My review of "The Primacy of Doubt," by Tim Palmer

[Giulio Prisco]

Turing Church newsletter. Fractal chaos meets quantum mechanics and
metaphysics. My review of "The Primacy of Doubt," by Tim Palmer.
https://www.turingchurch.com/p/fractal-chaos-meets-quantum-mechanics

[John Clark]

On https://www.turingchurch.com/p/fractal-chaos-meets-quantum-mechanics    Giulio Prisco wrote:

> This is a deterministic loop, but the geometry of the IS is not computable.

I agree with that.  

> “In this sense,” says Palmer, “we are not mindless automata.”

We are certainly not mindless but we are automata, although we are the type of automata in which the only way to know what we will do is to watch it and see, we can't even know for sure what we ourselves will do until we actually do it. It's good thing too because the only alternative to being an automata is being a roulette wheel.

> This, according to Palmer, helps make sense of quantum weirdness. Each point in the IS is, Palmer says, “a synthesis of everything that is, has been and will be.” My interpretation of “Each point in the set is a synthesis of everything that is, has been and will be”

If that were true then I don't see how Science could exist, I don't even see how we could make any successful predictions at all because you'd have to understand everything before you could understand anything. And yet despite the many things that we don't understand science nevertheless manages to exist and we are able to make some very good predictions.  

> (which is different, I guess, from Palmer’s own interpretation) seems to imply that Palmer’s theory is nonlocal and retrocausal.

I agree, based on that quote I don't see how anybody could reach a different conclusion.  And that is a blatant contradiction to what Palmer said previously.

> To me, determinism means that the future is determined by the present, and local causality means that causal influences are limited by the speed of light and therefore take time to propagate in space.

That's what those words mean to me as well.  

> According to Palmer, we have some sort of free will because we are part of the IS.

If Palmer could explain what "free will" is supposed to mean then I'd be able to say if I agree with him or not. 

 >This opens the door to a concept of afterlife: we and our loved ones “will be coming back in future epochs of the universe” along new paths close to this one.

 

Poincaré's Recurrence Theorem says  any dynamical system composed of a finite number of particles (as the human brain is) will, given sufficient time, return to its original state, however I wouldn't consider just repeating the same identical thing over and over again to be an afterlife because  repeating an event an infinite number of times and doing it just once would be subjectively identical. And subjectivity is the most important thing in the universe, or at least it is in my subjective opinion. But if you could keep on increasing the number of particles, that is to say if your brain kept getting bigger, then you could keep on having novel experiences until you ran out of particles to add. 

John K Clark

[Giulio Prisco]

<John: Poincaré's Recurrence Theorem says  any dynamical system composed of a finite number of particles (as the human brain is) will, given sufficient time, return to its original state, however I wouldn't consider just repeating the same identical thing over and over again to be an afterlife because  repeating an event an infinite number of times and doing it just once would be subjectively identical. And subjectivity is the most important thing in the universe, or at least it is in my subjective opinion. But if you could keep on increasing the number of particles, that is to say if your brain kept getting bigger, then you could keep on having novel experiences until you ran out of particles to add. >

Poincaré’s eternal return universe would be a repetitive closed loop without novelty as you say. It would be a loop because in classical mechanics different phase space paths don’t intersect (if they did, one present would have multiple futures), so if two paths intersect once they are one and the same path.

Palmer says that the universe will return to a state that is arbitrarily close (not identical) to any previous state. In his theory, inspired by fractal and chaos maths, the universe will eventually (after a loooong time) return to a state very close (arbitrarily close) to its current state. And then again and again on new paths in the fractal invariant set.

But there are variations, and then other variations ever and ever again, so it is not the same one life over and over, and there are real subjective experiences forever. And you keep meeting new versions of your loved ones forever! To me, this is an emotionally satisfying concept of afterlife. 

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[Lawrence Crowell]

Fractal geometry is recursively enumerable. The complement of a recursively enumerable set is not recursively enumerable or computable by Godel's theorem. 

LC