On 13 Sep 2013, at 19:49, John Clark wrote:
On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 10:11 AM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be>
wrote:
>> Science, or at least theoretical physics, is all about
explaining physical laws in terms of other more general laws.
Either this process goes on forever like a infinitely nested
Russian doll, or it does not go on forever and come to a end and
some things are just fundamental and it is pointless when you reach
that level to ask "what is it made of?".
> Indeed. But some stop at elementary particles, or strings,
One step at a time! At this point it would be pretty silly to worry
about what strings are made of when we have almost no evidence that
they even exist. Right now it can explain almost nothing we see so
there is no such thing as string theory, there is only the striving
for a string theory; when and if theorists succeed in building
something useful out of it then we can talk about what if anything
strings are made of.
As long as you suggest that there are things "made of" things, you are
staying in the Aristotelian frame. Other can suggest that there are no
such things at all, just natural numbers relative computations, lived
as dream of things made of things. This makes sense as all those
(mathematical, arithmetical) computations exists in a sense similar to
the existence of, say, even or prime numbers.
> With comp (the idea that we are machine),
By "machine" I assume you mean a deterministic process.
A machine is not a process, and I was refereing to digital machines,
which are defined in term of number relations.
Well you're a logician so you know we either are or we are not, and
if we are not then we are by definition random. Like it or not its a
question of cuckoo clocks or roulette wheels.
There are many other options, like a machine + a random oracle, or
even options with spiritual substances (I don't believe in them, but
logically we cannot exclude them).
Bruno
John K Clark
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