Skip to main content

switching from the higher spheres to the higher symmetries

Okay: this may be a hot idea, or it may be plain nutty--but here goes:

Aristotle had the notion of the sublunar sphere and all within it being moved by the higher spheres. And the natural state of the motion of these spheres was motion rather than rest. We certainly don't have spheres any more, but from the point of view of physics (i.e., abstracting from biological questions) we do have a higher and lower. The higher has a kind of circularity about it. And a kind of simplicity about it (just as the movement of the spheres was thoguht to be circular. And the higher does drive the lower (at least until we get to questions of life). But the higher in this case is not above our heads. And it is not in any sense "macro" or large. Rather, it is micro. Yep, (at least if Stephen Barr is right) the smaller, less evident purely physical (i.e, apart from biological) processes have higher symmetry than the larger, more evident ones. Just as a marble (sez Barr) has more symmetry than a hexagon, yet the not-so-apparent circularity of the marble underlies and makes possible the more-apparent orderliness of the hexagon. And the less apparent physical level is naturally in motion.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

P F Strawson's Freedom and Resentment: the argument laid out

Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson.  He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal.  My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this.  I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true.  Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist.  In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...

Daniel Dennett, disqualifying qualia, softening up the hard problem, fullness of vacuity, dysfunctional functionalism

Around track 2 of disc 9 of Intuition Pumps , Dennett offers what I would call an argument from vacuity.  He argues that David Chalmers unwittingly plays a magic trick on himself and others by placing a set of issues under the one umbrella called the "hard problem of consciousness." None of these issues is really , in Dennett's opinion, a hard problem.  But in naming them thus, Chalmers (says Dennett) is like a magician who seems to be playing the same card trick over and over again, but is really playing several different ones.  In this analogy, expert magicians watch what they think is the same trick played over and over again.  They find it unusually difficult to determine which trick he is playing because they take these performances as iterations of the same trick when each is  in fact different from the one that came before.  Furthermore, each of the tricks that he plays is actually an easy one, so it is precisely because they are looki...

robot/computers, awareness of causality, holism

For a purportedly cognizant machine to be aware of causality, it would seem (given how it happens with us rational animals) that being aware of its own causal interactions is a necessary condition for its being aware of how causal relations exist in nature.  But to be aware of its own causal interactions, the machine would have to have a sense of its acting as a whole, as an individual, and as being acted upon at a whole.  It would not suffice merely to register information from this or that outside source: there would have to be a sense of the whole acting and being acted upon.   It seems that such awareness requires appropriation and that machines can't do that (at least not in the precise sense that I have discussed in this blog).