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

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

#31

Post by pmoriarty »

redial wrote: post #29
pmoriarty wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Nature of Life (we are still nowhere near understanding how it arose or how living organisms work in all their intricate detail)." Not only that, but do you have an existence before you are born? This might be a religious question to some, or perhaps involve a religious answer, but religion need not be involved. It's possible that in some not yet understood way an individual might exist before they're born and are s…

> Not only that, but do you have an existence before you are born? If you are inventing mysteries out of thin air why stop there? What if you will yourself into existence? What if it is you that is making "time" perceivable for the rest of us? Do your half-existing-yet-unborn-brother dies every time you are reborn into this plane but not if you will yourself to be born into another parallel universe?

I didn't invent that question. It's a been a question that people have had for millenia.

Some people believe that one has a soul that exists before one is born in to a body. So in a way that's an answer to this question -- an answer that's been around for thousands of years. Clearly many people are concerned about it. I'm far from the only one, much less the first one.

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

#32

Post by md224 »

pmoriarty wrote: post #21
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…

"Nature of Life (we are still nowhere near understanding how it arose or how living organisms work in all their intricate detail)." Not only that, but do you have an existence before you are born? This might be a religious question to some, or perhaps involve a religious answer, but religion need not be involved. It's possible that in some not yet understood way an individual might exist before they're born and are s…

It says a lot that you felt the need to hedge against the assumption that you were talking about religious beliefs. These days it seems like there’s a materialist mindset that assumes anyone who questions certain assumptions about consciousness (e.g. that it is a creation of the brain that begins and ends when the brain does) has ventured into the terrain of religion, the supernatural, or “magic” (whatever that’s supposed to mean). It doesn’t seem to occur to people that consciousness itself is completely inexplicable and therefore all bets are off regarding its true nature. These assumptions people have are based on faith (yes, faith) in a hypothetical explanation that has yet to materialize. Until scientists cross the Explanatory Gap (which is more like a chasm), nobody has the right to tell anyone that their speculation about consciousness is kooky or unscientific or whatever. The only thing that’s unscientific is letting one’s thought be constrained by rigid dogma regarding what is and isn’t possible.

I feel your pain (if I’m understanding you correctly, that is). It sucks to be trapped in a no-man’s-land between scientific dogma and religious dogma. We need a better way forward.

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

#33

Post by mongol »

jfaucett wrote: post #5
pmoriarty wrote: post #2

Not to nitpick, but I'm not sure the nature of time is so indisputably the greatest remaining mystery. The nature of consciousness, life, and death can all certainly give it a run for its money. Incidentally, would anyone happen to have a direct link to a version of this article that could be read without enabling javascript?

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?

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

#34

Post by redial »

pmoriarty wrote: post #31
redial wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not only that, but do you have an existence before you are born? If you are inventing mysteries out of thin air why stop there? What if you will yourself into existence? What if it is you that is making "time" perceivable for the rest of us? Do your half-existing-yet-unborn-brother dies every time you are reborn into this plane but not if you will yourself to be born into another parallel universe?

I didn't invent that question. It's a been a question that people have had for millenia. Some people believe that one has a soul that exists before one is born in to a body. So in a way that's an answer to this question -- an answer that's been around for thousands of years. Clearly many people are concerned about it. I'm far from the only one, much less the first one.

I was talking about the royal you: we. But more importantly, "when" the question was first asked doesn't change the nature of the question. Sure, you (we) can ask it, but it is no more insightful that the myriad of other metaphysical questions that have been asked through history that will never be answered because they lack a fundamental grounding in the shared experience we call "reality". Are there any blue reds? We can spend a millennia thinking about it.

