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Politics : About that Cuban boy, Elian -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Master (Hijacked) who wrote (7888)	7/1/2000 2:15:56 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9127

Hi Vince. I found myself wide awake in the middle of the night the other day. Surfing the TV trying to find something to fall asleep to, I came upon a show called "How Did This Universe Begin?" It made me think of you--it was just full of theories. <g> I may be the last soul on this earth not to have heard of this Closer to Truth series on public TV and I don't know if the US public TV stations reach you up north like the commercial ones do. Anyway, here's the link to the series on the Web, if you're interested. There are transcripts of the shows and I'm finding them quite interesting. They're panel discussions. I noticed they don't bother much with the formalities of labeling things as theories, though. Some snippets: ROBERT: Pat, you're one of the leading thinkers about what's traditionally known as the mind-body problem. I'm revealing my bias here, but could you tell us why the brain and the mind are among the grand questions of science? PAT: Two major questions need to be distinguished here. One has to do with whether psychological states--our mental life of remembering, thinking, creating--are really a subset of brain activity. And on that major question, although there are residual problems, I think most people agree that it's all only the brain--that there isn't anything in addition to the brain, such as a nonphysical soul. ROBERT: Most people agree? Or most scientists agree? PAT: Scientists do, by and large. And I think that's the way the evidence stacks up now, in neuroscience. It's possible that there is a nonphysical soul, but it doesn't really look like that's the way things work. The other major question you need to ask, given that [materialist] framework, is, How do high-level psychological processes come about from basic neurophysiological effects? How do these brain cells, organized in this complex way, give rise to my watching something move, or seeing color, or smelling a rose. These are the kinds of questions that preoccupy me. ----------------------- ROBERT: Andrei, inflationary cosmology has been hailed as one of the most remarkable scientific theories in the history of science, extending the scope of reality beyond comprehension. How would you explain inflationary theory to a high school student? ------------------------ FRANK: The anthropic principle asks why the universe has one value [for a given physical parameter] rather than another, since a complete range of values is possible. For example, take the cosmological constant, which results in a universal vacuum field that causes an accelerated expansion. The natural value that we theoretical physicists have computed is something like a hundred and twenty orders of magnitude larger than what is actually seen by observational astronomers. So there's a gigantic discrepancy between our theory and experiment. Now, we would expect other universes to have very different cosmological constants. But only those universes that have a cosmological constant very close to zero would be capable of giving rise to intelligent life. ------------------------ FWIW, Karen