Physics is self-healing.
I was thinking about a likely initial state for the universe, absolute nothingness. How it works is that we can ask the ex nihilo question, and therefore absolute nothingness must not be stable, and I take that to mean that while there is no reason for it to end, there is also no reason for it not to end.
There is the problem of determination, though; once nothingness decays, what does it decay into?
Most likely, a single random rule appears. Specifically, something exists, (absolute nothingness just ended) and it has some rule through and by which it exists.
This has, as far as I can conceive, the immediate corollaries of A=A and A!=~A. Without the first, it doesn't exist, and without the second, it decays immediately back into non-existence, because it spawns only pure chaos.
Through the law of non-contradiction, this rule will immediately start spawning new rules. Anything that is a contradiction immediately becomes impossible, and then these restricted actions start spawning corollaries.
(Since it's safe to view physics as a list of things energy cannot do, this immediately makes sense.)
This is the reason, I think, that physics is consistent to a mathematical degree. Every law is simply a consequence of some initial law.
This makes the mind node even more interesting. Somehow, as physics was sorting itself out, there was a conflict. The NIP - the fact that this universe is a finite universe - requires stochastic behavior.* However, you can build a non -determinism machine using a stochastic object, and so physics was doomed to be under-determined.
*(Particles have to smeared out over space because the probability of an event occurring at exactly one point in time is an ∞/0 situation, and so the uncertainty principle is required. And yet, it's still one particle - it cannot interact with anything but another particle, which requires more or less one point in space. Thus, stochastic behavior.)
However, the whole point of this formulation is that it's basically self-healing because it's self-generating. Any time a new situation arrives that has no particular rule, a new one is simply generated at random, restricted only to not contradicting existing rules. And so, it may be in fact that there was no consciousness until a mind node was actually created, at which time the existence->rule->system event was repeated all over again.
Incidentally, I think the law of excluded middle is optional - there is a second version, which results in a continuous or possibly infinite universe, unlike our quantized finite one.
One of the upsides of this idea is that it tells us where our seemingly arbitrary quantities came from - it was physics growing to describe a new situation.
Thinking about this, I realized there's also various less-silly versions of the God idea - the idea that there is in fact an atemporal set of rules which held in the 'time' 'before'* the big bang. I plan to analyze these as well, soon.
*(In a scenario of non-time, the term 'before' is meaningless. Note that by the NIP time must be finite.)
I have thought about this subject as well, though not to the same depth as you. My own angle on it was slightly different. I think that as physics advances, and as new laws are discovered and new theories are formulated (e.g. the quantum theory of gravity), we will get closer and closer to a kind of irreducible foundation of all physics, which, if I understand you, is what you think as well. My feeling is that, if this is the case, it should be just as possible for a philosopher to arrive at these laws as a physicist, providing he keeps up to date with modern physics, because if they are irreducible they are presumably logical. I commend you on your observations so far.
ReplyDeleteI commend you on your observations so far.
ReplyDeleteWell thank you!
The final physical theory is, amusingly, named after body parts.
You've got your Grand Unified Theory, but lately called the Theory of Everything.
That is, GUT or ToE. I prefer GUT for obvious reasons.
I don't know, I like ToE. I can see the headline now: "scientists have finally found the much sought ToE"...
ReplyDeleteHeadline: Universe goes on diet.
ReplyDelete"Physicists, having finally achieved knowledge of the ToE, have found that Universe is much lighter than expected..."