Comment by general_reveal
8 hours ago
Haven’t even made too far down, but:
”There is no logical reason why the second method should be possible at all, but one has found in practice that it does work and meets with reasonable success. This must be ascribed to some mathematical quality in Nature, a quality which the casual observer of Nature would not suspect, but which nevertheless plays an important role in Nature's scheme.”
I mean, Hume answers this, but so does time, and I guess they both answer it together. Our observed measurements are true for the certain time period we’re in and remain true while we are in that window. To conclude with Hume, it’s all true until it isn’t, in time (well I suppose even in timelessness, entire properties can change - even so, with respect to measuring, I believe that requires a physical step function so we can’t avoid time here :)).
Aside:
”This is a quality which cannot be defined, any more than beauty in art can be defined, but which people who study mathematics usually have no difficulty in appreciating.”
Thorough worshipping of Math and “Mathers”, like as if they are a gift from God. Again, let’s stick with Hume, you’re the shit until you’re not. Einstein went to death not understanding Physics as he wanted to.
Hey, I’m a programmer, I didn’t necessarily want robots to do my job either. God loves that essay Hume wrote, truly.
It’s all fun and games until God mindfucks your understanding.
This is probably a reference to Hume's problem of induction, i.e. that observing a regularity in the past cannot justify assuming that it will hold in the future. It's vaguely related to the article, but talking about "time windows" and "Mathers" muddles the point.
Is it vaguely related? He wondered why measuring anything even works. Why wouldn’t the measurement disappear, thus making all this measuring pointless? Because, apparently the measurement(s) are true each time-step, and it will be true for that time, until it’s not true. Why it reasonably works well for us? Well, God , I guess. Same way the Sun doesn’t burn our skin off (God, I guess, but some have issues with that).
Sorry, I had to critique that immediately because I could already see that other second paragraph I quoted coming, as in, this author probably worships Math, Science, and those that do it, certainly not God, because he was unable to characterize the phenomena of it as related to God.
Yes, vaguely related. Dirac is not wondering why measurement itself works, but why mathematical reasoning applies so effectively to the measurement results.
I think it's valid to be surprised that all observations of a physical phenomena up until this point have obeyed a beautiful and (relatively) simple mathematical relationship, without even thinking about predicting the future.
Measurement works because universe moves in a simple way. As Hume indicates, you need very complex motion for irregularity, maybe even sentient, but sentient universe is fairy tale.
> Math, Science, ..., certainly not God
Pretty much everyone worships some sort of God. (The exceptions are non-self-aware people living moment-to-moment.)
What people argue about is the degree of personality and autonomy that God possesses.
>There is no logical reason why the second method should be possible at all,
One reason I can think of is if we consider that some regularity in the physical behavior is required for consciousness to evolve and so consciousness only forms in such worlds.
Later down in the essay, Dirac himself answers this;
With this kind of cosmological picture one is led to suppose that there was a beginning of time, and that it is meaningless to inquire into what happened before then. One can get a rough idea of the geometrical relationships this involves by imagining the present to be the surface of a sphere, going into the past to be going in towards the centre of the sphere, and going into the future to be going outwards. There is then no limit to how far one may go into the future, but there is a limit to how far one can go into the past, corresponding to when one has reached the centre of the sphere. The beginning of time provides a natural origin from which to measure the time of any event. The result is usually called the epoch of that event. Thus the present epoch is 2 x 109 years [actually 2x10^9].
One further point in connection with the new cosmology is worthy of note. At the beginning of time the laws of Nature were probably very different from what they are now. Thus we should consider the laws of Nature as continually changing with the epoch, instead of as holding uniformly throughout space-time. This idea was first put forward by Milne, who worked it out on the assumptions that the universe at a given epoch is roughly everywhere uniform and spherically symmetrical. I find these assumptions not very satisfying, because the local departures from uniformity are so great and are of such essential importance for our world of life that it seems unlikely there should be a principle of uniformity overlying them. Further, as we already have the laws of Nature depending on the epoch, we should expect them also to depend on position in space, in order to preserve the beautiful idea of the theory of relativity there is fundamental similarity between space and time. This goes more drastically against Milne's assumptions than a mere lack of uniformity in the distribution of matter.
Show respect to Mathematicians/Physicists/etc. many of whom had studied Philosophy and i dare say had a better understanding/insight of it than mere academic Philosophers. Why? Because they don't go off into la-la land but try very hard to have both observed evidence and a mathematical model of it match cleanly via a Theory.
For your edification, read first "Meditations on First Philosophy by Rene Descartes" followed by "Physics and Philosophy by Werner Heisenberg".