According to classical physics, everything is causal. Though classical physics always allowed that spirituality, and possibly some aspect of life, were outside the realm of physics. To the extent those were part of thing, it was pretty much assumed that people had free will. That we could make decisions independent of physics, which was causal, or spiritual forces like good and evil, which were driven by supernatural beings or forces. Sure we were influenced by them, yet we had the ability to make free will decisions, and a thing called free will existed.
The Paradox of Sports and Free Will
The paradox of sports
The paradox of sports is this: you need to believe you have a 100% chance of winning in order to have a 50% chance of winning. If you don’t believe in your heart that you’re going to win – not that it’s automatic, but that you have the right combination of talent, practice and divine favor – then you have little chance of winning.
The Soft Anthropic Principle
Question: Is there a reason the universe is the way it is, or is it just arbitrary?
A few of these attributes are: number and topology of dimensions (like space is 3-dimensional, not 2- or 4-dim), conservation of energy (energy can’t wax and wane, either arbitrarily or according to some rule), four forces and their properties (why not more or fewer forces; why gravity not both attract and repel, electricity only attract, etc), has the particles w/properties that it does.
The Three-Body Problem
With two interacting bodies, interacting via the r-squared forces of gravity or electricity, and obeying classical mechanics, the equation of motion can be written down in closed form.
With three interacting bodies, the equation of motion can’t be written down in closed form.
So the three-body problem can’t be solved exactly (and this is just for classical mechanics and r-squared forces). Algebraic approximations or numerical simulations can do a good job, but they’re not exact.
So what’s it mean?
The Universe Doesn’t Think Like We Do
The Universe doesn’t care. Really what I mean is…
How the universe operates and how we understand and analyze it are entirely different.
The universe…
- doesn’t define or categorize things, like mammals vs reptiles, or life vs non-life
- doesn’t calculate things, like quantum mechanics or relativity or three-body problems
- can’t be divided into holistic vs reductionistic situations, or matter vs space
Holism vs Reductionism
Reductionism reduces everything to its parts. You know how the parts behave, then put them together, and thus you know how the whole thing behaves.
This could be for our knowledge in principle, for our knowledge in practice, and for how the universe does it (except the universe doesn’t, we just think it does).
Reductionism has been exceptionally successful in the last thousand years or so, first with the Arabs and then with the Europeans and their descendants.
Life
DEFINITION
A living object is material in an ordered state, which actively maintains its state (at least), and (better yet) is able to rearrange increasing amounts of its environment into something similar to itself, by growth (ok) or replication (best of all).
In detail, it’s an object that is…
- significantly more ordered than its environment (maybe not its immediate environment, as a bacterium living inside an animal, but its broader environment, like the environment that animal lives in), and
- actively maintains its ordered state (when its order is disrupted, energy is involved in (attempting to) return to its previous state), and
- is able to make more of itself or something very similar to itself.
The Universe
The Universe…
Is softly anthropic.
What does that mean – it listens to quiet piano music by the light of warm candles while meditating on self-awareness? Continue reading The Universe
Very Universe 