Why are people so cruel to me?

Post Reply New Topic

http://atheistforums.com/index.php?topi ... 008121#new

Why are the they so cruel? What did I do wrong?

I can't get the answer from them. Now I am asking in a completely different place, on WrongPlanet, to ask what on Earth I am doing wrong!! !

I am going to try and explain because I don't know you and would like to give you a benefit of the doubt:

You can't go into forums outside the autistic community and expect not to be bullied when you don't conform. They weren't even being cruel, they were probably embarrassed on your behalf for making an idiot of yourself with your assertions. You cannot (in all seriousness and without a trace of irony) challenge scientific theory without having pre-requisite scientific knowledge.

Basically, what you did is the equivalent of a 4 year old bursting into his parent's business meeting and declaring that he is now the boss.

Now, I do stuff like this all the time, but I do it wide awake and fully aware of what is and might be coming my way. I don't expect agreement and I don't even expect to be treated in a civil manner - that's how the society works. If you are acting and speaking in a non conformist way, you are the outsider and outsiders are always dealt with suspicion, mistrust and sometimes aggression.

You challenge someone's status quo, you have to be prepared to defend not just your view, but yourself.

Thank you.

This just re-asserts my thesis that the entire world is, indeed, cruel.

I just wrote that no, the world isn't cruel, it's mostly indifferent, but then I looked up the definition of cruelty and it says 'Cruelty is indifference to suffering, and even pleasure in inflicting it.' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruelty Up till now I aalways assumed cruelty is was inflicting suffering on purpose to derive pleasure from someone else experiencing pain.

Before you get too sad, consider how what you are doing and saying may look to others as you not caring about their suffering. Life is complicated, we all get by as best we can.

It is unfortunate that so few people enjoy pure intellectual what-ifs. I see you posted on an atheist forum, it's easy for us to not consider our context. This forum would be cruel to anyone who held an opinion or wanted to argue on conjectures not already agreed upon. The ultimate irony is that said forum was created for ideas, yet, is really just to reinforce existing beliefs.

Yes, it is cruel. I would have loved to read your OP, I am fascinated by QM.

Thank you. Luckily though, I did keep a copy on my Hard Drive, before posting it online.

Here it is:



It is sort of like how the lunar cycle influence human sleep, not because of direct influence, but because of biological rythm that just happened to be at the same time as the lunar phases.
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abs ... %2900754-9
- just applied to Quantum Mechanics.

Please don't ridicule me.

Last edited by thinkinginpictures on 10 Apr 2014, 7:56 am, edited 1 time in total.

It doesn't matter one bit what other people think and say about such things.

Think for yourself.

Erm.

Predestination tends to imply the opposite of atheism, that we're being controlled by some force outside ourselves.
Why would you post something like that on an atheism forum and expect not to be ridiculed?

Predestination does not neccessarily imply intelligent beings knowing what will happen to us.
That was not the intention of my post.

It could as well be a non-intelligent "just is"-force that has no intentions whatsoever.
Which was the intention of my post.

If people believe we have free will, they will have to prove it.
So far, traditional physics/mechanics tells us that we have no free will. Life runs its course.
Everything is merely a result of causation-chains.

Last edited by thinkinginpictures on 10 Apr 2014, 9:08 am, edited 1 time in total.

Fascinating. It goes right along with the theory that everything that has happened, is happening, will happen all at once. The particle was ALREADY decided, your consciousness of your action is what brought it into reality, observed now rather than potential.

The particle would have both up and down, at once, then as soon as someone intervened (ie. consciousness) the decision, was already made because it already happened!!

Hopefully I'm not getting it wrong.

So, yes, everything is predetermined, because in ABSOLUTE reality, it has already happened and you just get to watch the show!!

There may be entanglement in relative reality, that's the one of the only ways we have of describing the indescribable.

Well, that is probably another way of describing it.

deleted

I didn't get what the OP's post is about so I can't even say why people reacted the way they did.

People who are arrogantly convinced that they have a monopoly on truth always reject anyone whose ideas they perceive as not conforming to their dogma.

Atheism is a religion, like any other. It is founded on the unprovable belief that there is not and can be no consciousness or intelligence, therefore no intent, underlying the existence of material reality. Anything that even hints that physical reality is other than absolutely real, yet an absolute accident, is heresy.

In fact, as philosophers have pointed out for ages, other than one's own individual consciousness, there is no absolute certainty of anything (and I would contend, not even any certainty of that). Everything you experience, including the existence of others, may only be an extremely vivid, elaborate fantasy, and even the individual you think of as yourself could be just another fictional character in that dream.

Skeptical agnosticism is the only honest viewpoint one can assume. One can accept whatever one likes as reality, for the sake of convenience, but ultimately, for all you can ever know, you may be living in The Matrix.

First, I said nothing about intelligent beings, you inferred that I think that atheists only reject the concept of gods.
Knowing many atheists in my time, I can tell you this is not the case.
They generally reject the idea of any outside force controlling themselves and the universe, intelligent or not.
Which is what I was saying.

Moreover, Newtonian Physics and the idea of the cause & effect based 'Clockwork Universe' were discarded by physicists in the first part of the 20th century with the advent of relativity & quantum physics as inaccurate representations of what was actually going on, even if they tended to mostly hold true if applied within certain contraints.

