"The Comprehensible Cosmos" is one that is just about the structure of
physics and one I like best. "The Fallacy of Fine Tuning" primarily
debunks theists who try to invoke physics to prove the existence of God.
It also has some interesting physics and philosophical ideas in it.
Brent
On 7/11/2017 1:26 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
Hi Brent,
Which book by Vic would you recommend one to read first?
Cheers,
Telmo.
On Tue, Jul 11, 2017 at 5:22 AM, Brent Meeker <[email protected]> wrote:
Interesting essay. When I was helping edit Vic's books I made a similar
argument too him - that the reason his Point-of-View-Invariance seemed so
powerful in rederiving physics is that physicist were only interested in
things that obeyed POVI.
You wrote:
Let us say we were interested in describing all phenomena in our universe.
What type of mathematics would we need? How many axioms would be needed for
mathematical structure to describe all the phenomena? Of course, it is hard
to predict, but it is even harder not to speculate. One possible conclusion
would be that if we look at the universe in totality and not bracket any
subset of phenomena, the mathematics we would need would have no axioms at
all. That is, the universe in totality is devoid of structure and needs no
axioms to describe it. Total lawlessness! The mathematics are just plain
sets without structure. This would finally eliminate all metaphysics when
dealing with the laws of nature and mathematical structure. It is only the
way we look at the universe that gives us the illusion of structure.
I"m sure you're aware of Max Tegmark's "Mathematical Universe Hypothesis" in
which all possible mathematical structures obtain in some universe; and his
later restriction of this idea to the "Computable Universe Hypothesis" in
which only Turing computable universes exist. But you are probably not
aware of the ideas of Bruno Marchal, a mathematical logician in Brussels.
He has a much more worked out idea of reality based on the Universal
Dovetailing computer which he combines with the assumption that
consciousness is certain kind of information processing to conclude that the
UD computation produces all experience and implies physics. It seems like a
crankish idea at first, but Bruno is a very nice and serious guy, not at all
a crank (though I don't agree with all of his theories). Here's his basic
paper:
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html
I know him from his posting on the Everything list;
[email protected]
Brent
On 7/10/2017 3:56 PM, Noson Yanofsky wrote:
Thank you!
Vic Stenger’s books are always very interesting!!!
Attached is a paper on finding lawlessness.
And here is a link to another paper that was just published:
http://nautil.us/issue/49/the-absurd/chaos-makes-the-multiverse-unnecessary
Please pass them on to whoever would be interested in them.
All the best,
Noson
From: Brent Meeker [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Monday, July 10, 2017 4:48 PM
To: spinozalens via Free Thinkers Physics Discussion Group
<[email protected]>; [email protected]; Atvoid-2
<[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Lawrence Krauss Should Have Paid Attention to Vic
It's gratifying to see Vic's contribution to the philosophy of science
recognized. I think it's important to recognize though that mathematics is
not "effective" in weeding out false physics theories. Intelligence has
evolutionary advantage insofar as it is good at prediction; which is
implicitly projection of regularities into the future. So humans have a
built-in tendency to see patterns - even where they are specious. They can
build mathematical theories which don't have any reference reality, just as
they can invent superstitions about physical events.
Anyway, thanks to Prof Yanofsky.
Brent
On 7/10/2017 8:14 AM, spinozalens via Free Thinkers Physics Discussion Group
wrote:
In Marcus Chown's delightful book " The Never Ending Days of Being Dead" a
whole chapter ( Patterns in the Void) is devoted to Vic's ideas " Where The
Laws Of Physics Comes From" Chown used good judgement including this chapter
in his book. I think that had Lawrence Krauss been more familiar with
Vic's work , he possibly wouldn't have walked in the minefield he did with
his book. "A Universe From Nothing" In my opinion Vic had a very good
answer to this question. This answer has not received enough attention in
the physics and philosophy communities. Here mathematician Noson S Yanofky
fleshes out these ideas in more detail.
Bob Zannelli
Why Mathematics Works So Well
Noson S. Yanofsky
(Submitted on 28 Jun 2015)
A major question in philosophy of science involves the unreasonable
effectiveness of mathematics in physics. Why should mathematics, created or
discovered, with nothing empirical in mind be so perfectly suited to
describe the laws of the physical universe? We review the well-known fact
that the symmetries of the laws of physics are their defining properties. We
show that there are similar symmetries of mathematical facts and that these
symmetries are the defining properties of mathematics. By examining the
symmetries of physics and mathematics, we show that the effectiveness is
actually quite reasonable. In essence, we show that the regularities of
physics are a subset of the regularities of mathematics.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.08426
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