https://youtu.be/lt1fPSjYK-U

Interviewer: “Do you believe in God?”
Kaku, “I believe in the god of Einstein, the god of Spinoza, which is the god of beauty and order. The universe could have been ugly and chaotic, yet here we are, in a universe that is orderly and beautiful. That doesn’t happen by accident.”

The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round, the wheels on the bus go round and round, all the live long day . . .

Honest question for SC:
Do you have some form of autism or OCD? I'm asking so maybe we can understand why you seem to have a needle stuck in a groove (for all you old folks who played vinyl records).

We are all repetitive and have our pet topics for sure, but this is getting bizarre.

Not as obsessed as Kaku, who just released a whole book on the topic!
Posted for those of you interested in an alternative to the false theist vs. atheist dichotomy so often on full display here on RfM.
For those of you not interested, carry on and feel free to NOT click on the topic.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/08/2021 02:32PM by schrodingerscat.

>> "Posted for those of you interested in an alternative to the false theist vs. atheist dichotomy so often on full display here on RfM.
For those of you not interested, carry on and feel free to NOT click on the topic."

So you have yet to be able to ascertain that there is minimal to no interest in this stuff you post over and over, just in case someone is interested, even though you're told over and over by them?

Maybe its this.....especially the last sentence.

"Alexithymia is a personality trait characterized by the subclinical inability to identify and describe emotions experienced by one's self or others.[1] The core characteristic of alexithymia is marked dysfunction in emotional awareness, social attachment, and interpersonal relation.[2] Furthermore, people with alexithymia have difficulty distinguishing and appreciating the emotions of others, which is thought to lead to unempathic and ineffective emotional responses."

I'm confident he doesn't read the books.

“I believe in the god of Einstein, the god of Spinoza, which is the god of beauty and order. The universe could have been ugly and chaotic, yet here we are, in a universe that is orderly and beautiful. That doesn’t happen by accident.”

Read this quote carefully. If Kaku really said this, he has gone beyond the "the God of Spinoza" and "the God of Einstein." Neither would claim that the order of the universe was anything other than random or happenstance. If the order of the universe did not happen by accident, then by definition it happened by design. And, unlike biological evolution, where design can occur naturally, through natural selection; there is no mechanism for the "design" of the universe outside of a designer God. In other words, there is nothing for natural selection to act upon; there are no substitutes for "survival" and "reproduction" such that one universe would be naturally preferable to another. Thus, a universe that is "orderly and beautiful" and did not "happen by accident" is a statement for Intelligent Design! So, we are back to the atheist/theist dichotomy that you are trying to avoid.

Note also, that this is why the anthropic principle and theories of multiple universes are prevalent; i.e. in order to explain the natural orderliness of the universe as the result of random happenstance, rather than by ID.

Changing your name doesn't make it any more interesting.

schrodingerscat Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> Posted for those of you interested in an
> alternative to the false theist vs. atheist
> dichotomy so often on full display here on RfM.
> For those of you not interested, carry on and feel
> free to NOT click on the topic.


I have asked you before to stop posting on topics that you keep bringing up repeatedly. Here's what I wrote you in an e-mail almost two years ago:

"I'd also like to ask you to drop some of the topics that you've been posting about a lot. This would include [XXXX] and [YYYY]. These topics have been beaten to death and do nothing more than waste bandwidth at this point."

I will grant that the whole atheist/theist definition thing was not one of those two topics I explicitly called out, but my request was clearly more general.

Let me make things explicit for you now: Please stop bringing up the same topics over and over again. If you feel a need to do that, please do it somewhere else. Feel free to e-mail me if you have questions.

Thanks,

CZ (admin)

Thank You!!!!

If my assumption in one of my posts above is anything close, I doubt what you said will make any difference.

<swoon>


ETA: now if I can just find my socks . . .



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/08/2021 03:26PM by elderolddog.

Thanks X ∞.

