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The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is one of two specific trees in the story of the Garden of Eden in Genesis 2–3, along with the tree of life. Contents.
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What was so terrible about their acquisition of this knowledge that they deserved capital punishment? What is wrong with knowing good and bad, and how does it differ from knowing true and false or right and wrong?

Conclusion

RaMBaM or Maimonides explains that the better Adam and Eve understood the concepts of good and evil, the less they were able to differentiate true and false or judge right from wrong:. Through the intellect, man distinguishes between the true and the false. This faculty Adam possessed perfectly and completely.

Thus, it is the function of the intellect to discriminate between the true and the false—a distinction which is applicable to all objects of intellectual perception. When Adam was yet in a state of innocence and was guided solely by reflection and reason. Then he fully understood the magnitude of the loss he had sustained, what he had forfeited. The Guide for the Perplexed, Part 1, Ch. This is very perplexing, indeed! Maimonides is telling us that so long as Adam and Eve, of course had been granted intellectual faculties, which provided the ability to know true and false and discern right from wrong, Adam and Eve were unable to comprehend the notions of good and evil.

The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil

To wit, they did not see anything wrong in being naked. However, after the sin, the situation reversed—having gained the ability to see good and evil and, consequently, becoming ashamed of their nudity , the first humans lost some of their intellectual prowess and the ability to know true and false. How are we to understand this? Why does the knowledge of good and evil preclude—or why is it incompatible with—the knowledge of right and wrong?

Let us summarize what Maimonides says: Adam could know either true and false right and wrong , or good and bad evil , but not both. The more he learned the latter, the more he lost the ability to know the former. This is structurally similar to the superposition of states and Heisenberg uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics. I am very grateful to my son-in-law, Maimon Kirschenbaum, for pointing this out to me.

The essence of the uncertainty principle, first formulated by Werner Heisenberg in , is that two complementary variables In physics, such pairs of variables are called canonically conjugate variables; examples of such pairings include coordinates and momenta, or time and energy. For example, the more precisely we know the position of a particle, the less certain we are of its momentum, and vice versa.

In quantum mechanics, it is always a trade-off: the more we know of one characteristic of an object, the less we know of the other complementary characteristic. In the story of the Tree of Knowledge, we are presented with a pair of complementary characteristics: truth and false right and wrong on the one hand, and good and bad evil on the other. This is why the tree is called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—because by tasting its fruit the first humans acquired knowledge of good and evil, but lost their knowledge of right and wrong.

The philosopher of physics David Albert gives the following example, as paraphrased here see chapter 1 of David Z. We can build a color box that has three apertures: one for letting in all that is, both types of electrons, one for letting out black electrons, and one for letting out white electrons. The color box does not change the color of the particles that enter it. The only thing the color box does is to test the color of the electrons and to sort them accordingly.

It is a color-sorting apparatus, nothing more. If we mix some black electrons with some white electrons and send them all through the inlet aperture on the left of the box as shown in Figure 1, all the black electrons will exit through the black aperture at the top of the box, and all the white electrons will exit through the white aperture on the right.

We can also build a hardness box that has three apertures: one for letting electrons in, one for letting out hard electrons, and one for letting out soft electrons. If we mix some hard electrons and soft electrons together and send them through the inlet aperture on the left, all the hard electrons will exit through the hard aperture on the top of the box, and all the soft electrons will exit through the soft aperture on the right, as shown in Figure 2.

We build the hardness box so that it does not change the hardness of the particles that enter it. Similarly, if we were to send in a single hard electron, it would always exit through the hard aperture.


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The only thing the hardness box does is to test for hardness and sort the electrons accordingly. It is a hardness sorting apparatus, nothing more. In this experiment, we send only white electrons into the first color box shown on the left of Figure 3. We already know that the color box does not change the color of the particles that pass through it. And this is exactly what happens. The white electrons exiting the first color box now enter the hardness box in the middle of Figure 3.

Now, let us feed all soft electrons exiting from the soft aperture into the second color box on the right of Figure 3. What do we expect to see? We should reasonably expect to see all those electrons exiting the second color box through the white aperture.

Indeed, since we sent only white electrons into the middle box, and the middle box supposedly does nothing to these electrons except for checking their hardness, their color should not—or so it seems—be affected. However, surprisingly, this is not what happens. But from where did the black electrons come from? This paradoxical result has been verified in countless experiments, which invariably produce the same outcome. It turns out that as soon as we discover information about the hardness of the electrons, we erase all knowledge about their color characteristics.

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The hardness box does not change the color, but in the process of measuring the hardness of the electrons, the hardness box erases any information of their color, which means we have an equal probability of finding a white color or a black one. In other words, the electrons, whose hardness characteristic is precisely known to us, have their color characteristic in a state of superposition: their color is neither black nor white nor both nor neither, but is in the state of superposition of black color and white color—the fifth state unknown to classical Newtonian physics.

This thought experiment, therefore, illustrates the concept of superposition of states. Whereas in classical physics, a system can be only in one state at any moment in time, in quantum mechanics, the system could be in a superposition of states. For example, if we spin a Chanukah dreidel top , it will spin either clockwise or counterclockwise, depending on which direction we spun it. In quantum mechanics, a top can be in a superposition of states of spinning clockwise and counterclockwise.

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In fact, physicists routinely put electrons in the superposition of states of having spin up and spin down, which is roughly equivalent to spinning clockwise and counterclockwise. This experiment also illustrates the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, according to which, as we have said above, a state where one of the two complementary characteristics has a definite value somehow corresponds with a superposition of many states for the other characteristic thereby making it indefinite.

This is precisely what is going on in the Torah narrative of the Tree of Knowledge! For as long as Adam and Eve were endowed with the intellectual prowess to know right and wrong precisely, the complementary knowledge of good and bad was in the state of superposition—the first humans, before their primordial sin, were ambivalent about good and evil. After the sin, the situation flipped, as in our example with the three boxes above: the knowledge of good and evil that came with the forbidden fruit put the knowledge of right and wrong into the state of superposition.

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