On 07 Nov 2014, at 00:48, meekerdb wrote:
On 11/6/2014 10:59 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
You should look at how Vic Stenger gets QM in "The Comprehensible
Cosmos". I think you already have that book.
I read a lot of it in a bookshop, and a lot of papers by Stenger
(but I have only its book on God). What is Stenger position on QM.
Collapse or no collapse? I don't remember.
Vic derived QM as an application of guage invariance. You can read
the relevant pages 229-241 by going to Amazon.com and "Look inside"
the book.
I did it. It just beautiful. It would be interesting to formalize
this. It would give a hint of what needs to be done in "pure
computationalism", where consciousness is assumed to be independent
for some "information" preserving substitution.
You convince me to buy the book. It failed the test of looking for
Everett in the book though. Amazon replied: "0 answers". Hmm... :)
It doesn't include the projection postulate, just Schroedinger's
equation.
Vic liked Everett's relative state interpretation, but he insisted
it happened in one world (i.e. one Hilbert space)
How could the universal wave live in two Hilbert Spaces?
and he disliked talk of multiple worlds as instances of multiple
universes as speculated by some cosmologists.
I can agree, but although is derivation is very nice and convincing,
it does not solve gravity, and I don't see the strings so easily
derive by a gauge transformation. So we are still not knowing, even in
one Hilbert Space, if we get a unique cosmos, a multiverse-à-la-
Deutch, a multi-multivers, a multi-multivers, and the role of many
constants is still unclear in the general setting.
In comp, we have not yet a 3d-space, nor a group, but we have the
starting orthogonality conditions for an infinite "Hilbert Space", at
the place where the machine tries to quantify the first person
indeterminacy.
But he also thought that time-symmetry could provide an
interpretation of EPR and delayed choice and other quantum
weirdness. One his earlier books, "Timeless Reality" pursued this
view.
It should please to Liz, and I think this explanation is coherent with
the absence of collapse (which imo leads to the quantum relative
states).
He was an instrumentalist who cautioned that we make up theories to
(1) correctly predict/describe phenomena and (2) to be point-of-view-
invariant (i.e. public).
That is "third person point of view invariant", but comp starts from a
first person point of view invariance, in a third person settings,
made specifically possible by comp's remation with computer science/
mathematical logic. Comp gives rise to the possibility (and
necessity) of an objective idealism, on machine and their dream in
arithmetic.
Consequently we should not assume that theory is reality - it might
be, but even if it were we could never know it for sure.
Yes, that is why I insist that the first person point of view
invariance (comp) needs some act of faith. But it is a very "simple"
principle from which you can derive, well everything communicable +
everything knowable but not communicable, etc.
http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/BookChapters/Reality.pdf
Well, thanks for reminding me that he is still an aristotelian
theologian. I think consciousness is the little dust which will force
us to see the whole physical reality as only a part of the ultimate
reality, which will be simpler (like the additive and multiplicative
properties of numbers).
He does not push his own logic up to the point he could. he has the
right metaphysical methodology, but he does not take into account the
consciousness problem, that is our dispersion in arithmetic.
Physicists use implicitly an identity thesis mind-brain + a limitation
principle, or induction, limiting reality to the observable. You need
to do that to predict an eclipse or that your water will boil on the
gas. technically, that is what is shown in the UD reasoning. Comp
broke that induction, below the substitution level.
With respect to consciousness, he questioned whether it should even
be considered to exist since it was not in the objective world, i.e.
there were no facts about it on which we could reach intersubjective
agreement.
That is (aristotelian) reductionism, and then I think that there is an
intersubjective agreement (among a growing part of the human
population) that consciousness exists, even if we can't define it. In
fact, this attitude explains why he miss the non communicable part.
But comp makes it natural, and unavoidable: all universal machine
looking inward discover the gap between truth and the communicable
truth, and this with many different intensions. He remains on the left
side of the hypostases.
But that's based on personal communications; I don't think he ever
wrote about it publicly.
Academicians can be terrible, you can loose your job, or your
reputation when just mentioning words like mind, consciousness,
reality, etc. They are of course unaware that we can theorize on that
too, and it becomes just math. Nobody in science pretends to know even
one truth, although few doubts elementary arithmetic. The point is
that we can agree on some points about consciousness or its relation
with machine: in comp we accept that consciousness is invariant for
some substitution, and then derive the laws of mind and matter from
what is necessary for machine and what is consistent, + the nuance of
true, and (local) consistency.
So I agree with Vic's physics, but disagree with his theology. I don't
believe in his "objective God" as an explanation, like he illustrates
himself that such a God can have a purely mathematical origin, from a
simpler god (the truth-extension of any universal machine/language/
system/number will do).
It is so sad he left us.
Bruno
Brent
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it,
send an email to [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
