I agree - thought is its own foundation. See www.higgo.com/quantum ----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: everything list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, June 29, 2001 10:11 PM Subject: Re: Introduction (Digital Physics)
> > Joel: > ... But there MAY be some reasons to want to know exactly which > algorithm is really being run on the bottom... > > Bruno: > I am not sure there is any (absolute) bottom. > > Joel: > Mustn't we assume there is? > If there is no bottom, what will we stand on? > How can we understand anything at all? > > I wrote this to the list a while ago: > > Gerard O'Neill, the late Princeton physicist best known for his space > colony studies, once said that if you met a race that insisted that > logical developments must be built step by step from a firm > foundation, you could be pretty sure they were planet dwellers. Races > that live in space realize that it's perfectly OK to build structures > that have no foundation at all. They can be circular and unsupported, > yet if you spin them they'll have gravity just like the ponderous > planetary piles! > > The context, related to the discussion above, was the need for a > logical foundation for objective attributions of consciousness. more: > > Many of the people on this list (in common with a lot of western > philosophy at least since Descartes) are hoping to construct their > existence measures on the bedrock of the objectively decidable > self-awareness. They've built very interesting structures, but you > may notice there's been no progress at all on stabilizing the > foundation. Instead we have on this list the same debates that > endlessly, repetitively and inconclusively flood comp.ai.philosophy, > never mind philosophy journals and books. > > I think the insistence on the absolute underpinning of an objective > consciousness is just planet-bound thinking. Bruno's, Juergen's, > Russell's or Max Tegmark's analyses can just as well be built on > arbitrary selections of what's conscious (Turing test passers? > biological brains? red-haired people? teddy bears?). The teddy bear > universes may have different probabilities than the biological brain > universes or the Turing test universes, but so what? Each is as > likely to be self-consistent as another. > > i.e. You don't have to give up the goals of this list just because you > don't believe there is an objective fact of the matter to > consciousness. >
