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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

#451

Post by pksebben »

archgoon wrote: post #360
pksebben wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think perhaps there's a subtlety in that quote - "philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds". Maybe part of the meaning, is that I'm the course of doing what scientists do, philosophy doesn't move their particular ball forward in the way they want so they can and sometimes do ignore it. Not necessarily that they should. This guy helped create nuclear weapons, and then quoted…

> and then quoted the bagvad ghita and had a long time to think about it. That was Oppenheimer, not Feynman.

D'oh. You're totally right; I was having a different conversation apparently.

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

#452

Post by anotherman554 »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #229
anotherman554 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could just mean causality has more dimensions than we can perceive. It doesn't mean it is nonexistent.

So my decision to have a ham sandwich for lunch is determined by some meta-universe that created the starting conditions for this universe, and allows for the breach in causality? Or somehow is involved in the backwards-arrow of quantum events that the article talks about so the universe cannot turn out any other way? I dunno, seems like a "God of the gaps" thing - we can speculate on meta-meta-universes endlessly. I…

Right, physicists seem to generally agree there are parts or dimensions of the universe we cannot directly measure. If scientists can't predict whether you will eat a ham sandwich for lunch or not, it won't be clear if they can't predict it because you have "free will" or because we have limited access to information on how the universe works.

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

#453

Post by febusravenga »

bsder wrote: post #165
jonny_eh wrote: post #77

> It may seem eerie to our brains, which process events sequentially, but the history of science is also littered with examples of human biases leading to bad conclusions, such as the Earth-centric model of the solar system. Slow down. Assuming that time moves in one direction is not comparable to geocentrism.

> Slow down. Assuming that time moves in one direction is not comparable to geocentrism. Why not? The "arrow of time" almost always requires thermodynamic arguments. And that requires a concentration of "low entropy" to move toward "high entropy". Which, by definition, are "boundary conditions" and not a fundamental part of your physical rules. If, for example, your universe is entropically uniform, is there an "arro…

> If, for example, your universe is entropically uniform, is there an "arrow of time"? And, even if there were, could you detect it?

Would we have fluctuations in that state? In which directions they would... Progress?

Isn't what you describe an anomaly like black hole or division by zero, where we cannot understand what actually happens because normal laws break because they are unsolvable with current models?

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

#455

Post by strogonoff »

mistermann wrote: post #437
strogonoff wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? What do you mean?

The complaint (a very valid and important one, imho) is that physicists are ~inadequately curious about philosophy - this is the current state of affairs . To make this no longer be (at some point in the future) the state of affairs, how could it be done ( make it "in fact")? "Why not?" seems like a decent first attack to the problem - why are physicists (or, scientists in general ) so bad at philosophy? For one, I w…

“Everything looks like a nail” strikes me as an accurate description. Dominance of natural sciences provides this philosophical bias towards physicalistic monism, and physicalism in turn limits how those sciences evolve.
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