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Left to their own devices while Rob’s away, Messrs. Lileks and Robinson chat with Peter Schweizer, best-selling author of Red Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win. They discuss the malfeasant Biden family and the cronies who give them cover. Then David Berlinksi stops by to muse on the vast everything that the scientific community promises to explain; and why he thinks they haven’t delivered. (Read all about it in his newly released Science After Babel.)
Peter and James also discuss the Titan submersible and the conversations, such as they are, that have surrounded it and the souls that were on board.
Song of the week:
- Sound this week is Rep. Darin LaHood (R, IL-18) talking about Hunter Biden on The Ingrahm Angle last night on FNC.
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The New York Times is a subscription model. Their subscribers pay to get lied to, misinformed, and dis-informed. IMO, this is a disaster for The Republic.
Add to that all the damage being done by “the eunuchs of justice”* at DOJ.
*hat tip to Leon Trotsky
David Berlinski leaves us hanging, and doesn’t really tell us anything. Amazing how someone so erudite can converse so meaninglessly.
David, tell us, what is consciousness? Yes, Berkeley says to be is to be perceived. Who does the perceiving? Berkeley didn’t discard the hypothesis of Deity. What is perception? What is awareness? Whence comes consciousness?
Daniel Dennett tries to explain it and admits that he doesn’t succeed. You don’t even try to explain it. You imply that science can’t explain it. Science could give us some insight, but seems to purposely ignore its own implications. Schrodinger told us that consciousness collapses the wave equation, then seemed to retreat into a sort of Vedantic pan psychism. Kind of like Berkeley. But Schrodinger’s cat is out of the bag, or the box as the case may be. Consciousness interacts with the physical world. So it cannot be that everything is consciousness only. That is, something immaterial. If consciousness directly interacts with the physical world, it must be something physical. Right?
David Gelernter has suggested the possibility of a field as yet unrecognized. A Consciousness Field. A field under whose influence the human brain has developed, rightly akin to how the vertebrate eye developed under the influence of an electromagnetic field. With a fundamental particle. Perhaps a “cogniton”? Probably of near zero mass. That field may be ubiquitous in the Universe. So Consciousness may be a fundamental attribute of the Cosmos. What say you?
Penrose and Hameroff have described the human nervous system as a plasma (continuous via gap junctions between nerves), that is a high temperature superconducting quantum computational system. It would have to be to explain something like savantism.
And such a nervous system would potentially interact with a consciousness field to extend perception beyond ones five senses. Hence the phenomenon of remote viewing. Or clairvoyance. Or Poincare’ type inspiration. Perhaps our ability to perceive is nonlocal. In both space and time. Hence Isaiah? Or the Prophets?
You are right that Evolution does not succeed in explaining the biological world. 3 billion years do not come close to enough to produce the biosphere via random mutation and natural selection. So there must be something more going on. Something related to quantum systems? Or, as Piaget suggested, an “Organizing Function”? Perhaps, in that felicitous phrase in Job, “..like clay under the seal.” And perhaps there is a consciousness that indeed “…sustains the Universe by the Word of His power.” It seems to me that biblical descriptions resonate far more accurately with the nature of the world than does Science.
Indeed, it would seem irrational to postulate anything other than a deity to explain creation. While we investigate the World and the Cosmos. Yet you seem to have an aversion to such an hypothesis. Why?
Postulating “a deity to explain creation” would seem to use something more complex to explain something less complex.
It’s like that old “Superman” episode in which the economy is threatened by an invention that converts another metal into gold. Except the other metal turns out to be platinum, which is twice as expensive as gold.
Seems to me, even assuming a deity created everything around us, it would be even less likely that said deity has any direct/”personal” interest in US.
Or, perhaps, interested in us, and interested as well in the other 100 quadrillion intelligent species in the observable universe.
That certainly contradicts several millennia of religious teachings. A deity of randomness is an odd thing. But man has also argued for millennia the concepts of predestination, free will, divine intervention, etc..
Is there a manifest destiny? Has God truly written every chapter already? That must be boring – for Him.
Well, supposedly, even God doesn’t know what we’re going to do next.
Brian Green and Jonathan Edwards agree: There is no free will.