joigus

What is untrue? That neutrons decay time cannot be predicted? Of course there are many different situations for neutrons. Lifetimes of bound neutrons can be very long indeed. Slow neutrons can couple to a nucleus and prolong their life, etc. If and when they decay cannot be predicted though. Neutron decay time cannot be predicted.

This is obviously false, as indeterminism is not a consequence of superposition. Superpositions in quantum mechanics evolve in a perfectly deterministic way. They're more to do with non-realism than with indeterminsm. It is measurements that introduce indeterminism. But that's an independent postulate that has nothing to do with superpositions. It's quite ad hoc. The fact that it's ad hoc is bothersome, but it is what it is. And it works. As to the rest, I'm afraid it's just a heavily-worded expression of your hopes that has little or nothing to do with an actual theorem in mathematical physics, like the Coleman-Mandula theorem, and the like. You cannot tell when a neutron will decay. Even though neutrons are all the same. That's indeterminism for you.

I think physics has enough philosophy to go by. Neopositivism, operationalism, rationalism, inductivism, and so many other "isms"... But any philosophical approach needs more concrete assumptions and mathematical statements in order to permeate physics --as pointed out by most members. It's not that your ideas cannot be true. It's rather that nobody would know how to turn them into laboratory propositions.

It could have been "metamorphic" or "hypermorphic", and nobody would have been any the wiser.

Agreed.

This is an old myth. "Observing" is not a part of quantum mechanics. Interaction through entanglement is.

Probably a mammalian thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Economo_neuron#In_the_anterior_cingulate_cortex

Because you didn't use the quote function, I cannot be sure this was addressed to me... None of this even touches what I said. I said (or clearly implied) actions have consequences, that's why morality has everything to do with cause and effect. Morality came later? But of course! Animal metabolism came only much later than energy, although conservation of energy came first. But animal metabolism has everything to do with energy and its conservation. You seem to be inverting the arrows of implication here. And it was @Phi for All who mentioned samsara when arguing about religions general motivation and conceptual apparatus. I didn't mention samsara, although it's also a Sanskrit word. Nothing cause-and-effect about samsara, AFAIK. It's karma what I was talking about, IOW, cause and effect. I was surprised that you seem to think morality has nothing to do with cause and effect. I still am.

I think you do.

We're talking cause and effect here, not the laws of physics. Morality is all about cause and effect. You don't need physics to have cause and effect. Do show me.

Really? So are you arguing for a world in which there are no consequences to your actions? I don't think that's how the world of human actions operates, and I don't think one can cogently argue for that to be the case. But those are just your thoughts on the subject. There is no a priori reason to think there should be any message in the natural laws, or in the vastness of the universe, or in the sunset on the surface of Saturn. A message is to do with how information is organised in brains. In particular, the sequential nature of language clearly suggests so.

An example I can think of is: Numbers of states are "combinatorial" wrt numbers of "entities" (I hope the quoted terms are more or less clear). For any number of things/entities etc you can think of, say N, combinatorial numbers are built out of factorials of those. Entropies go like logs of these numbers, which "keeps hugeness at bay" in a manner of speaking, because logs grow very slowly, but phase space gets you back to the hugeness of the combinatorial number, as phase space is roughly \( \exp{S} \) with S= entropy Phase spaces are huge indeed. That's roughly why the chances of something happening again are zero to all intents and purposes.

Why would you think there is?

I don't think so. Karma for Buddhists (and in Indian tradition in general) is a fancy Sankcrit word for "cause and effect". Not the same. In Abrahamic religions God can break the law of cause and effect (think of the Book of Joshua, and the Sun standing still under God's command). Assuming there is a message...

I don't think this is totally fair. Most religions seriously intersect the proper domain of science. For one thing, they tend to start with a cosmogony and anthropogenesis. And for another thing, they appeal to the supernatural only too often. It's not like they are non-overlapping magisteria, as S. J. Gould would have it. Think about it. In these forums, every day and its eve we have a religious character of some kind or another deeply concerned with what science has to say about evolution, the origin of the universe, or whether the world is a simulation (a modern version of a deity) etc. That happens for a reason. Buddhism seems different though.

In a seies of postulates, at least one must be operational. Otherwise, the theory is empty. Thus, quatum mechanics (which has eight or more) starts with, physical system --> Hilbert space state --> vector observable --> operator etc, but closes the deal with, probabilities --> quadratics in Hilbert space Now, probabilities can be measured. No operational postulate can be seen here.

I very much agree with @MigL when he said, In my own wording: It's TVTBU.* Therefore, it's NEW. * = Too vague to be useful

Historians are held to higher standards of accuracy than religious leaders. Reconstructions of the past must match documented facts and salient results from archeology. Let's see: "as any other intellectual construct" implies science as well. Drop the strawman. It's only that science is held to higher standards of accuracy: Predictions must match experimental results. Religious leaders, in fact, aren't held to any standards of accuracy at all. No checking for facts in religion.

I see you're taking a detour... Nothing you said addresses my observation that religion, as any other intelectual construct, is a projection from people's minds, and therefore the way we interpret religion evolves with our collective human experience. Now you point out the way we face life depends on expectations. Sure it does. What's your point? Suffering justifies irrational belief?

Sorry I came so late to this. Are you still interested?

Brilliant points here, including the story. Indeed, energy is frame-dependent. Although I must say, at this point I'm not sure if we're talking about an energy, an action, or a number of particles. The concepts seem to be flailing about.

I re-read our previous exchange and it seems to me that you said God demanding to be praised was in the Old Testament, but we've somehow learnt to interpret praising in a different light. Here: To me, that's very much "growing out of it". "It" = "belief in a personal god". Don't get me wrong. I think that's good! Something like this is exactly what I meant.

Doesn't this imply that we're slowly but surely growing out of it? (Believe in personal gods, I mean).

Both the proton's proper length and the speed of light are GR invariants, as I'm sure you know. Or do you? Are you trying to catch me? 🤣 I'm getting tired of this rambling...

As is the jiffy. Not special. A femtosecond? Much more special. A Planck time? We believe that to be so special that it doesn't even make sense to talk about a fraction of it. A king's foot is not a special measure of length either. You seem to have a problem understanding what I mean by "special". The time it takes a photon to go through a proton is the same everywhere in the universe, because photons and protons are the same everywhere. An alien from Alpha Centauri would immediately understand the relevance of that unit of time, but would have a much harder time understanding what you mean by a second. You could tell them it's the inverse of a certain number of times the frequency of a certain transition energy of caesium. But why exactly that number of times would be a mystery to them. Unless you told them about a place called Earth and a people called the Babylonians. The second is a convention.