This sentence in his response to you really stands out:

> Not as obsessed as Kaku,
> who just released a whole
> book on the topic!

It would be easy to believe that the sentence was written by a love-struck teenage girl in praise of her teen idol.

hammer>nail>wall -- in single strike

schrodingerscat Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The universe could have been ugly and chaotic, yet
> here we are, in a universe that is orderly and
> beautiful. That doesn’t happen by accident.”

Order is the result of things that don't work within the system ceasing to exist — because they don't work. All that's left is that which does work.

The atheist versus theist false dichotomy was adequately dealt with a century and a half ago.

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

-- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass


Yes, if you redefine god broadly enough, god exists. If you redefine inverse colloidal chartreuse toast broadly enough, it exists too, though it will not likely replace Cheerios.


Actually, the belief that the universe has laws that are simple and mathematical in nature, and can be discovered and understood by humans goes back at least to the Pythagoreans in 600 BCE. That is precisely where the word rational comes from - laws described by the ratio of integers.

When they discovered quite simple relationships that could not be described by the ratio of integers, they totally freaked out, and labeled such relationships "irrational". It upset them so much the Greeks backed off from what later became known as algebra, and invested most of their intellectual horsepower into geometry, which didn't have a problem with those irrational relationships, like the diagonal of a square. Geometrically they were a piece of cake, even if they caused algebra to have a severe case of indigestion.

That is the foundational bedrock of secular humanism. Gods do not control the universe, laws do. So in a real sense, it is the laws of the universe that knocked the gods off their pedestal. If Kaku, SC, et. al. want to redefine the concepts that dethroned gods as the new and improved version of god, what--evverrrr.

Is god supposed to be everything that has ever existed, will ever exist, might somehow find its way into existence, or can be imagined?

> Yes, if you redefine god broadly enough, god
> exists. If you redefine inverse colloidal
> chartreuse toast broadly enough, it exists too,
> though it will not likely replace Cheerios.

New rule on RfM: Don’t post about #1 Bestselling books on Quantum Physics or you’ll be banned for life!

I can live with that.

No one has banned you. I've just asked that you not keep posting on the same topics, over and over and over and over. The horse is dead; you can stop beating it.

I personally love physics and quantum mechanics and would love more deep conversations about them on the board. The problem is that you read popularizations and don't really understand them, then you cherry pick quotes (or misquotes) that seem to fit your opinions and keep posting those opinions over and over.

It's annoying. Please stop. I'm sure that you can think of different topics to post about. If you can't, then you might ask yourself why you post at all.

CZ (admin)

I've never brought up this topic before, because I just heard about his best selling Quantum Physics book, and his thesis, yesterday. Yes he has tended to repeat himself over the years and I do understand exactly what he's talking about.
No I have not read his book, the God Equation yet, because I just heard about it yesterday, when I posted that. Since then I ordered the book and he was on Colbert last night flogging his book.
I don't need to sell books for the best selling author, but I'm just curious about his thesis and the philosophical implications of his theory of everything, M Theory.
Which is what Hawking called our best candidate for a unified field theory.
I'd just like to see if anybody here has anything to add to that discussion, because it fascinates me personally.
But usually, it's just people trying to diminish what I have to say about different scientists mainly.
Perhaps it's you who doesn't undertand.
Got a better candidate for a theory of everything besides M theory?
But it's not the only thing I post about.
I post a lot about the Mormon abuses of racism, homophobia, sexism and sexual abuse that I know of personally that the Mormon church has covered up and enabled, in at least 10 cases that I have knowledge of.
That's the main reason I post, to stand up to bullies, even ones who yield heavy handed authority over this heavily censored board.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 04/08/2021 10:13PM by schrodingerscat.

That's pretty funny. You think you know more physics than people whose background you don't know.

There are any number of people on this board who understand the topics. You do not, which is not really surprising inasmuch as you only watch Youtube videos.

That's pretty funny you think you know more about what I read than I do?

