1P-causality
The exchange between SPK and Bruno is hard to personalize, there is am unmarked paragraph after a par marked ... so I was in doubt whether it is Bruno, or Stephen who wrote: *His use of the word causation is unfortunate but we can forgive him because there is no correct word for the relation that he is considering. * ** Both mathematical and philosophical causation is partial: all we can consider as instigating a 'change' (= cause?) may only come from the part of the totality we already know of and include into that partivular model used in our consideration, while the influences of the still unknown factors are included (active?) as well (not to mention those known ones we neglected in our limited thinking). In precise thinking such uncertainty interferes with applying 'correct' vocabulary. John M -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The Nature of Time
Hi Stephen, My point is that time as a pointer that points to what exists and what not (anymore or yet), cannot exist. You can indeed map the set of all such pointers to the real line. I agree that relativity is inconsistent with such an idea of time. Saibal Hi Saibal Are you defining time as isomorphic to the Real number line? Could it be that all of these proofs of the nonexistence of time are really just proofs that time is *not* that but something else entirely? It seems to me that we are thinking of the way that we can chronometrize events in our past with real number values and concluding that this labeling scheme extends into the future in a unique way, the problem is that if we take General Relativity seriously this is a non-started of an idea. The relativity of simultaneity coupled with general covariance does not permit any form of unique labeling events. We really need to stop assuming a Newtonian Absolute chronometrization of events. Time is a local measure of change, nothing more. Onward! Stephen *** -Original Message- From: smi...@zonnet.nl Sent: Saturday, April 02, 2011 8:27 PM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: QTI is trivially false I think we are now making hidden assumptions about the nature of time, namely that it really exists, and then we are trying to argue that you can still have immortality (in different senses). However, it is far more natural to assume that time does not exist and then you get immortality (in the sense of my conscious states that have a finite memory always existing) in a far more straightforward way. That time does not exist is a quite natural assumption. To see this, assume that it does exist. But then, since time evolution is given by a unitary transform, the past still exists in a scrambled way in the present (when taking into account parallel universes). E.g. your past brain state of ten years ago can still be described in terms of the physical variables as they exist today. Of course such a description is extremely complicated involving the physical state of today's multiverse within a sphere of ten lightyears. Then assuming that the details of implementation does not affect consciousness (as long as the right program is being run), one has to conclude that your past state of coinsciousess exists also today. You could therefore just as well assume that time does not exist, as the two possibilities are operationally equivalent. Saibal -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: 1P-causality
On 4/6/2011 2:06 PM, John Mikes wrote: The exchange between SPK and Bruno is hard to personalize, there is am unmarked paragraph after a par marked ... so I was in doubt whether it is Bruno, or Stephen who wrote: /His use of the word causation is unfortunate but we can forgive him because there is no correct word for the relation that he is considering. / // Both mathematical and philosophical causation is partial: all we can consider as instigating a 'change' (= cause?) may only come from the part of the totality we already know of and include into that partivular model used in our consideration, while the influences of the still unknown factors are included (active?) as well (not to mention those known ones we neglected in our limited thinking). In precise thinking such uncertainty interferes with applying 'correct' vocabulary. John M In fundamental physics where evolution is time-symmetric, the distinction between cause and effect is just an arbitrary choice. In more practical terms cause usually refers to some part of a process we could chose to control. If a cable breaks and drops something, we say the accident was caused by cable failure - because what we think we could have done to prevent the accident is use a better cable. We don't say gravity caused it because we can't turn off gravity. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: 1P-causality
On Wed, Apr 6, 2011 at 4:59 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: In fundamental physics where evolution is time-symmetric, the distinction between cause and effect is just an arbitrary choice. In more practical terms cause usually refers to some part of a process we could chose to control. If a cable breaks and drops something, we say the accident was caused by cable failure - because what we think we could have done to prevent the accident is use a better cable. We don't say gravity caused it because we can't turn off gravity. Quoting Bill Vallicella: “Suppose a man dies in a fire while in bed. The salient cause might be determined to be smoking in bed. No one will say that the flammability of the bedsheets and other room furnishings is the cause of the man's incineration. Nevertheless, had the room and its furnishings not been flammable, the fire would not have occurred. The flammability is not merely a logical, but also a causal, condition of the fire. It is part of the total cause, but no one will consider it salient. The word is from the Latin salire to leap, whence our word 'sally' as when one sallies forth to do battle at a chess tournament, say. A salient cause, then, is one that jumps out at you, grabbing you by your epistemic shorthairs as it were, as opposed to being a mere background condition. What these examples show is that there is an ordinary-language use of 'cause' which is context-sensitive and interest-relative and (if I may) point-of-view-ish. A wholly objective view of nature, a Nagelian view from nowhere, would not be able to discriminate the salient from the nonsalient in matters causal. In terms of fundamental physics, the whole state of the world at time t determines its state at subsequent times. At this level, a short-circuit and the current's being on are equally causal in respect of the effect of a fire. Our saying that the short-circuit caused the fire, not the current's being on, simply advertises the fact that for us the latter is the normal and desired state of things, the state we have an interest in maintaining, and that the former is the opposite.” -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
