Thursday, February 23, 2006

A comment from Uncommon Descent...

In quantum cryptography, we can detect the effect of an intelligent intrusion into a crytographic system because someone’s intelligent choice has triggered a collapse. See: Dartmouth.edu

By way of extension, because we see the universe, we are detecting that some agency is collapsing wave functions in the future.

We are being created through the Ultimate Observer’s act of knowing (measurement) in the future. In other words, your question is approaching QM classically (where the past affects the future). But the Quantum idea is the reverse: the future affects the past. The fact we exist is evidence our wave functions are being observed at the end of time and have not yet collapsed in the present. The past and present exist because of what will happen in the future. If our wave functions were already fully collapsed, the world would be at an end.

So to answer your question, observant entities (you and I and everyone) encapsualted inside the Universal wave function would not even exist to make observations in the present world were it not for the Ultimate Observer in the future peering back into time. In a way, our wave functions have collapsed, but in the future. The history of the universe is fixed by a future event.

This rather shocking inference was borne out by experiments in the 1970 with Wheeler’s double-slit-delayed-choice experiment which happened actually in Tipler’s school, the University of Maryland. We were able to demonstrate the future affects the past in small quantum systems. More amazingly, one could even somewhat re-write the past (quantum erasure experiments) and thus make something anew.
Comment under: Peer-Reviewed Stealth ID Classic : The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1987)

Given that I already think that God exists, in fact I know it, I'm not focused on more evidence in that respect. The real question to me is what type of God exists. For instance, a thought may come to my mind about why any type of God or gods would not just go back in time and fix things with respect to Good and Evil. That thought can become a question or a doubt depending on how it is thought about. The interesting thing is that one could will your own ignorance into a whole chain of doubts that undermine faith in God and build faiths in other things like your own will or capacity to sit in judgment on Good and Evil, when there are ultimately answers. Or it may be that there is ultimately knowledge that we may just have to be ignorant of for now or that there are answers that only a few have the intellect to understand anyway. Even knowing such possibilities I may will to weave a little stream of doubt and the like if I choose to oppose God. It is a choice of the will that God allows and seems to keep letting exist, after all.

It seems to me that most of the time that we try to sit in judgment on good and evil in ways that are far beyond us, as in my time travel example or the condemnations of God typical to atheists, that all we're really doing is asking for our own destruction. For instance, in the example above if God had said, "People are evil, so let's go back in time and try creating them again." instead of letting evil exist for a time then I, as a sinful person, would not exist. Why do we ask for our own destruction? It's pretty consistent that we do. Most of the time when we judge we condemn ourselves with our own words.

Interesting to note that according to some sociologists who control for many variables in their studies and the like suicide rates are higher among atheists. Atheists seem to be making manifest a form of self-destructive judgment that is typical to them. Yet have they succeeded in their own destruction in the way that they think they will? After all, the events that brought them into existence were written in the dust of the verses of the universe long ago. It would seem that no one can be certain that their body, brain, form and soul will not be written again in some form given all that could be.

Some people make the mistake of assuming that the soul is some spirit divorced from the physical reality of our bodily form now or is some Platonic form that only exists in the supposed world of the Forms/Heaven. That leads to many things, like thinking that the flesh is always evil while the idealized form is always good; that people who do physical work are lesser than those who work with forms of information; that men who tend to have a sense of the sensuous form are better than women who tend to be the sensuous form, and so on and on. Read Plato, he promoted that type of thinking. Yet such notions actually do not comport with biblical texts, which instead indicate that the soul is a constant marriage of spirit/essence with body/existence, form and being in the physical here and now. In other words this is your soul, existing in your brain events here and now. Yeah. Hi there, little fella...

Plato often seems to speak of many biblical things given his understanding of basic patterns, e.g. the heavenly world of the Forms and coming out of the symbolic cave to be born again with respect to signs and symbols and so on. But that does not mean that the Bible comports with Platonic ideas.

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