No.

I can only tell when you fail to understand a subject. Whether that ignorance arises from a failure to read--often likely, I'd think, given how many of your sources are Youtube videos--or an inability to comprehend what you have read is beyond me.

But no, I have no way to identify what you have read. Which is itself telling.

Based upon your contributions I doubt you graduated HS, much less college.

Wow! That’s getting directly to heart of the matter!

What a shocking display of playground justice!

schrodingerscat Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Based upon your contributions I doubt you
> graduated HS, much less college.

That really hurts, S-cat. I mean, if someone who doesn't know the difference between "wield" and "yield," someone who calls women "whores," thinks I didn't graduate from high school, either you or I must be an idiot.

And we all know you aren't an idiot.

Seriously, THAT's your perception of LW?

schrodingerscat Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> That's the main reason I post, to stand up to
> bullies, even ones who yield heavy handed
> authority over this heavily censored board.

You edited your post to add THAT?

And the word isn't "yield," it's "wield." But that's just a typo, right? Because there's no way an expert on quantum mechanics would make such a silly mistake.

Lot's Wife Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> schrodingerscat Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > That's the main reason I post, to stand up to
> > bullies, even ones who yield heavy handed
> > authority over this heavily censored board.
>
> You edited your post to add THAT?
>
> And the word isn't "yield," it's "wield." But
> that's just a typo, right? Because there's no way
> an expert on quantum mechanics would make such a
> silly mistake.

It was a typo. so what?
I didn't say I was an expert on quantum mechanics, but I understand Michio Kaku just fine. It's not complicated. He said I misunderstand physics. I studied physics in college and ever since college. And I'm fascinated by science and what scientists have had to say about cosmology.
I just asked him to name a better unified field of everything than M theory.
He still hasn't answered and neither did you.

> I've never brought up
> this topic before...

This is called splinting hairs. When you say 'this topic' and mean it to encompass just his new book, you are weasel-wording. Post containing Michio Kaku and what he believes constitute about 1/3 of your output here.

. . . How old are you? (I don't mean that literally, now do I?) I kept waiting for the sound of your bedroom door slamming.

Word of advice. Read #1 Bestselling books on Quantum Physics then post about them in your own words.

There's a reason he only quotes the advertisements.

Attention span?

Okay, two reasons.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Somebody HELP!!!
How will knowing this improve my life of help with my recovery?

of course I don't HAVE TO read it

This is a distraction from thinking about mormonism for a while so we have that going for us as far as recovery.

Wait--

Is that the Equation Delusion or the Neo-Equation Delusion?

Tyson Dunn (not logged in) Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> n/t

Dawkins admits in the first chapter of "The God Delusion, A Deeply Religions Non-Believer" that he believes in Einstein's religion, which was Spinoza's religion.
Pretty sure Dawkins would agree with Hawking, that M theory was our best candidate for what Einstein called, "The Mind of god" or "Unified Field Theory of Everything".
And the best explanation for Dark Energy/Matter, which makes up 95% of our Universe, as far as we can tell.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/08/2021 10:19PM by schrodingerscat.

Oh my hecque

Look, just publish a list of your greatest hits, and number them. Then you can save time by just posting the number.

I wonder if Michiofilia is a diagnosable disorder.

> I wonder if Michiofilia is
> a diagnosable disorder.

I think you just made the correct diagnosis.

But after over ten years of watching the patient's activity, I would bet serious coin that it is not treatable.

RfM is now The Cat's long-term care facility. Where else is The Cat going to go in his mission to topple the church, using information that only he has?

That’s it, make it sound like I’m crazy, for referencing a genius cosmologist who developed M theory, to make yourself look less stupid, when you can’t name a better unified field theory.

> That’s it, make it sound like I'm
> crazy, for referencing a genius
> cosmologist who developed M theory,
> to make yourself look less stupid,
> when you can’t name a better unified
> field theory.


