[hallenrm]

Those who have been noticing my presence here for the last few months would have noticed my signatures too. They negate permanence and profess that changes are imminent.

I was indeed very delighted when I opened my email box today and discovered two new articles in the New Scientists so close to my thoughts. I would like to share some of it with all my friends here.
The first one appeared in the issue that was released on 21 September 2006, it said

Originally Posted by New Scientist

In science we aim for a picture of nature as it really is, unencumbered by any philosophical or theological prejudice. Some see the search for scientific truth as a search for an unchanging reality behind the ever-changing spectacle we observe with our senses. The ultimate prize in that search would be to grasp a law of nature - a part of a transcendent reality that governs all change, but itself never changes.

The idea of eternally true laws of nature is a beautiful vision, but is it really an escape from philosophy and theology? For, as philosophers have argued, we can test the predictions of a law of nature and see if they are verified or contradicted, but we can never prove a law must always be true. So if we believe a law of nature is eternally true, we are believing in something that logic and evidence cannot establish. ...

The gist of the other article published on Sept 28 is

Originally Posted by New Scientist

Ever wish you could reach back in time and change the past? Maybe you'd like to take back an unfortunate voicemail message, or rephrase what you just said to your boss. Or perhaps you've even dreamed of tweaking the outcome of yesterday's lottery to make yourself the winner.

Common sense tells us that influencing the past is impossible - what's done is done, right? Even if it were possible, think of the mind-bending paradoxes it would create. While tinkering with the past, you might change the circumstances by which your parents met, derailing the key event that led to your birth.

Such are the perils of retrocausality, the idea that the present can affect the past, and the future can affect the present. Strange as it sounds, retrocausality is perfectly permissible within the known laws of nature. It has been debated for decades, mostly in the realm of philosophy and ...

Any comments, please!

[hallenrm]

Well let me comment first of all, While appears to be an established fact that knowledge as well as substances change with time, there is always a lingering doubt that some segments of human knowledge may not change with time, for example, the paradigm that change is imminent

The idea that it may be possible to alter the past is indeed the most revolutionary idea, but the question would arise if I can change my ancestors how would my present form change. Won't it change too? If that is granted then it follows that our perceptions of our objective self are in fact illusory; just as it followed from relativistic mechanics that our perception of the state of motion of an object depends on our frame of reference. So our overall perception may be subject to some wider definition of frame of reference.

[TheFaithfulStone]

Hey, I'm interesting in reading that article about retrocausality, but the link is not working.

Could you repost?

tfs

[Vending]

Cool, i guess I will chime in a bit.

My comments in response to the first aticle, esp. the part in the begginning...

In science we aim for a picture of nature as it really is, unencumbered by any philosophical or theological prejudice.

I completely dissagree with this statement.

First off, science cannot exist outside the bounds of philosophy. Philosophy shapes how we view the world and, thusly, how we interpret our observations.

One major philisophical point on which science hinges is that the acient past has been govered by the same rules as the present. This concept, called uniformitarianism, is integral to many branches of science, but is not a part of it. Rather it is a philisophical contruct that allows us to apply our current science to the acient past.

Another philisophical point which is critical to science: out memories are accurate and so are our observations. There is no proof that we are actually observing anything -- perhaps this is a dream or randoms neurtons firing in our brains. It is a philisopical point that we can trust our observations. The same is true of our memories. (I should add that while it seems unlikely that we would all be having the same delusions, that itself is also a philisophical point.)

Still another: Free will (for real! Without this, science is meaningless!). If we are unable to come to our own rational conclusions, then we cannot trust any conclusion stemming from our observations.

The list goes on.

The point here is that the workings of science rely heavily on philisophical predjudice. Unless we believe that things happen baised on laws, that we can accurately observe the effects of these laws, accurately relate them, and come to rational conclusions about our obvsevations, we cannot perform science as it is practiced today.

This is why you cannot seperate science from philisophical predjudice. Science relies to much upon philisophical ideas and ideals.


I am somewhat less certain that you cannot seperate out theological predjudice, but I am not quite prepared to talk about that yet. So i will just leave it at perhaps science can be perfomed without theological prejudice.


As per the second of the articles...
It seems to me that the amount of information a human carries (both in his physical make-up as well as in his brain) is quite largee. Transfering this information is equivalent to transfering order, so from a thermodynamic standpoint, the amount of energy required to send a person back must be prodigous.

I think that is my only comment about that so far.