Tuesday, October 11, 2005

Facts just twist the truth

You wrote:

"...... God's existence either is or is not. But if it is, it is. And our inability to measure him plays no role in that reality."

Ok I will give you three examples of "a fact".
  1. In a vacuum light travels at 186,000 miles per second. This is a fact. It has never deviated from this speed in vacuo no matter what the religious belief of the observer is.
  2. Christians say that the existence of YHWH is a fact. I'm being picky I know, but it's not a fact until it is measured and agreed upon by all observers. The existence of YHWH is only a fact when you consider the set of observers in your local church or the set of all Christians, but as soon as you include non-Christians into the set it no longer becomes a fact it becomes a belief held by a subset of the population.
  3. My imaginary friend on the Unicorn is "a fact" to me and no-one else but me believes in him, except maybe you :-)
Get my point here?

Measurement effects reality in a very real way - take the following example, (I think you know this one):

You're a game show contestant and you want to win a car which is hidden behind one of three doors

The game show host asks you to choose a door, you pick door 3 (for example, you could have picked any door)

Then door number 2 is removed so just doors 1 and 3 are left.

The gameshow host asks you if you wish to change doors.

Question: to maximise your chance of winning the car should you:

a) stick to your original door (door 3 in this example)?
b) change doors (so select door 1 instead in this example)?
c) it's doesn't matter, both doors have a 50% chance of winning the car?

Now I will tell you if you were not the game show contestant, but someone who walked in off the street when there were only two doors there and asked to choose, then it would not matter, each door would have a 50% chance to you.

But to the original game show contestant this is not the case. This is how measurement affects the reality of two people standing next to eachother. One has measured, and gained some information that the other has not. So their worlds are very different. The latters inability to measure something changes his reality, as compared to the former. Truth is relative.

Maybe:

"...... And our inability to measure him plays no role in that reality."

Is not the case? I don't know. In any case I choose to believe, I don't like playing devils advocate either.

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