Atheist kids these days...

[Weeping Sore]

The rest of your post is spot on, but this statement is fuzzy. While it's certainly true that there are a lot of people that are certainly philosophically atheist but that hesitate to embrace the label (for understandable social reasons, mostly), someone who answers the question "Do you believe in God?" with "I don't know" isn't answering in the negative, they're simply changing the subject (whether they know that's what they're doing or not). There are lots of agnostic theists out there that profess faith.

The colloquial understanding of "agnostic" as a kind of "atheism-lite" is certainly wrong, however. Lots of self-described agnostics are in actuality soft atheists that certainly lack positive belief but that either don't want to engage in any kind of debate or are just hesitant to accept a label that carries a significant stigma with it.

While I agree that pushing someone to "pick a side" isn't the best approach, this is a false equivalency. Belief vs. disbelief is binary (though not necessarily static). You either believe or you don't. It's not logically dissimilar from asking someone if, say, they own a Camaro. "No, but I drove a Camaro once" is still "no." Sexual orientation is a more complex concept, involving levels of attraction to two different genders that vary considerably from person to person and where the labels used to describe various identities are inevitably categories that encompass a significant spectrum on that continuum. Kinsey's 0-6 scale is more descriptive, but still just a slightly more narrow set of categories.

Point well taken by multiple posters about the literal meaning of agnostic. I reserve the right to continue to use its colloquial meaning when trying to actually communicate with other Americans, just as I might not tell someone who uses "verbally" imprecisely, "You mean orally, philistine!"

Just to be clear, if you answer "Do you believe in God?" with "no", but answer "Is there a God?" with "I don't know", then you're an agnostic atheist? Fine.

The Kinsey scale seems arbitrary to me- I always ask people to self-assess what percentage gay/straight they are. I'm about 30/70, but I'll identify as bi as a short answer.

I do think it's possible to simultaneously believe/not believe. We all "contain multitudes", after all.

[Seli]

...

So a physical detector, not a ham sandwich or a rock. The detector also has to be turned on and functional, essentially placed with the intention of observing/recording the result.Consciousness playing a role was first suggested by John von Neumann, and later Eugene Wigner who, to be fair, later abandoned the theory. Physicists would rather avoid anything that would imply dualism even to the point of positing the "many worlds" theory that says all quantum realities are equally (un)real and that universes are in effect multiplying at a nearly infinite mind-boggling rate.

...

Yes a physical detector, which actually can be a ham or a rock, that is roughly how the original experiment started: You take a double slit; interference pattern; block one of the slits (aka place a perfect detector that detects any pathways through that slit, it could be a rock if one feels like it); absence of the interference pattern.

Of course nowadays we can use more sensitive detectors. In that case we take the double slit; pattern; use something that detects the passage of the photon through the slit (by definition interacting with it); no pattern.

Exactly the same mechanism can be explained to explain both situations. In both cases the history path, the describing Hamiltonian, the wavefunction, whatever term we want to use, can only go through one of the slits.

for the rest this thread is perhaps a better home.

How can something without consciousness observe anything? If there is no observation how can the wave function collapse?

How can a rock observe it hits another rock in an avalanche? Same answer. Observations is a horrible term to use for the process due to the values and expectations attached to the word.

[Weeping Sore]

Yes a physical detector, which actually can be a ham or a rock, that is roughly how the original experiment started: You take a double slit; interference pattern; block one of the slits (aka place a perfect detector that detects any pathways through that slit, it could be a rock if one feels like it); absence of the interference pattern.

If you literally blocked one of the slits it would cease to be a two-slit experiment and it would not tell you anything about wave-function vs particle function. Blocking and detecting are not interchangeable.

Again, you're right that this is a thread-jack. If you want to pick it up again on the "does consciousness exist" thread, that's fine.

As for the actual topic, I'll admit I am having trouble explaining death to my 3-year- old, and it is a subject she has a keen interest in. Right now she's gathered that our family will be ghosts after we die and we're reluctant to disabuse her of that notion.

[Olvyr]

As for the actual topic, I'll admit I am having trouble explaining death to my 3-year- old, and it is a subject she has a keen interest in. Right now she's gathered that our family will be ghosts after we die and we're reluctant to disabuse her of that notion.

I have the same problem. My son just turned 3 in July. My dad died 3 months ago and both of them were very close. It "helped" that my dad died in hospital after a 3 week post-op coma, so my son understood that my family went to see grandpa in hospital (him not having been allowed to come along) so there was already a " separation" before death dor my son, but he still fluctuates between "grandpa will come back" (we keep telling him that will unfortunately never happen, because it would be wrong to keep this false hope up) and "grandpa is in heaven", but for him that is a physical place and sometimes he asks if a plane or a helicopter could be used to visit him... Poor boy... What makes me most sad is the fact that in a couple of years, memories of his grandpa will have faded almost completely, even though they were so close...

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Seli,

Is "interact" better than observation? Are we all a mass of probablity waves until the particles that make up our bodies interact with each other?

[Seli]

Seli,

Is "interact" better than observation? Are we all a mass of probablity waves until the particles that make up our bodies interact with each other?

It seems to be a way to describe it. But due to all the interacting that takes place the probability waves tend to collapse for a lot of important functions. I believe one of the big problems is still how to explain that we don't see more quantum behaviour at daily scales, which is the whole idea behind the original cat thought experiment of Schrödinger.

Still on our way to understand atoms, molecules, light, their interactions, models and calculations that use the quantum approach are amongst our best tools. Even though we cannot actually solve any but the simplest equations.

[TerraPrime]

It seems to be a way to describe it. But due to all the interacting that takes place the probability waves tend to collapse for a lot of important functions. I believe one of the big problems is still how to explain that we don't see more quantum behaviour at daily scales, which is the whole idea behind the original cat thought experiment of Schrödinger.

