Posted: Mar 20, 2017 12:27 pm
John Platko wrote:Now consider again the set of all physically possible transformations. For almost every such transformation, the story of how it could happen is the story of how knowledge might be created and applied to cause it. Part of that story is, in almost all cases, the story of how people (intelligent beings) would create that knowledge, and of why they would retain the proposal to apply it in that way while rejecting or amending rival proposals (so a significant determinant is moral knowledge). Hence, from the constructor-theoretic perspective, physics is almost entirely the theory of the effects that knowledge (abstract constructors) can have on the physical world, via people. But again, the prevailing conception conceals this.
Oh I'm not sure about this rather bold claim. This may or may not be a good description of something, but I don't think it's a good description of physics. 'Almost entirely via people'? My guess is that there was a LOT of physics going on in the universe, for a very long time, before people came along, and still is, in what appears to be the vast majority of the universe not peopled.