On 16 Dec 2016, at 15:11, spudboy100 via Everything List wrote:
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?
I guess each one of us has his, or her, own motivation.
Mine is just to try to figure out what is reality, and what is the
relation between us and that reality.
I try to get some rationalist light (for a change) on afterlife, soul,
consciousness, meaning, etc. And I hope we can improve our relations
in general by extending our knowledge of that reality, although with
computationalism, we can never be sure our knowledge *is* knowledge,
except for a few first person indexical (like a pain here&now or a
pleasure here&now, that we can know but not communicate rationally,
nor justified).
I think most fundamental researchers are motivated by a curiosity and
fascination on some Reality that they are searching, and often, it can
happen they get cursed by the beauty of their theories, which can help
but can also become an handicap----that will depend on many things.
So it is neither for the enjoyment of some science per se, nor for
helping humanity, it is by curiosity of what is real, with, in the
background some enjoyment for what we can see/conceive in the process,
and the idea that better knowing what is real can only help humanity
if she needs help.
Bruno
-----Original Message-----
From: Russell Standish <[email protected]>
To: everything-list <[email protected]>
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 [email protected]
Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au
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