Friday, November 22, 2019
Internal reference frame
Suppose a long snake is stretched out and its front half is annihilated instantaneously. This presumably instantly destroys the snake's form or soul. So the tip of the snake's tail instantly ceases to be informed by the snake form. But then there will be a reference frame according to which the front half is annihilated before the tail loses its form. In that frame, the tip of the tail still has a snake form at a time at which the snake's front half doesn't exist. That seems wrong. So it seems there should be a privilege to reference frames where the front half is destroyed simultaneously with the tail losing its form. But a global privileged frame is unattractive. Maybe, however, we should suppose that particular substances carry along privileged frames of their own, frames internal to them. Then there will be a privilege frame for each substance, but these frames need not cohere into a global privileged frame.
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The existence of such a soul seems to depend on the frame of reference. So there seems to be a forced choice between belief in such souls and belief in relativity. You might be able to make something up to evade that choice, but it would be bound to look unconvincing unless there was some independent justification for it. Do you get independent justification from quantum mechanics, from two separated but related particles, where a measurement on one simultaneously forces the other to be a certain way? Do they have a privileged reference frame?
Martin Cooke
I used to accept the notion:
independent justification from quantum mechanics, from two separated but related particles, where a measurement on one simultaneously forces the other to be a certain way?
However, something I am working on presently is making it clear to me that this is not the case with regards to quantum measurement.
Martin: The justification you referred to was enough for Quentin Smith to write a pretty convincing paper contesting that a Neo-Lorentzian approach (with a privileged frame) had been empirically identical to STR, but then the violations of Bell's inequality in Aspect-style experiments conclusively chooses between the two on an empirical basis (STR loses). He then sketches how that NL view + a sort of neo-Bohmian approach to QM can replace GTR and recover all the same predictions + violations of Bell. It's an interesting paper anyway.
Pruss: Do you really think that the back half "ceasing to be 'informed'" by the ψυχε of the snake is an even to which Physics (including Relativity) is relevant? I haven't thought about it before (I love this thought experiment you've created!), but it immediately makes me wonder if "informing", in the Aristotelian sense, isn't yet another phenomenon for which the linguistic/conceptual scheme of Physics is inadequate.
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