Natural Fabrications by William Seager

Author:William Seager
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg

The definitions given above result in a number of ‘theorems’ or at least a number of notable relations between them that, in addition to their own interest, can be used to clarify a variety of possible views on the nature of emergence. Some additional assumptions are required for certain of these results, which are discussed as necessary.

R1. Final-physical-possibility does not imply physical-totality.

What I mean by this claim is just that there is no inbuilt necessity that the laws of final-physics will sustain completeness, closure and resolution. It is, I think, the goal of many modern physicists to produce a theory that has totality. The structure of basic physics now in place would appear to be that of one aiming, so to speak, to be a total theory, but the current theory is manifestly incomplete (or worse, incoherent). We do not have a coherent theoretical description of every physically possible situation, even if we permit such understanding to be general and qualitative. For example, we just do not know the physics of processes that essentially involve both quantum and gravitational processes (and the two fundamental theories involved, general relativity and quantum field theory seem to be fundamentally inconsistent with one another). There are several possible approaches to integrating the quantum world with gravitation (for an intelligible overview of some see Smolin 2001), but none are very far advanced at present and it remains far from clear whether any of them will succeed.

In fact, it is a possibility that there is no theory which integrates these disparate domains. Nature herself needs no theory and does not calculate the evolution of the universe. There can be no a priori guarantee that there is a unified mathematical description of this evolution. Even something as wild as Ian Hacking’s ‘Argentine fantasy’ cannot be ruled out. Hacking imagines that

God did not write a Book of Nature of the sort that the old Europeans imagined. He wrote a Borgesian library, each book of which is as brief as possible, yet each book is inconsistent with every other...For every book, there is some humanly accessible bit of Nature such that that book, and no other, makes possible the comprehension, prediction and influencing of what is going on. (Hacking 1983, p. 219)

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