines of "I was atheist until I discovered x" Oh, by the way I am now in established 2000+ year old religion "x", or some other sort of nonsense.
A true atheist would never jump from some sort of self perceived evidence "why atheist have it wrong" all the way to an established religion, swallowing whole all the other many many problems with these holy book based religions.
It sounds to me like this person read a few things about quantum physics, that he was able to fit into his narrative why his particular god exists. Using the edges of science understanding to make an awful equate to "see my god exist!"
I actually believe that we will likely create AI's that are more intelligent than humans in some ways, and this AI could eventually create even better AI for it self. Kind of depends on how you define intelligence though. (A very fluid definition I find.) I think an AI or even humans could create something as complex, or more complex than the universe some day if humans/AI was given enough time. The universe had 14 billion years to do it, why not us given the time? Also we are playing with words here, we are in the universe, the universe includes everything including us, if we create something that creates something, by "word games," the universe itself is just now more complex.
We humans, in our nature programmed love affair for patterns have created math to help define patterns we see. We like to simplify things down to rules and numbers. Just because our mind's ordered it, does not mean the universe is one giant design that is impossible to have chaos and randomness. (Infact most of the universe is instead defined by chaos!)
He has drawn a bunch of conclusions, that nearly all of the top scientist and people involved in studying and testing quantum physics, math, AI and astrologist have never made.
He also mixed in heavily the cosmological argument. Which is fine, the cosmological argument takes advantage of edges of human and scientific understanding. But fails to recognize the cosmological arguments greatest flaw. It in no way supports that their particular god is "the creator." In my mind it is even further evidence pointing to that if their is some sort of out of "timeless" creator it would be absolutely nothing like what most everyone defines god to be.
His third point, why can't we be that creator, if we are in some sort of matrix like setup? Just because in this reality we lack the technology, why not in his supposed "higher realm" we do?
There are unlimited possibilities of the "why" on the edges of human/scientific understanding. It is a huge logical fallacy to assume that a particular religions god is the correct answer. When there is much evidence that god does not exist, and much more evidence that some other theories may be closer to the mark, or simply we are unable to fully comprehend such answers.
Again out of the many flaws with his conclusions on each of the three. Even if we accepted his conclusions, going from "the possibility of some sort of creator" all the way to "my god must exist" is skipping a lot of steps in between. Going straight from A to: therefore Z.
It is a bit like saying: I found I found a dollar stuck on a tree, therefore, I believe money does grow on trees! Accepting one unlikely and faulty conclusion leads all the way to the ridiculous notion that money grows on trees.
A very agreeable analyze, thanks, this helps a lot. I was sure he was wrong though, I just didn't know how to form the correct answer to counter him, you are as thoughtful as your profile picture is ironic.
Right! If you define intelligence as playing chess well (or something like that) it has already happened!
Yep, Chess and it's much more complex brother GO.
What is even more cool is, with just some practice I could beat both the top Chess programs and the top Chess players easily.
How? Working in concert WITH a computer.
It is exciting times in the world of AI advancement.
The idea of an "artificial intelligence" that is better than a human a human's intelligence in every measurable way, may never happen or at the very least be decades away even in a field that is moving very rapidly. But the idea that computers can be extremely proficient at tasks in ways that exceed humans capability as you said is already happening, and will continue to happen at an ever faster rate in surprising areas like: Xray/Cat Scan specialist.
I have personally seen large strides in google translate/dictate abilities in just the last year or so. If you ever tried putting the captions on in youtube videos a year or more ago, try again now, they are not perfect, but vastly improved.
Bringing it back to atheist discussion. It will be interesting to see, if we see forms of AI that greatly exceed even the brightest humans in certain areas, that would make the AI's intelligence seems god like how will the theist world respond. Where does their god fit in the picture that suddenly has an entity that its own intelligence outstrips our own?
@Endri: You have to recognize that using quantum mechanics to "try" to prove the existence of god has merit, a very mad one, but it does Ôo)-~
What I find really cool is we are already able to use some quantum mechanics/theory in real world practice.
Scientist have already used quantum entanglement to communicate. Albeit, very crudely and only 89 miles away, but we actually used quantum entanglement to communicate. If we can scale up and take quantum entanglement out of the lab, if I understand the theory correctly, we could communicate faster than lightspeed. Like, we could communicate with astronauts on a mars mission in real time, instead of dealing with the time delay, as communication moving at the speed of light would cause a few minute pause in all communication. Also, we could have high speed, terabit internet services anywhere on or above the planet if this technology can be scaled up.
Quantum physics is a lot of fun, the idea that if you go small enough (subatomic.) you can toss out other rules of physics that govern things of larger size.
Some more reading for those interested:
http://www.livescience.com/52811-spooky-action-is-real.html
This isn't actually possible (given the rules of quantum mechanics; if those are wrong, all bets are off of course). Again, there are popular articles that will tell you differently; but it just isn't the case. This one is much harder to explain, but I'll leave you with this: to communicate with entanglement requires the use of a classical data channel (English: a normal communication device); and classical data channels are limited by the speed of light.
What is really weird is how the laws of physics almost seem to conspire to protect special relativity. Every time you think you have found something that violates it, you will find something weird that conspires to prevent it. In this case it is the classical data channel.
Ah perhaps my understanding of it is off. I have only read a few articles on it, that I did not verify if it they were based on highly scholarly sources.
My understanding of it was, with quantum mechanics, they are finding other rules that govern our universe begin to not apply.
