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12-04-2004, 10:45 AM

Good thread.

First-Up, Lot's of people seem to think that Newton's laws fix the universe as a deterministic one and only see an escape from that determinism in the Uncertainty Principle. I think that Newton's laws do allow for the concept that people think of as free will (I don't want to get into that here, there's another thread where we talk about that in detail) because when they are applied to multiple objects in certain orientations, those objects will behave chaotically, their positions and velocities deviating from where our calculations might expect them to be.

But, Geezus' main question is, where did these laws come from?

I certainly don't think they have any relation to mind. Before Newton, things fell down. After Newton, things still fell down, we just had a more precise method of describing how they fell down.

The laws we are able to see and infer from what we see around us are describing how the universe operates. I'd like to think that one day, we will be able to refine all of the existing laws and replace them with 1, 2 or 3 fundamental ones. Our descriptions of reality we inherited and which have been the same for probably the last 50 years are starting to look a little parochial and dusty. I'm talking about the Bohr model of the atom, or the wave-particle nature of light, of the distinctions between energy and matter, relativity, quantum physics, field theory and all the classic textbook physics stuff. Every thing is described as specific instances, there's no strong consistancy between any of them - what I'd like to see is a single generic idea that covers all of these different situations. Apparently Quantum Physics comes close to this, and many phenomena that had previously had classical explanations for them are describable in terms of QP - but not all.

The trouble with QP is that it doesn't make sense. Things exist and don't exist at the same time, actions can happen at a distance, photons 'decide' how to behave depending on whether they are going through one slit or two - it's all messed up compared to the world we are used to.

It's one of my favorite ideas, Plato's allegory of the cave talks about how we can believe that shadows on a wall are reality while actually there's a lot more happening that we can't know about behind the scenes. I'd be happy to think that one day someone will work out a behind the scenes model that fits and describes the universe properly. It's been attempted by Bohm and others and though the idea is not widely accepted, it is at least IMO a step in a positive direction.

12-04-2004, 10:45 AM	#16 (permalink)
zen_tom Guest	Good thread. First-Up, Lot's of people seem to think that Newton's laws fix the universe as a deterministic one and only see an escape from that determinism in the Uncertainty Principle. I think that Newton's laws do allow for the concept that people think of as free will (I don't want to get into that here, there's another thread where we talk about that in detail) because when they are applied to multiple objects in certain orientations, those objects will behave chaotically, their positions and velocities deviating from where our calculations might expect them to be. But, Geezus' main question is, where did these laws come from? I certainly don't think they have any relation to mind. Before Newton, things fell down. After Newton, things still fell down, we just had a more precise method of describing how they fell down. The laws we are able to see and infer from what we see around us are describing how the universe operates. I'd like to think that one day, we will be able to refine all of the existing laws and replace them with 1, 2 or 3 fundamental ones. Our descriptions of reality we inherited and which have been the same for probably the last 50 years are starting to look a little parochial and dusty. I'm talking about the Bohr model of the atom, or the wave-particle nature of light, of the distinctions between energy and matter, relativity, quantum physics, field theory and all the classic textbook physics stuff. Every thing is described as specific instances, there's no strong consistancy between any of them - what I'd like to see is a single generic idea that covers all of these different situations. Apparently Quantum Physics comes close to this, and many phenomena that had previously had classical explanations for them are describable in terms of QP - but not all. The trouble with QP is that it doesn't make sense. Things exist and don't exist at the same time, actions can happen at a distance, photons 'decide' how to behave depending on whether they are going through one slit or two - it's all messed up compared to the world we are used to. It's one of my favorite ideas, Plato's allegory of the cave talks about how we can believe that shadows on a wall are reality while actually there's a lot more happening that we can't know about behind the scenes. I'd be happy to think that one day someone will work out a behind the scenes model that fits and describes the universe properly. It's been attempted by Bohm and others and though the idea is not widely accepted, it is at least IMO a step in a positive direction.