From: George Ellis … I fully accept ontological uncertainty. This has lead me to realise that there is a need to put forward an alternative to Ursula Goodenough’s “Covenant with Mystery”, which will try to encapsulate the kind of approach I have in mind. Both are attempts to deal with the relation of intellectual understanding…
From: Edward Remler I read this with a heavy heart. An eminent physicist confusing an already hopelessly confused subject. Consider the statement: “Superfluidity, like the fractional Hall effect, is an emergent phenomenon – a low-energy collective effect of huge numbers of particles that cannot be deduced from the microscopic equations of motion in a rigorous…
There seems to be quite a misunderstanding about reductionism, based on a strong misapprehension of what it allows in physics [which is where the idea comes from, after all!]. I think it would be salutary for those wish to seriously get involved in the area to get to know a bit about what the modern-day…
Regarding the second contribution in Meta 115, claiming that variations in the laws of physics do not make life improbable: I have found very interesting the web page I arrvied at via this discussion, namely http://www.phys.hawaii.edu/vjs/www/avoid/intel.html by Prof Stenger (Hawaii). This is by far one of the best argued purely physicalist discussions of the anthropic…
Meta 119. 6/29/99. Approximately 467 words. Below is a message from Vic Stenger at the University of Hawaii in responseto George Ellis on the “Toy Universe” thread (see Meta 116). Thediscussion revolves around the anthropic principle and the “fine tuning” ofthe fundamental laws of physics. We also have dueling webpages at<http://www.phys.hawaii.edu/vjs/www/avoid/intel.html> (Vic Stenger’s “ToyUniverse”) and…