Carlo Rovelli on the ‘greatest remaining mystery’: The nature of time • Hacker News Board

Re: Carlo Rovelli on the ‘greatest remaining mystery’: The nature of time

#61

Post by woodandsteel » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 3:20 AM UTC

dmfdmf wrote: post #58

dyukqu wrote: post #35

Some tangential thoughts: even though I like these popular science (physics, to be precise) books, I have hard times to imagine their writers as a real scientists . Tyson, Greene, Carroll, Kaku, Rovelli... So many writers author so many books about these hey-look!-so-fascinating! things. It looks like a bandwagon and more and more scientists (yes, physicists especially) are getting on it - like they don't have any im…

The crisis in physics is due to Kant. As long as physicists are disdainful of philosophy the crisis and deterioration will continue. They are Kantians and don't even know it. Ayn Rand identified Kant's error in his Critique of Pure Reason and destroyed his program, she rejected Hume's rank skepticism (which Kant was answering) and showed Descartes how to validate reason (i.e. to be certain) without being omniscient.…

I agree that Descartes, Hume, and Kant were wrong. However, modern scientists are not influenced by them. Their own views are much closer to Pragmatism (which is not surprising given that two of the three founders of Pragmatism, namely Peirce and James, were professional scientists).

Re: Carlo Rovelli on the ‘greatest remaining mystery’: The nature of time

#62

Post by Retra » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 3:21 AM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #23

make3 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how is death misunderstood?

"how is death misunderstood?" Can one survive death in some way? (for example, through having some sort of soul or other part of you that is separate from your body) Is there an afterlife? After you die, can you be reborn in another body? All of these are mysteries that might never be resolved to the complete satisfaction of the living.

Those aren't mysteries, they're nonsense. "Can left be right at the same time? Such a mystery!"

Re: Carlo Rovelli on the ‘greatest remaining mystery’: The nature of time

#63

Post by mcbits » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 3:22 AM UTC

redial wrote: post #44

pmoriarty wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Are there any blue reds? We can spend a millennia thinking about it." It's pretty obvious that you can have blue reds: they're called purples or violets. Just squeeze some blue out of a tube of paint, and then some red, mix them together and you get a blue red. You can also have a black white: it's called gray. Anyway, I'd agree that one could ask any number of metaphysical questions, but it could be argued that onl…

Violet is not blue and it is also not red. I'm not asking for a bluish red but for a 100% blue color that it is also red. You are misusing the language, or rather I am in this case, to ask a paradoxical question. Where are all the cat dogs? This is a never ending game because we don't agree on the language. This is exactly the realm of metaphysics. And greatness is in the eye of the beholder. To me greatness could be…

I'm not quite sure if it works for blue and red or only certain color combinations, but it's possible to create images where an item in the scene is obviously one color, yet the light hitting the eye is another color. The brain automatically adjusts for "that's what a red object would look like in that environment," when the light coming from the photograph is actually blue.

In that way you can have a picture that's "blue red" due to perspective rather than semantics. E.g. the car in the picture is really red and the color of the ink depicting it is really blue. The red is blue.

Re: Carlo Rovelli on the ‘greatest remaining mystery’: The nature of time

#64

Post by jerf » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 3:22 AM UTC

dyukqu wrote: post #35

Some tangential thoughts: even though I like these popular science (physics, to be precise) books, I have hard times to imagine their writers as a real scientists . Tyson, Greene, Carroll, Kaku, Rovelli... So many writers author so many books about these hey-look!-so-fascinating! things. It looks like a bandwagon and more and more scientists (yes, physicists especially) are getting on it - like they don't have any im…

"I have hard times to imagine their writers as a real scientists. Tyson, Greene, Carroll, Kaku, Rovelli..."

If you mean by "real scientist" that they are doing real work that advances the field, some of them are and, yes, some of them aren't. I don't mean that as a criticism, because there is real value in being a PR person for science. (Some danger if they do it poorly, but a lot of value, too.) Hawking, for instance, was certainly a real scientist by any measure, right up until his unfortunate passing, but also did good PR and wrote some very popular books. And not to pick on him, but according to his CV [1], Neil deGrasse Tyson hasn't published a paper in a decade, and if you skip three related papers in 2007-2008, hadn't published prior to that since 1998. Doesn't mean he's not doing useful stuff, or that he wasn't at least a scientist in the past, but he's certainly not on the same sort of track as Hawking was.

