When entering into discussions such as these, are you doing for the intellectual enjoyment of physics, astronomy, and math, or are you interested, instead, of allowing humanity better control of our region of the universe, by understanding the rules?
-----Original Message----- From: Russell Standish <li...@hpcoders.com.au> To: everything-list <everything-list@googlegroups.com> Sent: Thu, Dec 15, 2016 7:36 pm Subject: Re: No gravity / no dark matter On Thu, Dec 15, 2016 at 04:47:03PM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > The question you asked was (I quote): > > >>>I don't see why you would say physicalism needs to be assumed to > >>>explain the predictive power of physics. > > > Let me try to explain again. > > How do a physicist make a prediction about his future first person > experience? > > To fix the things, why am I pretty sure I will fell like seeing an > eclipse when predicted by Newton's law. > > The usual materialist/physicalist answer is roughly like this. There > is the assumption of a physical reality(*) and that it contains or > realized objects obeying laws. I don't think this is the case. For example, in the theory of statics, used to construct bridges, solid objects with properties of tensile strength, (mass) density, elasticity and so on are assumed, even though ontologically, they are known to be composed of mostly empty space, with those very ontological properties the result of electromagnetic fields. Most other physical models are the same - the example Brent gave of using continuous fluid mechanics to predict hurricances is an excelent point. Of course we know that the atmosphere is not a continuum, but rather made up of a collection of molecules with emergent properties that makes the continuous description a good one. It may be that some physicists think that the objects of the Standard Model (leptons, quarks, bosons etc) are somehow fundamental, but I doubt that many would stick to their guns on that. But the Standard Model is used quite rarely for making predictions, and is generally computationally infeasible. Classical dynamics is much more widely used. So I cannot see why someone pointing to the predictive power of physics is in any way making an ontological statement of the form of physicalism. IIRC, in the original context, Brent was trying to tongue-in-cheek say that the laws of fluid dynamics is God, even though I know he strongly asserts that God must be a person, so it must have been some sort of satirical response. Nevertheless, I didn't see anywhere where he claimed that the models of physics were ontological. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Senior Research Fellow hpco...@hpcoders.com.au Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
