On 3/1/2014 11:37 PM, LizR wrote:
On 2 March 2014 20:28, Chris de Morsella <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>>Yes, except I conceive of a virtuous circle of explanation...and reject
the idea that there is an base.
An interesting view. Recently I have been toying with retro-causality as a
potential mechanism for self-manifestation without any need of ultimate
origin or any primal causation.
IMHO you need some sort of logical explanation. Otherwise retrocausality is like eternal
inflation - you can use it to explain where the universe comes from, but you still need
to explain the origin of the laws of physics that allow it to happen. (This is why I
find Max Tegmark's mathematical universe stuff appealing.)
I don't think Tegmark appreciates how much the "laws of physics" depend on our demands
that the "laws" be invariant, e.g. conservation of energy is a consequence of requiring
the lagrangian to be time-translation invariant. See Vic Stenger's "The Comprehensible
Cosmos" for full development of the idea that all of physics can be seen this way. So the
"laws" are the way they are because we make them up to fit the observations and we only
want to make them up in certain ways that make them useful for prediction and
explanation. If stuff doesn't fit we may reject it as "geography" and then try to come
back later and explain it from better "laws". You can see this in the solar system.
Kepler proposed orbital laws based on the Platonic solids. Newton showed that gravity made
the orbital motion predictable; but it relegated the spacing of the planets to
"geography". Now we study the creation of stars from the accretion of dust clouds and
have statistical explanations for the "geography".
Brent
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