What, Why & How do we Know ?
I said, when reading Aldous Huxley back in 2007, that I was having trouble seeing the wood for the trees – what specific points Huxley was making – even though it was already a given that some kind of perennial philosophy is what we are dealing with in real life. Since before then my approach is … Continue reading “Perennialism”
Quite normally these days, headlines deliberately mislead – it’s called click-bait – and so often these days “Multiverse” is that click-bait. Total bollox, but it sells clicks. Trouble is, when it’s the headline, it’s very hard to tell if the piece itself is saying anything useful that may or may not depend on any multiverse … Continue reading “More Multiverse Bollox”
This is just a holding post. Already in my previous post on Carlo Rovelli, I was overdue a fuller review. Since then I’ve been reading Sean Carroll, and finding myself reading backwards, from the index of key topics and chapter headings. The reality is that every current philosophical physicist I read, I find enormous implicit … Continue reading “The Matrix Cometh”
I’m reading my way through Carlo Rovelli’s “The Order of Time” (Finished Part 1 of 3) and finding it full of items that resonate. Not least because I already loved his “Reality is Not What it Seems” but also because I have been joining up the dots with the work of David Deutsch and Erik … Continue reading “Well we never! PoPoMo Physics Again.”
Fundamentally – What do I know? Black holes ain’t so black, and science ain’t so different from the humanities. Singularities have horizons crammed with information. Nothing objective is more fundamental than the information available. This is a summary of recent work ostensibly on quantum gravity and the role of humans more generally in the science … Continue reading “Fundamentally – What do I know?”
Harris Podcast with Sean Carroll [Aside – Identity Politics topic – previously talking past each other with Ezra. Apart from better management of conversations with specific Q’s requiring A’s, main Harris lesson is to avoid agendas of extremists left or right. Convincing an extremist that they may be wrong is a counterproductive waste of effort. … Continue reading “Sam Harris & Sean Carroll – Raw Notes”
“It makes meaning the child of physics. Physics itself, however, according to this view, is also the child of meaning.” – John A Wheeler’s Meaning Circuit (1986). I love the way Wheeler wrote his papers!! @phalpern pic.twitter.com/xZDL93foaH — Rohit Kulkarni (@RoAKulkarni) April 10, 2018 “Physics is the child of meaning” Oh yes. Information is more … Continue reading “Physics as the Child of Meaning – John Wheeler (1986)”
Always seen the multiverse idea as nothing more than a thought experiment, a kludge, a total cop-out if seen as representing or explaining anything like reality, (pretty much the same as Schroedinger’s Cat in that respect). By adding a massively complex explanation – whole new universes of infinite posssibility – to answer simpler problems and … Continue reading “The Multiverse Kludge”