[extropy-chat] the future of ...

Wed Oct 13 01:40:33 UTC 2004

Another interpretation is from Bohm:
***************************************
A new theory of the relationship of mind and matter
(http://members.aol.com/Mszlazak/BOHM.html) - an article by David Bohm.
ABSTRACT: The relationship of mind and matter is approached in a new way in
this article. This approach is based on the causal interpretation of the
quantum theory, in which an electron, for example, is regarded as an
inseparable union of a particle and a field. This field has, however, some
new properties that can be seen to be the main sources of the differences
between the quantum theory and the classical (Newtonian) theory. These new
properties suggest that the field may be regarded as containing objective
and active information, and that the activity of this information is similar
in certain key ways to the activity of information in our ordinary
subjective experience. The analogy between mind and matter is thus fairly
close. This analogy leads to the proposal of the general outlines of a new
theory of mind, matter, and their relationship, in which the basic notion is
participation rather than interaction. Although the theory, can be developed
mathematically in more detail the main emphasis here is to show
qualitatively how it provides a way of thinking that does not divide mind
from matter, and thus leads to a more coherent understanding of such
questions than is possible in the common dualistic and reductionistic
approaches. These ideas may be relevant to connectionist theories and might
perhaps suggest new directions for their development. 
...
...
The question of the relationship of mind and matter has already been
explored to some extent in some of my earlier work in physics (Bohm, 1980).
In this work, which was originally aimed at understanding relativity and
quantum theory on a basis common to both, I developed the notion of the
enfolded or implicate order. The essential feature of this idea was that the
whole universe is in some way enfolded in everything and that each thing is
enfolded in the whole. From this it follows that in some way, and to some
degree everything enfolds or implicates everything, but in such a manner
that under typical conditions of ordinary experience, there is a great deal
of relative independence of things. The basic proposal is then that this
enfoldment relationship is not merely passive or superficial. Rather, it is
active and essential to what each thing is. It follows that each thing, is
internally related to the whole, and therefore, to everything else. The
external relationships are then displayed in the unfolded or explicate order
in which each thing is seen, as has already indeed been indicated, as
relatively separate and extended, and related only externally to other
things. The explicate order, which dominates ordinary experience as well as
classical (Newtonian) physics, thus appears to stand by itself. But
actually, it cannot be understood properly apart from its ground in the
primary reality of the implicate order. 
...
************************************************************

Thanks.

Walter.
---------

-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org
[mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of hal at finney.org
Sent: Wednesday, October 13, 2004 8:00 AM
To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] the future of ...

Scerir pointed to:

> http://online.itp.ucsb.edu/online/kitp25/

But he didn't say what it is the future of...

It is a conference on The Future of Physics!  And it was held at UC
Santa Barbara, just a couple of miles from where I live.  I did not try
to crash it, but there was quite a bit in the local news about it this
weekend because the director of the UCSB Kavli Institute for Theoretical
Physics is David Gross, who just won the Nobel Prize for his work on
quantum theory.

The conference program has audio and video of the talks available to
download, as well as the slides in an easy-to-view format.  Most of them
appear to be very technical however.

I watched one of the first ones, Where do we Stand? by Steven Weinberg.
It was a summary of the current state of physics.  Most of it was over my
head but I was surprised that he spent about ten minutes on the anthropic
principle, its implications and applications.

Anthropic reasoning in physics is anything that is built around the
assumption that conditions have to be such that observers can exist
to observe them.  The example given by Weinberg is the size of the
cosmological constant, which is equivalent (or at least related) to the
inherent gravitational energy of the vacuum.  It turns out that this
energy density is about the same as the energy density of the matter of
the universe, but there is no known theoretical reason to explain this
rough match.  In fact current theory does little to constrain the vacuum
energy density and this would suggest that it would more plausibly be
extremely high, at black-hole density levels.  However, if it were much
higher than we observe it at, the universe as we know it could not have
existed for long enough for stars to form and life to evolve.

If you imagine that there are a lot of universes and they each have a
random vacuum energy density, then in most of them life will never form.
Only in the ones where it is about the size that we actually see could
life evolve.  This can be viewed as a sort of explanation of why the
cosmological constant is the size it is.

Weinberg went on to mention that many physicists hate anthropic reasoning,
including Gross, the Nobelist who runs the Institute.  They want to
hold out hope that physics will advance to the point that it can explain
exactly why the cosmological constant has the value it does, along with
other such values.  The idea of saying that it was essentially an accident
is not acceptable to them.

However Weinberg explained that physicists might have to lower their
sights and accept that some things just can't be explained by theory.
He pointed out that his had happened in the past.  At one time, European
scientists thought that the arrangement of the continents on the Earth
ought to follow some simple geometrical rules.  When Columbus was
planning his voyage to Asia there were those who tried to use simple
symmetry arguments to argue about the size of the oceans based on the
known size of Asia.  Another famous case was Kepler's attempt to explain
the sizes of the planetary orbits using regular solids of various types,
nesting solids and spheres together in different ways to try to make
them come out to the sizes of the orbits.

Today we know that the positions of the continents, and the spacings
of the planets, have no such simple explanations, and are essentially
accidental outcomes of complex processes.  It might be, Weinberg
suggested, that the cosmological constant and perhaps some other physical
constants could turn out the same.

I find anthropic reasoning fascinating because of its connection to
the possibility that other universes exist, and in particular the Many
Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics which suggests that these
other worlds include ones that have alternate versions of ourselves.
Cosmologists tend to be more open to the MWI than most physicists,
because they have to deal with an early universe that had no conscious
observers around to make measurements, which keeps them from using
certain alternative quantum interpretations.

If you look at the slides for James Hartle's talk at the conference,
<http://online.itp.ucsb.edu/online/kitp25/zee/oh/201.html>, you see
this laid out explicitly.  He concludes, "We are all Schrodinger Cats
in Hawking's wave function of the universe."  That's pretty cool!

Hal
_______________________________________________
extropy-chat mailing list
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo/extropy-chat
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20041013/5fe546eb/attachment.html>