Well, Doc, you mentioned your afterlife view before, and I either found it emotively, unpalatable (Damn. there's goes the human amygdala again!) or found it too hard to comprehend, when you used to say "read the universal dovetailer argument," (Darn that weak cerebrum!), and so forth.
My own sense of things driven by both cranial structures, indicate for me, that since there is and has been unending tragic goings on in the world (perhaps 3.75 billion years worth?), so I in my insight have decided its up to our species, and/or its descendents, to sort thing out. I am believing that, lacking all other available actions, computing is the way to go. the only way at this point. 99.95% of our species population thinks differently from I, and taking that as a reasonable sign that I am on the wrong side of things, once more, I persist anyway. You look for and accept (as most do!) reality as it is. I sift through science papers (like at ARXIV) and other popular online source, attempting to look for possibilities of things, such as cosmological registers of some sort, a MAC address in the sky, but something, more read-write, a spacetime SSD, for a laugh. 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). -----Original Message----- From: Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> To: everything-list <[email protected]> Sent: Fri, Dec 16, 2016 12:48 pm Subject: Re: No gravity / no dark matter 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. 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