< I don't know if they're on the right track or if they're just a bunch of (really smart) guys playing and designing computer games>
This is precisely how people described quantum theorists in 1900. Nobody could believe that there were limits to what people got to know. Then Gödel showed that some axioms could not be verified within the system in which they were formulated. That made the whole proof of God thing impossible for people on Earth. This was possibly one of the great disappointments of clerics and philosophers of the age, who had, up to that time, embraced mathematics as revelation of God's mind. Well, God got the last laugh! We don't get to know him except through an unverified system called a probability density function.
Almost immediately on the heels of Gödel came theoreticians that could demonstrate that the theory of the past 100 years, the mechanical universe, was a gross oversimplification. Mechanics doesn't explain nuclear fusion. Ironically, gods very well could live in the spaces between substance and non-substance, yet only one religion is not dogmatically at odds with the fabric of the fundamental universe: Buddhism.
Now, we have simulations of dynamical systems approaching the complexity of life, and the minds in other sciences haven't yet grasped the full meaning of quantum theory. Even basic chemistry's assumption of path independence may be wrong on large scales of complexity. That's LIFE! And it doesn't matter whether its amino acids or silicon flipflops. In very small, but potentially complex relationships, we just don't get to see why a particular thing happens by simply summing its parts. It doesn't keep us from looking, but emergent phenomena can't be studied except as a wave function that varies over time... |
