grex

Aw man, just have to wait it out I guess..

I've heard nothing from the EE PhD program. I was wondering if anyone was in the same boat?

Again, I am NOT arguing against you. You have a perfectly legitimate stance. I am saying, that your stance is not so much more obvious than any other stance (e.g. religion). If you choose to believe that free will is an illusion, and that science has an answer to everything, that's you prerogative. If someone else chooses to believe that free will is not an illusion, that's theirs. Can we just agree already that yes, it's possible that you're right? But it isn't just the insanely stupid who believe that science doesn't hold the answer to everything.

Okay, I really thought I was done with my last post. But this is directly addressed to me. You are saying, I think something, and you can read my mind. That's fine. My mental state is reflected in my physical state. What I am asking is, can you predict that I am going to wave at you? If you examine the electrochemical state of my brain, or even the entire state of the universe, can you predict what I am going to do next? If you can, there is no such thing as free will. If not, my action was not predictable with science (ergo, there are some phenomena that cannot be explained by science). Here is something called the Free Will Theorem: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~jas/one/f ... eorem.html This isn't some obscure proof. This is actually very widely discussed.

I'm not rejecting science. Quite the contrary. If you would read my above posts, they are mostly in response to Minnesotan. I am saying that atheism is understandable, as is religion. The end. There really is no argument, sorry if I made it seem like there was. As for those "-isms". They date back to Aristotle and are by no means trivial. It's just an interesting problem I find fascinating, that people have been thinking about for millennia.

How about this: I have seen no scientific evidence for or against the existence of extraphysical forces. But those who believe in such forces don't believe everything can be explained by science. I have seen no scientific explanation for free will. I have heard that "scientists are working on it", but I have not even heard, nor can I imagine, the experiments one would undertake to explain free will. I haven't even heard of a hypothetical scientific explanation. It's not even possible to fudge a scientific explanation of free will. That's why most discussions on this topic are in the realm of philosophy. So you choose between: science can't explain everything, here's a nonscientific explanation vs. science can explain everything, but there is no scientific explanation for this. There. You might even say that the former is more tenable than the latter. It's just that people very much assume that science can provide an explanation for every phenomena out there, and most people don't even bother asking for a scientific explanation for something as simple as free will. Most atheists have no idea what reductionism is, what emergentism is, or even what the mind-body problem is. They just assume people smarter than they are are going to figure out the answer, as if an answer can be found. Sound like faith? And the belief that science is the be all and end all of everything in most cases comes about as a result of upbringing... imagine that. So if if you think the answer to the question "can science touch this?" is a "yes!", I'd very much like to hear an explanation.

Please tell me how neuroscientists are getting there? They're definitely getting somewhere, but not to any explanation of decision making. They can characterize things in great detail after a decision has been made, sure. But they will never be able to tell me how a decision is made in the first place. It's a matter of causality. I wave at someone. What caused that? Well, muscle contractions. What caused that? Electric impulses. What initiated those impulses? My brain. What prompted it to initiate them? A) The electrochemical state of my brain, coupled with the external stimuli that is affecting it, blah blah blah. Any scientific explanation implies we are simply products of the state of the universe, ergo we are robots. I would have waved no matter what, given those exact circumstances. My "decision" was merely an illusion. One explanation (I'm not claiming it's right), is that my decision arose from an extra-material force. If I am completely physical, my actions are completely determined by the physical world around me. If I am extra-physical, I can make decisions independent of the world around me. Hence the concept of a soul. And extra-physical forces in general. Now, when you see "Neuroscientists are getting there," they're getting to a point where they can describe A) in greater detail. My point: A belief in nonphysical forces is just as tenable as a belief that things can be explained with reductionistic methods, etc. I am NOT arguing for one side, or the other. I am merely saying that yes, you can be an intellectual and hold religious views.

That's assuming all the events are independent. If, for example, the same random people were applying to the same 10 schools, and all 10 schools had exactly the same admissions criteria, you might have a 10% chance getting into any of those 10 schools depending on your chances of being better than 90% of the applicants. Getting rejected from one school, though, would mean you would have 100% percent chance of getting rejected from the 9 others. Of course, the above scenario is an extreme. In general, admissions are not as correlated, but still pretty correlated. So your probability of getting accepted into at least 1 school, I'd imagine, would be under 41%, maybe significantly so (assuming your 10% estimate was correct).

The way I see it, atheism is a faith in randomness, Emergentism (to some extent), and a faith that there is no God. I say faith because the existence of God cannot be proven. If you don't have a faith that there is no God, or that there is a God (i.e. you aren't certain), you're probably agnostic. But agnostic just means you're ambivalent either way. But if you don't have faith and are searching, you're just searching?

Let me rephrase that. We will never know how. I might add that Emergentism is a philosophical rather than a scientific explanation. Science doesn't claim to ever be able to figure it out. In fact, due to the nature of the question, most scientists will tell you it is a question science can not answer, not because it's hard, but because it's outside the realm of science. My point: Atheism is a faith just like any other, and it's a perfectly legitimate faith to have. Just don't go bashing others for having theirs. Good luck, all.

Wow. I opened this thread not expecting a heated debate. Anyway, I'll just quickly add a thought. And that is to say, if science explains everything, how does it explain free will and self-consciousness? Are we all products of external stimuli, atomic collisions, and quantum interactions? Are our decisions predetermined, or probabilistically determined (if you consider quantum physics)? The most popular scientific theory that accommodates self-consciousness (but still doesn't explain free will) is something called Emergentism. Basically, it says, put a whole bunch of molecules together in a complicated enough fashion and it becomes self-aware. We don't know how, but it just does. Nor can we predict the arrangement of said molecules to produce such self-awareness. In fact, it doesn't even have to be molecules, it can be anything. Self-awareness just... happens. This has been the inspiration for Jane (in the Ender's Game series) and rogue computer programs in various movies (i.e. Eagle Eye, I, Robot). Can you really write software that can become self-aware, and undertake actions of free will? So those who are religious believe in God (or some higher power). Those who are atheists most commonly believe in Emergentism (which I find harder to swallow). I believe that, more likely than not, there are things in this universe that no human can comprehend no matter how hard he/she thinks.

That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the info! I didn't mention any profs in my SOP but I guess that shouldn't make too big of a difference.

Also, grading isn't supposed to be done by criteria. It's done holistically. They read it, get an overall impression of your arguments, and assign you a number. No checkboxes or anything.

Bogfrog: I'm pretty sure that spacing doesn't matter. I got a 6 without indentation. Teaching a prep class just means you teach a prep class, it doesn't mean you've graded anything. And there's nothing on the GRE website or the instructions on the GRE itself to indicate spacing matters.

I'm pretty sure they let you space it however they want. If you got a low score, it might be because of arbitrary grading, etc. But I'm pretty sure it wasn't because of spacing.