On 7/1/2014 2:55 PM, LizR wrote:
On 2 July 2014 09:33, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 7/1/2014 1:32 PM, David Nyman wrote:
On 1 July 2014 19:24, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I think you have created a strawman "exhaustively-reducible
physical or
material ontology". Sure, physicists take "forces" and "matter" as
working
assumptions - but they don't say what they are. They are never
anything
other than "elements of a mathematical model which works well."
And what
does it mean to work well? It means to explain appearances -
exactly the
same thing you put forward as a uniquely different goal of comp.
Firstly, I'm not really persuaded by your contention that forces and
matter, to use your example, are merely "elements of a mathematical
model which works well". Rather, in terms of that very model, such
elements are precisely those that (at least in principle) are supposed
to comprise a fully-sufficient bottom-up ontology for the theory as a
whole. The point, again in principle at least, is that nothing *above*
the level of the basic ontology need be taken into account in the
evolution of states defined in terms of it; put simply, there is no
top-down causality.
Actually, causality, except in the no-spacelike influence, doesn't enter
into
fundamental physics. Models are generally time-symmetric.
I agree. As Victor Stenger mentions in "The Comprehensible Cosmos" causality is just
another word for the 2nd law, and the 2nd law is an emergent result of the universe
being in a special state - namely expanding. The expansion determines an arrow of time
via various processes where initially time-symmetric systems "freeze out" into bound
states (quarks, nuclei, stars etc). This has the effect of allowing the entropy ceiling
to rise so a system that was originally at thermodynamic equilibrium is able to move
away from it as it cools / expands.
So the question boils down to whether the expansion is a result of fundamental physics,
or incidental / local. Eternal inflation seems to suggest it's fundamental - or does it?
Can someone more knowledgeable correct me on that, if necessary?
Just about any theory that includes a universe (and what good would one be if it didn't)
is going to allow multiple universes. Otherwise there would have to be some principle
allowing one but forbidding others. If the universe is big sometime and small others then
physical time is probably going to point to inflation (not deflation). But still, the
fact that the universe seems to have started in a low entropy state needs explanation
(c.f. Sean Carroll's "From Eternity to Here").
Brent
"Any eternal God would be so bored after one eternity that It would do Its best to commit
suicide by creating an equally adept Opponent. Half of the time the Opponent would
succeed and the process would repeat. It is impossible to know whether the current "God"
is an even or odd term in the series."
--- Roahn Wynar
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