Observer and natural law

From: <[email protected]>
Date: Sun 26 May 2002 - 13:06:16 CEST

Dear Pedro and Colleagues,

Thanks Pedro for new themes for the discussion. We certainly need to be
aware of entering the observer in the picture of reality. The latter
consists of natural laws, and there are alternative views on the law either
as external and objective - or as our subjective imprint on some indefinite
reality. But what means "objective"? In our culture it seems usually as a
synonym to external. Generally it is not true, "objective" means that under
the action of these constructs (natural laws), individual pictures of the
world are synchronized and we can communicate consistently. In other words,
the formulation of natural law implies that mental and physical events
consistently correspond each other as different modes of the same reality.
We discover this reality in our observation and communication.

Arising to Leibniz, the idea in general is following: the correspondence of
mental and physical events could be possible only at certain values of
fundamental constants and correspondingly at certain formulations of natural
laws. This needs further substantiation, but the fact that we all have
similar picture of the world can be substantiated by some "objective" values
for realizing observation (quantum measurements), otherwise the individual
pictures will be inconsistent to each other. This view is essentially
Platonic, and I cannot see any other possibility of consistent explanation
of natural law and anthropic principle. In this framework, the natural law
represents some canon of perfection realized in selection of our world from
a set of possible worlds.

These topics again seem to be metaphysical, but they imply some virtual
experimental procedure. Is really the set of existing natural laws and
fundamental constants unique for constructing image of real world, or other
observable worlds are possible at different values of fundamental constants
and different sets of elementary particles. The problem is that this task
may not be resolved by finite means. We may find out by the finite procedure
that some worlds are not observable, but we may miss important links in
proving that some worlds are observable. This reminds me the anecdote about
Wolfgang Pauli who asked God why such a particle as muon exists. When God
was explaining him this, Wolfgang Pauli exclaimed "Aber das ist ganz
Falsch!" and pointed the error in God's calculations.

Another topic (molecular recognition) I will comment in a separate
forthcoming letter. I think this topic may develop into concrete approach
where crucial outputs can be made.

Best regards,

Andrei

 
Received on Sun May 26 13:07:23 2002

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