Still on our way to understand atoms, molecules, light, their interactions, models and calculations that use the quantum approach are amongst our best tools. Even though we cannot actually solve any but the simplest equations.

Well, the tautological explanation is that if we did see more quantum behaviors exemplified on a daily observable scale, then the whole fabric of space-time would fluctuate so much that we would not be able to make sense of the world. Or perhaps it does, and our brains are just post-hoc fabricating a continuous sense of time to deal with the fragmented reality? :P

But I don't know enough to speculate on a true explanation for it. Perhaps it has to do with scale? At atomic scale, the effects of gravity (not that we totally understand gravity either) were negligent. But at larger scale beyond a single atom there are other forces holding things in check?

[Seli]

I would right now guess that it might have to do with the continuous interactions. But it has been a long time since I have used it all formally, so I might be wrong.

[Opisthokont]

Re: wave function

Would not the function collapse if a computer programmed to take the measurement performs the task? While it takes a human to program a computer to do this, I think it's fair to say that consciousness is not required to reveal the phenomenon of a wave function collapsing upon being observed.

This is the idea of objective reduction - that quantum reduction happens not because of subjective observations but rather because of some objective physical trigger - and it's definitely not mainstream (in the sense that any QM interpretations can be said to be mainstream or not, most physicists see it as a philosophical question and just don't give a shit).

One idea is that a quantum reduction happens when the difference in energy between the different possible states of a wavefunction crosses some threshold (for example, for reasons that I don't remember, the energy of one graviton), and this threshold is low enough that any observation made by a human will always trigger a reduction since the observation would change things in the brain of the human, which would easily exceed the threshold. Of course, this makes it very difficult to design experiments to test this since a reduction would happen as soon as a human became aware of the result of the experiment. I remember reading about an upcoming experiment in Penrose's The road to reality, but that book was published quite a while ago and I assume that if the experiment had managed to show that objective reduction happened, we would have heard about it.

[RhaenysBee]

That would be ma'am.

Assuming your statements about religious people is based on your perceptions via anecdotal data, I have plenty of anecdotal data to refute every point you made regarding religious people.

People are people, religious or not and there are far more instances of people being horrible in the name of their religion than than those who are not religious.

Also, people can have excellent morals and not be religious. You don't need a religion to know how and be a good person.

RhaenysBalerion,

Bale and SerG have the right of it. People are people reagrdless of their view on religious faith. I say that as a practicing Orthodox Christian. Some of the best most moral people I know are atheists. Some of the worst most immoral are religious. The reverse of both those statements are also true.

People are people good, bad, ugly, sinful, saintly, beautiful. We're all people.

Now, stop for a moment.

I have never ever said for a second that religious people are all good and happy and beautiful. Just please, quote me the part where I declare this, you'll not find it, I can promise.

It was you who read this into what I wrote. Which was, make no mistake, based on that very little I have experienced when coming across religious people. When I attended the funeral of close relatives or when I was babysitting for a strongly religious family and accompanied them to church every Sunday. All this means about 5-7 visits to a church I ever had in my life. And what I saw there is what I wrote, never claiming it was a world wide practice or statistics. Besides, as I wrote, I was christened Roman Catholic, therefore my little experience only applies for that one faith and not anything else, since I have absolutely NO experience with those. Yes, there are religious fanatics who are not nice, but I never said a word about that, nor did I mean to include any views in my post concerning them. What I meant to say and include in my post was that I think it's a beautiful thing when you go to church and see happy families bringing up their kids to be religious. And since most of the religious families I know are happy and a great number of the non-religious families I know is not so happy, I dared to draw a parallel which still only applies to the group of people I know and is not trying to generalize.

So please, next time before you come at me indoctrinating me, at least please make sure you understand what I meant or talked about instead of reading something into it, I never thought or meant.

[Weeping Sore]

I think it's a beautiful thing when you go to church and see happy families brining up their kids to be religious.

You've been visiting a temple of the Drowned God, haven't you? It is a breathtaking ceremony when they brine up the children.

[RhaenysBee]

You've been visiting a temple of the Drowned God, haven't you? It is a breathtaking ceremony when they brine up the children.

hehe, yeah, seems so :"D or subconsciously I AM religious, dedicated to the Drowned God.

[Lady Winter Rose]

Religious people could be like anything. Fanatics are same no matter if they are muslim o christian (well, symptoms of disease are the same). Or atheist or buddist.

I know normal religious people and I would like to call them a friend. But fanatics need cure.

[Honey Badger]

"Do you believe in God?" with "I don't know" isn't answering in the negative, they're simply changing the subject (whether they know that's what they're doing or not). There are lots of agnostic theists out there that profess faith.

I've seen that too. Plenty of agnostics don't subscribe to faith but still consider themselves "spiritual."

[Gertrude]

So ... kind of tangential related to the topic, a man in Czechoslovakia won the right to wear a colander on his head in a driver's licence photo as religious wear. He's a Pastafarian. Do people think that is disrespectful? I realize I am implying that he isn't a true believer. If you think there are true Pasafarian believers out there, that might be an interesting discussion as well. I also understand why the Flying Spaghetti monster was created, but I don't think that society in general does and just perceives it as mocking, or awesome dude!

[Black Walder]

Our vicar looked a little frightening as well, must have been 6ft 6' and liked to walk round the village in a cape. Quite an odd character.

I'm kind of scared shitless of the main priest at my birth (Catholic) church. The guy just. Won't. Die. He's over 100 now, and outlived the priest who was hired on to replace him. Seriously: They got a guy in his 60s to replace him, and he outlived that guy. If there is a God, he just doesn't want to give this guy up. If there's not, he is a scary freak of nature. Either way, he creeps me out.