Hi Russell and the list: I have been very distracted and am trying to catch up on the discussions.
At 01:35 AM 2/1/2006, you wrote: >I don't agree with equating the vacuum with "Nothing", although I know >a few people do. The vacuum still has a wealth of information >associated with it. > >In the ensemble of all descriptions (sometimes known as Schmidhuber >ensemble), all describable things correspond to subsets of cardinality >c=2^\aleph_0. For example every finite bitstring is represented by the >subset of descriptions having that bitstring as a prefix. The only >describable thing having vaguely the properties of "Nothing" is the >empty finite string, which is, in other words, the set of all possible >descriptions. But this is just the Everything. The Everything and the >Nothing are equivalent, just as a finite bitstring is equivalent with the >subset of bitstrings sharing the finite string as a prefix. The number of descriptions - divisions of my list of properties - in my model [in the All part] is also c so long as my list of properties is countably infinite which seems uncontroversial. My Nothing being absent any bit strings [containing the empty finite bit string?] has at least this property so is in the All. The All also has properties and so is a member of itself. I do not see my Nothing and my All as equivalent since my Nothing is incomplete and my All - being complete - is therefore inconsistent. In a recent post [23 Feb] Bruno said: "You can see G*, the "divine intellect" as an exhaustive catalog of true propositions, which, if added without caution to the entity's collection of beliefs, would make the entity inconsistent." At the moment I take this as a support for my position that my All is inconsistent since it could be considered an exhaustive catalog of divisions of my list each of which would have the same level of truthfulness as the list itself and each such division would establish a pair of "propositions". Further I see my descriptions in my All as describing possible individual states of universes and not of being descriptions of a group of such states - sub string after sub string - that are somehow [by a computer?] given a brief and sequential distinction such as a degree of "reality". In my system the isolated descriptions of states are given such a brief distinction by a dynamic resulting from the incompleteness of my Nothing and the inconsistency of my All. Avoiding any selection [information] requires this distinction to have any degree of overlapping duration during the progression of states which is my proposal for a "flow of consciousness". The inconsistency of the All makes this dynamic random. This randomness is a noise in the succession of states which in some such sequences can look like an ever increasing information content of that series of states which if the informational density of the associated universe is fixed to me looks like dark energy. Some of the above is of course contained in my earlier posts. >I note that Hal Ruhl was going around saying the Nothing was unstable >before Wilczek, but using a rather different argument. I am not sure that I said the Nothing is unstable prior to Wilczek - I will have to check this - but my argument indeed appears to be different in that it is based on an apparent logical incompleteness of the Nothing that the Nothing must attempt to resolve and not on what I consider to be a "local" - i.e. relevant for our particular universe - mathematical description of the Nothing such as its being a "vacuum" or having some identical [or not] particular simultaneous value [such as zero] for all "fields" which themselves may be just a currently useful but ultimately incorrect representation of the physics of our particular universe. Hal Ruhl --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
