Welcome to the nonprofits, and today we're going to discuss a semi scientific, pseudo scientific magical mystery tour. I'll leave the rest to Jonathan. Jonathan, what do you have for us?
This story summarizes a hypothesis put forward by a physicist who has a PhD from Harvard in physics. Doctor Michael Pravoca has specialties in explosives, high pressure science, raman spectroscopy. I'm going to make a problem with that word infra red and nuclear magnetic residence and X ray spectroscopies and accelerator physics. He believes not. He does not profess any proof here that hyperdimensionality more than four dimensions of space
time may hold the key to explaining consciousness. He expands on his hypothesis to say that string theory uses up to eleven dimensions to make it possible mathematically to exist as a viable model. That's my paraphrasing. The article says that string theory would allow for extra dimensions required for a dimension of consciousness. Is this just speculation or a daydream? Or is there any there there?
So?
What do you think? The story is? From earth dot Com by Eric Rowls on September twenty first, twenty twenty four.
Thanks Jonathan Neil for me, it sounded like another example as we usually see a religion hijacking an understanding of science. Are often a misunderstanding of science and using those scientific methods or those scientific hypothesis or theories and trying to comblet together to explain something that religion says happen but doesn't explain. What do you think?
Is that?
What you think that this guy's doing?
Well? When I read this article, it started out pretty good, you know, like, Okay, this is this, this is this, this is what you know? And I know not a lot, but a little bit about string theory, and yeah, there's in some versions of it, there's eleven dimensions that are wrapped tightly around strings and that sort of thing. But to say that it has anything to do with your consciousness,
to me is a huge leap with no evidence. And then he goes into and admitting that he is a Christian, He's an orthodox Christian, and it makes me believe that this is to say is trying to say his mythology might be true if this theory is true, but he has no evidence that consciousness has anything to do with other dimensions or what the connection is between them, and at least none that I was able to discern, and other dimensions if they actually exist anywhere else but in
the math. At this point and his imagination, it still doesn't prove that consciousness has anything to do with it. The other thing is that he's not really qualified to talk about consciousness. That bothers me a lot because he has no information about brain chemistry, brain function. fMRI studies, you know, all the current theory on that's and being developed on consciousness and the brain and how that interacts
and how it emerges from the complex system. So it's like they're still researching all that, but he has no experience in any of that. So how are you going to tie consciousness into abstract theoretical physics which has not been actually proven to be correct yet. It's kind of like, okay, you know quantum you know, they need a theory of quantum gravity to complete the unification of general relativity and quantum mechanics. But completing that would we'd have the you know,
the complete life, the universe and everything. And the answer is not forty two. For those of you were fans of Douglass, that.
To everyone who heard Jonathan say that it's not forty two. Just disregard that he does not speak for the ACA or the rest of the people on this program, because everyone knows it actually is forty two. But you know, I know somebody.
Else who says that all the time too. Everybody knows that, I mean, because it's true.
But you know, I noticed that Michael implied that Jesus may be a hyper dimensional entity. I know he said, according to the Bible, Jesus ascended into heaven forty days after being on earth. How do you ascend to heaven if you're a four dimensional creature? Well, yeah, I'd like to know that too. So I thought they had enough trouble to prove in Jesus in four dimensions. I don't know why they're trying to throw a few extra ones on.
But what do you think about him saying that, Eli, What were your thoughts?
Yeah, So, firstly, I'm really kind of just hoping that the article just didn't do him justice in his argument, because I would expect somebody with such a pedigree to formulate a better hypothesis for anything, to know that like, hey, this is not this doesn't hold out. There's a huge leap here, and like, the question is that the sparks from me, like, Okay, hold on, what does like? I don't even know where to start. Honestly, it's so difficult. It leads me to what does like? How what is
the correct number of dimensions to ascend to heaven? How do you know that? How do like? It's just there's it's really hard for me to figure out where to start, and he it's I don't know what it is about four dimensions that makes you incapable of visiting to heaven. I don't know what it is about other numbers of
dimensions that make you capable. And the article quotes some of pravacas peers as saying, like, well, that linking consciousness to hyperdimensionality and therefore to religious concepts is blurring the lines a little bit. And I don't agree at all. I think it's completely ignoring the lines that between empirical science and personal beliefs. It's he seems to have this idea that Okay, Jesus went to and Jesus is different
from us? How is Jesus different from us? Well, he must have more dimensions and you just have to ask him. Where are you getting that how do you get from Jesus as different to more dimensions? We need that work in between, and maybe he has it. And like I said, the article just didn't do him justice. But it's not it's at least not here.
