Well, God still exists…[:D]
And here comes Mises for the win…
I. The Limitations on Praxeological Concepts
The praxeological categories and concepts are devised for the comprehension of human action. They become self-contradictory and nonsensical if one tries to apply them in dealing with conditions different from those of human life. The naive anthropomorphism of primitive religions is unpalatable to the philosophic mind. However, the endeavors of philosophers to define neatly the attributes of an absolute being, free from all the limitations and frailties of human existence, by the use of praxeological concepts, are no less questionable.
Scholastic philosophers and theologians and likewise Theists and Deists of the Age of Reason conceived an absolute and perfect being, unchangeable, omnipotent, and omniscient, and yet planning and acting, aiming at ends and employing means for the attainment of these ends. But action can only be imputed to a discontented being, and repeated action only to a being who lacks the power to remove his uneasiness once and for all at one stroke. An acting being is discontented and therefore not almighty. If he were contented, he would not act, and if he were almighty, he would have long since radically removed his discontent. For an all-powerful being there is no pressure to choose between various states of uneasiness; he is not under the necessity of acquiescing in the lesser evil.
Omnipotence would mean the power to achieve everything and to enjoy full satisfaction without being restrained by any limitations. But this is incompatible with the very concept of action. For an almighty being the categories of ends and means do not exist. He is above all human comprehension, concepts, and understanding. For the almighty being every “means” renders unlimited services, he can apply every “means” for the attainment of any ends, he can achieve every end without the employment of any means. It is beyond the faculties of the human mind to think the concept of almightiness consistently to its ultimate logical consequences. The paradoxes are insoluble. Has the almighty being the power to achieve something which is immune to his later interference? If he has this power, then there are limits to his might and he is no longer almighty; if he lacks this power, he is by virtue of this fact alone not almighty.
Are omnipotence and omniscience compatible? Omniscience presupposes that all future happenings are already unalterably determined. If there is omniscience, omnipotence is inconceivable. Impotence to change anything in the predetermined course of events would restrict the power of any agent.
Action is a display of potency and control that are limited. It is a manifestation of man who is restrained by the circumscribed powers of his mind, the physiological nature of his body, the vicissitudes of his environment, and the scarcity of the external factors on which his welfare depends. It is vain to refer to the imperfections and weaknesses of human life if one aims at depicting something absolutely perfect. The very idea of absolute perfection is in every way selfcontradictory. The state of absolute perfection must be conceived as complete, final, and not exposed to any change.
Change could only impair its perfection and transform it into a less perfect state; the mere possibility that a change can occur is incompatible with the concept of absolute perfection. But the absence of change-ix., perfect immutability, rigidity and immobility-is tantamount to the absence of life. Life and perfection are incompatible, but so are death and perfection.
The living is not perfect because it is liable to change; the dead is not perfect because it does not live.
The language of living and acting men can form comparatives and superlatives in comparing degrees. But absoluteness is not a degree; it is a limiting notion. The absolute is indeterminable, unthinkable and ineffable. It is a chimerical conception. There are no such things as perfect happiness, perfect men, eternal bliss. Every attempt to describe the conditions of a land of Cockaigne, or the life of the Angels, results in paradoxes. Where there are conditions, there are limitations and not perfection; there are endeavors to conquer obstacles, there are frustration and discontent.
After the philosophers had abandoned the search for the absolute, the utopians took it up. They weave dreams about the perfect state. They do not realize that the state, the social apparatus of compulsion and coercion, is an institution to cope with human imperfection and that its essential function is to inflict punishment upon minorities in order to protect majorities against the detrimental consequences of certain actions. With “perfect” men there would not he any need for compulsion and coercion.
But utopians do not pay heed to human nature and the inalterable conditions of human life. Godwin thought that man might become immortal after the abolition of private property." Charles Fourier babbled about the ocean containing lemonade instead of salt water.20 Marx’s economic system blithely ignored the fact of the scarcity of material factors of production. Trotsky revealed that in the proletarian paradise “the average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.” 27 Nowadays the most popular chimeras are stabilization and security. We will test these catchwords later.
Human Action, Ludwig Von Mises pg 107
Besides the fact that they are also particles at the same time.
I’ve just displayed the limit of human understanding, and how a concept we cannot truly understand is very useful; ergo, there’s no contradiction is using concepts we cannot fathom in theology.
Wrong, you would have to understand the nature of a wave that is also a particle at the same time, which is unintelligable.
Are you seriously denying the existence of photons, and electrons?
- The human mind is limited with respect to what it can understand; ergo, there are some phenomenon in this world that completely defy our logical ability to describe them.
Not when all evidence points the the contrary, when there is no method of describing what the experimental evidence according to those rules, and when wave-particle duality has enabled physicists to explain plenty of other phenomena.
laminustacitus,
In physics and chemistry, wave–particle duality is the concept that all matter and energy exhibits both wave-like and particle-like properties
Wave–particle duality is deeply embedded into the foundations of quantum mechanics, so well that modern practitioners rarely discuss it as such. In the formalism of the theory, all the information about a particle is encoded in its wave function, a complex valued function roughly analogous to the amplitude of a wave at each point in space. This function evolves according to a differential equation (generically called the Schrödinger equation), and this equation gives rise to wave-like phenomena such as interference and diffraction.
