Clark, list,
It's quite possible that I'm wrong-headed about it, but Is this
inversion by the idea of constructors a difference that makes a
difference? What is it beyond rephrasing?
Peirce found plenty of modalism in the ordinary language or thinking of
physics. If something is conditionally necessary or fated in the sense
of a physical law, how does it help to express it _/more/_ modally for
any reason besides perhaps increased clarity? I mean, how does it result
in new predictions or help somebody do physics? If you have a bunch of
physical structures constraining possibilities in the same way, that's
called a law. Peirce saw generals, laws, etc., as governing individuals,
not vice versa to any significant extent. Why shouldn't Peirce have
thought of the idea of constructors as an effort to rephrase modal
realism in approximately nominalist terms?
Best. Ben
On 8/12/2015 12:59 PM, Clark Goble wrote:
Someone just introduced me to Constructor Theory. This is a new theory
of information which attempts to express all physics in terms of a
difference between possible and impossible physical transformation.
The idea is more or less to take the success of Shannon in the
classical realm and apply it to the quantum realm. David Deutsch and
Chiara Marletto at Oxford have been the main people working on it.
The big difference from traditional formulations of physics is that it
inverts the usual conclusions. Instead of the laws of physics telling
you what is possible or not, you get the laws from basic
considerations of what’s possible or not given a given physical
structure. Those of you who are familiar with thermodynamics might
know that you can derive the laws of thermodynamics in a very similar
way - while I don’t know their history I wonder if that’s the genesis
for this approach.
Upon reading it, the theory sounds very Peircean. I was curious if
anyone here has done any reading along those lines.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.7439
There’s also a recent writeup at Medium with a more populist description.
https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/deeper-than-quantum-mechanics-david-deutschs-new-theory-of-reality-9b8281bc793a
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