Time
At the Q2C festival in Ontario, which I mentioned in my previous post, Carroll gave a lecture on his favourite topic of entropy and the arrow of time (for a more mathematically precise version of the same talk see here). I think that whoever is interested in questions of time and temporality would pretty enjoy it (if perhaps critically). Others good talks are scheduled, and others have already been delivered and are available to watch in streaming. I still had no time to watch other ones, but S. James Gates’ one seems promising. And Lawrence Krauss’ one (coming up in some hours) will surely appeal to all those interested in the theme of extinction.
When watching Carroll’s talk, it started buzzing around in my head some possible Meillassouxian take on the Boltzmann brains argument, (for a longer explanation of it see here) and its counter argument, regarding the issue of randomness and human access to reality. Nothing concrete yet, I’ll give it more attention when I’ll have some time than now.
Fabio Cunctator
This is awesome stuff – I’ll definitely be reading all of it.
It’s really weird that entropy keeps coming up. I was just writing about it on my blog (in relation to entropy).
It is pretty cool indeed. He’s been (shamelessly) advertising his book on the topic for a while now, From Eternity to Here. I’m actually looking forward to it. If you watch the lecture, at the end he gives an interesting reply to a guy that asks about Kant: (I paraphrase) ‘Kant is all good, but he’s about the ‘psychological’ structure of time. We are talking about the real stuff here’.
[...] In another weird coincidence, Fabio at hyper tiling brings up the subject of entropy, and links to some very cool stuff to [...]
Normativity, Thermodynamics, and a Weird Coincidence « spoonerized alliterations said this on October 20, 2009 at 6:42 am |