In an earlier post of yours I find. “I’d add that mostly everyone accepts that the laws of nature are contingent, and that there could have been a law according to which lead would transmute into gold. So I’m presupposing that common background.”
This is definitely not what I assume. Rather, what I assume is that the laws of nature are, from our perspective, the computations that give our experience as their output. An emergent level of description of these computations is as being “about” various fundamental particles described by different equations, but the equations are all there is to say about the particles. There is no Aristotelian “material” which has the “form” described by the equation of an electron but could have some other “form”, say the equation , there is just the equation, what Chalmers calls, I believe, “pure causal flux”. Maybe some very very complex equation (more complex than the order of this perceived moment?) could be stated such that head explodes...
OK, Zombie Michael writing, brain stuffed back into skull. Michael’s head exploded from reading “Water just is H2O, which is why you can’t have one without the other (and this is so regardless of whether the physical laws differ. For example, there could be other worlds where water/H2O isn’t wet)” in the comments of the “Misusing Kripke” post. It’s a far clearer example of what he was talking about. H20 is shorthand for a lot of math, that is to say a lot of logical relationships. Wetness emerges from that math, which can be understood as logic, not just as symbols on paper following symbolic manipulation conventions. It’s not just a fact, not the teacher’s password, not a pattern to learn to recognize etc. Physics isn’t stamp collecting.
By the way, let me take the time here to plug “Thinking Physics” by Lewis Carrol Epstein, not just for Richard but for everyone here who doubts that the logic of physics can be conveyed cleanly without the formalism of symbolic manipulation.
Richard:
In an earlier post of yours I find. “I’d add that mostly everyone accepts that the laws of nature are contingent, and that there could have been a law according to which lead would transmute into gold. So I’m presupposing that common background.”
This is definitely not what I assume. Rather, what I assume is that the laws of nature are, from our perspective, the computations that give our experience as their output. An emergent level of description of these computations is as being “about” various fundamental particles described by different equations, but the equations are all there is to say about the particles. There is no Aristotelian “material” which has the “form” described by the equation of an electron but could have some other “form”, say the equation , there is just the equation, what Chalmers calls, I believe, “pure causal flux”. Maybe some very very complex equation (more complex than the order of this perceived moment?) could be stated such that head explodes...
OK, Zombie Michael writing, brain stuffed back into skull. Michael’s head exploded from reading “Water just is H2O, which is why you can’t have one without the other (and this is so regardless of whether the physical laws differ. For example, there could be other worlds where water/H2O isn’t wet)” in the comments of the “Misusing Kripke” post. It’s a far clearer example of what he was talking about. H20 is shorthand for a lot of math, that is to say a lot of logical relationships. Wetness emerges from that math, which can be understood as logic, not just as symbols on paper following symbolic manipulation conventions. It’s not just a fact, not the teacher’s password, not a pattern to learn to recognize etc. Physics isn’t stamp collecting.
By the way, let me take the time here to plug “Thinking Physics” by Lewis Carrol Epstein, not just for Richard but for everyone here who doubts that the logic of physics can be conveyed cleanly without the formalism of symbolic manipulation.