onsdag 30 december 2009

Zoroastrianism and Physics (was: The metaphysics of contingency)

Dear Dino and Tomash

You are both right!!!
Our focus is on Zoroastrian ethics, but it certainly helps when a teaching from 3,700 years ago is perfectly compatible with modern science.
The genius of Zarathushtra and the early Mazdayasni of course being that they were determined to speak about the human condition and ignore guesswork on scientific matters, the big mistake of the Abrahamic faiths. Because once you start rambling fantasies to your audience rather than deal with reality, you end up with a false moralism instead of a true ethos.
The facts of life are interesting and endlessly fascinating enough.
And if anything, modern science makes us humble towards existence. The Universe is amazingly complex and fascinating! We don't even know what particles or fields (or matter) are, we just know that those things are what our perceptions produce when observing the inner workings of our reality. And with the search for a Higgs boson at CERN, Physics has now started to take the next big thing seriously: Spacetime itself. The founding phenomenon of our reality that the early Mazdayasni called Zurvan.

Ushta
Alexander

2009/12/30 Special Kain

Dear Tomash

The point here is that every action causes a reaction. So if anyone could travel back in time and make a different choice 300 years ago, our present reality would be different only insofar as that somebody had a stronger influence on his fake contemporaries than someone else. Perhaps if he went on to became a politician 300 years ago and raise quite modern questions and make choices that were usually unheard of 300 years ago, our world would look a little differently.
Probabilism simply means that nothing is 100% fixed. So the physical laws that we take for granted must have come into being at one point in time, they must have evolved into the present laws that influence our existence. Just apply evolutionism even to the most solid-as-a-rock objects in our world! Nothing remains unscathed.
Thirdly, all will is free, but not unconditionally so. Free will only means that our decisions are fundamentally contingent. In this sense all will is conditional and free at the same time, simply because conditional doesn't mean determined. Will isn't random, but blind desire is. Please don't forget that there are awareness and self-control.

Ushta, Dino

--- Tomash schrieb am Mi, 30.12.2009:

Von: Tomash
Betreff: [Ushta] Re: Charles S. Peirce on determinism (was: The metaphysics of contingency)
An: Ushta@yahoogroups.com
Datum: Mittwoch, 30. Dezember 2009, 1:39

I believe consistency is true.

I'll draw an example from a Sci-Fi story I have been creating.
Imagine a man who has the ability to time travel and does not age (his body in a way is "frozen in time" but his mind has full control over it), he exists beyond our world sort of speak. When he zaps himself into a certain point in time and spends a period if time there, like let's 1000 years, his presence and actions there have an effect on the world there. But then when he zaps into another time period, just for an infinitely small period of time he is absent from this world, when he returns the world would exist as if he never did exist. In other words, the world has recalibrated itself to accommodate the fact that he never existed since the world could not detect his presence, just for an infinitely small period of time. Imagine the man is from the future, so he knows the past of his time. When he went into the past and changed it he also change the period of his own time, so the past he knew from his own time is different then the one that he had an effect on. But when the world recalibrates itself, the past he knew would again be true. If he would return to his own time by zapping himself there from the past, nothing would have changed in his own time.

There are many interpretations if quantum mechanics, some of which try to explain whether or not quantum mechanics are deterministic. It seems many much smarter and wiser than be cannot agree on this subject and so I won't bother with it until I'm able to understand even its basis.

To me it is personally it is of no practical importance what is true in this case. I'm more concerned with ethics and the idea we have no free will does not terrify me the slightest, even if I believed this to be true.

I personally do not understand of which probabilism you speak of. As far as I read there are several interpretation of probability and I'm sorry to say my English is not good enough yet to try and understand them all. My understanding of probability is naive for now. Even though I love philosophy and can call myself an amateur philosopher, my way of explaining things is no different than that of the ancient philosophers and I have almost no knowledge of post-medieval philosophy nor am I interested in it that much. I understand it may seem as a handicap of sorts, but it does not bother me.

Pozdrav,
Tomash

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