Le 05-juin-05, à 05:53, Hal Finney a écrit :
Lee Corbin writes:
But in general, what do observer-moments explain? Or what does the
hypothesis concerning them explain? I just don't get a good feel
that there are any "higher level" phenomena which might be reduced
to observer-moments (I am still very skeptical that all of physics
or math or something could be reduced to them---but if that is
what is meant, I stand corrected). Rather, it always seems like
a number of (other) people are trying to explain observer-moments
as arising from the activity of a Universal Dovetailer, or a
Platonic ensemble of bit strings, or something.
I would say that observer-moments are what need explaining, rather than
things that do the explaining. Or you could say that in a sense they
"explain" our experiences, although I think of them more as *being*
our experiences, moment by moment. As we agreed:
An observer-moment is really all we have as our primary experience of
the world. The world around us may be fake; we may be in the Matrix
or
a brain in a vat. Even our memories may be fake. But the fact that
we
are having particular experiences at a particular moment cannot be
faked.
Nothing could be truer.
All right. So you both (Hal Finney and Lee Corbin) with the first axiom
defining a knower. It is the incorrigibility axiom: let us write Cp for
"to know p" (or to be aware of p, or to be conscious of p).
incorrigibility can be stated by:
Cp -> p
Meaning that for any proposition p we have that Cp -> p is true.
The implication arrow "->" is just the classical implication. It has
nothing to do with notions of causality, or deduction or whatever ...
We can define A -> B by ((not A) or B) or (not (A and not B)) as this
can be verified by truth-table. I recall:
A -> B
1 1 1
1 0 0
0 1 1
0 1 0
OK?
That is the sense in which I say that observer-moments are primary;
they are the most fundamental experience we have of the world.
Everything else is only a theory which is built upon the raw existence
of observer-moments.
All right. I guess you agree that this is compatible with the fact that
such a theory, built upon the raw existence of OMs, could infer the
existence of more primitive objects, could explain how the "raw
existence of OM" emerges from those more primitive objects and explain
also how the theory of those more primitive objects emerge from the
(only apparently raw, now) observer moments. All this without being
circular. OK?
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
