Primordial Distinctions

Core Law of Physics is Circular, Physicists Say

The central finding of the paper by Wolpert, Rovelli, and Scharnhorst is that the Second Law, the Past Hypothesis, and the Boltzmann Brain hypothesis are formally identical in structure, each differing only in which single moment in time they choose to condition the entropy process on—and that this choice cannot be provided by physics itself. It requires an independent assumption.

What they’ve identified, in the language of stochastic process theory, is precisely the problem of treating a contingent conditioning choice as if it were an absolute ground state.

That’s physicists realizing the only reason we assign more credence to the Past Hypothesis or the Second Law than to the Boltzmann Brain hypothesis is the credence we assign to our cosmological observations concerning the Big Bang—which is itself just another conditioning event, not a metaphysical absolute.

Crucially, the second law is consistent with the prior probabilities (“priors”) that imply it—but only by virtue of the fact that we can adopt priors that our data is reliable.

The only known way to establish that the second law holds is, ultimately, to assume that the second law holds. That’s circular reasoning.

There is no proof that an absolute, universal ground state—ontologically—exists, let alone that it even could. For example, if you assert that “absolute, universal nothing” is the ground state of reality, you fail:

Absolute Nothing cannot logically exist, because it would be inherently unstable: If it did exist, there would be no mechanism to keep it stable, no distinction between true and false–and so no distinction between ‘possible’ and ‘impossible’–nor even any distinctions at all–and so no distinction between existence and non-existence, nor between what is real and what is not. Reality is not stable, but it is metastable. The distinction matters.

Absolute Nothing cannot even be coherently described or conceived without self-contradiction, because any description of it already introduces distinctions (between Nothing and Something, between what it is and what it isn’t). Nothing, when you try to define it rigorously, immediately becomes Something—at minimum, it becomes the concept of Nothing, which is already a distinction, already a something. The incoherence isn’t a contingent fact about Nothing; it’s intrinsic to the attempt to fully define it.