Prof Robert Koons - An Aristotelian Framework for Quantum Mechanics
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- Опубликовано: 15 сен 2024
- An Aristotelian Framework for Quantum Mechanics by Prof Robert Koons, University of Texas at Austin. Part of the 2020 Aquinas Colloquium entitled 'From Aristotle & Aquinas to Evolution, Quantum Mechanics, and Neuroscience.'
I rarely listen to lectures at .75 speed but I almost always slow Joe Schmid and Rob Koons down to .75
It would have been nice to see a visual. Because ot sounded like he was making marks on a board.
Agreed! Unfortunately this was an earlier era when we didn't have that facility in place. Apologies!
I don't understand the substance of the claim that "there's no problem with the arrow of time on an Aristotelian picture", by simply appealing to the fact that it is a measure of change and change is directed. But this is analogous to saying that time is fundamentally directed, and change is differences along the direction of time. One could just as well ask of the Aristotelian, "What explains the direction of change?"
This is something that I'm working through myself, but I think the answer is as follows:
Potentiality explains the direction of change. Change for Aristotle is the activity of a potential being a potential. So for instance the activity of a potential plant being a potential plant is its growth into a plant.
So you could think of it this way. Time is a bunch of points in a geometric coordinate system. You could say that change is the difference between two times, but (a) that seems like you are defining the effects of change not change itself, (b) you have the problem that points in a coordinate system don't intrinsically by virtue of being points occur in any order or sequence, many differences in the direction of time are not processes e.g. a cock crowed and the sun rose, but this is not a process, but two independent processes coinciding.
You can fix problems (b) by adding a direction to time and (c) by adding some account of which succeeding events are processes are which aren't but that just amounts to adding extra stuff to your explanation. (I don't think there is a fix for (a) I think that's a fatal flaw in the program). However, I think a more elegant solution is to define time as a count of changes. And to define change as the activity of a potency being itself. Potencies just are directional. If you understand what a potency is you can't help understanding both its intentionality toward the thing it is the potential to be and the necessary connection it has to the same. In short: spacetime-points require the addition of extra special sauce to get them to do the same explanatory work as powers.
@@joshualaytonwood5621 I think I agree that potentials are necessarily directed. But the difficulty is that they all point the same direction. I have a similar problem with attempts to define time in terms of the direction of increasing entropy. It prompts the question of why this direction should be well defined, rather than underdetermined.
@@davidfoley8546 I'm not sure I follow. I don't think that potentials all point the same direction. The potential for maturity points towards maturity. The potential for knowing points towards knowing. In which dimension are knowledge and maturity necessarily located together? You might think that all potentials are aimed towards some state the being with the potential doesn't presently or actually possess, but that isn't true either, because the potential to be mature exists in someone who is completely mature and doesn't change that person, and brings about no future state. So, for instance, the wood in a tree has the potential to fulfill various tree-ish functions, and because it's actually carrying those functions out it continues performing those functions with no essential orientation towards some future end-state. Potentials only bring about change, and therefore time, when the thing with that potential doesn't have the state the potential is aimed at, but they aren't uniformly aimed at non-actualized states. I'm not sure if that is what you were thinking though.
Do you care to elaborate on what you meant?