But it's not just motion that is an illusion, it's also force. Force played a very important role in classical physics and even in Einstein's relativistic physics, but with the advent of quantum mechanics it has basically disappeared from the foundations of physics as playing any important role. When you write down the equations of quantum field theory that govern the behavior of all matter and energy in the universe, there is no reference whatsoever to force. Emmy Noether proved that the so-called "forces" of nature are due instead to symmetries. The symmetries are the more fundamental concept, and they only turn into what looks like forces when you think about large macroscopic objects... or a large collection of certain types of particles like photons that are sometimes called "force carriers". Isaac Newton's concept of force was an illusion in the sense that there is no need for it in a truly fundamental description of the world. However, the idea can be preserved in our language, as long as it is understood that it's just an emergent concept not an important fundamental ingredient.
So, coming from that understanding of forces and motion, I have a hard time taking any argument seriously that tries to ascribe important metaphysical roles for them. But in addition to force and motion being mostly illusions, the idea of cause and effect has also become mostly extinct in modern physics. And I think this is related to the idea of viewing the universe as a static, 4th-dimensional manifold, rather than something 3 dimensional that keeps changing. We write down equations that try to describe the universe, but there's never any clear way of dividing the universe into separate causes and effects. Aside from a slight dependency on how you interpret quantum mechanics, the equations are fully deterministic and reversible. So you could just as easily view something far in the future as a cause of something in the past, or something far in the past as a cause for something in the future. The important thing is describing the *relationship* between them, viewing one things as a cause and another as an effect is an outdated way of thinking. In other branches of science, like biology, I think causes and effects remain more important. For instance, you could ask whether smoking causes cancer. However, even in these less fundamental fields of science, causality plays far less of a role than it did in the past, and most of the focus is on correlation not causation.
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timeasmymeasure
First Mover
Date: 2010-12-04 05:49 pm (UTC)So, coming from that understanding of forces and motion, I have a hard time taking any argument seriously that tries to ascribe important metaphysical roles for them. But in addition to force and motion being mostly illusions, the idea of cause and effect has also become mostly extinct in modern physics. And I think this is related to the idea of viewing the universe as a static, 4th-dimensional manifold, rather than something 3 dimensional that keeps changing. We write down equations that try to describe the universe, but there's never any clear way of dividing the universe into separate causes and effects. Aside from a slight dependency on how you interpret quantum mechanics, the equations are fully deterministic and reversible. So you could just as easily view something far in the future as a cause of something in the past, or something far in the past as a cause for something in the future. The important thing is describing the *relationship* between them, viewing one things as a cause and another as an effect is an outdated way of thinking. In other branches of science, like biology, I think causes and effects remain more important. For instance, you could ask whether smoking causes cancer. However, even in these less fundamental fields of science, causality plays far less of a role than it did in the past, and most of the focus is on correlation not causation.
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