Plato, you bastard.

[bec_87rb]

Reading on the VRE the initial chapters of a book by Lee Smolin, Time Reborn. (I get the impression he is controversial in his field of physics.) He is claiming that the Platonists have won, that modern western scientific thinking is that time is an illusion and that the laws of nature are out of the flow of time, that they exist on some eternal

Comments

[chhinnamasta]

How's the reading going? Any evidence that the laws of physics are dynamic? I am 2/3 through Sean Carroll's book. It's slow going, because it's on my nightstand, and how much I read is proportional to how insomniac I am. Carroll has got a lot to say about black holes and entropy at the moment. I had never heard of the holographic principle... Interesting stuff. The main thrust of discussion so far has been that the arrow of time is an artifact of the entropy gradient (low to high) since the big bang... I hope he has some remarks about human perception of that gradient, and the unidirectional encoding of memories following that arrow... perhaps something information theory related, involving Kolmogrov complexity? I don't know what I can realistically expect, or what would satisfy me, honestly.

I enjoyed his discussion of Boltzmann brains, which led to some musing, on my part, about consciousness potentially being a stringing together of discontinuities... a series of Boltzmann brain states, creating the illusion of a continuous consciousness. Fun with philosophy, eh? :-p