The particle-like behavior is most evident due to phenomena associated with measurement in quantum mechanics. Upon measuring the location of the particle, the wave-function will randomly “collapse” to a sharply peaked function at some location, with the likelihood of any particular location equal to the squared amplitude of the wave-function there. The measurement will return a well-defined position, a property traditionally associated with particles.
sourced from wiki.
its a complex story, but not unintelligble
Man cannot fathom a particle being both a particle, and a wave. Surely you can describe the attributes of it, and create a concept of it, if we couldn’t then modern physics could not exist in the form it is now, but in no way can you truly understand what it is.
the wave-packets are not ‘waves-not-particals’ whilst parodixally being ‘particals-not-waves’. they are wave packets that have wave-like and particle-like properties that come to the fore given the context.
you are right that it would be a paradox to have a father who is a motorcar, since fathers are not motorcars and motorcars are not fathers, yet its perfectly possible to have a woman with mother-like and daughter-like properties.
does this help, at all?
Yes. It’s a useful metaphor for the Holy Trinity. Many thanks.
You are unwelcome
Congragulations, you read the wikipedia entry, I would be more impressed if you had actually bothered to cite an actual source - the wiki does not count. How about this:
Once again, even though the concept of wave-particle duality, even though man truly cannot fathom what it even entails, is an extremely useful concept with whose aid quantum physics has become a branch of science with one of the most accurate predictive powers.
Also, Physicists, to do their experiments, treat an electron as either a particle, or a wave depending on the context that they want it, but nevertheless that does not mean that if an electron is treated as a particle in an experiment that it is not a wave as well, rather that the experimentors are merely idealizing the electron as only a particle since the electron has the qualities of a particle.
Terrible analogy, a mother is by definition also a daughter since humans don’t just spontaneously burst into existence; it has absolutely no application to the wave-particle duality phenomenon. I doubt a metaphor of a thing having both grandfather-like, and motorcar-like properties that, in an experiment can suddenly become either a grandfather, or a motorcare, or be idealized as either one to make calculations easier really makes any sense, but that’s what your metaphor would entail.
In fact, my pastor, who has a PhD in astronomy, loves to use wave-particle duality as a metaphor for the Holy Trinity.
“the wave-packets are not ‘waves-not-particals’ whilst parodixally being ‘particals-not-waves’. they are wave packets that have wave-like and particle-like properties that come to the fore given the context.”
According to Feynman, “there is no wave-particle duality. Every time we observe light, it is a particle.” Again, AtF, the ‘wave-like’ properties are just an artifact of quantum spin-rate averages over an extended spatio-temporal region.
Then there’s that “uncertainty principle” too…
Explain blackbody radiation, and the photoelectric effect then.
Without the wave-like features of a photon, then the double-slit experiment remains unexpained.
And so we’re back to Newton’s crepscular theory of light…
You know, using scientific terms to ‘explain’ things without an underlying knowledge of their theory or mechanics is not really making use of science. It’s pseudo-science - faux-science.
And how does this apply to the conersation?
Wrong. You have no idea of that which you speak, poseur. It is a wave which arrives in distinct packets, as the waveform arises from the combined released energy of individual electrons (that’s what photons are–the virtual particles of the energy released as light). You’d know that if you have taken any sort of physics class.
Is that clear enough?
citation.
wave-packets, depending on context, give rise to observed behaviour that one would expect from either particle or wave phenomenon as the case may be, yet in fact physicist would suppose its a wave-packet always, although under context one or the other side of its dual nature is emphasised whilst the other underplayed, for the purpose of simplifying explanations.
“And how does this apply to the conersation?”
I doubt many of us - if any - have the kind of intellectual background to talk about physics in a competent, speculative manner. Very few of us, even lay-enthusiasts of science, have a right to any sort of strong opinion on the physical sciences. Specialists in the various areas don’t agree on these topics, and I doubt most of the semi-literate internetniks who make up most of the population of any board are going to add to the debate.
The beginning of wisdom is to Identify your ignorance.
Yawn, more of this “the mind does not understand the garbage we come up” with nonsense to shield anything in violation of the LNC. So do explain what it is for something to both be and not be something in the same regard, without the obvious cop-out of “the human mind doesn’t comprehend it!”, which to be frank is as good as saying nothing at all. Rather, physicists face difficulty when it comes to interpreting what modern physics entails, and all wave-particule duality involves is that you can have properties common both to a particle and a wave. NOT that it is both a wave and not a wave and a particle and not a particle, so what needs expansion is our ontology and most certainly not the LNC. I’ll dismiss as empty garbage anything that says the LNC needs “revision”. Maybe it both needs it and doesn’t need it. Rubbish. Here’s a nice snippet from a reply to an ignorant review of a book on amazon:
I would say that the attempt to do metaphysics via empirical science is ass-backwards. It probably comes from Postivism/Analytic/Linguistic philosophy and the blanket attacks upon metaphysics in general, especially ontology. Or, relatedly, the fact that most scientists are know-nothing government money-whores who, like the rest of the academics, want to spend cash on a hobby-horse and attack anyone or anything which seems to cut into its ‘territory’. I can not count how many times I have heard a physical science/engineering student attack primary philosophy while being totally oblivious to the fact that he had reduced his own sentence to arbitrary nonsense following his own premises.
People are stupid, and highly compartmentalized.