On 4/2/2013 6:44 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Tuesday, April 2, 2013 8:07:48 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:
On 4/2/2013 3:54 PM, John Mikes wrote:
Dear Stathis,
your lengthy reply to Craig is a bit longer than I can manage to reply in
all
facets so here is a condensed opinion:
Your position about the 'material' world (atoms, etc.) seems a bit
mechanistic:
like us, the (call it:) inanimates are also different no matter how
identical we
think they are in those lines we observe by our instruments and
reductionist means.
You ask about Na-ions: well, even atoms/ions are different to a wider
scrutiny than
enclosed in our physical sciences. Just think about the fission-sequence -
unpredictable WHICH one will undergo it next. It maybe differential within
the
atomic nucleus, may be in the circumstances and their so far not
established impact
on the individual atoms (ions?) leading to a "next one".
That would imply a hidden variable in the atom which determined when it decayed.
Local hidden variables have been ruled out by numerous experiments. Non-local
hidden variables (as in Bohm's quantum mechanics) are not ruled out in
non-relativistic experiments but it doesn't appear possible to extend them
to
quantum field theory in which the number of particles is not conserved.
We know only a portion of the totality and just think that everything has
been
covered.
I am not representing Craig, I make remarks upon your ideas of everything
being
predictably identical to its similars.
The (so far) "known facts" are neither: not 'known' and not 'facts'.
Characteristics are restricted to yesterday's inventory and many potentials
are not
even dreamed of.
We can manipulate a lot of circumstances, but be ready for others that may
show up
tomorrow - beyond our control.
I agree with Craig (in his response to this same long post):
"...Nothing is absolutely identical to anything else. Nothing is even
identical to itself from moment to moment. Identical is a local approximation
contingent upon the comprehensiveness of sense capacities. If your senses
aren't
very discerning, then lots of things seem identical...."
The Schrodinger equation only works if the interchange of two bosons makes
no
difference - so it is implicit in the success of quantum mechanics that
they are
identical.
Does being interchangeable necessarily mean identical?
It does if the number of states that count toward the entropy doesn't increase when you
consider interchanges. Cars obey Maxwell-Boltzman statistics, elementary particles don't.
If I am driving in traffic, my car could be exchanged with any other on the road and be
observed to behave in the same way, yet my experience is that the car which I am driving
is very different from every other car in the universe. If we close our eyes to the
reality of subjectivity, then we can't be very surprised when we fail to see how reality
could be subjective.
Similarly the solution changes sign if fermions are interchanged and that
requires
that the two fermions be identical. Otherwise bosons wouldn't obey
bose-einstein
statistics and fermions wouldn't obey fermi-dirac statistics, they would
both obey
Maxwell-Boltzman statistics - but experiment shows they don't.
I would add: no TWO events have identical circumstances to face,
even if you do no detect inividual differences in the observed data of
participating entities, the influencing circumstances are different from
instance
to instance and call for changes in processes. Bio, or not.
But that becomes an all-purpose excuse for anything-goes. No
generalization is
possible, no pattern can be extrapolated.
Not true. Any generalization is permitted as long as it is recognized as such and not
mistaken for a literal and exhaustive description of nature.
You mean any generalization at all? Or any generalization that passes all empirical
tests. No generalization every needs to be nor is likely to be an exhaustive description
of nature, the whole point of generalizing is to abstract away particulars.
If your generalization makes consciousness undetectable,
You've never provided any way to detect consciousness. I and others have proposed that
the way to detect consciousness is by observing behavior - but you have rejected this
saying that one would have to observe that the conscious being was produced "organically"
by growing from a cell - which is just invoking magic.
then that generalization is no good for addressing consciousness, but it may very well
work for all kinds of precision engineering purposes.
Yet the success of empiricism and science is evidence that there are
regularities
in nature and not every event is unique, replication is possible.
But the failures of empiricism and science to bring about a sane and sustainable way of
life for our species are evidence that we cannot afford to assume that regularity is the
ultimate truth.
Empiricism and science are responsible for providing us with knowledge of the world - not
the wise use of knowledge. You're quite welcome to go the Amazon and join the Yanomano and
live without the insane use of the internet and computers and modern medicine. There's
apparently no danger that you will infect them with any knowledge either scientific or
mathematical.
Brent
Craig
Brent
This is one little corner how agnosticism frees up my mind (beware: not
"freezes"!!).
John Mikes
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