Re: How did it all begin?

[Bruno Marchal]

On 01 Sep 2005, at 00:40, Stephen Paul King wrote:    Does it truly make sense to assume that Existence can have a Beginning? We are not talking here, I AFAIK, about the beginning of our observed universe as we can wind our way back in history to a Big Bang Event Horizon, but this event itself must have some form of antecedent that Exists. Remember, existence, per say, does not depend on anything, except for maybe self-consistency, and thus it follows that Existence itself can not have a "beginning". It follows that it is Eternal, without beginning or end. I would even say that it is out of time and space consideration.    IMHO, Tegmark's paper, like the rest of his papers, is not worth reading if only because they misdirect thoughts more than they inform thoughts. You are hard. Tegmark paper is interesting, except that he still (like many physicists) put the mind-body problem under the rug, and so he misses the impact of incompleteness, and the fact that at the level of mathematical platonism, the physical world is not just a mathematical structure among others. With comp, although physics is secondary, the physical world is not just a mathematical structure among others, but a very special mathematical structures emerging from existing relations among a vast set of mathematical structures. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/