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A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

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Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#321

Post by yesenadam »

flippinburgers wrote: post #318
yesenadam wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main thing I didn't like about it was pretending it's all scientists involved and not philosophers. The article talks mostly about Huw Price—and from phrases like "Scientists, including Price", you'd think he's a scientist. He's an Australian philosopher. He was my professor for a couple of philosophy-of-science-related courses at Sydney Uni 20 years ago. He started the Centre for Time there I believe. He's a gre…

I would imagine that the vast majority of people working at a place like vice don't understand the distinction between soft and hard sciences, don't care about the distinction, or are bitter about the distinction.

Philosophy isn't anywhere on the Mohs scale of sciences—it's not a science at all. Each philosopher has their own idea about what philosophy is, but I'm not aware of any who think it's a science. That's one way to tell the difference—a philosopher asking "what is philosophy?" is doing philosophy. A physicist asking "what is physics?" is doing philosophy, philosophy of science. Actually it's mostly philosophers who ask that.

Science was originally[0] a part of philosophy—natural philosophy—but that's a different story. Part of Socrates' originality was that every previous philosopher concerned themselves with physics and other physical sciences, but he was just concerned with the human world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohs_scale

[0] And until quite recently! The word scientist was only coined in 1834. And "The predominant modern use [of the term "science"], "natural and physical science," generally restricted to study of the phenomena of the material universe and its laws, is by mid-19c."

https://www.etymonline.com/word/scientist

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#322

Post by btilly »

memling wrote: post #311
jakzurr wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the links. Is it bad to upvote an article on HN, just because I think the comment quality is enlightening? Philosophers professing to be scientists has been troubling me more and more the past few years. Also, gotta say many of the top comments are pretty interesting here.

> Philosophers professing to be scientists has been troubling me more and more the past few years. Scientists professing not to be philosophers has been troubling me more and more the past few years.

Why does it bother you?

As Richard Feynman said, "Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds." Sure, lots of what scientists do, including Feynman, involve an implied philosophy. It is easy to read https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm or https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm and extract a lot of important philosophical ideas from them. But I have yet to see any self-proclaimed philosopher successfully do so without totally losing the key points.

There was a time when I thought that philosophy must have something important to it, and philosophers must have something useful to say. So I wound up reading works by various philosophers that were recommended to me. Some works, like Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, were invaluable. Most weren't. The ones that were invaluable to me inevitably were written by people whose primary profession was NOT philosopher. For example Marcus Aurelius was a Roman Emperor.

After a time I learned that if an important philosophical point happens to be made by a philosopher, I'd prefer to hear it filtered through the brain of a non-philosopher. Every time I try setting this rule aside, I am reminded of why I adopted it in the first place. And so, even if I'm reading about something which is apparently philosophical, I skip past the philosophers.

Paul Graham offers an explanation of why this might be in http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html. I don't completely agree. But I also don't have a better explanation to offer.

And I'll happily laugh at anyone who tells me that I should think of myself as a philosopher because I happen to be interested in a bunch of philosophical-sounding subjects like "philosophy of math", "epistemology" and so on.

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#323

Post by lupire »

hinkley wrote: post #288
ChancyChance wrote: post #195

It's an article about QM. On Vice. About a QM thought experiment. On Vice. Why would there be any expectation of scientific rigor whatsoever? "retrocausality, may seem like science fiction grist at first glance" Stop there, vice.

They cite a preceding article, though I've no idea if 'the conversation' has any more gravitas (literally first I've heard of it). https://theconversation.com/quantum-mechanics-how-the-future...

That article is written by the same philosopher Price.

The Conversation is a site where academics blog about their papers.

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#324

Post by TeMPOraL »

zone411 wrote: post #302
ashirviskas wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add, life just speeds up the chaos by orders of magnitude, it's a perfect entropy catalyst.

"there is 10 million times more entropy in that radiation [cosmic microwave radiation] than there is in all of the mass of the universe" https://news.berkeley.edu/2016/09/20/new-book-links-flow-of-...

But then, this is just entropy from a one-off event long ago. Meanwhile, life is an entropy producing reaction with a strong exponential factor.

To butcher an insightful quote by (IIRC) Hamming, any positive slope will eventually make up for y-intercept of a constant function.

