a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
alpha0  ·  4671 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Do the inner workings of nature change with time?
[This telegraphic conversation, @b_b, has been the highlight of a rather dismal few days.]

> I am interested to know why you believe that the arrow of time is superstition.

There is telltale evidence in both Number and Quantum Mechanics. The necessary work regarding latter has already been done, but most physicists reject the thought out of hand because of the said superstition. Surely, information flows from both past and future and the fact of wave function collapse is witness to it. Even when some, such as Roger Penrose, do consider it, they are circumspect for obvious reasons.

At some point, God Willing, the task of an elaboration of the nature of the former may be accomplished, or at least a measure of progress made, should yours truly become sufficiently motivated. For now consider (the fanciful notion that) the patterns of standing waves of the bounded electron are faithfully represented by "mere" Natural numbers. And would it interest you to know that the phenomena of the incidence, too, can be shown in what is to date asserted as the "chaotic" and "mysterious" Prime Numbers?

While I maintain my own personal confidence in the veracity of this matter -- based on above and certain experiences -- it would surprise me should an attempt at conveying inner perception, regardless of heroic effort to touch the asymptote that forever bars one from communicating in full, would suffice to convince you and cause you to abandon your firm faith in the construct. Certainly, if global the construct rents itself asunder in places to maintain the facade of completion -- here I refer to the singularities -- then what chance do I, a mere mortal, have to succeed in rendering the matter in full in objective form?

   I don't see any reason why we should have less confidence
   in this kind of perception, i.e., in mathematical intuition,
   than in the sense perception, which induces us to build up
   physical theories and to expect that future sense perceptions
   will agree with them, and, moreover, to believe that a 
   question not decidable now has meaning and may be decided
   in the future.  The set-theoretical paradoxes are hardly any
   more troublesome for mathematicians than deceptions of the 
   senses are for the physicist. […] Evidently the "given" 
   underlying mathematics is closely related to the abstract
   elements contained in our empirical ideas.  It by no means
   follows, however, that the data of this second kind, because
   they can not be associated with actions of certain things 
   upon our sense organs, are something subjective, as Kant
   asserted.  Rather, they, too, may represent an aspect of 
   objective reality, but as opposed to the sensations, their
   presence in us may be due to another kind of relationship
   between ourselves and reality.  

   [Kurt Gödel, What is Cantor's Continuum Problem?]


        How the world is, is completely indifferent for what 
        is higher. 

        God does not reveal himself in the world.	

        ...

   Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

   [Ludwig Wittgenstein - Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus]