In the following posts, I will take look at religion and Science from another angle, and I will do it exploiting the theme of the old Greek myth of Creation and Theogony.
Why do I use a myth instead of restricting myself to a purely rational and logical argument? Part of my reason is contained in the following quote from Plato’sRepublic, Book VII
(where also the famous “cave” story can be found):
And whereas the other so called virtues of the soul seem to be akin to bodily qualities, for even when they are not originally innate they can be implanted later by habit and exercise, the virtue of wisdom more than anything else contains a divine element which always remains, and by this conversion is rendered useful and profitable; or, on the other hand, hurtful and useless. Did you never observe the narrow intelligence flashing from the keen eye of a clever rogue–how eager he is, how clearly his paltry soul sees the way to his end; he is the reverse of blind, but his keen eyesight is forced into the service of evil, and he is mischievous in proportion to his cleverness.
But what if there had been a circumcision of such natures in the days of their youth; and they had been severed from those sensual pleasures, such as eating and drinking, which, like leaden weights, were attached to them at their birth, and which drag them down and turn the vision of their souls upon the things that are below --if, I say, they had been released from these impediments and turned in the opposite direction, the very same faculty in them would have seen the truth as keenly as they see what their eyes are turned to now.
Plato through the mouth of his teacher, is telling us that while we all have the necessary faculties for seeing the world, we are not always using them at their full strength – because some of our habits have been instilled deeply in us, without our permission, by our upbringing and education. The same theme shows up, though not as directly as in Plato, in the following excerpts from the New Testament:
And the disciples came, and said unto him, Why speakest thou unto them in parables?
He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.
For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.
Therefore speak me to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand. (Mat 13:10 -13)
P.S.2. 16-03-23 8:40 So, the paper on Generalized Uncertainty Relation that I am reviewing is supposed to be a PhD dissertation of the younger author. I am now having a conversation with the supervisor - the first author of the paper. Trying to understand the math!
P.S.3. 16-03-23 9:19 What do you call a constructivist who's recently accepted the Axiom of Choice?
A Zorn again mathematician.
P.S.4. 18:09 I need to understand spheres!
Hmmm that paper you are reviewing sounds interesting. Via you mentioning Oumuamua and linking to a paper mentioning "generalized" Poincare algebra, it sounds kind of like a Pioneer anomaly, Irving Segalish cosmology. Throwing it into a Heisenberg algebra Fock space commutation relations scheme is fun too. A certain big Heisenberg algebra grades much like Cl(8) and E8. Tony used all three interchangeably, he had fun being loose with morphing his math structures. I hope you and Mathilde S. aren't too far apart philosophically.
ReplyDelete@John. G.
DeleteMy "philosophy" is colinear with the views expressed by Einstein. Quoting from Kumar's book:
During the Easter vacation of 1929 Pauli went to see Einstein in Berlin. He found Einstein’s ‘attitude regarding modern quantum physics reactionary’ because he continued to believe in a reality where natural phenomena unfolded according to the laws of nature, independently of an observer. Shortly after Pauli’s visit, Einstein made his views perfectly clear as he received the Planck medal from Planck himself. ‘I admire to the highest degree the achievements of the younger generation of physicists which goes by the name quantum mechanics and believe in the deep level of truth of that theory,’ he told the audience, ‘but I believe that the restriction to statistical laws will be a passing one.’
So you may like some Born philosophy but not so much Born rule philosophy. Once the algebraic setup goes into Hilbert space things I tend to lose interest too though that's largely because I can't follow it. It's probably because Tony didn't work with Hilbert spaces but then I couldn't follow Tony's use of Jordan algebra either and I did get into differential forms even though Tony didn't much.
Delete@John G
DeleteThanks John. Will read about Max Born philosophy.
Reding Max Born, "The natural philosophy of cause and chance", Chapter X, Metaphysical conclusions:
Deletehttps://dspace.gipe.ac.in/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10973/36813/GIPE-023943.pdf?sequence=3
Yes, To much extent I share the philosophy of Max Born. Yet while Born seems to see either detrminism or chance, I prefer to choose the third option colinearly with Chris Langan's "the third option" - which yet needs to be articulated in details. And that is my task.
DeleteFrom
Deletehttps://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/born/
"There is no doubt that the formalism of quantum mechanics and its statistical interpretation are extremely successful in ordering and predicting physical experiences. But can our desire of understanding, our wish to explain things, be satisfied by a theory which is frankly and shamelessly statistical and indeterministic? Can we be content with accepting chance, not cause, as the supreme law of the physical world?
To this last question I answer that not causality, properly understood, is eliminated, but only a traditional interpretation of it, consisting in its identification with determinism. I have taken pains to show that these two concepts are not identical. Causality in my definition is the postulate that one physical situation depends on the other, and causal research means the discovery of such dependence. This is still true in quantum physics, though the objects of observation for which a dependence is claimed are different: they are the probabilities of elementary events, not those single events themselves. "
We still have the fundamental question: what are these "probabilities"? Where do they come from?
One can look at free will like you, the Cs or Jack Sarfatti do and think of a single particle using free will and choosing worldlines into the future and they kind of have to be probabilistically random since a single particle is really dumb and can't do otherwise. Doing physics experiments on choices of worldlines made by the human mind isn't technically possible though we humans could kind of obviously make better choices but they might be different than totally probabilistically random.
ReplyDeleteAs to why the probabilities have weird interference patterns, the classical-like algebraic setup must have a Feynman propagator degree of freedom. From a differential forms point of view, that propagator seems like the affine one-form that generalizes proper time for a null geodesic. So for your degenerate metric for the trapped light, does the frequency as the 4th dimension idea come from a generalized proper time for trapped light? This degree of freedom has confused me for a while, it also seems like a solder form which supposedly glues position to momentum.