On 2 July 2014 09:33, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: > On 7/1/2014 1:32 PM, David Nyman wrote: > >> On 1 July 2014 19:24, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: >> >> I think you have created a strawman "exhaustively-reducible physical or >>> material ontology". Sure, physicists take "forces" and "matter" as >>> working >>> assumptions - but they don't say what they are. They are never anything >>> other than "elements of a mathematical model which works well." And what >>> does it mean to work well? It means to explain appearances - exactly the >>> same thing you put forward as a uniquely different goal of comp. >>> >> Firstly, I'm not really persuaded by your contention that forces and >> matter, to use your example, are merely "elements of a mathematical >> model which works well". Rather, in terms of that very model, such >> elements are precisely those that (at least in principle) are supposed >> to comprise a fully-sufficient bottom-up ontology for the theory as a >> whole. The point, again in principle at least, is that nothing *above* >> the level of the basic ontology need be taken into account in the >> evolution of states defined in terms of it; put simply, there is no >> top-down causality. >> > > Actually, causality, except in the no-spacelike influence, doesn't enter > into fundamental physics. Models are generally time-symmetric. >
I agree. As Victor Stenger mentions in "The Comprehensible Cosmos" causality is just another word for the 2nd law, and the 2nd law is an emergent result of the universe being in a special state - namely expanding. The expansion determines an arrow of time via various processes where initially time-symmetric systems "freeze out" into bound states (quarks, nuclei, stars etc). This has the effect of allowing the entropy ceiling to rise so a system that was originally at thermodynamic equilibrium is able to move away from it as it cools / expands. So the question boils down to whether the expansion is a result of fundamental physics, or incidental / local. Eternal inflation seems to suggest it's fundamental - or does it? Can someone more knowledgeable correct me on that, if necessary? -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