Re: Carlo Rovelli on the ‘greatest remaining mystery’: The nature of time

#65

Post by jerf » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 3:29 AM UTC

_8j50 wrote: post #54

pmoriarty wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"An object's property had a specific value. That value became different." How is something that's different different from something that's changed? It sounds like it's one and the same to me. Also, you used the word "became". That word has temporal connotations. So if you define change in terms of time, you can't then go on to define time in terms of change without it being another circular definition.

I was defining time as the measurement of change. Change does not depend on measurement therefore there is no circular definition. For example, a star is different from star light. When I look at the sky through a telescope I don't see a star,I see star light. Same can be said for any object as well,we see light emanating from an object therefore vision is perception of an object as measured by our optics. Time is ho…

The problem is that if you take the time and carefully consider all of your statements, and carefully lay them all out in a row in the right way, you will find you've got circularity hiding in them. I am confident in this statement because you are walking very well-covered ground, and lots of smart people have examined it all very closely. For instance, "change" intrinsically has a before and after element in it; you can't use it to define time. You can use it to define a measure of time (which is pretty much exactly how we in fact do it), but it isn't useful for defining time. But I do not say that is the only place circular definitions lie in your various posts here; it is only an example. It is very hard to discuss exactly what time is because the very words of our thoughts and in some sense the very temporal nature of our thoughts themselves continuously betray us. Being embedded in time is the ground state of our being and virtually an unperceived constant in our thinking, slipping in to our every concept and thought. It is very hard to extricate ourselves from that, if it is really possible at all.

It is all too easy for us to bury ourselves in so many words that we push the circularity of the argument behind so much obfuscation that we can no longer perceive the circularity, but it is still there. To truly define time, one must fundamentally start from some sort of perspective in which it does not exist, then show how it arises. This is not something you're going to pull off in English. It is soaked in time. You're going to have to use math or you are almost certainly just moving the obfuscation around. (And also deal with the question of what it means to "arise", though to some extent that's an artifact of English popping up again. There are mathematical ways of dealing with that.)

The question isn't "is before different than after?", nor is it anything about how much difference there is, or how it may relate to other differences. The question is "how is it that there is a before and after at all?", to which merely pointing out that there is a before and after isn't very helpful.

Re: Carlo Rovelli on the ‘greatest remaining mystery’: The nature of time

#66

Post by pmoriarty » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 3:35 AM UTC

redial wrote: post #57

pmoriarty wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Solipsism is basically the only defense against the conclusions from the evidence of the "real" world." Far from it. There could very well be an external world, and one populated by plenty of other and fully real human beings even, but your own personal view or understanding of it could be distorted or false. This could be simply because you're hallucinating, or insane, or your brain could be injured, or could be li…

All those options are the same: they are either part of a shared experience or they are not. Nothing is preventing a demon from deceiving me right now, in fact one can come anytime I'd love to meet him, preferably her.

If experiencing something that's not shared is the only qualification for solipsism, then we're all solipsists, as (arguably barring the possibility of telepathy) our experiences are all private.

But that's not what solipsism typically means. Solipsism usually refers to the position that only you (or perhaps only your own mind) exist. By that commonly accepted definition, one could be mistaken or deceived in any of the ways I laid out earlier without them entailing solipsism.

Re: Carlo Rovelli on the ‘greatest remaining mystery’: The nature of time

#67

Post by redial » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 3:42 AM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #60

redial wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're asking if there exists something that's 100% X at the same time as being 100% not-X, I'm not sure there's much to debate about it, as there clearly isn't (at least not in this world, where things can't seem to be themselves and not themselves at the same time). You found the loophole! Sad to see you abandoned so swiftly your own logic when the time came to evaluate your own statement. This is exactly why…

"a question like "is there life after death?" is uninteresting: by definition life comes before death." You're not being charitable to the questioner by interpreting it as a paradox. Clearly, what most people intend to ask by that question is whether one can exist in some form (as a "spirit" or as "soul", or maybe come out of the VR that is the world, or in heaven even in a body like the present one or a more perfect…

Not so clear, because you see, that is another question. This is why we need to define things very explicitly and then accept the implications of those definitions or we’ll never get anywhere.

Now that you accepted that there is a paradox in the original question (“is there life after death?”) you reformulated it in a way the paradox is no longer present and your meaning is less ambiguous:

“Is there something not physical that continues to exists even after the physical body no longer does?”