Just because cultural perceptions have been slow to change in terms of a general way of looking at the world does not mean that science has not moved on and proven otherwise.
In fact, my focus in college was on applying modern scientific theory to philosophy in an attempt to reconcile the two because as it turns out there are very few modern philosophers who have not dismissed the implications of modern physics on their philosophical constructs.
Clearly you're among them.

I really didn't want to tear down your argument, but here goes:

Your premise rests on two assumptions, namely that "No information can travel faster than light" and "If any such connection should occur, there should be a signal transmitted from one particle to the other" and an erroneous understanding of what is meant by 'information' and 'signal'.

The first assumption is only true if local realism is true.
Unfortunately, the fact that the predictions made by quantum mechanics turn out to be correct negates the possibility of local realism being an accurate description of the universe.

Worse for both your assumptions than that, technically quantum entaglement effects do not transmit what can be considered information or a signal, in the relativistic, classical sense since it is not actually possible to know the state of the entangled particle before it is observed & the wave function callapses.
Therefore it is impossible to predict the effect on the other particle beforehand, which in order to transmit non-random data, i.e. information or a signal in the classical relativistic sense you would have to be able to do.

The effective signal to noise ratio is 0, meaning no purposeful signal/information can be sent/discerned.
This, even though observing one particle will inevitably have a direct, instantaneous effect on the other entagled particle.
It's just that there's no way to predict what that effect will be so there's no real violation of relativity yet there's still action at a distance.

However, it's clear that entangled particles do contain information about each other in their states which changes instantaneously to reflect the current observed states of both particles.
This phenomenon has been successfully used as recently as this year to increase the level of detail of extremely sensistive microscopes which use photon beams for imaging the tiniest things we're able to image with our current technology.
By using two entangled instead of two regular photon beams each entangled photon contains information about its pair and therefore together they contain more information about the surface they've been bounced off of than the two regular photon beams that such microscopes normally use, thus allowing for the creation of significantly more detailed, accurate images.

Really, though, the biggest problem with your theory is the that the mathematics of the Standard Model of Quantum Physics, if incomplete in regards to gravity so far, demonstrates & relatively accurately predicts randomness & probability as the foundations of the smallest-scale interactions in our universe, and experimental evidence has consistently & repeatedly backed this up.
For your theory to be true, that would all have to be a massive coincidence with what's predetermined.
Occam's Razor suggests that since this a much more complicated and less likely explaination than there simply being the elements of randomness, probability, and at macro levels even strict causality which the mathematics & experimenal evidence point to, that it is very unlikely to be the correct explanation.

Interestingly, a lack of absolute predetermination does not necessarily mean that our actions are not mostly or even entirely driven by fairly strict causal relationships, and thus it does not automatically mean that we have 'free will' per se.
If consciousness is a purely electro-chemical phenomenon, then it's likely that for the most part our actions are the inevitable result of specific mostly cause & effect reactions on a macro level, paired with a bit of randomness here and there from quantum-level interactions over which we have no control, and therefore we have no free will per se, though there's still no predicting entirely what we will think or do.
However, if consciousness is, to some large extent, a quantum level phenomenon with macro-level manifestations & interactions then we are indeed, to some extent, in control of our actions and have some form of 'free will', although cause and effect reactions play a role as well to some extent.
For various reasons I think the second scenario is more likely, but there's no concrete evidence either way.

Not that any of this really matters in the long run.

As Willard pointed out, this may all be some sort of delusion or dream or illusion, and all I can really know is that I am that which is thinking these things: 'Cogito ergo sum.' -Descartes

However, it doesn't really matter if things are real or not or if we have free will or not or even if things are predestined or not.
This seems to be real.
I seem to have control over my actions, i.e. free will.
It seems like we are able to change the future through concerted effort and shape events rather than everything just being predestined.
Because these things seem this way, and because it seems advantageous to, in general, think & act as if these things we in fact true, we may as well do so and not worry so much about the 'true' nature of reality.

That's how I live my life.
As if I have control over whatever things it seems like I do.

My atheist friends tend to have a similar view, that things seem this way so it doesn't matter one way or another what's really going on, we can only act on our experiences, on what seems to be.
I don't know about you, but my experiences seem to indicate that I do have some control & free will, so I act as if that were true, since my experience is all I have access to.

Personally, I find the notion of absolute predetermination repugnant.
If it's true, why bother working or trying, when it'll all just happen if it's meant to, right?

I'd rather choose to believe in what seems to be the case, that I'm an entity capable of deliberately making choices and taking actions which will affect my future & that of others.
That's a much more positive and effective vision & way of looking at the world, imho.

Believe what you like, though.
Next time, however, try not to use science you really don't understand to explain, describe, or prove your beliefs to others if you don't want to get called to carpet for doing so.

One thing I have noticed about Atheist forums, blogs and vlogs. The majority of Atheist who populate these places seem to perceive themselves as philosophical poohbahs. I think they all imagine themselves to be the modern day equivalent of Plato, or Socrates, standing upon some boulder holding public discourse with some assembly of like minded "thinkers" back in the 14th century. They all seem to view themselves as great intellectuals and masters of debate. Their debating ability is a great source of personal pride to them.

I see a dividing line between people who enthusiastically proclaim themselves to be Atheist, and feel a great need for everyone around them to know that they are Atheists, and those who are content to simply not believe in a God, or Creator, but don't feel the need to label themselves with a title so that everyone know their opinion about the issue.