If that is the best that he has to offer, he's not doing very well. But also, in fairness to the writer of the article, I don't know if I've ever heard anyone lay out anything even remotely cogent trying to rationalize a proof for evidence that Jesus ascended to heaven. Now, you might make a case for Jesus being a person that existed, that's one thing, and I'm a little dubious on that admittedly, But when you say Jesus ascended to heaven, then you've created a whole new thing because we know
people existed. We know people name you're sure existed in that timeframe. So that's not that much of a stretch. Well, once we jump in, once we jump into heaven, we're in a whole different ball game. Then we don't even know what that means. Yeah, how many dimensions? As Eli said, how many dimensions do we need to go to? Heavens? Is one the thor of Hammer and two voltron sword and three toz. How does this work? It really doesn't
make a lot of sense. But honestly, one of the reasons I chose this article initially was the sheer number of logical fallacies in it. So I just want to kind of throw it out to you, starting with you, Jonathan, what are some of the logical fallacies you saw in this guy's argument, because he really made some serious leaps. Forget God of the Gaps, this is God of the dimensions.
Well, I know, yeah, just a couple of them are the obvious ones. Appeal to authority, hasty generalizations like you said in your notes, and the intentional obscuring of any source of where his ideas come from as they jumped from one place to another. And there's just this, you know, a huge gap between it's a huge red herring between
this and that. You know, it's either a red herring or just a huge non sequitur, you know, And and that's kind of like the non secutor is probably the biggest one I see, because Jesus, as a fifth dimensional being is a non secutor from eleven mensions and Jesus, you know, there's there's how do you get there? You know,
there's nothing in between. You know, it's like, please, just because some old mythology says something does not mean that it actually happened, and therefore you can take it and and and try and plug it into some new fangled pseudoscience, trying to tie it into a one of many theories that are being tested to give us the parts we
need to get a theory of everything. There are other ones as well, so it's like, yeah, okay, if this one makes it easy for you to up around and and gyrate and and make your twist your ideas to fit into even roughly into this, which I don't think it does very well. But it's just come on, guys, you know better than this. Give us some more. Give us, give us, you know, do your work, show us your work. Where did this come from? You know, if you don't show us your work, we don't know how you got there.
And if we don't know how you got there, I am really not going to believe you. So that's pretty much all I have to say on.
He lighted, he covered pretty much all the logical fallacies that you saw. Is one that stuck out to you as well?
Well, yeah, there is sort of it seems like it's sort of based on this idea that I feel like I've seen a lot where it's like, oh, well, the cause is just something that we just we God works in mysterious ways sort of thing, right, So it gives this actually kind of gives me the opportunity to clarify something that I was talking about in the comments of another clip. So he kind of bakes his idea that, like our our senses are limited, we can't sense everything
about the universe, and therefore our perception is limited. So there's going to be some things that we miss, some things that happen with some phenomenon in the universe that
we just don't notice right away. I don't think that that means that things are unmeasurable, just means that because like to detect, to observe something directly with our senses is not the only way to know that something exists, Like most of modern physics is either is the mathematical result of something else that has been experimentally confirmed that just has not yet been experimentally confirmed but is close to being, or or not it's hard to say close
to being, but like very likely going to be because it fits with the rest of the theory that we have. What he has here is basically saying that like, oh, well, these extra dimensions, we just can't see them for some reason. And then he's making up that reason by saying, and a quote from the Arquay here is saying, is the extra dimensions aren't easily observed because they might become past defied or curled up. Its skills so small they're beyond
our current ability to detect. And that's just conjecture. It's it's this sort of it's honestly sort of this reskin of turtles all the way down, because if you're saying, like, oh, well, you know the cause is something, it's just so small, like well, there's a cause for this, and a cause for this, and a cause for this, but what's the fundamental cause. Well, it's just so small that you can't see it. God works in mysterious ways. Turtles all the way down. It doesn't like you pick the way you
want to phrase it. It's it's probably yeah, I guess John didn't cover it's argument from ignorance, and they're just reskinning it in different ways.
I would have to say that for me reading the first time, I couldn't help but think that this is pretty much a status quo. Oftentimes Christians in particular will spend a lot of time talking about things other than their God and other than their Bible to prove their God's real, which seems odd to me, because if your God's real and so evident, it's hard for me to imagine why you need to come up with half a dozen dozen more dimensions and abercadabra alek exam and here
comes Baltimore. Because really it gets to the point where you're reading what this guy says and it sounds like mediocre science fiction. It's like, you know, damn, I think I saw that on MST three k once. That's really the field of some of the things he says. But I do think that oftentimes it's it is that attempt to avoid actually talking about their lack of evidence. And Jonathan, I was just kind of wonder what your.
