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How Did Matter Come into Being?
- Thread starter MendotoManteo
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Milk and Cookies
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My reply attempts to make no assertion as to what "religion is basically about" and the role religions may have played in the foundations of different civilizations. In our context here, the point is that early religions have repeatedly made existential claims about reality. And often those claims share similarities across people groups and time.
Turns out the track record for religions in explaining reality is atrocious. No, the sun is not actually the Hindu god Surya being pulled across the sky in a chariot by seven horses. The fact that many religions have explanations about reality that are similar to other cultures adds zero weight to whether those claims are justified. If that fact comes across as sniffy then that's a problem for those holding onto bronze age beliefs, not science itself.
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As opposed to the sniffy sense of arrogance you frequently exhibit on the topic?
I'd guess that a religious studies professor finds it tiresome when self-styled secular materialists conclude that knowing the elements on the periodic table somehow gives them some special window unto capital-r reality. Every one, I'd venture, is hitting their marks and delivering their lines in a social script that absolutely supersedes our purchase on rationality.
Milk and Cookies
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Do YOU think the sun is a supernatural being in a chariot being pulled by seven horses? I don't see anyone on the science side claiming certainty, but when it comes to providing the best explanations for reality you're going to have a lot of work to convince most people bosides are pulling similar weight.
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I apologize if I come across that way...it's not my intention.
But it does get tiresome for me to hear people define religion as basically a form of science based on trying to understand things - and it's much more complex than that - and then to disparage religion based on that starting point.
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An interesting point that comes closer to the traditional worldview than modern materialist reductionism...
"For more than a century, physics has been built on two great theories. Einstein's general relativity explains gravity as the bending of space and time.
Quantum mechanics governs the world of particles and fields. Both work brilliantly in their own domains. But put them together and contradictions appear—especially when it comes to black holes, dark matter, dark energy and the origins of the cosmos.
My colleagues and I have been exploring a new way to bridge that divide. The idea is to treat information—not matter, not energy, not even spacetime itself—as the most fundamental ingredient of reality. We call this framework the quantum memory matrix (QMM)."
phys.org
"For more than a century, physics has been built on two great theories. Einstein's general relativity explains gravity as the bending of space and time.
Quantum mechanics governs the world of particles and fields. Both work brilliantly in their own domains. But put them together and contradictions appear—especially when it comes to black holes, dark matter, dark energy and the origins of the cosmos.
My colleagues and I have been exploring a new way to bridge that divide. The idea is to treat information—not matter, not energy, not even spacetime itself—as the most fundamental ingredient of reality. We call this framework the quantum memory matrix (QMM)."
Information could be a fundamental part of the universe, and may explain dark energy and dark matter
For more than a century, physics has been built on two great theories. Einstein's general relativity explains gravity as the bending of space and time.
Not my point. My point is that religion and science on the level of humans have absolutely no fucking clue about the universe or our place in any sort of universal hierarchy. Scientists do their best by ,conventionally, accepting that everything is as they know it as best they can. Religions believe that they know where they belong and were already given all the rules. Of course, this is an ultra simplistic approach but, literally anything we could comprehend would be when it comes to who and what we are.
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Sounds good. But these physicists who are working on QMM are not working in the spiritual domain but the material. Where does 'the spiritual' come in to play here?An interesting point that comes closer to the traditional worldview than modern materialist reductionism...
"For more than a century, physics has been built on two great theories. Einstein's general relativity explains gravity as the bending of space and time.
Quantum mechanics governs the world of particles and fields. Both work brilliantly in their own domains. But put them together and contradictions appear—especially when it comes to black holes, dark matter, dark energy and the origins of the cosmos.
My colleagues and I have been exploring a new way to bridge that divide. The idea is to treat information—not matter, not energy, not even spacetime itself—as the most fundamental ingredient of reality. We call this framework the quantum memory matrix (QMM)."
Information could be a fundamental part of the universe, and may explain dark energy and dark matter
For more than a century, physics has been built on two great theories. Einstein's general relativity explains gravity as the bending of space and time.
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Well that's exactly my point...there's a lot more to religion than just "knowing where they belong" and being given "rules"
The very terms your using to characterize religion are the really one-sided and oversimplified view I was alluding to.
