Re: Quantum Gravity 293.0: Probable Causation/Influence (PI) in Prime Number Geometry/Factorizations From France

On Oct 18, 11:19 pm, OsherD <mdocto...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Oct 17, 4:12 pm, Huang <huangxienc...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:



It makes perfect sense that causation would be probabilistic, but I
doubt that Einstein ever put much energy into that idea. Afterall -
God dont play dice.- Hide quoted text -

From Osher Doctorow:

Huang, Einstein had much insight, but I think that he underestimated
the difficulties that the human brain or mind faces in studying the
Universe and even in communicating with different fields like physics,
mathematics, biology, etc.  Erwin Schrodinger of the University of
Vienna, who was a friend of Einstein, had much more understanding of
these communication difficulties, though even he was probably carried
by his friendship too much toward the non-probabilistic view.  One of
their big problems was mathematical probability-statistics, which
probably looked so simple to them at that time that they enormously
underestimated its depth.  Mathematicians of the probabilistic
specialty would not do that in these days or even in the last few
decades, but statisticians (who use probability as their main
mathematical tool but try usually to focus on relationships with data
including to some extent "data-obsession", although there are some
exceptions especially in Decision Theory and Game Theory) do so a
little more.

One clue should have been that Pierre de Fermat, who co-discovered
Probability in the early 1600s with Pascal, also invented or
discovered modern Number Theory, which led to Cryptography.  He also
discovered several calculus equations before Newton and Leibniz, he
discovered Cartesian/Analytic geometry before Descartes, and he
upstaged or "beat" Descartes in the analysis of light speed in water.

Bohr and Heisenberg chose to defend probability in their quantum
theory, largely via Max Born who knew more about it than they did, but
all three far underestimated its nature and importance, and in fact
all the people whom I mentioned above (Einstein, Schrodinger, Bohr,
Heisenberg) seem to have eventually concluded that Statistics is
"Good" while Probability in physics is only a "relic" of its
Statistical nature, an absurdity.  One might ask why they did not then
use Statistics, whose main tool is Probability, throughout their
theories as a main tool, if it was so "Good".  They got around this
difficulty by claiming and believing that Statistics was only
concerned with the "preparation" of experiments as repeated events,
which for the purposes of Quantum Theory could be put into the
background as a type of "fixed background" much as Theoreticians
sometimes put Experiment into the background as secondary if not
almost irrelevant.

Eventually, "Causation" or "Causality" found their ways into modern
theoretical and mathematical physics (the latter a branch of
mathematics), but mostly without Probability or Statistics, as
constraints on light cones for example.  This is like saying that
we're going to study Physics only by studying what happens at the
furthest observable or detectible "boundary" of the Universe.

There was also a backfiring of ergodic theorems which enter this
picture and which enabled physicists to ignore Probability-Statistics
in theoretical developments, but that is a topic for another time
hopefully.

Osher Doctorow


I really dont know very much about the history of ideas and arguments
long forgotten, because it seems that science merely discards things
that seem wrong at the time and they are simply forgotten. I get a
very strong feeling that questions regarding existence have been
around for a very long time, and there were probably many conjectures
along the way which were either discarded or beaten down.

Somehow, science and mathematics found the path of least resistance
and developed along the lines that existence is either a yes or no
situation. That there is no inbetween, nor can there be. I question
that, but in a very careful way.

Probability theory narrows in on what is missing. You have a outcome
space, and you will have an outcome. But the actual process by which
an outcome is chosen - this has no structure otherwise it would be a
function and therefore deterministic.

Random variables are "functionless functions". Which is to say, that
they are functions which are not functions. We dance around the issue
in such a way that it jives cleanly with mathematics proper, but
clearly there is something going on which is very strange. We have a
contradiction, and yet all of probability theory makes so much sense.

I cant see any way to reconcile this except to say that random output
might be random, and it might not be.

But devising a tool based on "existential indeterminacy" is very
strange. Not at all like mathematics in many ways, and in some other
ways it is. If you accept existential indeterminacy, you must abandon
the hope of ever proving anything - unless you use a highly modified
methodology of proving things. I think that it might be possible, but
you wind up working with things that are difficult to contemplate.

I think that a whole new species of proof is required to study
indeterminacy. The proofs we are familiar with are inherently
deterministic by their very nature. You have a beginning, and an end,
and decisive steps along the way which are all carefully made. To
think that you could use this to study indeterminacy that way - is
like trying to draw cured lines with a straight ruler.

I've been trying to comtemplate what you might call an Anti-Proof, but
it's very difficult to think about things like this. Just imagine
trying to invent proof by contradiction, or direct proof, or any other
method. Very strange problem. Somehow - you have logical structure -
and you have indeterminacy. You are going to let the indeterminacy
loose - like letting a dog off it's leash, and it will run loose
through that structure somehow, and all you need to do is understand
that process, always keeping in mind that what you just created "may
or may not be mathematics"...and to accept that as being the result
that you desire. It's really quite crazy sounding.



.

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