Comments on: Making Demands of the Foundation of All Being

By: It Does Matter What People Think About How the World Works | Cosmic Variance

Mon, 04 Jun 2007 18:02:23 +0000

[...] a decision to put aside evidence and deduction in favor of wishful thinking, and an insistence on a picture of the universe that flatters ourselves. The kind of reasoning that leads one to conclude that we can’t explain human evolution [...]

By: What the bleep does David Albert know?, 2007-03-03 « Skeptigator

What the bleep does David Albert know?, 2007-03-03 « Skeptigator — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 11:33:11 +0000

[...] Posted by Skeptigator on March 3rd, 2007 Here’s a great post over at Cosmic Variance shedding some light on at least one person who was mischaracterized by the “What the bleep” movie. [...]

By: ken

ken — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 15:50:34 +0000

Is there anything in physics that deals with the concept of “now”? Relativity seems to deal with the simultaneity of possible “nows”, but not the concept of an actual “now”, which is fundamental to conciousness.

By: Neil B.

Neil B. — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 02:47:07 +0000

Excuse me, but you shouldn’t assume that what someone else says is an assumption. For example, we have found out, not assumed, that the universe’s constants are just what they need to be to be life-friendly (e.g., the dimensionless fine structure constant, just sticking out there at around 1/137 “appropos of nothing” in logical terms, but just right for us or other thinking creatures.) This is often met with hypocritical claims of a massive undetectable and theoretically baseless other universes with different laws, something that would be pilloried if it wasn’t “politically” useful to those attacking the anthropic principle outlined above. And, why stop with things like a universe, why not reified Road Runner cartoons, heavens and hells, etc? What runs the actualizing of the possible? If modal realists are right, we have minimal Bayesian chance of being in a consistent possible world that has all the same electron masses, theoretically satisfying force laws, etc, because there is no inner “virtus” or law giver to define such sensibility. Every describable pattern of motion and relation is viable, and “exists” somehow. There are many more possible images for example that start out patterned and then fall apart, than continue in like manner throughout. To have order goes even beyond the luck of the right “constants” into the near impossible. There is a reason for it being orderly; that I think has to do with what order allows to be.

Furthermore, the quantum situation really is weird. Really, what does come out of an electron or photon emitter? What happens to “that” when the particle is localized? Decoherence doesn’t even deal with the simple basics of collapse of a given single emission, nor can it deal with the much neglected Renninger negative-result experiment. (If a reliable detector show that a particle was *not* absorbed at a particular point, then the wave function must be redistributed accordingly. For example, all of it now in one leg of a split beam course. Yes, it isn’t just “detection” that collapses the wave function…) Great minds like von Neumann thought of consciousness being involve in QM because we just can’t make it comprehensible or sensible on its own, not from narcissm.

By: Simon DeDeo

Simon DeDeo — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 20:59:22 +0000

At the risk of sounding like a nut, take Alpert’s statement, where he complains about:

1. “what has got to turn out to lie at THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE, that what has got to turn out to lie at THE FOUNDATION OF ALL BEING, is some powerful and reassuring and accessible image of OURSELVES.”

One could easily rephrase this to describe physics today:

2. “what has got to turn out to lie at THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE, that what has got to turn out to lie at THE FOUNDATION OF ALL BEING, is some powerful and reassuring and accessible image of MATHEMATICAL OBJECTS.”

It’s the old “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” problem. I think #2 has gotten us a lot farther than #1 in terms of enriching exciting stuff, but I think it’s important to be clear that what physicists do at heart is no more metaphysically justified than what crazy people do.

By: Flash Starwalker

Flash Starwalker — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 03:56:21 +0000

I guess I should say more. Garrett gave a talk at the AAAS meeting at UCR in June 2006. I think he is head of the electrical engineering department at Boulder? Anyway I think he said that if you make a measurement there is always a signal transmission and that the entropy of the system measured (the receiver) decreases whilst the entropy of the sender increases i.e. the cost of making the measurement.

OK, I started reading Hawking and Ellis on the deSitter dark energy universe.
Fig 19 p. 130 (paperback) The observer O has both a finite future event horizon and a past event horizon. Using the general idea of Wheeler and Feynman, if advanced light signals went from the future horizon back to the past horizon, then the future horizon should have the large entropy ~(Lp^2/\)^-1/2 ~ 10^122 in Bekenstein bits and the past event horizon’s entropy should be small, i.e. one Bekenstein bit pre-inflation. So at some point we need to sew dark energy deSitter metric to the inflation metric to get this idea to work. It’s only a rough half-baked idea at this point that retrocausality explains the arrow of time, i.e. why the early universe has small entropy and the future universe has large entropy. Thus the universe bootstraps itself into being and becoming by a kind of Novikov globally self-consistent loop in time, but from the future deSitter horizon. This is not the same as Gott’s model.

By: Flash Starwalker

Flash Starwalker — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 03:37:57 +0000

Garrett Moddel at U. Colorado has an interesting idea about this.

By: dm

dm — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 02:23:38 +0000

The problem is that reality (whatever that is) cannot be separated from your conciousness. Not to mention the problem of why you are you, and not someone else (which is the first question you are confronted with after rejecting solipsism).

By: Jack

Jack — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 01:36:24 +0000

Sean — is Albert’s book about the arrow of time all that great? Doesn’t he just say that there must be a law of nature which dictates that entropy had to be low at the beginning of the universe? A valid point, but nothing new, right?

By: mtraven

mtraven — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 20:51:16 +0000

Great post, and great comment by Tyler above. Very clarifying.

Let me muddy the waters a bit — there is the physical world, which the hard sciences study, and the mental/social/cultural world, which is indeed part of and emergent from the physical world but is also in some sense a separate sphere, striving for independence from its physical substrate. This is the world people spend most of their time in, even physicists. In this world, people ARE the central and most important feature.

The relationship between these two worlds is hard to understand and What the Bleep sounds like an example of how NOT to think about it clearly.