Hi Hal and fellow Members,
I hae been following Hal's work for quite some time. Some comments...
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tom Caylor" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Everything List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, February 06, 2008 12:42 AM
Subject: Re: Properties of observers
>
> On Feb 3, 11:46 am, Hal Ruhl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> The following discusses observer properties under my model of the
>> Everything.
>>
>> I take the list of observer properties I discuss below from what I
>> have so far found in Russell's "Theory of Nothing". One property -
>> Giving meaning to data [number 5 on the list] - does not seem to be
>> supportable under a description of the Everything as containing all
>> information.
>>
>
> Hi again between my being too busy to converse here in a while.
> Surprise, surprise, that the crux of the matter ends up in yet another
> circumstance being the mystery of where meaning comes from. Alas,
> this single unsolved problem has a viral effect to the rest of any
> theory of everything. See below.
>
>> As indicated in earlier posts, within my model of the Everything is a
>> dynamic which consists of incomplete Nothings and Somethings that
>> progress towards completeness in a step by step fashion. At each
>> step they grow more complete by encompassing more of the information
>> in the Everything.
>>
>> The incompleteness is not just that of mathematical systems but is
>> more general. It is the inability to resolve any question that is
>> meaningful to the particular Nothing or Something. Some such
>> questions may be of a sort that they must be resolved. The one I
>> focus on in this regard is the duration of the current boundary of
>> the particular Nothing or Something with the Everything.
>>
>
> Without the ability to give meaning to anything, how can there be a
> "meaningful question"?
>
[SPK]
Does this "inability" need to be, itself, Complete? It seems to me that
"meaning" per say is relational and more of a sort of "how much of X is
expressed in Y". A Complete resolution of a "question" such as this would be
like unto a exact equality between X and Y. We could use Leibniz' principle
of the Indentity of Indiscernables here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_of_indiscernibles
>> A Something will of course be divisible into subsets of the
>> information it contains. Many of these subsets will participate in
>> the incompleteness of the Something of which it is a subset. At each
>> step wise increase in the information content of that Something many
>> of its subsets will receive information relevant to the resolution of
>> their "local" un-resolvable meaningful questions.
>>
[SPK]
Consider how a word in a dictionary is "defined" in terms of a web of
relations with other words... How would we quantify this amount of
Incompleteness?
>> Resultant observer properties:
>>
>> 1) Prediction of the future behavior of the Something of which they
>> are a subset [of their particular universe]:
>> The subsets share some of the incompleteness of their Something and
>> participate in the progressive resolution of this
>> incompleteness. The current "local" incompleteness [part of the
>> current state of an observer] can serve as a predictor of the
>> Something's evolution since it is a target of the progressive influx
>> of information.
>>
>
> How can there be any meaningful "progressive resolution" without
> meaning?
>
[SPK]
Maybe because there is no "meaningfulness" in absense of a relationship.
Meaning would arise just as the notion of "between-ness". (This idea comes
from James N. Rose)
>> 2) Communication between subsets:
>> There is no requirement that the subsets be disjoint or have fixed
>> intersections. There are no restrictions on the number of copies of
>> a given packet of information contained within in a Something and no
>> restrictions on the copy function. A Something containing any number
>> of copies of part or all of itself is just as incomplete as if it
>> contained just one copy.
>>
>> 3) Evolution:
>> The progressive resolution of the incompleteness is an evolution.
>>
>> 4) Developing filters [re: white rabbit density]:
>> The shifting incompleteness of a subset constitutes a shifting filter
>> that is founded in the history of the dynamic for that Something. [I
>> mentioned white rabbits in this regard in another post.]
>>
>> 5) Giving meaning to data [symbol strings][generation of information?]:
>> The Everything is considered information. A symbol string seems to
>> be just a link between the set of all possible meanings that
>> particular string can have. It is just a boundary within the
>> Everything enclosing the associated set of meanings. It is a
>> definition, definitions are information [meaning] and thus part of
>> the Everything. How can an evolving Something and its subsets give
>> more meaning to a meaning? This property seems unsupportable in an
>> Everything.
>>
>
> I think you've summed up in your words the crux of the matter.
>
>> 6) Necessity of "Time":
>> As I mentioned in a earlier post the meaningful question I use
>> bootstraps time and thus the dynamic.
>>
>> 7) Life:
>> The characteristics of life [evolution, copy, variation] are just
>> part of the ensemble of potential meaningful questions - some
>> un-resolvable - that can apply to some subsets of a Something and
>> seem covered by the other discussions herein.
>>
>> 8) Randomness:
>> Each step in the progression towards completeness provides a
>> resolution to a random set of the open meaningful questions.
>>
>> 9) Self awareness, consciousness:
>> The Something subset boundary dynamics/allowances described above
>> appear to cover these varieties of subset evolution.
>>
>> 10 Creativity:
>> See #8 - randomness.
>>
>
> I don't see how creativity just pops automatically out of randomness.
> That's the crux of the matter.
>
[SPK]
COuld it be that a "random set" is just a stand in for some collection
chosen without a pre-established "rule"? Again, consider a dictionary and
the sequensing of words in a paragraph or a string of symbols.Given a notion
of a grammar, do the words/symbols follow necessarily monotonically from a
fixed one-to-one and onto type of rule? No. Just because a rule may exist
that could generate a given string, it does not follow that said string was
in fact thus generated.
>> Subsets of evolving Somethings in my model appear to have the
>> properties of observers mentioned above that also seem supportable by
>> an Everything - all but giving meaning to data.
>>
>> There is so far no subset based spontaneous influence on the
>> progression of the dynamic. All aspects of the information dynamic
>> appear to originate from the history of the dynamic for a particular
>> Something and its resultant current incompleteness.
>>
>> Hal Ruhl
snip
Onward,
Stephen
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