On 28 November 2017 at 13:50, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Tue, Nov 28, 2017 at 6:06 AM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote: > >> >> On 27 Nov 2017, at 04:04, Jason Resch wrote: >> >> >> Richard Feynman in "The Character of Physical Law" Chapter 2 wrote: >> >> "It always bothers me that according to the laws as we understand them >> today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical >> operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of >> space, and no matter how tiny a region of time. How can all that be going >> on in that tiny space? Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to >> figure out what one tiny piece of space/time is going to do?" >> >> Does computationalism provide the answer to this question, >> >> >> Yes. :) >> >> >> > Very nice. It seems then Feynman's intuition was in the right place. The > second half of the above quote was: > > "So I have often made the hypothesis ultimately physics will not require a > mathematical statement, that in the end the machinery will be revealed and > the laws will turn out to be simple, like the checker board with all its > apparent complexities. But this is just speculation." > > > So it looks like that simple machinery is the machinery of the universal > machine and the simple laws are those of Peano (or Robinson?) Arithmetic. > Note also that what we call the 'laws' of physics are in fact inferences from observation postulated to explain and predict the behaviour of physical phenomena. They are not themselves in principle observable and physics doesn't concern itself with how the postulated entities 'know' how to behave with such precision, or indeed behave at all. Wheeler, and in turn his student Feynman, were so impressed with this precision in the case of the electron that Wheeler was moved to suggest to Feynman (though not entirely seriously) the idea that they might in fact all be the same one. Computation by contrast is explicitly 'all of a piece' in this respect, in that its entities and relations are (in principle at least) exposable and cut from the same arithmetical cloth, as it were. Further, if entities such as the electron were indeed to be associated with a class of identical computations it would perhaps be less surprising that they are observed to behave identically. In that sense Wheeler would have been right. David > >> >> in the sense that even the tiniest region of space is the result of an >> infinity of computations going through an observer's mind state as it >> observes the tiniest region of space? >> >> >> That might be OK, if space was something entirely physical, which is >> suggested by the physics of the vacuum, or general relativity, but with >> Mechanism, spece and time might be less physical than here suggested. The >> reason is that it is not clear how "empty space" could make a computation >> different from another, >> > > I think what I was thinking here were "closed loop feyman diagrams", where > any possible diagram might be drawn in the tiniest area of space, so long > as it is closed, e.g. fluctuations/particle creations are permitted so long > as they all cancel out. So if space is physical, and enables any of these > fluctuations to happen, then this noise can take any possible value from > the observer's point of view (like the polarization of a photon). > > >> and so space could be only a marker differentiating some computations, >> like time seems to be in the indexical approach. All this would need big >> advance in the mathematics of the intelligible and sensible arithmetical >> matter. I expect space to be explained by quantum knot invariant algebra >> due to subtil relation between BDB and DBD logical operators (I mean []<>[] >> and <>[]<>). Kant might be right on this, apparently space and time are >> really in the "categorie de l'entendement", I don't know Kant in English >> sorry, but this means mainly that they belong to the mind). >> >> > Thanks I very much appreciate these additional insights. I do subscribe to > the belief that time is an illusion created by the mind. I have a little > more trouble seeing that when extended to spacetime as a whole. Though > perhaps what's come closest to helping me see this picture is Amanda > Gefter's excellent book "Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn"--I would recommend > it to everyone on the Everything list. It takes the approach that only > things that are invariant are real, and from there proceeds to deconstruct > almost all of physics. > > 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 https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. 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