The Irrelevance of the Extremists of Belief—III
Anil Mitra, Copyright © November 21, 2007
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This piece is one of a number of articles on belief:
Aspects of the psycho-sociology of belief
The Irrelevance of the Extremists of Belief I.html
The Irrelevance of the Extremists of Belief II.html
The Irrelevance of the Extremists of Belief III.html
There is a relatively systematic discussion of belief in Journey in Being-New World-2007
Introduction
See The Irrelevance of the Extremists of Belief I.html for a general introduction to this sequence of three pieces on extremism in belief
In this piece the focus is on integration of ‘modes of belief’ and justification based in the metaphysics of immanence from http://www.horizons-2000.org
Discussion
I’ve posted the idea before that we should stop posting to this blog because it serves to promote ideas that are extreme and should be marginal. I know that there are ‘believers’ and others who will disagree with my assessments of DD’s blog. And, since I haven’t stopped posting I couldn’t be too serious about my proposal. Actually, I find many of the posts entertaining and many informative. I do wish, though, that it would be in the context of a more intelligent blog. I’m not saying, of course, that DD is not intelligent—he is. And, I’m not saying that his blogs are not at all clever—they are perversely clever in that they seem to be designed to appear persuasive and that they appeal to ‘the lowest common denominator’
The comments from William Hays—the multiple universes / inflationary big-bang cosmology are interesting. You may have read Lee Smolin’s work—he says something similar. It’s interesting that the different universes are weakly or not at all connected. I’ve done some work from a quite different angle that shows that an entire lack of connection, i.e. over all time and space, is impossible even though at any particular time there may be no interaction. I just read—October13-19 issue of NewScientist—of the idea of a second time dimension. We can conceive of additional dimensions of space but what could a second dimension of time be? How could fundamental processes have two fundamental rates at the same ‘time?’ There are various traditionally recognized problems with an additional time dimension, e.g. negative probability, but Itzhak Bars claims to have resolved them. He says that a second time dimension would resolve problems such as asymmetries, not observed in experiments, of standard QCD (Quantum Chromodynamics.) Of course, Bars ideas are still rather hypothetical but suggest that there’s more reality under than the rug than has been imagined and hence one of my favorite Shakespeare quotes from Hamlet which goes roughly ‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’
Given the idea of multiverses with different—laws of—physics it seems reasonable that some of the different universes might have extremely different physics (compared to our physics.) Just a speculation but perhaps there are universes in which there are beings rather like us in their capabilities but there are also super-beings…
Almost the entire discussion of ‘God’ in the western world is predicated on the monotheistic Judaic / Christian / Islamic notion of One God—a supreme being that is rather external to ‘this world.’ His (her) dynamics, to use the terminology of physics, are not the dynamics of our world; the one dynamics created the other. The notion seems—or tends to seem—absurd to us (except ‘believers’) but the idea of multiverses puts a dent in that absurdity
There are notions of God that are other than the monotheistic remote-like God of the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Buddhism doesn’t say much of God and Buddha himself shunned such concerns. Hinduism is complex and admits many varieties; in the Vedanta version there is Brahman that is one being—the entire universe and that would be all the universes in the multiverse language—that is identical to Atman the self of you and I and everyone else; to be ‘realized’ is to know this. In the Western notion anyone who believes he or she is God is delusional; in Hinduism that belief is not quite as delusional. Of course, Vedanta would not have you think you are God but, rather, that you partake in God. ‘I am not God but I cannot be other than God.’ In modern terms, you and I partake of the power of the (entire) universe; this is rather obvious since our atoms are no different than the atoms of the far flung corners of the galaxy. And when, if ever, we encounter the ‘other’ multiverses we may find certain laws and elements that lie below and ground our local laws and elements (elementary particles) and it will still be true that we partake of the power of all being
Before I leave these speculative ideas I want to comment on the Abrahamic religions. Even though they are and often have been in conflict they have much similarity. Without reference to content this suggests that there is something savage to these religions. However, I am not one of those who say that ‘religion is bad.’ Rather, I think that there are parts of religion that do not make sense anymore. If religion would respond to changing knowledge (science…) it might be more relevant (religion does speak to a part of human nature that science including psychology may speak of but does not address) and, as suggested by the speculations on multiverses above, these parts may not be as absurd as is often thought to be the case on the scientific view
Is there any foundation to the speculations? (When I use the word speculation I’m thinking more of my use of the idea of multiverses above than to the scientific work on multiverses)
I referred to some work that I have done in the second paragraph of this post. This work is accessible in my website http://www.horizons-2000.org. The view there is rather different from that of modern science including the work on multiverses. I’m not going to reproduce what I say there for that would make this post far too long. I should say, however, that the ‘theory’ I’ve developed, while it appears strange at first, does not contradict ‘common sense’ or science (in there valid parts.) One approach to my theory is to ask what inferences can be made from the empirical data of our senses and of science. Given a set of data, laws are often derived in science by finding the simplest or in some sense most reasonable ‘equation’ that fits the data. Although this sounds ad hoc it is not—it is ad hoc in the beginning but after this is done in more and more contexts and as the laws are adapted so that they mesh while still matching the data (this of course is part of why genius is significant) a coherent and persuasive picture emerges. The picture begins to appear necessary. But science (e.g. big-bang cosmology) shows its own limits: there are limits of time, space and variety of being; at the lower limits are scales so small that modern science gives no guarantee that space-time has meaning at that level; at the long range limits, big-bang cosmology yields to the possibility of multiverses that are infinitely varied and that are at least explanatory in that they eliminate the question ‘why is our cosmos so fine tuned and special.’ To go back to the question of what inference we can make from the data we’ve seen that what is done in science is to make the most reasonable inference; i.e., science may become more and more reasonable and persuasive in building up a coherent picture but the element of hypothesis is (has not been) entirely eliminated. Suppose, however, we did not want to make any hypothesis—assumption—at all. What law could we come up with that made no assumption or hypothesis? The—an—answer is Logic. This is an intuitive starting point for my ‘theory.’ In my essays (website) I do the following. I provide a rigorous foundation for the ‘theory.’ I show how other thinkers such as Leibniz, Hume and Wittgenstein have glimpsed the theory; they did not however develop a positive or systematic theory out of their insights. The theory has momentous conclusions. Some of these conclusions appear to be absurd and have made me question my ideas over and over. The theory however does not at all disagree with science and in some cases, I have been able to suggest a foundation for the ideas of quantum theory and Einstein’s theory of gravitation; the ‘theory’ is consistent with the idea of multiple times and provides an interpretation for it; the ‘theory’ independently leads to the necessity of multiverses and shows that there cannot be ‘no-interaction.’ My ideas suggest new directions for ‘religion’ but I haven’t developed the thought (very far.) These thoughts have taken a chunk out of my morning but I will return