How about a video introduction? 
(I started listening to the audiobook for Signposts)
Often called metaphysics. When the internet infidels had their forum around 2005, I made a point about how metaphysics begins with recognizing there are 3 possible explanations for the world: from nothing, an infinite regress, or an uncaused cause.
What’s somewhat fascinating is how something from nothing is exactly how the immediate effect of an uncaused cause appears.
Or how, based on the ontological and cosmological arguments, there is an infinite being, but not an infinite number of things… and yet, this doesn’t necessarily prove God. For as Augustine considered there is still one last possibility… or as Aquinas unwittingly referred with the possibility of an eternal universe (proceeding infinitely to the past as it does to the future)
why do you need an observer? and can you define ‘observer’?
1 Like
‘In which case we are just playing intellectual games.’ - I think that’s the definition of string theory! It’s just a shame so much resource and funding has been thrown into that black hole…
1 Like
I like that way of putting it.
Now that way of putting it makes it sound arbitrary or genie-like. I think of it as artfully/skillfully finding a way to create in great abundance in a self perpetuating manner.
The “observer”, otherwise known as a “measuring device” is a piece of apparatus such that when a quantum particle is exposed to it, one of a number of outcomes can occur, each with its own probability. For example a quantum particle is described by a wave that impinges on a set of detectors in different places, just one of which registers the particle, thereby giving a “measurement” of the particle position.
3 Likes
With regard to quantum phenomena, this was such a great quote from Feynman
This thing cannot keep on going so that we are always going to discover more and more new laws. If we do, it will become boring that there are so many levels one underneath the other.
Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law
1 Like
Regarding the video–
I don’t agree that the universe is getting more orderly: Galaxy clusters are spreading past where they are gravitationally joined and galaxies within clusters are doing the same. That decreases order because it ‘breaks’ links. I also can’t see how he can say there is more and more structure given that the universe is evidently heading towards heat death where eventually there will be nothing but photons. I don’t see increasing structure, I see decreasing structure.
I notice that his entire position depends on the universe being open, not closed; a closed universe would be a mega-equivalent of a closed box.
The idea of time flowing in both directions from the Big Bang is nothing new, it appeared in science fiction several decades ago (late 1980s, I think). I recall a story where the idea was that in the universe where time flowed the other way antimatter dominated rather than matter.
I also can’t see how quantum mechanics came out of thermodynamics; it came out of particle physics.
2 Likes
That’s an interesting takeaway. I hope you enjoyed the video. I still haven’t had a chance to watch it.
I tend to be agnostic, but will point out that if spacetime is discrete, the parts will necessarily have a kind of spatial relationship.
That’s the part I find super intriguing as it goes back to the notion of an infinite (brute fact) universe that present events are added to. I wrote my professor a few years after our class to see if he ever spoke with Rowe about the problem I found in Rowe’s reading of Aquinas. In the midst of the conversation, I mentioned that one can only add to the beginning of a supposedly (or symbolically) infinite series.
1 Like
I know Hawking believed (and many others) that the wave function can collapse by itself. But didn’t Schrodinger himself believe you had to have a human observer, as exemplified by his famous “cat” thought experiment?
From my understanding, Schroedinger’s cat analogy was supposed to ridicule the idea of humans as a required observer.
IOW, imagine someone snidely stating, “Do you really think the cat is both alive and dead at the same time?”. I’m not sure how stringently the Copenhagen Interpretation defined the observer, but current understanding does not require a human as an observer. A mote of dust that absorbs a photon is an observer for the purposes of quantum mechanics. If this wasn’t the case, then I would wonder what repercussions this would have with respect to cosmology and astronomy where we see multiple layers of interactions in galaxies billions of light years away. We could also consider the photons we see coming from our Sun, each of which is at the end of a long chain of absorption and emission events at the quantum level that span tens of thousands of years.
This topic was automatically closed 6 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.