It wouldn't have been crazy to reference Dr. Kaku . . . once. Maybe even twice or three times... But incessantly?

As for naming a 'better' unified theory, who will be the judge?

It is obvious, I hope, that we would need a neutral party to make that decision if there was any chance of actually accruing bragging rights. And of course, the loser will cry foul. That is the nature of pulling for the home team.

But how about this: Could you explain to us how being a fan of the 'best Unified Theory in the whole world' would be a reason for granting you a privilege or privileges that the rest of us don't have? Aren't you more like a fan of a sports team who keeps loudly declaring that 'his' team is the best ever, and that 'we' thoroughly spanked the other team in that game that 'we' just won?


You and Michio Kaku: "We're #1!!!" And he has no idea that without you, he is nothing.

You have a hobby horse. Every post is about the same point - your fanboyism for this idée fixe. And rest assured, the occasional discussion about cosmology would not be unappreciated, but with you, it's all the time.

You start threads just to go on and on about the same things. Frankly, I don't know why you settled on this board, perhaps, because CZ has been kind enough not to boot you, but you don't bring anything of value to the table. You've shot your wad, and you don't see it.

As for the bonafides of the board, no one is checking degrees, reading lists, or IQ test results at the door, but there are more than adequate numbers of your interlocutors who are far more knowledgeable than you imagine.


I recently read a very old thread on a forum of high level learners of a specific, difficult foreign language. A non-speaker of that language who styles himself to be an internet polyglot swooped in to inform them they were learning it all wrong, and that he would learn said language in an absurdly short period of time.

The locals to the board encouraged his enthusiasm but explained to him that his Pollyanna view was really misguided, if he thought he would be fluent in his absurdly short goal time. 16 pages of posts followed in which he called out their stupidity, their shortsightedness, their blindness, their ignorance, their lack of appreciation, and so forth.

The thing is, at the end of the short period, despite being in-country and having the advantage of native speakers at his fingertips, he was awful: bad accent, awkward prosody, poor vocabulary - just bad everything. The forum was right - he wasn't fluent - BUT he left declaring himself victorious.


You come across the same way. You appear to think you're the only one who's right, and clearly, you have an exceedingly low opinion of everyone else, which makes it more baffling that you continue to deign to grace us with your presence. Unless, one might infer, you're not welcome elsewhere.

Tyson



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 04/09/2021 12:36PM by Tyson Dunn.

Holy shizz! (I've made a note not to piss you off, Tyson.)

Quick, The Cat, call Tyson some names!!!

I am reluctant to get further into this discussion, except to point out that both Superstring theory and M-Theory are massively complicated. Few who are not dedicated practitioners understand it fully--even among theoretical physicists. I certainly don't, and I doubt very much that anyone on RfM does, except perhaps from very meager and distorted populist accounts. As such, as a layperson, one must be extremely careful of popular books that attempt to explain String Theory. In the first place, they are almost always String theorists themselves (like Kaku) who are unduly committed to String Theory over many years, and are not similarly well versed in its alternatives. Thus, such books rarely provide an objective view of the state of the theory, much less an adequate account of the criticisms of the theory.

In specific response to your points here:

(1) Kaku did not develop M-Theory. Spring Theory was developed by numerous theorists over several decades. M-Theory was initially the brain-child of Ed Witten in trying to unite the five versions of String Theory. Kaku no doubt *is* an expert on such matters, and has made contributions to this effort.

(2) Calling M-Theory "the best" unification theory is absurd. In the first place it is not a complete theory, and is more a conjecture than a theory. In addition, it has not been confirmed by experiment. It is a mathematical theory whose main appeal is its mathematical elegance. Many prominent physicists reject in unequivocally as non-scientific!

(3) There *are* alternative unified field theories; including most famously, loop quantum gravity, and twister theory; which are also currently being studied and developed. (See L. Smolin, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity) No single one of them can be considered the theoretical "best." However, I will grant that String Theory (M-Theory) is no doubt the most popular; which is largely a cultural phenomenon within the scientific community rather than an indication of relative merit.

