> On 14 May 2018, at 06:52, [email protected] wrote: > > 'There is no inductive method which could lead to the fundamental concepts of > physics. Failure to understand this fact constituted the basic philosophical > error of so many investigators of the nineteenth century.' > > What does he mean? AG
He means that you cannot be sure to find a physical laws (which involves infinities of examples) from a finite number of observations. Obviously, this is quite close to the spirit of computationalism, which go farer in justifying that we can deduce the existence of the indexical apparence of the physical realm, and its quantitative aspects, by reasoning alone. The physical reality is still needed to test it, and in this case it is computationalism which is tested. The physical reality is “in the head” of all universal number (in arithmetic or in a Turing equivalent). Einstein is right, and the way physics approach reality makes it impossible to distinguish a physical laws from geographical law. With computationalism, and who knows perhaps with other hypotheses, we have the mean to distinguish physics from geography, and computationalism justifies well what is a physical law (it is what is invariant for all observable by any universal machine). I guess this is a quote of the old Einstein, perhaps after he met Gödel, although the young Einstein was also rather “physical platonist”, so I am not sure. He did say to someone asking if he do experiments that his laboratory was his pen and paper, if I remind well. I have not the time to mesquite it, but Raymond Smullyan, in “Forever Undecided” made very precisely the confusion between physics and geography, and it helped me to realise this was a common confusion for mathematicians, still today. Mechanism makes physics invariant for the primitive universal machinery (invariant for the choice of the “base” used for naming the partial computable functions phi_i and their range/domain the w_i). This should be enough to deduce the laws of the observable, and indeed that has been done, and confirmed up to now. One day we should discuss on the similarity and difference between the induction axioms in mathematics, and the inductive inference in the empirical science. It is both quite different yet much more related than is usually thought. Bruno > > -- > 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] > <mailto:[email protected]>. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>. > Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list > <https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list>. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout > <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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
