On 11 Jul 2017, at 05:22, Brent Meeker wrote:
Interesting essay. When I was helping edit Vic's books I made a
similar argument too him - that the reason his Point-of-View-
Invariance seemed so powerful in rederiving physics is that
physicist were only interested in things that obeyed POVI.
You wrote:
Let us say we were interested in describing all phenomena in our
universe. What type of mathematics would we need? How many axioms
would be needed for mathematical structure to describe all the
phenomena? Of course, it is hard to predict, but it is even harder
not to speculate. One possible conclusion would be that if we look
at the universe in totality and not bracket any subset of phenomena,
the mathematics we would need would have no axioms at all.
With no axiom at all, we get all models of reality, but no theorem, so
we can no more even use 1+1=2, even in everyday life. That leads to
total "occasionalism". There is some coffee in my cup by pure chance!
It is a good insight though, but some axioms are needed, like x+0 =
x, ... or the combinators laws Kxy = x, Sxyz = xz(yz).
And if we assume Mechanism (in cognitive science, not in physics) then
we can prove that the whole physics is entirely determined by any
(first order) logical specification of any universal (in the Church or
Turing sense) machine.
That is, the universe in totality is devoid of structure and needs
no axioms to describe it. Total lawlessness!
That would have been the case if the self-reference logic collapsed.
In that case physics would have been boolean logic (still needing some
axiom), but the physical would have become purely contingent (no laws
indeed). But with mechanism, we know (or should know) that quantum
mechanics, or a quantum mechanics is part of the physical laws.
The mechanist hypothesis in the mind science saves physics!
The problem: physicists do not study (mathematical) logic (and rarely
philosophy of mind or cognitive science).
The mathematics are just plain sets without structure. This would
finally eliminate all metaphysics when dealing with the laws of
nature and mathematical structure. It is only the way we look at the
universe that gives us the illusion of structure.
I"m sure you're aware of Max Tegmark's "Mathematical Universe
Hypothesis" in which all possible mathematical structures obtain in
some universe; and his later restriction of this idea to the
"Computable Universe Hypothesis" in which only Turing computable
universes exist. But you are probably not aware of the ideas of
Bruno Marchal, a mathematical logician in Brussels. He has a much
more worked out idea of reality based on the Universal
Dovetailing computer which he combines with the assumption that
consciousness is certain kind of information processing to conclude
that the UD computation produces all experience and implies
physics. It seems like a crankish idea at first, but Bruno is a
very nice and serious guy, not at all a crank (though I don't agree
with all of his theories). Here's his basic paper: http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html
I know him from his posting on the Everything list; everything-list@googlegroups.com
Thanks Brent,
Bruno
Brent
On 7/10/2017 3:56 PM, Noson Yanofsky wrote:
Thank you!
Vic Stenger’s books are always very interesting!!!
Attached is a paper on finding lawlessness.
And here is a link to another paper that was just published:
http://nautil.us/issue/49/the-absurd/chaos-makes-the-multiverse-unnecessary
Please pass them on to whoever would be interested in them.
All the best,
Noson
From: Brent Meeker [mailto:meeke...@verizon.net]
Sent: Monday, July 10, 2017 4:48 PM
To: spinozalens via Free Thinkers Physics Discussion Group <atvoi...@googlegroups.com
>; no...@sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu; Atvoid-2 <atvoi...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: Lawrence Krauss Should Have Paid Attention to Vic
It's gratifying to see Vic's contribution to the philosophy of
science recognized. I think it's important to recognize though
that mathematics is not "effective" in weeding out false physics
theories. Intelligence has evolutionary advantage insofar as it is
good at prediction; which is implicitly projection of regularities
into the future. So humans have a built-in tendency to see
patterns - even where they are specious. They can build
mathematical theories which don't have any reference reality, just
as they can invent superstitions about physical events.
Anyway, thanks to Prof Yanofsky.
Brent
On 7/10/2017 8:14 AM, spinozalens via Free Thinkers Physics
Discussion Group wrote:
In Marcus Chown's delightful book " The Never Ending Days of Being
Dead" a whole chapter ( Patterns in the Void) is devoted to Vic's
ideas " Where The Laws Of Physics Comes From" Chown used good
judgement including this chapter in his book. I think that had
Lawrence Krauss been more familiar with Vic's work , he possibly
wouldn't have walked in the minefield he did with his book. "A
Universe From Nothing" In my opinion Vic had a very good answer
to this question. This answer has not received enough
attention in the physics and philosophy communities. Here
mathematician Noson S Yanofky fleshes out these ideas in more detail.
Bob Zannelli
Why Mathematics Works So Well
Noson S. Yanofsky
(Submitted on 28 Jun 2015)
A major question in philosophy of science involves the unreasonable
effectiveness of mathematics in physics. Why should mathematics,
created or discovered, with nothing empirical in mind be so
perfectly suited to describe the laws of the physical universe? We
review the well-known fact that the symmetries of the laws of
physics are their defining properties. We show that there are
similar symmetries of mathematical facts and that these symmetries
are the defining properties of mathematics. By examining the
symmetries of physics and mathematics, we show that the
effectiveness is actually quite reasonable. In essence, we show
that the regularities of physics are a subset of the regularities
of mathematics.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.08426
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