No(-)Justification Justifies The Everything Ensemble Youness Ayaita
In this message, I present my "no-justification" of the hypothesis that everything exists. The no-justification argues that no justification at all is needed to accept the hypothesis. This provides a new and very satisfying approach to the Everything ensemble. 1 Hitherto proposed justifications In this first section I give a brief overview of some existing justifications for the Everything ensemble. The reader familiar with the topic may skip this section. Several thinkers have come independently to the hypothesis that---in some sense or another---everything exists. The justifications they have found in favor of this hypothesis vary as do their intellectual backgrounds (philosophy, computer science, mathematics or physics). When I myself developed the hypothesis, I found three justifications which I call respectively the 'metaphysical approach', the 'generalized Copernican principle' and the 'no-justification'. The main justifications supported by contributors to the everything-list are the 'zero information principle' and 'arithmetical realism' (also called 'mathematical Platonism'). Another justification is due to the analytic philosopher David Lewis: "Why believe in a plurality of worlds?---Because the hypothesis is serviceable, and that is a reason to think it is true." For most philosophers Lewis's justification was not convincing. Much more attractive to many thinkers is arithmetical realism, assuming the objective existence of all mathematical objects. The zero information principle bases upon the observation that the Everything has no information content. Russell Standish writes: "There is a mathematical equivalence between the Everything, as represented by this collection of all possible descriptions and Nothing, a state of no information." This justification is impressive since it shows that Everything is--- in some sense---not more than Nothing. It thus provides a striking argument against the critics' objection that supporters of the Everything ensemble postulate too much additional ontology. As a last example, I mention the generalized Copernican principle. The idea is to give up the categorical difference between our world and all other possible worlds: Everything is equally real. 2 Remarks on new fundamental theories Before starting to explain my no-justification of the Everything ensemble, I want to summarize some important statements in advance which concern all new fundamental theories. Taking seriously the approach given by the no-justification, it will turn out that the term "Everything exists" is logically meaningless. Nonetheless I'll still use the term without questioning its outstanding significance. The only thing that changes is the term's role within our thinking. It will no longer be an integral part of the fundamental theory, but merely a link from the fundamental theory to our 'everyday theory'. As a typical example of such a relation may serve Einstein's theory of general relativity. The concept of mass---or to be more precise, the energy-momentum tensor---is no integral part of general relativity, it is replaced by the curvature of spacetime. Einstein's famous field equations that relate the curvature of spacetime to the energy- momentum tensor, are thus meaningless insofar as they only 'define' the energy-momentum tensor. In principle, we could abandon the concept of mass and energy and use the curvature tensor instead. So, would the theory of general relativity lose anything if we removed Enstein's field equations? The answer to this question is twofold. As a mathematical theory, general relativity would remain complete and as rich as it is today. But as a physical theory it would lose its meaning, i.e. it would lose its explanatory and predictive power. This is because a mathematical theory (in the case of general relativity: Spacetime is a smooth 4-manifold with a metric tensor and such and such properties) does not give a physical interpretation by itself. The term "physical interpretation" means that we have a procedure how to interpret elements of the theory as elements of our everyday theory. A physical interpretation serves as translation from the theory's mathematical language to our concrete everyday language. Einstein's field equations link general relativity (with the curvature of spacetime) to special relativity (with the energy-momentum tensor) which is itself linked to Newtonian mechanics (with the usual concept of mass and Euclidian space). Newtonian mechanics is understood in the everyday theory. We see from this that Einstein's field equations are part of the physical interpretation in the sense described above. The everyday theory, of course, is only a vague concept that allows us to exchange information about events in the world that surrounds us. Though, it is not clearly defined. 3 No-justification The no-justification is the most satisfying justification for the Everything ensemble I know. I even think that a more satisfying justification is impossible in principle. So what is it about? The crucial point is to try to get to the bottom of our understanding of 'existence'. In our everyday theory we use 'existence' as a property: Some things 'exist', whereas other (imaginable) things don't. The origin of this practice lies in very pragmatic reasons. It makes sense to separate things that are 'accessible in principle' from things that are not. This relation between 'us' and 'things which are accessible in principle for us' was falsely understood as an objective property of those things. I feel Wittgenstein's hands slapping on my back when I tell you that 'existence' is nothing else than a linguistic confusion. Strictly speaking, the concept of 'existence' doesn't make sense. I encourage you to abandon it. If we take the right point of view, the problem of having to find a "theory of everything" doesn't occur. The amazing result of these simple considerations is that we get the Everything ensemble gratis! We don't need any postulate. But how is this transition made? At this point I remind you of the second section of this article: The Everything ensemble, or the statement that everything exists, is the interpretation of our new perspective in the everyday theory. In our everyday theory, we use the concept of 'existence' as a property of things. A property p is given by the ensemble of (imaginable) things that have that property. Thus we can identify the property p with the ensemble of (imaginable) things having that property. The no-justification argues that it doesn't make sense to introduce 'existence' as a property, or expressed in another way, that it is not possible to meaningfully separate (imaginable) things that have the (hypothetic) property that they 'exist' from (imaginable) things without that property. This leaves us with two options if we still want to use the concept of existence given by the everyday theory: that the ensemble of (imaginable) things is empty or that every (imaginable) thing has the property that it exists. The property is degenerate, it does not separate some (imaginable) things from others. Since, in our everyday theory, we say that things surrounding us exist, we must consequently take the second option: that every (imaginable) thing has the property that it exists. This is the Everything ensemble. I repeat that the statement "everything exists" can be seen as a definition of the new (and degenerate!) property of existence: for an imaginable thing, to exist doesn't mean anything else than being an imaginable thing. From our new perspective, it's a tautology. But it is the interpretation of the new perspective in the everyday theory. In this last paragraph it can be seen that the no-justification has a lot in common with the zero information principle. I wrote that, if we want to introduce the property of existence, than this property must be degenerate (given by no entity or given by the ensemble of all entities). In other words, there cannot be any information separating some entities that exist from other entities that don't. --- A PDF-version of the message can be found at http://www.rzuser.uni-heidelberg.de/~yayaita/philosophy/no-justification.pdf --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
