On May 9, 2:37 am, Bruno Marchal <marc....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
> Le 08-mai-07, à 04:27, marc.ged....domain.name.hidden a écrit :
>
> > Say what!! this is not a valid analogy since the laws of physics are
> > absolutely the fundamental level of reality, where as dsecriptions of
> > chimpanzee behaviour are not.
>
> What makes you so sure. This is a physicalist assumption, and it has
> been shown non compatible with very weak form of mechanism.
I would modify what I said slightly...I should have said 'the laws of
physics are *a* fundamental way to describe reality. (in the sense of
being able to provide in principle accurate descriptions). But they
are not the *only* way to describe reality.
>
>
>
> > 'The Laws of Physics' don't refer to human notions (they certainly
> > are not regarded that way by scientists - the whole notion of an
> > objective reality would have be thrown out the window if we thought
> > that there were no objective laws of physics since as mentioned,
> > physics is the base level of reality), but are precise mathematical
> > rules which have to be (postulated as) *universal* in scope for the
> > scientific method to work at all.
>
> Actually, although the current laws of physics does not refer to
> humans, they do refer to observers, if not only through the notions of
> observable and measurement..
> With Everett, the observer can be "just" a memory machine. Once a
> machine, the laws of physics have to emerge from something else, like
> number or information science/computer science, or mathematics.
>
> You are perhaps confusing the notion of objective reality with the
> physicalist assumption that the objective reality is the physical
> reality. This has never been proved, and indeed is already jeopardized
> independently by both the quantum facts and simple hypotheses, like the
> finiteness of some possible representations of the observers.
>
> Bruno
>
> http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Well, until very recently I didn't agree with the physicalist
assumption , but er... I've adopted a slightly more subtle view of
things and now accept a weak form of physicalism. I now think
everything has 'physical' properties associated with it.
It would take a while to explain , but suffice it to say that
'physical' does not have to mean concrete or finite.... I gave the
example of a notion like 'the laws of physics' or the 'QM Wave
function'. I think there can be abstract physical concepts.
Also, I think there can be more than one valid way to explain
reality. For a long time I thought mathematics was the 'ultimate
reality', whereas hard materialists argue that the physical world is
'ultimate reality'. But I think they're both wrong. I would agree
that physics is not prior to mathematics, but I would now also say
that mathematics is not prior to physics either. I place mathematics
and physics on an *equal* footing.
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Received on Tue May 08 2007 - 22:03:43 PDT