Re: [Fis] Consilience and Structure

Koichiro's multiply pregnant posting stimultes me to take up my own
outrageous point again, just to make sure that I have made it clear (so all
and sundry can decompose into laughter!).
     The multiple worlds I was postulating derived from" observation" being
frequently made by every complicated enough dynamical system within the
universe (equating 'observation' with a kind of interactive dynamics that
might cause decoherence). This means that where I find myself at any
moment comes complete with a coherent memory (known to be multiply "false"
in any case!). The important point comes with one's own attitude --
emotionally postive or negative. If positive, my actions will create, in
almost every moment, a world + memory favorable to my being, if negative,
etc. Thus, consider the case when my car on a crowded road slipped on
spilled oil, took flight in the direction of oncoming traffic, but at the
last moment something in its rear hit the low dividing fence between the
roadbeds and my car twisted back in the direction of its own roadbed again,
landing fairly softly and moving in its original direction, if wiggling a
bit. One -- a rather unlikely one -- of the multiple possible worlds
branching off at that instant came to be, I can only say because my
'spiritual orientation' at the moment was positive. BUT, for others at the
scene this is NOT what happened at all. The next day in most of the
branched off worlds there was a news item about a calamitous crash in which
the unfortunate driver was killed, as were others [I can still see the
faces in the oncoming cars looking up at me as I was suspended before them
just prior to the (in my world) rectifying bump in the rear saved us all.].
So, in many -- even most -- other worlds I have been gone these many years,
but here I am in my own. So, will this go on forever? Not so, I think.
One gets tired of the everyday debilitating insults from the weather, from
disease, from pests, from all things one is NOT CONSCIOUS OF that are
continually generating annoyances, from colds to floods, that fill our
days. I have yet to experience a disaster tht I anticipated. But you
cannot anticipate everything, and the bad event always comes upon one from
"nowhere". Eventually one says, with Count Dracula, "Oh, to hell with it
all!", and with this attitude, the killing event will soon befall. This is
not unrelated I suppose to the fact that a positive attitude can suppress
the growth of cancer, for example. Unfortunately this view does bear the
burden of accusing those that fail, and those that die, of not bracing up
well enough. Their demise was their own fault! This seems at least to
lack compassion. But I have not infrequently found that what seemed to me
to be a "truth" was extremely unpalatable (like my conviction that we all
first and foremost serve the Second Law of thermodynamics). Well, I have
used up my weekly ration of postings.

In a minor key,
STAN

> Malcom and Stan, Malcom's preference to one-world view seems
>quite continental in the spirit of Rafael instead of merely being
>analytical, and not quite antagonistic to Stan's preference to
>many-worlds. Here is my excuse. If we are happy with applying the
>successful standard practice of quantum mechanics to the physical
>universe at large, we may also have to assume somebody who would sit
>outside of the universe and see what is going on in the inside. According
>to the accepted user's manual, the universe may transit from the possible
>to the actual every time the observer does the job through the collapse
>of the wavefunction. However, there have been some dissidents
>including Everett, DeWitt and Gell-Mann among others as charging the idea
>outrageous. DeWitt's many-world interpretation must be one necessary
>consequence out of dismissing the idea of the observer sitting outside of
>the universe as unfounded. One remedy for the purpose would be to live
>with another outrageous picture that our actual universe is just one of
>the many alternatives when the inhabitants look into the past, while it
>constantly serves as the source of branching off into many alternatives
>toward the future. One sturdy problem with the many-world scenario is
>whether the universe we experience as the incumbents has anything special
>compared with all of the others already branched off. This question
>touches upon what is the durable fundamental set of the elements
>constructing the actual universe, that is , the choice of the preferred
>basis set in the physicist jargon. No easy solution in sight, so far.
> At this point, Jerry's concern on chemical syntax may enter.
>Firstly, quantum mechanics grounds itself upon the present progressive
>tense being concurrent and punctuated with the present perfect tense.
>This stipulation is entirely empirical. Secondly, chemistry as a material
>substrate of biology is also empirical in bridging the present
>progressive and the present perfect tense. Chemical reaction is about the
>process of updating the reactants once registered in the present perfect
>tense again through their resurrection in the movement in progressive.
>Chemistry practices quantum mechanics so that the material record
>registered in the present perfect tense may constantly be updated. One
>outcome would be to return products in the downstream again back into
>reactants in the upstream, as letting the whole reaction
>scheme circular.$B!!(BOnce the robust closure of chemical reactions
>is formed, it could be settled also in the biological organization.
> If the branching of one world off into many happens to generate a
>strange world almost similar to the one branched off previously, that
>strange one could be retained and entrapped in a closure. This would make
>our physical universe quite biological. Still, another outrageous
>picture? Cheers, Koichiro

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Received on Sun Nov 14 22:11:31 2004