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#325

Post by polishdude20 »

sdwr wrote: post #175
polishdude20 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would also mean that when I don't see or hear other people, they don't "exist" as physical things that can be seen or heard until I encounter a situation in which they would be. It's the same as "If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" But then again, that information has to be stored somewhere right? Like, if a tree falls in the woods and nobody is around, sure you…

The idea is that the universe "cheats" by replacing a computationally expensive process (a tree falling, breaking into pieces, being eaten by insects, moss growing) with a series of cheaper, "good-enough" replacements, based on the level of scrutiny. Not existing is the cheapest. Then, broad strokes, location and orientation Then pieces, level of decay etc, and moving between the layers is you spending your attention…

At that point, the least amount of work would be to flip the various chemical and neural vitamin my brain to make me think there is a tree there.

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#326

Post by lupire »

whatshisface wrote: post #118
nanidin wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we reverse time and this implies running everything backwards in physics, do we include gravity in the set of things that are reversed? Then everything would fly off the face of the earth in reverse-time.

Let's check. F = ma F = m dv/dt u = -t dv/dt = -dv/du - F = m dv/du If you stop there it looks like you're right, but you also must change the definition of velocity to account for the new time. v = dx/dt = -dx/du +F = m dx/du So the direction of gravity (the force F) stays the same when you flip time. I can explain that without the math by pointing out that if you took a video of a ball being thrown up and caught an…

What is u?

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#327

Post by modzu »

yesenadam wrote: post #284
ChancyChance wrote: post #195

It's an article about QM. On Vice. About a QM thought experiment. On Vice. Why would there be any expectation of scientific rigor whatsoever? "retrocausality, may seem like science fiction grist at first glance" Stop there, vice.

The main thing I didn't like about it was pretending it's all scientists involved and not philosophers. The article talks mostly about Huw Price—and from phrases like "Scientists, including Price", you'd think he's a scientist. He's an Australian philosopher. He was my professor for a couple of philosophy-of-science-related courses at Sydney Uni 20 years ago. He started the Centre for Time there I believe. He's a gre…

Time in physics is operationally defined as "what a clock reads". Nascent sciences start in philosophy.

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#328

Post by gotoeleven »

richardw wrote: post #223
ChancyChance wrote: post #195

It's an article about QM. On Vice. About a QM thought experiment. On Vice. Why would there be any expectation of scientific rigor whatsoever? "retrocausality, may seem like science fiction grist at first glance" Stop there, vice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

Hacker news has the best passive-aggressive link commenting anywhere on the internet.

This reminds me of an old joke my grandfather told me:

two hacker news commenters are climbing up a mountain

one of them loses his footing and falls on his butt, and asks the other to help pull him up

the other responds that this looks like a textbook case of slippery slope fall-assy and that it is beneath his intellectual dignity to even consider responding on the merits and further...

while he continues on the first commenter falls into an ice crevice and dies

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#329

Post by Rury »

photochemsyn wrote: post #164
0xBABAD00C wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the analogy, per Sean Carroll [1]: - There seems to be a special direction "down", where things fall by default, because we live in the vicinity of an influential object in space, called Earth - There seems to be a special direction "forward in time", where things happen by default, because we live in the vicinity of an influential event in time, called Big Bang If we had stuck to the local Earth context and g…

It's difficult to see how such a hypothesis could be tested either experimentally or observationally. Sounds more like metaphysics? Stars shine until they run out of fuel, and the age of a star - the status of its fuel, the buildup of fusion products - happens as time passes. Life on planets taps into the flow of sunlight from the star (and/or the flow of heat and chemical energy from the a hot planetary core) to gen…

> Life on planets taps into the flow of sunlight from the star (and/or the flow of heat and chemical energy from the a hot planetary core) to generate complex structures in defiance of the regular direction of entropy

It doesn't defy the direction of entropy. Frankly, I'm not sure why you have that notion? Entropy is a measure of system's state of equilibrium. Moving energy from a concentrated source, and distributing it more equally (across life forms and other complex structures), is following the direction of entropy, as is it makes energy more equalized, in contrast to the former state where energy levels are more unequal between highly concentrated areas (like stars, the Big Bang), and areas with less energy.

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#330

Post by mhh__ »

modzu wrote: post #327
yesenadam wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main thing I didn't like about it was pretending it's all scientists involved and not philosophers. The article talks mostly about Huw Price—and from phrases like "Scientists, including Price", you'd think he's a scientist. He's an Australian philosopher. He was my professor for a couple of philosophy-of-science-related courses at Sydney Uni 20 years ago. He started the Centre for Time there I believe. He's a gre…

Time in physics is operationally defined as "what a clock reads". Nascent sciences start in philosophy.

"Time is defined such that motion is simple" is a bit of physics-genius from MTW
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