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I don't know that it does...but giving the fundamental foundation of the material universe as something other than "matter" or "energy" is a lot closer to the traditional worldview. Not the same, clearly, but they have more in common with each other than does the view that everything is ultimately either matter or energy (or, as the article speculates, even spacetime itself).
Of course I don't. But it is anachronistic to regard the history of religion as the history of a pseudo-science. Religion is, I'd surmise, an attempt to make sense of how the world works in a way that does not directly depend on knowing the exact constituents of the sun. You're clearly not religious--I am, in fact, an atheist--but our status as such does not somehow exempt us from similar efforts. Sure, science contributes to those efforts and so too does the history of religious thought. For instance, and whether they like it or not, every filthy fucking liberal on this board has likely bathed their brain juices (I call it 'jesus fluid') in the social gospel of early 20th century Protestantism. Even scientists found motivation for their humanitarian efforts in what amounts to a latent Christian postmillenialism without Jesus.
Remember who controlled all the institutes of learning in Europe for 1600 years and most thereafter. Divesting scholarship of that as motivation with the obvious inherent biases is a lot tougher than being motivated by them. Of course, many of them are well founded ideas. Knowledge is still knowledge and progress is still progress. The blinders of religion hurt both.
Lol, the idea of progress is thoroughly religious.
Close. The direction of progress has always been religious, much to its detriment.
Lol, close alright. Our idea of progress got its start, at the very least, as a secularized version of Christian salvation history: life moves toward something better just as creation moves from despoliation & disaster towards its eventual redemption as a new, better creation.
When the Enlightenment fuckers came up with this idea of progress, it prioritized free reason and autonomy as the means for a) resembling God and b) effecting this movement towards something better.
ETA: I mean, secular ideas of progress have got a telos staring you right in the face. When Francis Fukayama wrote The End of History after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he was effectively describing the culmination of a liberal-secular salvation history. And the problem, as he understood it, was that there would be scant opportunity for thumos (for glory & achievement) in what was, effectively, a liberal this-worldly heaven.
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stankeylegjones
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Lenny Susskind has been doing some good work related to this, going back to the early years of the holographic principle. Very interesting for sure.An interesting point that comes closer to the traditional worldview than modern materialist reductionism...
"For more than a century, physics has been built on two great theories. Einstein's general relativity explains gravity as the bending of space and time.
Quantum mechanics governs the world of particles and fields. Both work brilliantly in their own domains. But put them together and contradictions appear—especially when it comes to black holes, dark matter, dark energy and the origins of the cosmos.
My colleagues and I have been exploring a new way to bridge that divide. The idea is to treat information—not matter, not energy, not even spacetime itself—as the most fundamental ingredient of reality. We call this framework the quantum memory matrix (QMM)."
Information could be a fundamental part of the universe, and may explain dark energy and dark matter
For more than a century, physics has been built on two great theories. Einstein's general relativity explains gravity as the bending of space and time.
I've only heard the basics of Penrose's conformal cyclic cosmology theory, seems interesting.
Milk and Cookies
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That's great. You should raise some of these good points in a thread about motivations for humanitarian efforts or bathing juices for brains.
Again, I don't think anyone here is trying to summarize the history of religion. Instead in a more narrower sense in this particular thread the OP and early posters are asking unanswered ontological questions about the observable universe and the best way we can go about answering those questions. Religion does not have anything worthwhile to contribute in this area anymore -- if it ever did. Pointing that out bluntly may rub a few people the wrong way, but I think its the truth. Science is by far the better method for advancing our understanding of the observable universe, which is what this thread was about. How can religion have anything to say about QFT? It can't. And I'm actively trying not to be close minded. If religion does have something to say about answering these types of questions I'm all ears to understand how.
I 100% agree that religion has nothing to say about quantum field theory.
superrific
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This theory reminds me of luminiferous aether. It reifies the contradictions of our theories as properties of the universe. Couldn't explain the motion of Mercury? Wave propagation through space? Cool, just hypothesize that the universe fundamentally is of a nature that those problems go away. And of course, it used a concept that scientists at the time were very much interested in.
So too with this quantum memory matrix. Can't explain unitarity? Embed it into the structure of the universe, as a concept we are very familiar with these days: information.
I mean, maybe it's a good theory. It just seems convenient and reminds me of a theory that signals the need for a paradigm shift, rather than a paradigm shift itself