DemistifySci Podcast - Paradox Lost

It's their new book on presale now.


Part II coming up: 

See my comment to this post:

There is a problem with your general thesis to the effect that the only reasonable explanation of a law of force is one which is couched in terms of some material medium. The problem is that physical force as we intuitively perceive it comes ultimately from our own agency acting against a spontaneous physical evolution of a system. So when we are in free fall we experience no force because we are unable to react against it as we do when we stand up on the surface of the earth, for example. But when we are in free fall we can experience inertia as a force if we push another free-falling massive object away from us. So what this amounts to in classical terms is that we interact with a closed deterministic system and in so doing we interfere with its normal spontaneous physical evolution. So what this tells us is that the empirical basis of experimental physics, which includes the agency and the conscious integration of information, is a fundamental part of any explanation. In a phrase "What happens in an experiment happens because there is no particular reason why anything else should happen". If you drop a stick, for example, then there is no particular reason why one part of the stick should fall faster or slower than another part, so if you cut a stick into two pieces then whatever their relative masses may be, there is no reason why one would fall faster than the other. Now if you catch one of those falling pieces then you will experience a force proportional to the mass because you are using your agency to cause something else to happen other than the spontaneous evolution, i.e. falling.

Hence your demand that any real force must be caused by some material medium actually precludes any empirical observation and so I don't think it could be part of any experimentally confirmed theory. What I want to say is that in addition to the material and efficient causes there are formal and final causes that are a necessary part of any explanation. 

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Charlotte Moser on Models, Understanding and Applied Mathematics: 


And on how understanding can be thought of as integrating information about a system: 


Subscribe to Charlotte Moser. 

See the paper Emerging dynamic regimes and tipping points from finite empirical principles by Sergio Cobo-López, Matthew Witt, Forest L. Rohwer and Antoni Luque and my comments in Janet Axelrud on the Soul. 


Subscribe to Santa Fe Institute. 

This applies in spades to economics: Jeffrey Sachs on Judge Napolitano's Talk Show. 


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