“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Friday, July 23, 2010

Survival 2: Nonlocality

There's another problem with picking survival as foundational: the fact that you can entangle particles. You can then tell one particle to do something, and the other one will do it simultaneously. This holds for arbitrary distances like, say, the other side of the street, or the other side of the galaxy.

Time as a succession of moments is epiphenomenal to this fact. It very much depends on the fact that humans are traveling way slower than photons.

So from this point of view time-as-succession is also correlationism.

Not convinced? Here's physicist Julian Barbour explaining how time as a succession of instants is produced by deeper causes. (Thanks Peter Gratton.) Now, Barbour doesn't have to be right. It's simply that you need not believe in time as a succession of instants to be an eliminative materialist.

Time is not necessary to eliminative materialism. So you can't use eliminative materialist arguments about survival to beat up on other views. Your weapon turns out to be a styrofoam bat at best.

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