Interesting thoughts re anthropic explanations, thanks!
I agree that asymmetry doesn’t tell us which one is more fundamental, and I wasn’t aiming to argue for either one being more fundamental (though position does feel more fundamental to me, and that may have shown through). What I was trying to say was only that they are asymmetric on a cognitive level, in the sense that they don’t feel interchangeable, and that there must therefore be some physical asymmetry.
Still, I should have been more specific than saying “asymmetric”, because not any kind of asymmetry in the Hamiltonian can explain the cognitive asymmetry. For the “forces decay with distance in position space” asymmetry, I think it’s reasonably clear why this leads to cognitive asymmetry, but for the “position occurs as an infinite power series” asymmetry, it’s not clear to me whether this has noticeable macro effects.
Interesting thoughts re anthropic explanations, thanks!
I agree that asymmetry doesn’t tell us which one is more fundamental, and I wasn’t aiming to argue for either one being more fundamental (though position does feel more fundamental to me, and that may have shown through). What I was trying to say was only that they are asymmetric on a cognitive level, in the sense that they don’t feel interchangeable, and that there must therefore be some physical asymmetry.
Still, I should have been more specific than saying “asymmetric”, because not any kind of asymmetry in the Hamiltonian can explain the cognitive asymmetry. For the “forces decay with distance in position space” asymmetry, I think it’s reasonably clear why this leads to cognitive asymmetry, but for the “position occurs as an infinite power series” asymmetry, it’s not clear to me whether this has noticeable macro effects.