Hello Moshen and welcome. I think it is a very good question, and succinctly put.
I have been trying to ask the same question and get a plain-English answer, but without success. Of course, I could be missing 'the point' too, and it wouldn't be the first time by a long shot. :-) If there was simply nothing, utterly and absolutely nothing, well that would be the end of it: 'No problemas!' as the cool dudes say. But there seems to be something, because I seem to be here, at the moment anyway, and I have this distinct belief that I was here yesterday living in this same house with all these recalcitrantly individualistic people who all play along with a story about being my wife and children. Appeals to solipsism degenerate into incoherent babbling; I really am here, even though my grasp of the facts about my existence gets shaken loose every so often. And you are here too, except you are over there. In short there IS a universe and it seems to be remarkably self-consistent. I, like you, am confronted by the manifest existence of an objective reality. Being educated and impressed by the successes of the application of scientific method we are quite well equipped to accept certain problematic statements about the parts of the world we normally take for granted as 'real'. We have learned that the *appearances* of solidity, power, enduring nature, and so forth, which we experience as *qualities* of those things, are not the full story; that in fact the '*true* nature of things is that if you try and find absolute objective boundaries to things you can't and if you try to make any other kind of measurement, you have to make do with an approximation. Indeed, the more you wish to precisely specify anything about the location or motion of anything then the more you must accept a complex statistical description about the rest of its characteristics. Well and good; normally we don't have to worry about this too much. It is only when we start persistently asking *How does it all work?* that the seemingly intractable problems begin. And for each of us there is some kind of recursive process: we read and interact with others [indeed some lucky people can apparently just wander into the next room and straight away *talk* on the topic with someone who is interested!], and then we cogitate and imagine things and some of you scribble arcane arithmetic and run mathematical 'what-ifs' on computers; finally we reach some kind of internal stability of viewpoint that allows a reassessment of things previously held to be clear, or problematic perhaps. But after some time, doubt sets in, we think something far enough through and see a problem or, more likely, we read of some new viewpoint which challenges what we believe and we feel we must take it seriously because of its apparent validity, consistency, etc, or it is presented by someone we respect. Either way we have to work to either assimilate it or uncover valid reasons for rejecting it. The mathematicians who contribute here seemingly have no problems with a totally 'insubstantial' existence of numbers. Unlike me who has *ultimate* problems wrapping my head around the idea. I have not yet succeeded. You asked about 'assumptions' in you 'Joining' thread, but here by definition the only one is the existence of Many Worlds, which is hugely problematic because nobody really knows what it means. In my case it is obvious why, but in the case of those who *espouse* the Many-Worlds hypothesis, I have absolutely know idea how they can account for the purely logical - and therefore mathematically necessary, yes? - consequence of the problem you have so succinctly put. As I reason it, this 'continuous' aspect of location, even if it is only 'virtual' guarantees that the Many Worlds are always proliferating at a rate which must effectively be an infinity times an infinity of infinities. [I fear I might have underestimated the speed there, but as I say, my maths is not all that good!] In other words it seems to make no sense at all! Why? [Grin!] well because *my* world seems to be just one story. What keeps it together? It can't be any inherent smartness on my part! [Grin again; no false modesty there mate!] So *IT*, what I call 'The Great IT', is just doing IT'S thing. Nobody here has yet explained in plain-English why we have entropy. Oh well, surely, in the Many Worlds, that's just one of the universes that can happen! Except that, for plain-English reasons stated above, there are *and always have been* infinity x infinity x infinity of entropic universes. It doesn't make sense. Call me a heretic if you like, but I will 'stick to my guns' here: If it can't be put into plain-English then it probably isn't true! :-) Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Mohsen Ravanbakhsh wrote: > I don't know if in the hypothesis of simulation, the conflict of > Countable and Uncountable has been considered. > When we're talking about a machine with an infinite power of > computation, we're considering a TM which has a countable number of > states, even if it's running an undecidable problem to produce the > infinite possible outputs and even we're considering time to be > infinitely compressed to allow for the infinity of the power of our > machine, at the end the possible states of a TM is Countably infinite. > > But as one might notice we have some continuous and therefore > Uncountable parameters in our universe, like the measures of distance > which are not reducible to countable ones even considering the concept > of precision. They are naturally Uncountable. > > Now the question is: can that kind of infinitely powerful machine > simulate this infinite reality? > Am I missing a point? > -- > > Mohsen Ravanbakhsh, > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
