The road to entanglement had nothing to do with analyzing some lifeless equations. It was the result of extraordinary intuition by Bohm and Bell followed by some fascinating creativity by Aspect which ultimately resulted in confirmation experiments by Aspect and others. The equations are simply some symbolic representations of the quality of the minds of these scientists and are confirmed by repetition. — Rich
So, if as you claim, physical laws merely describe repetitious events, rather than capture and reveal the structure of Reality, then please explain how it is possible that these laws reveal novel features of Reality. — tom
The equations are simply some symbolic representations of the quality of the minds of these scientists and are confirmed by repetition. — Rich
The problem over laws seems to start simply because talking of "laws of nature" suggest an analogy with human laws. So particle A acts like it does because it knows it should follow some general rule. Which is obviously a silly kind of metaphysics - unless you are a Whiteheadian panpsychic I guess. — apokrisis
I side of course with the view that the laws of nature are emergent regularities or states of generalised constraint that develop from a history of free interactions. So that is the Peircean story of reality as a habit. In this view, laws would seem to evolve with time. — apokrisis
Chaos is more subtle than that. It does have characteristic organisation. — apokrisis
So if it has any organisation whatever, then it's not strictly speaking chaos, in the sense envisaged as 'primordial chaos'. — Wayfarer
The 'primordial chaos' doesn't exist against the background of any organisation whatever. — Wayfarer
The chaos, the crystal's chance path, during the formation of snowflake fractals is comfortably situated in the context of our orderly stable lawful universe. IOWs it is not chaos all the way down. It is chaos embedded in order. — Querius
Moreover the law ‘every snowflake is six-sided’, which emerges due to symmetry/equifinality, is fully determined by underlying more fundamental laws, such as the laws which dictate what binding angles are permissible for water molecules. — Querius
My point is: sure you can watch some pretty amazing things emerge in nature by a combination of law and chance/chaos, but this does not tell us that chaos can explain the natural laws. — Querius
God conceived an inexhaustible continuum of possibilities, and then chose which of them to actualize. — aletheist
The tendency to take habits was one of those spontaneous occurrences at first, but its very nature was to persist and reinforce itself, so it did. Then other things began to take habits, and that is how matter eventually came about, with the "laws of nature" serving as its habits. — aletheist
My argument in favour of effective physics is instead that the chaos~lawfulness dichotomy would be a mutually deal from the vague get-go. — apokrisis
Chaos is a fully deterministic feature of some time-reversible dynamical laws. — tom
You can look at the equation from now to doom's day and there is nothing about entanglement. It is a leap of creative intuition. Bohm describes the process quite meticulously in his essay on Creativity. In fact, the development of the concept of entanglement was quite a long one and involved several intuitive leaps. This process is fundamental to scientific discovery. I have no idea where you get the idea that by staring at a lifeless equations, out pops something new. It just emerges from the paper? — Rich
Sean Carroll in his book ‘The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself’, Dutton, 2016 writes:Hah. ... So they are an example of top-down causality ... So snowflakes are a good example of an effective solution - a global equilibrium balance that reshapes the very stuff out of which it is being formed. What you call "fundamental" is what has got fundamentally pwned. — apokrisis
<my emphasis>A standard example given by proponents of top-down causation is the formation of snowflakes. Snowflakes are made of water molecules interacting with other water molecules to form a crystalline structure. But there are many possible structures, determined by the initial seed from which the snowflake grows.
Therefore, it is claimed, the macroscopic shape of the snowflake is ‘acting downwards’ to determine the precise location of individual water molecules.
We should all resist the temptation to talk that way. Water molecules interact with other water molecules, and other molecules in the air, in precise ways that are determined by the rules of atomic physics. Those rules are unambiguous: you tell me what other molecules an individual water molecule is interacting with, and the rules will say precisely what will happen next. The relevant molecules may indeed be a large part of a crystalline structure, but that knowledge is of precisely zero import when studying the behaviour of the water molecule under consideration. The environment in which the molecule is imbedded is of course relevant, but there is no obstacle to describing the environment in terms of its own molecular structure. The individual molecule has no idea it’s part of a snowflake, and could not care less.
It's quite clear that this notion of top-down causation is completely ungrounded. It's nothing more than fantasy. — Metaphysician Undercover
God conceived an inexhaustible continuum of possibilities, and then chose which of them to actualize. — aletheist
But could God have had a choice if mathematical symmetries limited His options rather rigorously? — apokrisis
Assuming omnipotence, as Peirce did, the only thing that could have limited God's options were God's own previous choices, including the creation of those mathematical symmetries. — aletheist
But it is one thing saying God could choose to create a world in which 1+1=3, quite another to believe it in your heart. Do you think Peirce would have gone along with such a frontal assault on natural reason? — apokrisis
He also insisted that we cannot be absolutely certain that 2+2=4, since human fallibility entails that it is possible - even if very unlikely - that every single person who ever performed this addition made the same mistake. — aletheist
... and I am still not following you here:I am not seeing the connection between this comment and the notion that "mathematical symmetries" somehow limited God's options. For one thing, Peirce consistently held that mathematics deals only with hypothetical states of affairs, not actual ones. — aletheist
So either God is constrained Himself by the general principle of intelligibility - existence as the universal growth of reasonableness - or the whole of Peirce's metaphysics collapses for a far more serious reason. — apokrisis
Semiotics just doesn't exist unless the sign relation is in fact a sign of something. — apokrisis
I think it makes the case for 'top-down' causation very eloquently. Were you a classical atomist, who believed that the fundmental constituents of the world really were point-particles, then the fact that such a purported 'point-particle' relies on its context would, I think, greatly weaken your case. — Wayfarer
So you now agree that relationships themselves have causal status when we talk about the reality of things. — apokrisis
Sean Carroll in his book ‘The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself’, Dutton, 2016 writes: ... — Querius
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