On Sun, Apr 26, 2015 at 3:10 PM, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
> On 4/25/2015 11:51 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > A muslim can agree that Allah verifies the definition above. An atheist > can agree that "The material reality" plays the role of God, > > > That already assumes that there is such a role. It's not in my play. > > > I am not sure I understand. > > > I don't think there's a single cause/source of for all of physical > reality, culuture, ethics, art, mathematics, consciousness... There is > circumstance and accident at different levels. > > > We agree on that. But what about the initial assumptions? The TOE? > > > Initial assumptions and TOE's are not everything. You yourself often > refer to "geography" as a metaphor for the other accidental stuff; which > physicists call "symmetry breaking". > > I know this list is based on the idea that any "geography" you can't > explain can be swept under the rug of "everything happens (just not > here)". But I think that's just another form of giving up or invoking > magic, of which you often accuse materialists. > It's giving up only in the sense of realizing it was always a fruitless task. Imagine if there were a lot of dust in the Oort cloud so we couldn't see anything beyond our solar system. We might wonder, why is the Earth's orbit and the suns size and radiation level just right to last long enough for life to evolve without being so low in luminosity that Earth would be a frozen planet. Entire generations of physicists might search in vain for a theory that explains why the Suns size has to be exactly the size it is observed, and why it can be no other way. This is the mistake I think some physicists make when they think they can mathematically derive (from pure number theory or similar) the constants of physics or the single realized set of string theory equations. Is it giving up to lean towards the theory that there are many suns beyond what can be seen from our position? Sure, it might dissuade one from searching for a mathematical basis for a single set of physics, but Kepler wasted a good portion of his time looking for a geometric explanation for the orbits of the planets. I don't think it should be framed as giving up vs. not giving up, but rather, which questions are the most interesting ones to concentrate our time on. The general trend of evidence has been accumulating to suggest there are multiple universes with different laws, rather than towards there only being one allowed set of laws. There will always be Keplers out there who won't give up, and so there's always room for the possibility of them one day finding something, but personally I'd rather spend my time consider the consequences and implications of the view that there are many universes. Jason -- 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.
