Friday, November 2, 2018

Reconceptualizing reality; alternate realities

The philosophers Plato and Descartes claimed to have had, at certain moments in their lives, a new view of the world, its basic constituents, and its rules which were totally different from our conventional view of reality. (Reflections on Kurt Gödel, H. Wang, MIT Press, 1987) For most people the world is composed of objects, pushed around in a 3 dimensional space by fields, and following something like Newton's laws of motion. What are possible alternative conceptualizations? Lewis' book, Quantum Ontology (Oxford University Press, 2016) offers some possibilities, like holistic quantum wave functions, in a high dimensional space, following something like a Schrodinger equation.

A physicist who spends some of his time doing quantum mechanical research and some of his time doing classical mechanics would be working in  two alternative realities. Also an example of scientific pluralism.

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