The Fire in the Equations #5

Reflecting on the questions:

Have we met all of the candidates for the creation of the universe?
Could we still believe that God created the universe? That God could be the first cause? (pg 136)
Or is God restrained by mathematical and logical consistency?
What actual relevance does the theory have to wether or not we believe there is a real God? (125, 126)
Have we gotten any closer to the answer of the origins of the universe?


There are more than 81 questions in this chapter. This gives us a hint on the way Kitty Ferguson writes.

What does Ferguson mean when she says that it would be a bigger bother if the universe did not exist?

Is truth God?

Armando de la Torre 4

El hombre, a comparación del resto del universo, es nuevo. Pero lo mas importante que le sucedo al mundo. (mientras no se demuestre lo contrario).

Heráclito: todo cambia
Parmenides: nada cambia
los griegos pensaban que los objetos que se mueven tienen como causa final el reposo. (como propósito).


Si no hubieran colores, ¿podríamos ver el mundo?
No, por que con colores miramos formas, perspectivas, movimientos, etcétera.

¿Que pasaria si todos fuéramos sordos?
Parte de nuestro conocimiento no existiría.

Nuestras suposiciones están ligadas a nuestros sentidos. pero los humanos son los únicos que pueden divide de suposiciones y crear cosas nuevas. Podemos suponen cosas mas allá de nuestra existencia; imaginación.
Casi todo lo que hacemos en la vida es basado en algo que suponemos y no conocemos.

La ventaja del hombre sobre todo en el mundo es que podemos imaginar.

 "Tu eres lo que has comido intelectualmente"

Si no hubieran leyes naturales, no podría haber ciencia.
Solo que no debería de ser llamado 'ley' ya que uno puede romper las leyes, y estas leyes naturales no se pueden romper.

La ley natural es como una descripción de algo que pasa en un momento y lugar determinado.
Pero las leyes naturales son muchas clases, y dependiendo de cual escogemos, nos acercamos mas o menos a la verdad.

La mente nunca va a poder concebir todas las leyes naturales, porque no tenemos las palabras y conocimiento.

El cientifico busca aproximar al infinito aunque sabe que nunca va a saberlo todo. Durante el camino encuentra cosas, pero nunca lo sabrá todo.
Por eso es que todas las teorías y experimentos pueden ser falseables.

La ciencia y la ley natural solo son aproximaciones.

Copernican Revolution

Why was innovation clearly so difficult for an aristotelian to conceive or accept?

Meta-Dialogue: apr 4

Different perspectives affect how we see everything.

• The Fire in the Equations dialogue (between Majo and Bert)
• Big Bang 
• Copernican Revolution
• Difficult conversations ch.2
• GEB (maps)

To improve in this, we must try to understand other people. But we must expect things to just work like this either. It is a process of trial and error. (like the process with which we made our rubrics).

Why is it that one day we are influenced by something, and the next day by something else? Are we really that affected by our humor, the way we receive the message and the way in which the message is given? 

But really, they are biases in ourselves:

• difficult conversations (conversation between Eng-an and her husband)
• Khaneman's beauty.
• Subjective reasons
• Kitty Ferguson's beauty

At the end the influence of accepting something or not accepting it comes from ourselves. 

To improve in this, we have to suspend assumptions. 

This leads us to the following:

why is it that sometimes we know we have a bias and we still use it?

The power of the mind:

All of the time I am looking at everything through my mind. We have memories of our past and we have assumptions of our future. 

We don't just live in one dimension and time, we live in many (inside our heads) and this affects our decisions. 

Sometimes we don't realize things like assumptions, social problems, etc, because we would need to pop-out of the system. 

Meta-Dialogue: apr 4 (Stream of Thought)

Something that has really impressed me this week was how sometimes we have many views on things, different perspectives. It is hard to realize which one is true. That is if you can ever realize it. But I could see it this week with our discussion of The Fire in the Equations, specially between Majo and Bert. I could also see it in the book, where there are many theories about the origins of the universe, but it is hard to tell which one is right, whether it was the Big Bang who created it or God. I think that our maps in Bloom's dialogue also has a lot to do with this. We all see/remember things differently. But I think this is for another reason, which is experience.
But going back to the Big Bang, all of that had to be caused by something. I mean, yeah, the Big Bang could've created our universe, but there had to be something before that, something had to cause it.
This relates to our class with Armando, about all of the causalities of the greeks and how just one remained, the efficient cause. Although I think I got a little lost or something because I don't remember why that was.

The Fire in the Equations #4

Even though we have all theories about the creation of the universe, God, the universe just is and mathematical and logical consistency, we can't prove or disprove any of them.

"As dearly as we may hold those assumptions and as well as they’ve served us in the past, when it comes to arguing for the validity of a proposal for the origin of the universe, these are self-serving arguments—good argu- ments maybe for hoping a theory is correct, but no arguments for decid- ing it is. Such a decision would be an act of faith." 

 This is prove that we can't really prove anything. They don't prove that they are the only truth.

Armando de la Torre 3

For the greeks, science is to discover the cause of something.

Cause: all that produces the existence of other things. (Episteme)

The Greeks had four kinds of causes:

• Efficient: That which present causes another (who did it?)
• Material: what something is made up of (stone, rubber)
• Formal: what something represents, the shape it represents (a horse, a god)
• Final: the purpose of something, what it was made for. 

There is always a reason for things that people do. There is a purpose in everything.

Scientific Revolution:

The regularities that Kepler proves about Copernicus' theory is what we now know as natural laws. (Kepler's laws).

• When people changed from the Greek way of thinking to the modern one, this is what happened:
• the material and formal cause cease to function and at the end are discarded. 
• the modern stat to explain everything through numbers. 
• moderns only took into account the efficient cause. 
• humans started being studied as a machine. 
• Final cause is reestablished (intentions). Specially in economics, but it only count for the study of humans, the rest of nature only uses the efficient cause. 

Consciousness is what separates us from the rest of the animals.