SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the will-this-help-me-win-the-lottery? dept.
A team in Australia turned thought experiment into lab reality by using lasers. Their subject matter was not a photon but a helium atom. The lasers they used served as a pair of grates, one before the other, with the second grate randomly dropped in.
What they found is weirder than anything seen to date: Every time the two grates were in place, the helium atom passed through, on many paths in many forms, just like a wave. But whenever the second grate was not present, the atom invariably passed through the first grate like a particle. The fascinating part was, the second grate's very existence in the path was random. And what's more, it hadn't happened yet.
In other words, it was as if the helium particle "knew" whether there would be a second grate at the time it passed through the first.
Also covered at: phys.org. An abstract is available; full report is pay-walled. The original news article is at Australian National University
Original Submission
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2015, @02:44PM
Exactly. God created a static but very complex universe. We are mere bugs in intellectual comparison. To us, it seems dynamic and unpredictable at the edge of our limited understanding. To Him, it is like a simple algebraic formula. He knows all the possible inputs and their corresponding outputs. The only variable in the equation is Mankind. This is how and why I believe in predetermination and free-will at the same time. He knows every possible choice we can make and the outcome of those choices. Its all been iterated in His mind...and the equation was designed to always output, sooner or later, the answer He desires. 42, maybe? Who among us can truly know? Our free-will determines the route. There are many routes but only two destinations: Renewal and Destruction.
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Thursday June 11 2015, @02:53PM
I think I'm having a Poe's Law moment. Are you that guy from Time Cube?
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2015, @03:00PM
I think Christianity (depending on denomination) teaches that while the future is predetermined we still have free will. The way I heard it taught is that just because we have no control of our past doesn't negate the fact that we have/had free will to do what we do/did. We're still responsible for what we did. The future is simply the past of a more distant determined future. God already knows the future because he knows how we will act under all possible conditions, he knows what future conditions will come to pass, but this doesn't change the fact that it is we that voluntarily chose/choose how we wish to act under these conditions. I believe the doctrine is called divine providence.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by FreeUser on Thursday June 11 2015, @03:31PM
I think Christianity (depending on denomination) teaches that while the future is predetermined we still have free will.
Like nearly all religious doctrine, it's full of doublespeak and riddled with cognitive dissonance designed to force a believer into accepting two sides of a contradiction at the same time and thus undermining their ability to think (or argue against the point) clearly (or sometimes at all).
What they're really saying boils down to is:
"Your fate is predetermined. You have absolutely no control over it, but we're going to tell you that you do, so you're consumed with guilt, and we're going blame you for everything you have no control over anyway, so you better throw yourself on our (deity's) mercy and maybe, just maybe, you won't burn in hell forever, but you probably will, because god loves you!"
One of the classic ways to brainwash, disrupt, or otherwise attack a person's ability to reason is to try and force them to believe two contradictory things at the same time. What is interesting is, depending on the level of emotional investment, the lengths to which people will go to turn themselves into intellectual pretzels to do just that.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy, a Novel
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2015, @03:43PM
I love the 'intellectual pretzel' analogy!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2015, @04:18PM
Like nearly all religious doctrine, it's full of doublespeak and riddled with cognitive dissonance designed to force a believer into accepting two sides of a contradiction at the same time and thus undermining their ability to think (or argue against the point) clearly (or sometimes at all).
And what makes you so confident that everything fits nicely and neatly into your view? This universe does seem to have its fair share of "two sides of contradiction at the same time".
So just because you believe the "free will vs knowing the future stuff" is contradictory doesn't mean that you are right.
The apparent results of this experiment is more data indicating that things are not all that simple. If you believe in the scientific method, you should be willing to challenge your beliefs given new data. Perhaps the experimenters made a mistake or they misinterpreted the results, so I'd wait till it's confirmed by others.
But so far, this universe isn't so "neatly simple", thus if it really has a Creator, it would be really stupid to assume that the Creator is as simple as many of those silly philosophers/logicians like to assume[1].
[1] A lot of what they do is as stupid as the Ghosts in Pacman assuming the Creator(s) of the Pacman game are as simple or even simpler than the game itself. And using the Pacman game logic to prove the nonexistence of a Creator of the Pacman game is even stupider.
Arguments that the Creator if he does actually exist doesn't really care that much about those in the game, do seem a fair bit more tenable.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2015, @04:34PM
That's a Deist argument, not a Christian one. I hate how Christian apologists constantly make Deist arguments and then switcheroo in ol' Yahweh when they think no one's looking. It's dishonest as hell and if there *were* a good and just God that took realtime interest in human affairs those people would burst into flames at the podium when they did it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2015, @06:23PM
tldr; "even if a creator exists, the evidence is that he doesn't really care that much or he's an asshole" angle works better vs Christianity than the "contradiction" angle.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Thursday June 11 2015, @07:38PM
tldr; "even if a creator exists, the evidence is that he doesn't really care that much or he's an asshole"
I think you're on to something...
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2015, @06:45PM
So just because you believe the "free will vs knowing the future stuff" is contradictory doesn't mean that you are right.
If you can know the future, that means it is pre-determined, if it is pre-determined you cannot have free will to make choices. If you wish to argue otherwise you are trying to define "free will" to mean something other than what it does. It really is that simple.
Personally I don't believe in free will, as we are in essence just incredibly complicated machines. If you believe we can have free will you must logically believe a single die can have free will over which number it will land on when you throw it. You might try to claim we are different, but other than in terms of complexity, how are we? At what point on the evolutionary tree did we acquire free will?
Now whether the universe is deterministic or not is a different question. As although a deterministic universe prevents free will, the universe being non-deterministic doesn't mean we can or do have free will. And we don't know how the universe works well enough at a fundamental level to know whether or not the universe is deterministic.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by curunir_wolf on Thursday June 11 2015, @04:49PM
Spirituality has little to do with the physical world. Like quantum mechanics, it seems like paradox when viewed logically. But logic fails to convey the universal truths in the unseen. Your brain cannot even understand your brain - only a scaled down model of it. Likewise the ephemeral interconnections of all matter and energy. So - it is taught in paradoxes to the uninitiated, paradoxes that your mind cannot reconcile, like an Escher painting, until you give up on recording and analyzing your observations, and instead let the experience flow through you.
It is the pinnacle of difficulty to impart a personal viewpoint of something that cannot be explained to another person through our crude symbolic language. But there are techniques that can lead others to enlightenment. Most of them use paradoxical lessons.
I am a crackpot
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2015, @05:24PM
Your signature never was so appropriate than right now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 12 2015, @04:29AM
>But logic fails to convey the universal truths in the unseen.
*Some* of them.
>Your brain cannot even understand your brain - only a scaled down model of it.
Oh I think we're making great strides [newscientist.com] in that direction.
>it is taught in paradoxes to the uninitiated, paradoxes that your mind cannot reconcile
To tread the sharp edge of a sword,
To run on smooth-frozen ice,
One needs no footsteps to follow.
Walk over the cliffs with hands free.
I see no paradox here. Nor anything to reconcile. Seems rather clear cut.
>It is the pinnacle of difficulty to impart a personal viewpoint of something
>that cannot be explained to another person through our crude symbolic language.
Difficult? yes. I take issue with "crude" though. The Blue Cliffs are most beautiful no?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 13 2015, @04:12AM
Who the fuck modded this up? Mod this motherfucker down! And you lot laugh at Kansas City School Board? It's you fucktards that keep pseudoscience quacks in business..
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2015, @10:01PM
One of my friends once told me what amounts to "I don't know how magnets work, therefore as a species we don't know how magnets work, therefore God."