More Denton: A new book (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, March 10, 2016, 18:30 (2970 days ago) @ dhw

dhw; Your article says: “at the subatomic level it's difficult to identify a single particle that could be called the basic building block of matter. You could say quarks and leptons [an electron is a lepton] are the basic building blocks of matter, if you like.”
> dhw: Similarly, your fellow scientists can believe in strings and multiverses, though you suddenly become sceptical when they come up with such “unknowns”.
> DAVID: Plasmas are knowns!
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> Are you saying we actually know of a "pure plasma of energy"?-Yes. Quark gluon plasmas exist briefly at the LHC for example:-http://press.web.cern.ch/backgrounders/heavy-ion-collisions-quark-gluon-plasma-and-quantum-chromodynamics-"For a few millionths of a second, shortly after the big bang, the universe was filled with an astonishingly hot, dense soup made of all kinds of particles moving at near light speed. This mixture was dominated by quarks - fundamental bits of matter - and by gluons, carriers of the strong force that normally “glue” quarks together into familiar protons and neutrons and other species. In those first evanescent moments of extreme temperature, however, quarks and gluons were bound only weakly, free to move on their own in what's called a quark-gluon plasma.-"In these heavy-ion collisions the hundreds of protons and neutrons in two such nuclei smash into one another at energies of upwards of a few trillion electronvolts each. This forms a miniscule fireball in which everything “melts” into a quark-gluon plasma.-"The fireball instantly cools, and the individual quarks and gluons (collectively called partons) recombine into a blizzard of ordinary matter that speeds away in all directions. The debris contains particles such as pions and kaons, which are made of a quark and an antiquark; protons and neutrons, made of three quarks; and even copious antiprotons and antineutrinos, which may combine to form the nuclei of antiatoms as heavy as helium. .. an early discovery was that the quark-gluon plasma behaves more like a perfect fluid with small viscosity than like a gas, as many researchers had expected." -A brick wall is not a wall until the bricks are made into one. Atoms are matter, pure energy particles must as noted in the quote coalesce into atoms of matter. Energy and matter are bound together, but at extreme levels of heat and energy they can be separated, as in The big Bang! I assume that God is in a pure energy state.-> DAVID: You want God to be matter. Why!?
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>dhw: I don't want any such thing. I called your God's consciousness “disembodied”. On Monday you responded “How do you know God's consciousness is disembodied? I consider is as a fully organized construction”. If you don't think it's disembodied, it must be material. -I wasn't clear. I apologize: I view God as a force of organized energy, a 'consciousness' and being organized it is not disembodied (and is a 'body' or a 'formation'), but not material at the same time because God does not have a material body. Obviously this concept of God is not of this reality, but exists in the quantum layer of reality, remembering the interconnectedness of all quantum sister particles.-> DAVID: Back to the theory that the brain is a receiver of consciousness as a possibility. Consciousness may exist as electromagnetic wave fields, and they are not matter. Magnetic fields are not matter, but magnets are.-> 
> dhw: Once again, my question is whether energy and matter can exist without each other - not whether they can be separated. Your “pure energy” God (magnetic fields)would have to exist independently of matter (magnet) and would then have to produce “de novo” the matter (magnet) that produces energy (magnetic fields). But nobody knows what consciousness is, so we should keep an open mind. -My mind is not closed, but what we know about reality needs a reasonable explanation, and I've given one I accept. I don't expect you to since you don't appear to like supernatural explanations, remembering that whatever created this universe existed prior to this natural reality we have and may well be considered supernatural, i.e., not of this reality.-> DAVID: If you have followed my reasoning, consciousness may be pure energy, and the only matter necessary is the matter that receives the thoughts and feelings and interprets.
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> dhw; I'll accept “may be”, but that still doesn't make it true, and it doesn't make “always been” more logical than “became”.-I don't know how anything can become conscious all by itself, when we recognize that consciousness is so mysterious we have no explanation at all for its existence (Nagel).-> dhw:Clearly, then, you think your God knew all about boredom, so it ties in perfectly with him creating life to relieve his own boredom.-I'm sure God know about all human emotions before we had any. Why you want Him to avoid boredom is beyond me. He had lots to do inventing the fine-tuned universe and running the process of evolution.-> 
> dhw: There was no need for ANY jumps [in evolution]. Yes, teleological, the purpose being survival and/or improvement. You seem to think the word “teleology” is confined to meaning “God created life for the purpose of producing humans”!-That is exactly my thought.