Why are you putting quote marks around a word nobody else has used?
Why are you saying anyone has claimed that you, or anyone else in this thread, is “offensive”, when no one else has used the word?
What people HAVE said is that if you are unwilling to debate, go find another forum, as this is the “Great Debate” forum.
No one in science dismisses thought. We study it, under the form of information. Information Theory is a legitimate science, and tells us a lot about thought. We also study it in Psychological sciences.
What we do is dismiss crappy woo that claims that “thought” has properties that elevate it above or beyond the conventional laws of physics. “Thought” in the absurd and hokey pseudo-physics of the Transcendental Meditation followers is meaningless, and very well should be dismissed. But “thought” as in the mental processes of many animals is very well acknowledged and studied.
(I suppose there might be a very few extremely ardent Behaviorists who deny that animals and humans “think.” I’ve never actually met anyone that extreme.)
I think if we were to replace the word conciousness with some other word that may allow conciousness to exist within it but only as a componet. It would be good to hear what some of the great minds have had to say about the creation of matter and energy even if they couldn’t speak from a scientific viewpoint.
It’s hard to do this when the premises are extravagantly counter-factual, or so speculative as to be nonsensical. Okay, let’s say that my coffee cup is sentient. It sits quietly and passively, thinking deep thoughts. It’s happy when warm and full, and sad when cold and empty. Let’s say.
What now? (Other than making another cuppa.) What does the hypothesis tell us in practical terms? It would suggest we try to communicate with our coffee cups…and, after a few initial attempts which fail miserably, what then?
Fair enough, and this certainly has strong historical support. Democritus had a good notion of what atoms were, but the existence of the atomic nucleus was a surprise, as was the existence of the neutron, as was the existence of the quark, as was the quantum wave-like nature of them all. It’s on very good form to bet that the surprises haven’t come to an end. As the mayor of Halloweentown said, “We’re all waiting for the next surprise!”
Tricky. The modern Big-Bang model is that the physical laws themselves coalesced out of nothing in the first fractions of a second, and that, once these laws had formed, then matter could come into existence accordingly. There was (it is thought) a brief period of time in which the laws of electricity and magnetism were not distinct, but unified with other laws. When electricity and magnetism split apart, only then could electrons and protons exist.
Your phrasing would leave out this middle step.
Tricky. The modern Big-Bang model is that the physical laws themselves coalesced out of nothing in the first fractions of a second, and that, once these laws had formed, then matter could come into existence accordingly. There was (it is thought) a brief period of time in which the laws of electricity and magnetism were not distinct, but unified with other laws. When electricity and magnetism split apart, only then could electrons and protons exist.
To me this sounds almost like an admission that another field exists which is more like spiritual than physical.That sounded like an admission of a spiritual force to you? What part of that paragraph gave you that idea?
Thats not exactly what I said, the entire paragraph sounds like an admission of a force more like spiritual than physical but undefined. Just because it recognizes that something just came into being.
Physicists:
I have a few questions: please forgive the mangled presentation.
Is the predominant view in the physics community that wave function collapse occurs when the quantum world interacts with an aspect of the macro world? So we don’t need a (conscious) observer? What’s the nature of this interaction?
How does that predominant view fit in with quantum entanglement?
How far out of favor have explanations like the Von Neumann–Wigner interpretation fallen? Ignore Daily Mail articles and even 4th tier physics journals.
Is Copenhagen still the default? What exactly constitutes, “Outside the system”?
“Shut up and focus on the equations”, works for me incidentally. (“You don’t like it? Tough.”)
No think of it this way - this is an imperfect analogy.
You’ve got water in a container under pressure and temperature control. You can get all 3 basic states of matter existing at the same time - solid/liquid/gas. Now, release the pressure and the thing collapses into vapour. It’s a phase change.
The term for the differentiation of EM/Weak/Strong and possibly Gravitational forces is called symmetry breaking.
To me, this sounds almost like an admission that you don’t have a clue as to what was actually said, and so have to resort to “he’s saying it’s magic” to fit it into your brain.
Ontology is an error. We CAN’T know what matter IS, because knowing “what something is” is not how knowing works. All we can know is what the universe does. And it doesn’t do anything resembling universal consciousness.
It might be true but it certainly is not an admission.
I would disagree, specifically because the word “spiritual” has so much connotative meaning. It depends upon a “spirit.” The idea that the laws of physics came out of nowhere does not depend upon a “spirit” in any way.
You could very well say that it sounds like an admission that we don’t know a lot of the details…and I’ll entirely agree with this. But “spirit” is too close to “mind” in the way it is connoted.
This is one of the views that has some strength these days. One of the bits of evidence is that entangled particle pairs seem to disentangle on their own, and this might be because of their interaction with other particles or quanta of energy. I don’t believe this is settled, however: last I heard, there are a number of interpretations still duking it out.
I can’t help with your other questions…and I might well be wrong even in what I have just said.
That’s not what a ‘unified theory’ refers to all, and physicists are certainly not claiming or even mentioning about some sort of ‘spiritual’ field. Before symmetry breaking, you had a Lagrangian and a large gauge group; afterward, the Lagrangian breaks up into some more pieces, including a mass term (usually symmetry breaking produces a massless Goldstone boson, but not in this case, because physics). Instead the original gauge group, you now have separate gauge groups for electromagnetism and spin.
What part of that is spiritual?
In my experience (and I’m a mathematician who does some physics, as opposed to even a mathematical physicist), the question really doesn’t come up. Wave functions collapse if they need to produce an eigenvalue, and the exact mechanism isn’t particularly relevant— or, at the very least, there’s not a suitable explanation that’s falsifiable instead of psuedoscientific. Really, the measurement problem doesn’t feature prominently in quantum after the first class or two in the subject. I can’t say it disappears completely or is uninteresting in terms of physics or philosophy, but it’s not the huge dilemma or defining feature of the subject that it may seem like from the outside.
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What part of that is spiritual?
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I never said anything was spiritual, I said more like spiritual than physical.
OK, so what part of it, specifically is “like” it’s spiritual?
Well the problem with that definition, in this forum, is that you’re likely surrounded by physicalists. 
What part of it is more spiritual, then? Adding interaction with a massive boson to the Lagrangian, finding a subgroup of the original group that acts trivially on that boson, and then separating out pieces of the Lagrangian accordingly sounds much more physical than spiritual to me.