I mentioned some things to you when I got to see you the previous month, but as you are looking for thought intensive comments ( as per Jimi's post ) I thought id take another look, with my thinking cap at full throttle.
I largely agree with many if not most of your premises. So many of my comments are attempts to polish or refine certain points you have made.
I agree with the sentiment if not the wording of "internal contradictions/inconsistencies" in refrence to Logic. It is true that Logic fails at producing an arrow to the truth, however the idea has been growing in my mind for some time, that we can not expect it to in the first place, as it was never its job to. Logic is consistent (and largely internally so), however it is incomplete in assertaining the truth. [ The wording here is dilliberate to bring it in line with Godel's incompleteness theorem and to avoid the problems of claiming that the rules of validity are in and of themselves invalid, for such a thing is treaturous. ] The deffinition of soundness itself illustrates Logic is lacking in proving "truth" because it requires external verification of Axioms outside of symbolic logic's system.
If im not mistaken the challenge the materialist would raise to the anti entropic nature of the human race's existence ( or coming into existence ), is that minor variations in random distribution are expected to produce rare occurrences of order, which are still insignificant in the cosmic scale. And that the cosmos is headed in the general direction of entropy.
Although if what the quantum theorist say is true (That the universe has irreducible randomness at a quantum level) then I have a hard time not picturing small pockets of heat-death particulate clumping up from the rest of heat death due to random variations ruining the uniform distribution of matter. And so I can not picture the end of "structure" and "meaningful" energy, which is supposed to be the result of heat death. But that is neither here nor their to your argument now.
In some googling I did a while back I read on a physicist or two who were arguing that chaos and order are simply two aspects of the same phenomena and that most of our understanding of these topics is biased towards one being able to supersede the other, when neither was the case. And I think such things are highly relevant to what you are talking about here.. [ Although I will have to look for the names of these guys again as I can not seem to find them quickly tonight. ]
I think your analogy of the number line and Heisenberg is very compelling. I just wonder if irreducible randomness within the number line is equatible with Chaos. It SEEMS to me that they are equal or close to equal, but id want to do more reading before I banked on it.
I would also caution your usage of consistency, soundness and validity in your second to last paragraph. I believe I know what you mean but these words do not "fit" the usage of how they are used in logic. If an argument is sound then it's consistency is not skewed in logic, etc etc. But you are correct. Logic is shown time and time again as fundamentally lacking the ability to produce "Truth" of its own accord, it requires some human experience, some bit of subjective human knowledge for varification. A very good example [ Also proved by Turing ] is the halting problem. It is a proof which shows that no finite program or algorithm can be made to test to see if other finite programs or algorithms come to an end or not. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem Which arguably is something human beings seem to be capable of.
Yeah I did read it :-p Which is why I said it is arguable. There exists a large class of halting problem casses in which human beings can conclude the outcome and that pure algorithms seem uncapable of. The limiting factor of the case the wikipedia sites is time. Their exists halting-problems which humans have yet to predict the final outcome on, because they rely on algorithms that may be unsolvable, but have not been proven so yet. So it may just be a factor of time.
I largely agree with many if not most of your premises. So many of my comments are attempts to polish or refine certain points you have made.
I agree with the sentiment if not the wording of "internal contradictions/inconsistencies" in refrence to Logic. It is true that Logic fails at producing an arrow to the truth, however the idea has been growing in my mind for some time, that we can not expect it to in the first place, as it was never its job to. Logic is consistent (and largely internally so), however it is incomplete in assertaining the truth. [ The wording here is dilliberate to bring it in line with Godel's incompleteness theorem and to avoid the problems of claiming that the rules of validity are in and of themselves invalid, for such a thing is treaturous. ] The deffinition of soundness itself illustrates Logic is lacking in proving "truth" because it requires external verification of Axioms outside of symbolic logic's system.
If im not mistaken the challenge the materialist would raise to the anti entropic nature of the human race's existence ( or coming into existence ), is that minor variations in random distribution are expected to produce rare occurrences of order, which are still insignificant in the cosmic scale. And that the cosmos is headed in the general direction of entropy.
Although if what the quantum theorist say is true (That the universe has irreducible randomness at a quantum level) then I have a hard time not picturing small pockets of heat-death particulate clumping up from the rest of heat death due to random variations ruining the uniform distribution of matter. And so I can not picture the end of "structure" and "meaningful" energy, which is supposed to be the result of heat death. But that is neither here nor their to your argument now.
In some googling I did a while back I read on a physicist or two who were arguing that chaos and order are simply two aspects of the same phenomena and that most of our understanding of these topics is biased towards one being able to supersede the other, when neither was the case. And I think such things are highly relevant to what you are talking about here.. [ Although I will have to look for the names of these guys again as I can not seem to find them quickly tonight. ]
I think your analogy of the number line and Heisenberg is very compelling. I just wonder if irreducible randomness within the number line is equatible with Chaos. It SEEMS to me that they are equal or close to equal, but id want to do more reading before I banked on it.
I would also caution your usage of consistency, soundness and validity in your second to last paragraph. I believe I know what you mean but these words do not "fit" the usage of how they are used in logic. If an argument is sound then it's consistency is not skewed in logic, etc etc. But you are correct. Logic is shown time and time again as fundamentally lacking the ability to produce "Truth" of its own accord, it requires some human experience, some bit of subjective human knowledge for varification. A very good example [ Also proved by Turing ] is the halting problem. It is a proof which shows that no finite program or algorithm can be made to test to see if other finite programs or algorithms come to an end or not. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem Which arguably is something human beings seem to be capable of.
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