Sterritt, Lanny wrote:
>
> Christopher,
>
> It's not clear to me that structures can exist that are acausal (at the
> macroscopic level); that is, it seems that only structures that obey
> physical laws can exist. The proof is left as an exercise for ...
>
> L.W.Sterritt
>
You're going to have to do better than that! To me it does not
seem readily apparent why causality should be the rule, instead
of chaos. Causality, stability, and predictability seem to imply
some sort of connection between two moments of time. Whence this
connection? And why, just because the universe seems to have
been stable (relatively) up to now, should we assume that it will
continue to be so?
> >
> > In Tegmark's paper,
> > in section 2G, he makes a crucial point that the fewer axioms
> > you use to define your mathematical structure, the larger is
> > the ensemble. This provides a concrete justification for the
> > principle of Occam's Razor. Similarly to the argument given
> > above, we would expect to find ourselves in worlds with fairly
> > few laws of physics, since those admit the most SAS's. You
> > can always add any bizarre behavior to the structure by adding
> > ad hoc axioms, but worlds in which that is the case
> > have a smaller measure than those that do not.
> >
> > This line of reasoning also explains why, in a general sense,
> > we find that our universe behaves sensibly from moment to moment.
> > Many philosophers have pondered the question of why everything
> > doesn't disintegrate into chaos in the next instant. What holds
> > the world together such that things persist and our memories
> > match our external reality? The answer is that the structure(s)
> > we are in obey physical laws, not because they were cast by
> > fiat from some omnipotent being, but simply because the structures
> > that do obey physical laws are more numerous than those that do
> > not, and hence we are likely to find ourselves in those.
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Chris Maloney
> > http://www.chrismaloney.com
> >
> > "Knowledge is good"
> > -- Emil Faber
> >
> >
--
Chris Maloney
http://www.chrismaloney.com
"Knowledge is good"
-- Emil Faber
Received on Sat Jun 05 1999 - 12:14:25 PDT