Whoa! A simple question that just opened up SO many things in my mind! (maybe a few screws too:-) ) Blabber on I shall!
[LC]: > By "event" do you mean an event that leaves a record? Just > wondering. "leaves a record" is the same as saying "affects/causes/interferes with other events". Side Note: Beware the pitfalls of visualizing this as a temporal cause-effect relationship though, we are talking of events, which happen in space-time, not space. Better to understand it as "interference". I think that if we consider an ENTIRE intricate interference-connected web of events, we are in fact considering one equivalence class from the partition called "multiverse". The equivalence relation creating this partition is the "interferes with" relation. And each equivalence class is a "universe". Side Note: If you are following till here, then please help me a bit with the reflexive part of the "interferes with" equivalence. How does an event interfere with itself? I am going the base the rest of the post on this assumption, and unfortunately I currently cannot substantiate it. But now this is a perfect example of something that our brain can "define" but not model. Because from our perspective, until and unless an event "interferes with" our universe, it is in "some other universe" which we have no way of describing. Therefore yes, for us the "knowable universe" at any time can only have events that leave records in our universe, or events that form part of our interference web. BUT, since "coming to know" is itself only an event, it is ALWAYS possible that even our notion of "knownable universe" is incomplete. This is because we ALWAYS have the potential to be "unlucky enough" to not "feel" some interference from an event that we currently believe is in "some other universe" and therefore "unknowable". It is just a matter of not being in the right place at the right time. So although I cannot say for sure whether there even exist events that "do not leave a record", but if they do exist, then they are unknowable. By their very definition they do not "affect" us in ANY way, and therefore can be ignored in a ToE. But the problem is, we have NO way of knowing that an event SURELY does NOT leave a record! Having said this, the universe seems to be at BEST only recursively enumerable to us, not recursive. Because while we CAN observe what's INSIDE it, we have NO way of saying what's OUTSIDE (yet INSIDE the "multiverse"). So my concluding claim is this: We may some day have a ToE that is in fact Consistent and Complete (finally TRUE), but we will NEVER be sure that it is so. [LC] > Thanks for a nice try at clearing up what Jesse, at least, > and I were discussing. Maybe now I have managed to complicate things again:-) -- Aditya Varun Chadha adichad AT gmail.com http://www.adichad.com ________________________________