Thoughts were, just if you're going to if you're going to write a paper, or you're going to do something that's outside your field, because there are lots of sub fields within physics, and as I listed this gentleman's it
doesn't mean he doesn't have information about that. But if you're only going to list those and not the ones that pertain to the subject matter you're doing, then theoretical physics covers things like string theory already in universe, things like that, various theories of everything that have not been substantially proven yet. So they call them a theory because they're well developed mathematically and they have no inconsistencies mathematically,
but they're not all the same. So it's like when they finally figure out a way to test these things, you know, we'll find out which one of these several ideas and they may have eliminated a few by now. I don't know, it's been a while since I've been doing a lot of reading on this. But then you can probably start working on connecting the dots between biology, which is the brain and how the brain functions, and physics, which is a bunch of forces and fields and particles
and things like that. But biology's macro level a lot of what he's talking about, Like, of these dimensions, I think in string theory, they're tightly wound around the strings, which are a trillianth the size of anything visible with our most powerful electron scanners. So it's like you know, you're talking something so small, and these dimensions are supposedly intertwined and twisted around each one of these. We'll never be able to confirm or deny that as far as
I know, at least not in my lifetime. But I only got ten or fifteen years left, you know, with all you young people, you're not going to sit in your lifetime either, you know. So it's unless we have you know, alien assistance or something. Not that I believe in aliens. But just like before, Just like before, right, not.
Its dimensions all the way down.
John, all the way down. But you know, so anyway, the whole idea is that how are you connecting the dots between biology and physics? At this point they're not. He's just he's fantasizing about how, when and if they ever do that, he'll find this consciousness dimension. Well, I don't know, there's there's there may be a universe somewhere where that's true. I don't know.
Let me say this, John, and this is very important, so you should probably listen closely. My god, he can wrap strings tight around anything he wants to, whether it's turtles are dimensions. Now take that?
Okay, what did he say I didn't hear any of that.
Can God build a guitar with so many strings and not even he can play it?
Of course, But as long as he doesn't do it, we're good. But I've got faith that the extra mentioned dimensional Jesus could play it. So that's what I would put my money on.
Now that's not a guitar, it's a sitar. Okay.
On that note, Is there anything you'd like to close up with Eli, any final thoughts?
Yeah, it's kind of John kind of starting to touch on this. This guy, uh Pravac is basically just saying like, well, maybe the reason, like we have to grant first of all, which I didn't even say before, we have to grant that Jesus he probably existed. I can accept that, grant that he ascended to heaven and did all the things that all the things that he didn't as send to heaven, and then grant that the reason he was capable of doing that was because he had he was a poly
hyperdimensional being. And but like he's just basically saying like, well, there's probably other dimensions. Some some theoretical physicists think there's other dimensions and there's consciousness. So he's like, so what, but it doesn't seem like and unless I haven't seen the paper, so maybe he does have some work that like mathematically demonstrates that there's some connection here. I wouldn't understand even if I did look at it, So I'm not so I would have to find someone to kind
of help me understand that's the case. But I really think that it's so much more likely that consciousness just like every other thing that the living things do, because to my knowledge, every example we have of a conscious thing is also a living thing, and consciousness, I think, is an emergent property of the cells that make up
the organ that facilitate it. Much like reproduction or digestion or excretion, all of those processes are a result of the interactions between the chemistry inside the living thing that is conducting that process. Consciousness has no reason to be
any different. And as I kind of I was looking into that idea because I've never really looked much into consciousness before, so I was looking into it like for this this episode, and the the what I see as the primary pushback on it is like, oh, well, how does how do those chemical processes result in a subjective experience? And I just I don't see that as a problem. It seems like this, it's just a way that it is.
You have, you know, sense neurons that send signals to neurons that interpret those signals, and then you have motor neurons and other things, and you have hormones, and you have you'r amigdala and tuitary glands and all these things that do a bunch of different stuff in response to environmental stimuli, and eventually it starts thinking about space.
They try to give it this, how does it do this? How does it do that? How does our body define what pain is? Or any of these things are? They're they're chemical interpretations of it. So when it comes down to our consciousness and what it's a product of, it's that same thing. It's nothing unique. There's no reason to make it hyperdimensional turtles all the way down to figure out why we're aware and who we are, because really, when it comes down to it, I find it interesting
that we have this. As you mentioned this group of people, well why is it this way? Well, not knowing why it's not another way isn't a disclaimer proving that it's not that way. So until someone showed me and Also, the other thing being is the fact that if we damage a physical brain, we get changes in that person's awareness, We get changes in that person's personality or what we
want to loosely define as characteristics of consciousness. So if physical changing a physical entity can cause changes in this consciousness, what in the world could there be to imply that that consciousness itself is not a product of that entity that you injured and changed that consciousness. It just doesn't make sense.
I like turtles.
I do too, That's why there's so many of them.
It's probably in soup.