[extropy-chat] PLAIN OLD PHYSICS

[Damien Broderick]

At 07:12 PM 11/28/2005 -0800, Eliezer wrote:

>Someday you will understand how qualia work.  And when you do, you are 
>going to be WAY embarassed by the fact that qualia turn out to be PLAIN 
>OLD PHYSICS, not mysterious physics but ordinary physics, just like the 
>LAST SIX THOUSAND MYSTERIES that the human species encountered, from stars 
>to phlogiston to elan vital.  That's what makes the mistake EMBARASSING.

SORT of. It depends, as always, on the EVIDENCE and the power of available 
THEORIES. Until a bit over a century ago, scientists would have scoffed at 
the idea of RADIOACTIVITY. If they'd known of its existence, they'd have 
been certain also that it could be explained by PLAIN OLD PHYSICS. What 
JACKASSES.

Meanwhile:

==============
Next June 18-22, 2006, the University of San Diego will host the 87th 
Annual Meeting of the Pacific Division of the AAAS.  As part of this 
wide-ranging conference (biology, chemistry, physics, psychology, marine 
and environmental science), AAAS will host a symposium tentatively called 
"Frontiers of Time:  Reverse Causation -- Experiment and Theory."

Frontiers of Time: Reverse Causation -- Experiment and Theory

Causality, the notion that earlier events can affect later events, but not 
vice versa, undergirds our experience of reality and physical law. 
Causality is predicated on the forward unidirectionality of time, however, 
most physical laws are time symmetric; that is, they formally and equally 
admit both time-forward and time-reverse solutions.  Time-reverse solutions 
are distressing because they would allow the future to influence the past, 
i.e., reverse (or retro-) causation.  Why time-forward solutions are 
preferentially observed in nature remains an unresolved problem in physics. 
(While the most convincing explanations invoke the second law of
thermodynamics or the expansion of the universe, in the end, purely forward 
causation is an ad hoc physical assumption.

Some recent experimental results from the domain of parapsychology, 
including human psychophysiological responses to future stimuli and 
mind-matter interactions with random physical systems provide evidence for 
reverse causation effects at the macroscopic scale.  While laboratory 
evidence is intriguing, theoretical models to explain such outcomes have 
lagged; those that exist have not yet made deep enough connections with 
fundamental physics. Furthermore, even the most basic physical constraints 
-- e.g., whether reverse causation is best explained by energy transfers or 
simply by correlations without information exchange -- remain open questions.

This symposium will explore recent experiments, theory, and philosophical 
issues connected with reverse causation.  In particular, it is hoped that 
this meeting will help: i) generate better theoretical models by which 
established experimental results can be understood; 2) devise new 
experiments by which the underlying physics may be more clearly exposed; 
and 3) establish fruitful research collaborations.

==============

Damien Broderick