[Alchemy]

Against my better judgment, I'll take a shot at this.

Originally posted by airspirit
You are right: there is no time. Think of it this way: each infinitely small moment is just a flash frame of existance and is a reality in and of itself, related to each alternate reality (time) that comes before and after. In reality, the future and the past are both the present, though our consciousness is stuck in a temporal progression through the 4th dimension (d4).

Zeno's paradox is old news, and most everything it could possibly have implied is wiped clean by Planck. There is no such thing as an infinitely small moment.

If one was to divine this equation and had the ability to propogate it forward through time taking into account the whole of existance on that parallel thread, they would be able to tell the future perfectly, uncertainty principle be damned, since each possible reality would split at the time of prediction.

You assume the universe is deterministic. I think Heisenburg highly implies (if not proves) that it is not. Dozens of other names float around my head, but I can't remember who did what in quantum mechanics anymore.

It's not enough for you to say that there are only a finite number of paths a particle travels in a situation. Unless these paths are individually predictable (and they are not) the system is not deterministic. Ergo, the universe cannot be deterministic. Predictable on various levels, for certain, but not perfectly so.

Does that make any sense?

Jesus Christ no. But that's alright; it takes a lot of education to be able to understand physics, and only after understanding the body of knowledge that is physics do you have the ability to intelligently criticize that body of knowledge. I certainly don't know enough to pick at but a few of your points.

Of course, by the time you learn and understand advanced physics, you would probably realize how well it worked in explaining the world, and find that the criticisms you had of physics beforehand are simply unintelligible.

You can certainly tell me to leave you alone, that physics has no place in philosophy, and that would be a fair refute.

But if you're going to interpret physics at all into this worldview, you need to take all of it, unless you can give compelling reason to say that Maxwell's equations are correct but the Hamiltonian equations are wrong.

Otherwise it's just so much sound and fury. I can't argue physics with you if I don't understand your terminology and which concepts you agree with and which you do not.

My brain hurts.

Alchemy