(4) String Theory, Superstring Theory and M-Theory have been the subject of extensive criticism by people who know it and understand it. See for example, Lee Smolin, The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next (2006); Peter Woit, Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law; Joao Magueijo, Faster Than The Speed of Light:The Story of Scientific Speculation (2003).

Finally, I know enough about theoretical physics to know that M-Theory has nothing whatever to do with God, in any shape or form (e.g. Spinoza's or Einstein's) outside of one's favored and distorted definitions that are clearly adopted in order to sell books.

Kaku didn't develop m theory. We've explained this numerous times.

>> "That’s it, make it sound like I’m crazy"

No one here is making you sound crazy.

CZ is in charge and I fully agree. schrodingerscat contributes little to this group with his off topic redundant posts. If schrodingerscat wishes to discuss recovery issues, he is always welcome. He is not being banned - he should just try to be relevant. I belong to a humanist group that is light years ahead of him intellectually. I am amazed at the groups' knowledge of science in our Sunday discussions. There are real PhDs in the group. I have only a masters degree in engineering so I mostly listen. schrodingerscat would be humbled, if that were possible, by folks who know what they are talking about instead of regurgitating other's works. Oh well...

The irony is that there are people with PhDs in mathematics and physics--college professors and the like--here on RfM. S-Cat constantly tells us that they don't know what they are talking about.

And I only have a Engineering B.S. degree! But then again, I was an AP.

The question I've always had is, when someone has a very important set of initials, like OBE or AP, does that go before or after the academic credential?

--LW, curious about your First World problems

It goes like this. My credentials.....

Mr. Engineer, AP, BS, JTS, RGB, OMG, WTF

My highest degree is also an engineering master's. I stopped short of a PhD (not even ABD), and it was the right decision at the time. I was very clearly in the wrong field and at the wrong school.

I should have dropped engineering as an undergraduate, but I thought I'd need to support my extended family, and engineering offered an obvious path to a high salary. In retrospect, all it did was make for far too many years studying a topic I didn't care about, only to dump it when I got in the career world.

Now that I'm on in years, I hope to go back and get a PhD, but not in engineering, but rather in the field that I love. I'll let you infer which field that is from my posts. I had hoped to apply to graduate schools before the pandemic side-tracked me.

It's not that I need a PhD - I know who I am as a person without it, and I have no descendants to revere my name any more greatly for having obtained one - but I want to complete what I feel I should have done the first time around.

Tyson



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/09/2021 08:00PM by Tyson Dunn.

Anybody with an engineering degree, let alone a master's degree, knows vastly more about S-Cat's topics than he does.

If you don't mind, tell us/me what you want do do a PhD in. I'd love to know.

Instead of actually discuss the topic, Kaku’s thesis almost everybody in this thread resorts to ad hominem attacks on me for bringing up the best selling book on Quantum Physics for philosophical discussion.
Interesting group pathology.

> Instead of actually discussing
> the topic ...

Instead of whining, head on over to https://www.exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,2370852
and discuss things.

But only use your own words...no YouTube links and no C&Pasting other people's commentaries. Just be yourself, using your own feelings.

You still don't know what "ad hominem" means.

And not one of you has mentioned a better candidate for what Einstein called,”The Mind of God”.
I’ll stick with the theory that Hawking said was the best candidate for a theory of everything, aka, the Mind of God Einstein said he wanted to know.

There is no evidence for the concept and the phrase is interpretationally loaded for cognitive bias.

Hawking also stated he didn't think a TOE was possible based on Goeddel's math.

Also, there are strong arguments that m theory is not a TOE in the sense of a GUT.

dogbloggernli Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Hawking also stated he didn't think a TOE was
> possible based on Goeddel's math.

What are the odds that that sentence has any meaning to our illustrious interlocutor?