What 慶功(’67) just wrote about the deaths of people close to him has moved me deeply, as I read it after a trip after Easter (which, of course, is the Christian answer to Death). So I feel a need to express some thoughts on this “eternal” subject, immature though they are.
Death is a debt that everyone repays, eventually. One common way to “QE” the debt is stoicism; another is religion. I subscribe to neither, but, in recent years, have developed some preliminary ideas of the “scientific” way to face Death.
Comments by KC Lee (65):
–whereas the me who wake up from a sleep is identical to the person of last night, and in what sense?–
No problem. Just reign in unnecessary mental over-exuberance and stay in down-to-earth perspective. 分清主客.
It is the person who sleeps. Not sleeping that makes a person. Non-problem solved.
My comment was intended for YK and our sparring buddy Edwin only. Had I known its destination, I would have left out my uncouth (per Fr. Finneran) verbal exuberance “Just reign in unnecessary mental over-exuberance and stay in down-to-earth perspective” altogether. Sorry.
Now that I found myself in here, despite feeling a bit disoriented, would beg to disagree with the entropy-based argument put forth for multiple copies of one individual within a single universe.
Philosophized physics is subjective, therefore, unscientific.
Wonder if inflation theory, and by extension, eternal inflation and multiverses, is philosophized physics (and therefore unscientific)?
The “entropy-based argument … for multiple copies” is a deduction from the Holographic Principle (G. t’Hooft 1993), which asserts that all information regarding a region of space can be encoded on its bounding surface. Note that entropies as a thermodynamic state function and as information in Shannon’s formulation are mathematically equivalent here. This Principle has been proved to be a likely property of String Theories for elementary particles as well as quantum gravity for the universe. Of course, no String Theory has yet been supported by empirical evidence and our understanding of quantum gravity is still sketchy at best, but don’t “disagree” just out of feelings? insight? intuition?
What is meant by “philosophised physics”? If you use the term loosely, then it is of course unscientific, trivially. If you go for precise formulation, then you have to decide why A is, but B isn’t. Remember that, in the history of human intellectual development, lots and lots of ideas have ascended from the realm of philosophy (or religion) to that of science. Such as the origin of the universe, and (soon) the nature of human individuality.
Religion is a form of philosophy. Philosophy may provide ideas. Math builds models. Evidence results from validated experiments. Beliefs are subjective.