Tuesday, June 28, 2022

Superfluous Thoughs

While I am still working on Egel, some Facebook thoughts -I now assume known- I threw through Google translate:

"Little big thoughts." Causality is an old discussion in metaphysics. If you have two related events A and B, and they happen one after the other, then we call event A the 'cause' and event B the 'effect'. There is not much to argue with and it is utterly pointless to think deeply about it because we simply cannot see into the future.

So just a few pointless thoughts again because my brain is taking me down strange paths.

The first thought is that we can never prove that the universe is causal. With every two observations that we make, usually the relationship is described mathematically, you end up with a relation R(A,B) and there is simply nothing in that relation R that says that B is physically determined by A or vice versa.

You can make causality very plausible, however, but that gets hairy fast too. One definition I once learned of causality was precisely a mathematical one.

Let's take the Fibonacci numbers, where each number is the sum of the preceding two numbers:

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, ...

A very well-known series, but also one that we call causal because every number depends on its past. And yet you can also turn that definition on its head.

The problem is exactly that when I have the number '13', I know that the two preceding numbers were '5' and '8', given the rules of this small universe. So what tells me that it is not exactly the other way around with this series and that the past depends on the future?

What you really want somewhere is that you have an event of which you can no longer reconstruct the past. There has to be a loss of information for this to happen.

Occam's razor, that again proves nothing because often misunderstood as 'the simplest explanation is true' when scientists mean 'don't make the model more difficult than you need', then gives you an intuitive explanation that events apparently cannot depend on the future because there's not enough information there to construct them.

And that's exactly what physicists don't see, the most fundamental models can be read in two directions. Forward as well as backward, there is no loss of information. (In addition, I can give a trivial intuition that Quantum Mechanics is precisely an indication of retrocausality, the reverse.)

Well, another one in a series of completely superficial thoughts.