On 02 Mar 2014, at 20:33, meekerdb wrote:
On 3/1/2014 11:37 PM, LizR wrote:
On 2 March 2014 20:28, Chris de Morsella <[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.
OK. That is a very good book. (Much better than his book on theology).
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.
OK.
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".
Very nice. This fits very well with how computationalism needs to
redefine physics, with the risk that physics might become purely
geographical. But the results obtained so far saves physics as a non
trivial core guiding all the geographies.
Note that physics becomes "TOE" invariant with comp. You can define
physics by what is observable by *any* universal (Löbian) machine.
Physics is invariant for the choice of the base phi_i.
Like Noether and Vic Stenger explains energy conservation (a physical
law) by the time-translation invariance, comp explains the whole of
physics by the phi_i invariance, somehow.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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