Hi Stephen,
Glad to hear from you.
On 20 Dec 2008, at 03:46, Stephen Paul King wrote:
> Here is where I have a serious difficulty with Bruno's idea (all
> the while I must admit that I am in awe of its elegance) it is the
> fact that all notions of "observable" quantities in QM are coded in
> terms of complex numbers ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
> Complex_number ) as "amplitutes" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amplitude)-
> which have no notion of a unique successor relation - until after a
> particular notion of a physical world in introduced to allow for the
> operation of "reduction of the wavefunction" or what ever equivalent
> procedure implements the Born's rule: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_Rule
>
> Thus QM tells us that the Universe is Complex valued and thus we
> have a severe problem in that there is no unique and a priori
> ordering of events from which to derive a first person notion of
> time or a "flow of events".
You put the horses at the wrong place. First, if we accept the axiom
of choice in set theory, I can well-order the reals and the complex
numbers. Of course (for the mathematicians) there is no ordering of
the complex numbers which *respects* the usual algebraic structures,
but I don't see for what reason this would be a problem. And then, if
that was a problem, it should be a problem for those who believes in
QM and physics, not for someone who takes as only primitive objects
the positive integers with their usual unproblematic order.
I remind you, that at some point in the reasoning we abandon the
belief that QM is a theory. IF QM remains correct, it will have to be
a theorem (a bit like the collapse is a theorem in Everett (ok, this
can be debated, I try to give an image)).
> How are we sure that GR needs to be "quantized" at all? We have,
> with QM, a very good theory covering all notions of "interactions"
> in terms of their energy, charge, spin, etc; why is it necessary to
> "quantize" geometry? What is geometry is a derivative quantity and
> not a primitive? After all, In Bruno's model our observed universe
> is derived from NUMBERS...
Indeed. Now,a physicist can argue that we have to quantized geometry
if we want to marry QM and GR. Why? Because if we want an unification
of all forces in QM, we have to quantize the force of gravitation. But
with GR gravitation is space curvature, so we have to quantize space
curvature, and thus geometry. Superstring theory misses this point,
imho. Loop gravity does not.
Now, as you say, in the comp reasoning, such talk put the horses at
the wrong place.
> But substituting an Asymetry between events for 1st person time
> does nothing to further our questions.
But we don't decide to put such an asymmetry. We derive it from
arithmetic and self-reference. It is not a matter of choice.
> Unless there is a means to derive a notion of a measure or an
> ordering from primitive arithmatic (that is not that of Natural
> numbers!) we are still where we started on this excursion. :(
>
What difference are you introducing between "primitive arithmetic" and
the natural numbers? Is it the difference between Robinson or Peano
Arithmetic and Arithmetical Truth?
Also, to be precise, I am not proposing a theory or a model. All my
point is that if we say "yes" to the doctor, then we have the
obligation (if we want solve the mind-body problem) to extract physics
from numbers, and indeed from a (relative) measure on computations.
The fact that we don't have such measure means that the problem is
open and probably difficult. In case we prove such measure doesn't
exist, then we will know that comp is false.
Hope this helps a bit,
Best regards,
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Received on Sun Dec 21 2008 - 10:02:15 PST