On Tue, Nov 28, 2017 at 7:50 AM, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com
<mailto:jasonre...@gmail.com>> wrote:
On Tue, Nov 28, 2017 at 6:06 AM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be
<mailto: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.
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
I wanted to add, it also shows that the function (if you can call it
that) of practically every physical law is to ensure consistency
between observers. I think you would like it.