On Sunday, March 3, 2019 at 7:58:01 AM UTC-6, Philip Thrift wrote: > > > > On Sunday, March 3, 2019 at 7:32:00 AM UTC-6, Lawrence Crowell wrote: > > Bringing Gödel into physics is treading on a mine field as it is. Believe >> me, most physicists react in horror at the mere suggestion of this. I have >> this suspicion however that quantum measurement is a a sort of Gödel >> self-reference with quantum information or qubits. This may, at least >> within how we describe quantum mechanics if it should turn out to be not >> how the quantum world actually is, be one reason why we have this growing >> pantheon of quantum interpretations and no apparent way to decide which is >> definitively correct. >> >> > > > I still think it's Darwin, not Gödel, that has anything to do with > "quantum measurement". > > But physicists recoil in horror from that. > > - pt >
Darwinian logic did put down the Aristotelian-Cartesian hierarchical structure with respect to biology. Aristotle and Plato are the two most known Hellenic philosophers because their systems of thought were wrapped into the New Testament Bible. Plato had this idea of there being a hierarchy of being, which was taken up by St Paul, carried further by Augustine, Aquinas and eventually encoded by Descartes. Descartes had this hierarchy of structure over function, design over material form etc, which was carried into science during the 17th and 18th century. In some ways Newtonian mechanics was seen as a confirmation of Descartes' metaphysics. Darwin struck a fatal blow to this with respect to biology. Darwin did away with Aristotle and Descartes with biology. Gödel had an impact on Plato, though it is not clear to me how. Gödel saw himself as a Platonist and that his incompleteness theorem demonstrated how mathematical truth is independent of knowing it. I tend to see this in terms of Turing machines, which would say that certain problems are not computable and as such no information can be derived. Whether there is a self-referential truth that is not enumerated is less important. The real number line has a continuum of elements and there is not enough information, even if that is infinite, to encode it all. We might say in some sense that these numbers exist as if being in Plato's cave we can imagine the existence of things by looking at shadows. Kant proposed a metaphysics that is somewhat parallel to quantum mechanics. The noumena of what "actually is," that Bohm insisted we could come to really know, is the unknown of QM. We probably can't know if the quanta is epistemic or ontic. The phenomena are the measurements and predictions. This has a certain Platonic character to it, but within the physical domain. The noumena are similar to Plato's pure forms and the phenomena are similar to the physical forms. The employment of Gödel with physics might be compared to shifting from Plato to Kant. However, if quantum interpretations are Gödel self-referential physical axioms of an auxiliary nature we are not left with any knowledge of what might be called a noumena. What we face is either the fact that decoherence and the outcome of a quantum event occurs for no reason at all, where quantum interpretations are fantasies of sorts, or that quantum mechanics is embedded in some physical axiomatic system of greater power. A Darwinian viewpoint on physics is worth keeping in the back of one's head. The superstring paradigm might be the endpoint of the idea there is some axiomatic scheme behind physical existence. It would be similar to Darwin, in that Darwin ended the hierarchical order of life with lower animals "down there" and us humans at the top "up there" as the pinnacle of creation by rules given by what we call God. Smolin and other have proposed Darwinian ideas, but so far nothing has come of them. Maybe physicists should keep working. The Darwinian order to the world relies upon an open world system. A closed world is one where entropy does reach maximum and at equilibrium there is just death. The creationists love this argument, which is true in a closed world, but not open. We may then compare it to the structure of cream in coffee, which has become a bit of a design game these days. If you pour cream in black coffee it makes all sorts of swirls and structures, but as you keep swirling the coffee that becomes a brown mix and equilibrium is struck. So the analogue for an open system would be where both the coffee and cream are constantly replenished so there is always black coffee and there is always primarily cream whirls. It is an open system. It is not one that reaches maximum entropy. Well we know the universe started at a very low entropy. We know of no particular reason why there could not have been lots of black holes generated so the initial entropy would be much higher. So how the universe was generated, say how the inflationary spacetime with a high energy false vacuum generated the low energy of the true vacuum in our observable pocket, may have been an aspect of an open system. The quantum states of the universe may in fact never reach equilibrium. Suppose we have a black hole of mass M and temperature T = 1/8πM in a background with the same temperature. If the black hole absorbs a photon from the background or emits a photon to the background as Hawking radiation we then have M → M ± δM and reciprocally the temperature of the black hole decreases or increases. So the black hole will by stochastic events drift away from this equality situation. Equilibrium is not defined. This suggests there is no general meaning to equilibrium in quantum gravitation. So as a result a Darwinian concept for cosmology might be possible. LC -- 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.