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

#35

Post by dyukqu »

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 important research to do, like they are so hopeless and desperate about the current state of physics and they stopped caring about it and found a proxy to monetize their knowledge. But hey, that's not a secret anymore - everyone knows about the crisis, from the Queen of England to the hounds of hell. Sabine Hossenfelder is a legend for me. A few years back, when I was taking a Physics101 class, even the lecturer almost begged for help after the last lecture at the end of the semester: "my fellow students, please, please, consider (to continue your career in the field of) physics. Physics is stuck. It needs new ideas, new theories, new minds. Please consider this." I was stunned. That was some real thing. I guess the fast advancement of technology in the late ~100 years made even the most brilliant minds (relatively) lazy. They gradually stopped thinking, beating their brains out year after year and here we are. No serious discovery after the quantum theory. String theory? Yeah, gazillions of dimensions - good luck with that. Higgs boson, Gravitational waves? Come on, nothing revolutionary - we're still waiting for the revolution to emerge from (upgraded!) LHC. For me, they are cleverly and beautifully marketed (minor) findings. (Maybe some of you have heard of, some (if not many) of the top universities have teams working hard doing all the "scientific-marketing" for the Nobel Prize - it's a precious prestige win in this popular world we live in).

Minds get eroded by technology by heavily relying on it. And it's getting worse and worse by the distraction caused by all the digital "life" surrounding us, pulling and tightening its ropes every day. I imagine a true scientist as a monk. S/he doesn't think about writing a pop-sci book, appearing on TV and s/he got a distantiation even for interviews about her/his latest important research/discovery. "Monks" are needed more than ever for science nowadays.

Those were my humble 2 cents.

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

#36

Post by pmoriarty »

redial wrote: post #34
pmoriarty wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't invent that question. It's a been a question that people have had for millenia. Some people believe that one has a soul that exists before one is born in to a body. So in a way that's an answer to this question -- an answer that's been around for thousands of years. Clearly many people are concerned about it. I'm far from the only one, much less the first one.

I was talking about the royal you: we. But more importantly, "when" the question was first asked doesn't change the nature of the question. Sure, you (we) can ask it, but it is no more insightful that the myriad of other metaphysical questions that have been asked through history that will never be answered because they lack a fundamental grounding in the shared experience we call "reality". Are there any blue reds?…

"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 only some of them would be considered "great". One (arguable) measure to use for the greatness of questions is how many people do they occupy, and how critical do they consider those questions. Whether one exists before birth or after death would be considered "great" by this measure, whether there's a blue red would not.

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

#37

Post by andrepd »

_8j50 wrote: post #20

I think I'm a simpleton because I could never imagine time being it's own thing. I see time as simply the amount of change in reality we can perceptually sample. Much like how an object in motion will continue in it's motion until it meets resistance,reality in my opinion is in continuous motion that has yet to meet resistance. Time (imo)is our measure of this change divided by our ability to sample it(where this abi…

Right, however relativity tells us that time is an actual, physical thing that can be affected by and affect matter.

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

#38

Post by andrepd »

crb002 wrote: post #13

Planck's constant, speed of light travel when you chain across space which Planck himself should have understood if he thought about transmissions of information in series. Curves when gravity pushes/pulls light from straight paths. What questions are there?

Your comment is gibberish (I've read it 3 times and can't make head nor tails, but maybe I'm missing something).

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

#39

Post by andrepd »

whatshisface wrote: post #16
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 bump the origin of the universe to the top, because no matter what universe-generating physics you come up with I can always ask, "but what set things up to work that way?" I'd also put consciousness up there, because it's fundamentally distinct from measurable things. Consciousness and the origin of the universe get place 0, and the others all get place 1 because they're solvable but we don't know in which o…

I very much share that sentiment, in that I rate "the nature of consciousness" and "why does the universe, why does anything at all even exist" as fundamental questions of a completely different class, perhaps even unsolvable.

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

#40

Post by andrepd »

redial wrote: post #30
whatshisface wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would bump the origin of the universe to the top, because no matter what universe-generating physics you come up with I can always ask, "but what set things up to work that way?" I'd also put consciousness up there, because it's fundamentally distinct from measurable things. Consciousness and the origin of the universe get place 0, and the others all get place 1 because they're solvable but we don't know in which o…

> I'd also put consciousness up there, because it's fundamentally distinct from measurable things. No one knows that it is not measurable. Is love measurable? is hunger? happiness? they seem to be as measurable as consciousness, that is to say we can at least measure them in binary as either present or not.

How do you know everyone else is not a "p-zombie", indistinguishable in any external way from a human such as yourself, but devoid of internal "consciousness"/"subjective experience". Even the mere logical possibility of p-zombies indicates that consciousness is unmeasurable.
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