Path: ultra.sonic.net!wiley.napanet.net!nntp.conxion.net!news.exodus.net!uunet!in1.uu.net!199.94.215.18!cam-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!rill.news.pipex.net!pipex!dispatch.news.demon.net!demon!aristos.demon.co.uk!aristos.demon.co.uk!sam From: Sam Dodsworth Newsgroups: alt.books.cs-lewis Subject: Re: Fundamentals -- JB???? Date: Tue, 25 Feb 1997 12:56:43 +0000 Organization: Annexia Free Press Distribution: world Message-ID: References: <01bc1f83$e240b6c0$LocalHost@#metanoi1> <19970221051700.AAA16432@ladder02.news.aol.com> <5ejg7i$ggr@news.acns.nwu.edu> <5ekj55$2gs@btc1.up.net> <5esfud$5np@news.acns.nwu.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: aristos.demon.co.uk X-NNTP-Posting-Host: aristos.demon.co.uk MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Newsreader: Turnpike Version 3.01 <7c0azr3XvpMr4dZzpifF$I+pPf> Lines: 56 Xref: ultra.sonic.net alt.books.cs-lewis:6626 In article <5esfud$5np@news.acns.nwu.edu>, "Joshua W. Burton" writes > >Both quantum mechanics and the relevant part of chaos theory (namely, >Poincare recurrence) were well-understood by the time Lewis published >Miracles. He loses no credit for ignoring chaos, because it was seen >as an uncomfortable oddity even by bright people like Von Neumann in >those days, and it's unlikely he had even an, er, inkling of it. > My knowledge of chaos theory comes only from James Gleik's (sp?) popular book, but I'd got the impression that although the experimental evidence and a lot of the maths was lying around, it wasn't all put together until there were computers to do the calculations. The idea of that sort of sensitivity to initial conditions was counterintuitive enough not to be apparent until people could see the process actually happening. >For quantum mechanics he has no such excuse, as his words make it >plain that he has heard at least the nontechnical story, and decided >to disbelieve it on philosophical grounds. The trouble here is that we need both chaos theory and QM to produce a non-deterministic Naturalism - and Lewis didn't have chaos theory. Lewis' mistake (insofar as it was a mistake) was to build determinism into his definition of Naturalism, failing to consider the possibility of non-deterministic non-Supernaturalist alternatives. >This unwillingness to >accept that scientists actually mean what they are telling you has >been going on with regard to QM for about seventy years now (and is >still alive and well in this group). From where I sit, it smacks of >intellectual laziness: a devout hope on the part of philosophers >that if they persistently avoid learning QM it will obligingly go >away. Although I remember reading in the TLS some years ago a physicist's devout wish that philosophers would realize that there was more to science than QM. I suspect that QM is quite attractive to philosophers because, like Goedel's Theorem, it's very easily turned into something mystical. >Perhaps the ultimate solution lies in secondary education. Or just good popularization. Get people interested and they'll (sometimes) inform themselves. >Anyway, one would think that three generations would at least be long >enough to get past all this nonsense about QM being new and >provisional---even in Lewis's day, that wasn't true. > Sam Dodsworth (sam@aristos.demon.co.uk) "I think there should be more sex and violence on television, not less. Both are powerful catalysts of social change, at a time when change is desperately needed." -J.G. Ballard