-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Günther Greindl on 11/17/2007 01:12 PM: > Ok - but the gooey glob is also only a description - we can extend the > gooey glob to contain the whole universe (the Hubble volume). Would you > say that at that level we have total ordering?
I CANNOT extend the gooey glob to contain the whole universe. And I doubt that you can, either. [grin] But, I don't know that for sure. I'm not being entirely facetious, here. Partial ordering is a consequence of locality. And locality seems fundamental to what we understand about the universe (which is why entanglement is so freaky to us). So, I suspect "the universe" is actually an ill-formed and delusional concept, perhaps even meaningless. Nothing is universal. Everything is local. Even if I could pretend to have enough information for that sort of extension and just gloss over all the parts of which I'm ignorant, I doubt that I would suggest it is totally ordered, regardless of whether the ordering index is time or not. > I guess the problem boils back down to the question of a deterministic > universe or an indeterministic one. I don't see it that way. I see it as boiling back to the question of universality versus locality. But, [in]determinism may well just be a particular dichotomy within the whole class of universal vs. local dichotomies. > Only if you subscribe to indeterminism partial ordering arises. > > And to the hammer/nail question: in the macroworld determinism well > established (because even if one assumes totally indet. quantum > fluctuations they would cancel out). > > How could you ever get a partial odering in the hammer/nail question? Even in a determined universe, you could _perceive_, react to, or act upon, partial orders. Partial orders come about through ignorance just as well as through stochasticity or parallelism. Phil's "arousal of his arm in preparation for the targeted explosion of effort" highlights that quite well. Our ignorance of the complex cause for human hammering (no nail required ... just a human and a hammer) leads us to quantify "the hammering arm" into one big lump. But, in reality, it's a complex process that requires time and consists of many interwoven effects, not all of them caused by the thoughts in the hammerist's mind. To see that concretely, all we need do is define an experiment studying the differences between the hammering done by people with all 5 fingers versus the hammering done by people with fewer fingers, or even the hammering done by robot versus the hammering done by humans. Such distinctions do NOT require one to consider [in]determinism. But, they do require one to consider historical accumulation and canalization of causes, i.e. where and how ignorance (particularly of "negligible" influences e.g. events very FAR away in space or time) affects causality. - -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com Reprove not an arrogant man, lest he hate you; reprove a wise man, and he will love you. -- Proverbs 9:8 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFHQeFfZeB+vOTnLkoRAj4NAKCBjuHAXE4VrA9iNroqynecCNWtGgCg1b2C m+QaAki9+KuGW6UyBesxANY= =UD3Q -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