And that is a very interesting question, but first we have to acknowledge that it is a different question and because you asked it in a non paradoxical way it opens up avenues for exploration unavailable to the original question. I would personally start simply by asking “is there something not physical, ie. a soul, “in” a being?” That is in itself is own can of worms because even if there are “souls” they might “die” when the body does so it is not as clear cut as one might initially think, but at least is a start. I’m sure there are other approaches, but at least we should all agree: it is a different question.

My point is only unparadoxical questions can have a shot at being answered. Most of the “great questions” are paradoxes; “what came before the beginning?” sounds very profound but it will never lead anywhere, as centuries pondering it have already proven.

Re: Carlo Rovelli on the ‘greatest remaining mystery’: The nature of time

#68

Post by jerf » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 3:43 AM UTC

mongol wrote: post #33

jfaucett wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. For me the greatest remaining mysteries are more in this order. 1. Nature of Life (we are still nowhere near understanding how it arose or how living organisms work in all their intricate detail). 2. Nature of Consciousness - what is consciousness, how can living matter instantiate it, how can we quantify it, etc? 3. Origin of the Universe 4. Why do we seem so alone in the Universe? 5. Resolving Quantum Mechanic…

I would add Free will to it. Does it exist?

Also, what exactly is it that we mean by "free will"? Even just that question can get ugly, fast. I think I've only ever heard one definition of the concept sufficiently precise to even have a meaningful answer.

(In short, it was this: If we our model of the material universe is essentially correct, and if we assume that it is closed and that the material that we see is all there is, or at least all that can ever influence us, then suppose we define free will as the inability of any real external predictor to ever perfectly predict our actions in advance. I emphasize the word real to highlight that we are emphatically not talking about some abstract god, or something vaguely sitting outside of time, but the ability of a real device constructed out of real materials in real spacetime to predict your actions. We assumed away hypothetical infinite beings or math games at the beginning. In that case, it can be mathematically shown that you are simply too complicated to be fully correctly simulated by any system that attempts to build a model of your actions simply by external observation of you; you do not produce enough bits in your external actions to uniquely identify the state space of the inside of your head, not even if you turn the entire rest of the universe to the task (literally!). By this definition, it can be concretely answered: Yes, you have free will. Interestingly, this turns out to be true even if the universe is 100% deterministic, which definitely conflicts with most people's ideas about "free will"... but then, there's another demonstration of how rare it is for anyone to carefully define it before endlessly pontificating about it.

Also, while I consider this a valuable contribution to the field that any interested philosopher should ruminate on, I am not claiming that I 100% believe it, nor that it "solves" the problem. It is simply as I said at the beginning, the only sufficiently careful treatment of the problem that one can actually say it has an answer. Personally I find the presuppositions it is based on to be highly questionable. But it is at least worth pondering for a bit.)

Re: Carlo Rovelli on the ‘greatest remaining mystery’: The nature of time

#69

Post by wallace_f » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 3:46 AM UTC

dyukqu wrote: post #35

Some tangential thoughts: even though I like these popular science (physics, to be precise) books, I have hard times to imagine their writers as a real scientists . Tyson, Greene, Carroll, Kaku, Rovelli... So many writers author so many books about these hey-look!-so-fascinating! things. It looks like a bandwagon and more and more scientists (yes, physicists especially) are getting on it - like they don't have any im…

Reminds me of:

>I have been thinking of how very gently I have always been dealt with. I have never so much as had a violent shove in my entire life

-Maxwell

Also: do we need monks in other places? In the courts--removed from the carrots and sticks society can throw at them?

Re: Carlo Rovelli on the ‘greatest remaining mystery’: The nature of time

#70

Post by redial » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 3:48 AM UTC

mcbits wrote: post #63

redial wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Violet is not blue and it is also not red. I'm not asking for a bluish red but for a 100% blue color that it is also red. You are misusing the language, or rather I am in this case, to ask a paradoxical question. Where are all the cat dogs? This is a never ending game because we don't agree on the language. This is exactly the realm of metaphysics. And greatness is in the eye of the beholder. To me greatness could be…

I'm not quite sure if it works for blue and red or only certain color combinations, but it's possible to create images where an item in the scene is obviously one color, yet the light hitting the eye is another color. The brain automatically adjusts for "that's what a red object would look like in that environment," when the light coming from the photograph is actually blue. In that way you can have a picture that's…

That is interesting, but it is also an answer to a different question. The question is "are there any blue reds?" not "can we see in some circumstances reds as blue?".