I have heard of the need for classic data channels, but do not fully understand them. The article I linked talked about using RNG to prove use of quantum entanglement communication w/o classic data channels. But it introduces the problem of: is the RNG tools used truly random, or is the communication we pick up via entanglement not actually random but a pattern in the randomness. Which falls into a sort of logical trap, how can anything be truly 100% random but still able to be measured?
Interesting stuff, and I do not pretend to be any sort of expert on it.
A quick hand-wavy explanation:
Alice and Bob start with a pair of electrons with their spins entangled. Alice wants to send Bob 1 bit of information faster than the speed of light. She wants to tell him who won the Superbowl. She will send a 1 if the Packers win, and a 0 if the Cowboys win.
Alice can choose to measure the spin of her electron along any direction, but to keep it simple I will only discuss measurements along the x and y axis (up/down, left/right). Same goes for Bob (and they are both using the same coordinate system). So each of them has 2 choices (measure along x or y). Alice and Bob agree ahead of time that Alice will measure along x if the Packers win, and along y if the Cowboys win. Bob will measure along x at the appointed time (where the game is over for Alice, but before the TV signal reaches him, maybe he is on Mars or something).
----------------------------------
Here are the possible outcomes:
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So if Bob gets "up" he knows that either
He discovered that either the Packers won, or the Cowboys won; but he already knew that!
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So if Bob gets "down" he knows that either
Again, he discovers that either the Packers won, or the Cowboys won; but he already knew that!
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Let's say Bob gets "up". He shrugs his shoulders and just turns on the TV to watch the game (the TV is our classical data channel). At the end of the game he sees the Packers win. ONLY NOW does he receive any information from Alice. He learns that Alice measured along X, and received "down". And he received this information at the speed of light (the speed of the TV broadcast).
I read what you said, pondered on it for a while, and will continue to ponder on it. But realized I could short cut this thought process short for me if you could answer this question:
Quantum entanglement can not send enough information to even send basic binary information (a single bit)/(on/off) by it self. Even with a preset agreement on how to read the data.
It can send some sort of information, but it needs a secondary classical data channel to complete the information hand off process.
If so, my notion, on how they can use quantum information to send data is very incorrect. Or even what exactly quantum entanglement means. Admittedly, trying to understand even quantum computing makes my head hurt.
"It is not on or off binary, but all the states in between on and off all at once."
This interesting subject requires further research for me :) Perhaps I need to catch up a little on this subject before I talk about it more.
Your summary is exactly right. As you eluded to: when Bob sees the end of the game on TV, he gets 2 bits of information (Packers won, Alice measured on x and got "down") while everyone else watching the game only got 1 bit of information (Packers won). It is almost like he already had that second bit, and just needed the first bit to decode it.
Another interesting thing is a possibility I didn't mention. Alice falls asleep and just never makes a measurement. There is no way for Bob to tell if even this happened until he receives information though a classical channel. If we assume the teams are evenly matched in our example, then 3 things can happen. Alice measures on x (Packers won), Alice measures on y (Cowboys won), Alice fell asleep (no measurement is done). In all 3 situations Bob has a 50% chance of getting "up" and a 50% chance of getting "down". This is another way to see that no information was sent.
I get it now, I get it. I think... hah!
We can entangle the electrons of two atoms so that they are both spinning in the same direction, (for the most part,) and we could use the known now similar spin state of these two atoms, to act as a powerful preset code "key" that would be nigh impossible to decode, but the magic part, (that never made any sense to me in the first place.) Is that once you separated these two atoms, that if you were to change one of the two quantum entangled atoms, to a different spin rate which ever way, that change does NOT magically, (well through some sort of weird quantum physics rule,) happen to the other atom that it used to be entangled with and paired up spin, but separated. Their is no data or information sent over this space between the two quantumly entangled but separated atoms.
If this is the case, the whole concept is pretty simple really.
If I am way off on this, feel free to just tell me to read up on it more, perhaps from more scholarly sources.
Thanks :)
To make it a little more exact: Before Alice measures her electron, the entire entangled system (that is both electrons, even though they are separated) is in the state {1/√(2) |ud> + 1/√(2)|du>}.
This is a weird state in that it is the sum of 2 states (called an entangled state). Let's say Alice preforms her measurement and receives up. This instantly changes the state of the entire system to {1|ud> + 0|du>}: meaning there is a 100% chance to find Alice's electron up (if she was to measure again), and a 100% chance to find Bob's down (whenever he gets around to doing his measurement); and a 0% chance to find |du>. This is the part that makes people worry about faster than light; since the change propagates instantly over any distance. But as we've seen, this instant change in the state can not be used to send a message.
The final state: {1|ud> + 0|du>} would normally be written as just {|ud>}, with the 1 being implied, and the configuration with 0 amplitude (which also means 0 probability) just being left out. This is not an entangled state; the entanglement has be ruined by Alice's measurement. The two electrons will now behave independently of each other (although they will start their new "lives" with Alice's being up, and Bob's being down).
Even this has been fudged a little by me, for example the plus sign isn't technically correct, but that's an entire different can of worms.
Yep, now my head hurts. ;) I did learn a few things. I am fairly strong in math, Completing 3 college courses in calculus. I think I understand just enough of the math and what you are saying to really start to get lost in all the possibilities of what these discoveries in quantum mechanics means.
Yeah that is almost enough, you'd just need some linear algebra and differential equations; and I wouldn't be surprised if you were already familiar with those subjects. After that you just need a few very wacky postulates; and maybe some aspirin.
This always cracks me up! These believers never understand the observer effect. They always bend it to match their fallacies. Deepak Chopra is making millions doing just that.