Fallacies of Logic

[avandonk]

What Hofstadter really meant to say was what Carl Sagan said 'in order to make an apple pie from scratch you would first need to invent the whole Universe.'

Hofstadter just said the same thing in a lot more words. I think he was a bit of a show off.

There are a few, OK many bits I had trouble with.

Bert

[Octane (Humayun)]

Ref: attached.

H

[CraigS]

Originally Posted by Octane

Ref: attached.

H

Looks like Bert !?!

[renormalised (Carl)]

Originally Posted by sjastro

Politics and logic are mutually exclusive.
Regards

Steven

Never a truer word has been said

[CraigS]

Originally Posted by renormalised

Never a truer word has been said

Is that a scientific statement ?


Cheers

[renormalised (Carl)]

Originally Posted by CraigS

Is that a scientific statement ?


Cheers

It's a statement of truth

One of the very few you can bank your money on

[CraigS]

Originally Posted by renormalised

It's a statement of truth

One of the very few you can bank your money on

Ahh.. but there's no truth in Science !!

And if you bank your money, the pollies get it !!

Cheers

[renormalised (Carl)]

Originally Posted by CraigS

Ahh.. but there's no truth in Science !!

And if you bank your money, the pollies get it !!

Cheers

Who said it was science, and they can't get your money in a Swiss bank a/c

[avandonk]

Quoting CraigS

"Absolutely .. me too !
Why/how does mathematics do this ? Is it because it describes the reality which conceived it in the first place ?"


The quick answer is we do not know. Hofstadter addresses this in his book. Paul Davies has tried to answer this as well.

Craig you will find Hofstadter's book perplexing at first. It is way above my abilities to fully comprehend but then I have only been trying for about twenty years.

Godel's Incompleteness Theorem stunned the mathematical world out of their smugness.

Escher by his brilliant drawings showed the same sort of paradoxes. Locally logical but globally paradoxical.

Bach did the same with music as his seemingly continuous descending and ascending scales fooled your senses completely. I dont have perfect pitch so I wonder if people with this skill woud be fooled.

In my humble opinion a way around these paradoxes is that at the fundamental level of QM there is only probability governed by interactions. There is no possibilty of feed back in QM so Chaos theory does not have any effect.

Once we get into the realm of the macroscopic we have feedback that causes complexity beyond the inherent qualities of the system. Is there is a boundary?

The problem is of course order out of chaos and chaos out of order so defying any so called logic!

It is difficult to get these concepts across in a few sentences. Hofstadter needed a very thick book and it is still incomprehensible to me!

Bert

[CraigS]

Fascinating this stuff is, Bert !

Originally Posted by Avondonk

at the fundamental level of QM there is only probability governed by interactions. There is no possibilty of feed back in QM so Chaos theory does not have any effect.

Hmm .. I'm not sure I understand this. (Its OK … just because I don't understand it, doesn't mean much). But I find it difficult to wrap my mind around this. The behaviour at the quantum level would seem to be almost random, which is so close, (but distinctly separate), to Chaotic behaviour.

A feedback mechanism might simply be beyond our ability to detect it.(?) Surely things at the Quantum level interact through some means (?? .. I don't know )

Seems to me the extra dimensions of String Theory would be a convenient place for these interactions/feedback, if it were present .. but there again, I'm sure some of the bright guys working on this are millions of steps beyond this thought.

From the little I've read so far, Hofstadter seems to be on about consciousness … the plot must thicken as I wade further into it. I'm not sure I even understand the Introduction yet !!

Cheers

[avandonk]

Craig an indeterminate state cannot have feedback upon itself!

Bert

[CraigS]

Originally Posted by avandonk

Craig an indeterminate state cannot have feedback upon itself!

Bert

Ok .. this is just my lack of understanding of all this. I think I exposed myself in this respect, on the topic of 'entanglement' and probability waves. The message was (from all, Bert included) that the probability 'lists' at each entangled photon detector are completely independent of eachother in terms of local reality … but I still can't stop myself wondering how two photons appear to be the same photon, at two physically separate locations, at the same instant, without some form of connection (or feedback) .. I still can't get the idea of 'connection' out of my mind.

Maybe I just have my knickers-in-a-knot (this wouldn't surprise me !).

Cheers

[avandonk]

Craig the two entangled particles have the same wave function so they can be considered as the one particle. So anything you do to one you do too 'both'.

This is the way I think of it.

What this leads to of course is connexion across time and space for all particles that have had previous interactions in a way we do not yet understand.

String theory allows connexion through other dimensions so allowing 'instant' action at a distance faster than light.

I would further propose that since all the Universe was once in the one 'place' in the one 'time' in the putative naked singularity before the big bang, EVERYTHING is forever connected in ways we do not understand yet!

An inderterminate state such as a wave function cannot interact with itself to change its state from a future conformation. Once these wave functions collapse to 'reality' they can then have a feedback effect on the system to modulate the systems future.

I am most probably totally wrong but it is the best I can come up with to explain the evidence.

When Bucky Balls with Chlorine and or Fluorine atoms can produce diffraction patterns by interfering with themselves I have to consider that these molecules are just wave functions until we 'look' at them.

Of course the inevitable conclusion is that our perceived reality is only a consequence of constant interaction of all these wave functions. When the interactions stop the Universe ceases to exist.

Bert

[CraigS]

Originally Posted by avandonk

Craig the two entangled particles have the same wave function so they can be considered as the one particle. So anything you do to one you do too 'both'.

This is the way I think of it.

What this leads to of course is connexion across time and space for all particles that have had previous interactions in a way we do not yet understand.

String theory allows connexion through other dimensions so allowing 'instant' action at a distance faster than light.

I would further propose that since all the Universe was once in the one 'place' in the one 'time' in the putative naked singularity before the big bang, EVERYTHING is forever connected in ways we do not understand yet!

An inderterminate state such as a wave function cannot interact with itself to change its state from a future conformation. Once these wave functions collapse to 'reality' they can then have a feedback effect on the system to modulate the systems future.

I am most probably totally wrong but it is the best I can come up with to explain the evidence.

When Bucky Balls with Chlorine and or Fluorine atoms can produce diffraction patterns by interfering with themselves I have to consider that these molecules are just wave functions until we 'look' at them.

Of course the inevitable conclusion is that our perceived reality is only a consequence of constant interaction of all these wave functions. When the interactions stop the Universe ceases to exist.

Bert

Hmm I get where you're coming from Bert. All sounds credible to me.
All poised for some real evidence … I hope we see it in our lifetimes !

These extra dimensions of String Theory are still perplexing to me.

Whenever I've read up on these, the explanation seems to always indicate that these are incredibly small curly things (like my Avatar), which may occur at every point in space. But these representations are just very tiny 3D objects … I still don't see how these are actually what I'd call 'extra dimensions'.

I can actually relate more closely to the maths definitions of them, than the analogies painted by the mainstream Physics authors.

Interesting.

Cheers

[avandonk]

A simple analogy is a two dimensional being observing an elephant crossing his 'Universe'.

This strange thing starts off as a thick circle then get much fatter and has islands as well finally dissapearing with a thin circle.

What if all we see is elephants crossing our three dimensional Universe?

We have no way of knowing!

I will keep a very open mind.

Bert