On 03 Oct 2011, at 19:41, meekerdb wrote:
On 10/3/2011 8:43 AM, Stephen P. King wrote:
[SPK]
Let me try to be sure that I understand this comment. When you
write: "they will all see the same laws" are you referring to
those invariant quantities and relations/functions with respect to
transformations of reference frames/coordinate systems (which has
become the de facto definition of physical laws) or are you
referring to our collective human idea of physical laws?
Why does it seem to me that you assume that the physical laws
that we observe are the only possible ones? To badly echo Leibniz:
How these and not some others? It seems to me that we observe
exactly the physical laws that are consistent with our existence as
observers within this universe, a universe where we can communicate
representations of the contents of our 1p to each other.
Communication requires a plurality of possible 1p for each and
every separate observer in one universe to act as the template from
which signal is distinguished from noise, plurality is insufficient
to communications between observers. One needs something like the
Hennessy-Milner property for a coherent notion of communication.
There seems to be no a priori reason why we do not experience a
universe that contains only a single conscious entity or a universe
with completely different laws along with completely different
physicality for the observers wherein. IMHO, There is something to
the self-selection that Nick Bostrom tedand others have writen
about that needs to be included in this discussion in addition to
the contraints that communications between many separate entities
generates.
The conservation laws come from the requirement that we want our
laws to be the same for everyone at every time and place. This is
our idea of "laws". I'm sure you're familiar with Noether's theorem
and how she showed that conservation of moment comes from the
requirement of invariance under spatial shifts, etc.
That is beautiful and rather convincing.
My friend Vic Stenger has written a book, "The Comprehesible
Cosmos", which shows how this idea extends to general relativity,
the standard model, gauge theories, etc. and provides a unified
view of physics. I recommend it.
The part of physics is interesting, but if he would take more
seriously the mind-body problem, I think he would appreciated the comp
new form of invariance for the physical laws: that is, that the laws
of physics do not depend on the initial universal theory. It does not
depend on the choice of the computation-coordinates (the phi_i).
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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