Brent, I wonder, what do you mean with materialism (I ask this having been a materialist myself)?
Physics only describes relations. (see for instance here http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/structural-realism/) I gather you accept MWI, so quite a lot of relations hold. The question is, why the quantum (as Wheeler, I think, put it)? Bruno's COMP gives a very elegant _explanation_. Also, with COMP, the mind-body problem indeed disappears. We have computations within computations within computations. (And I think that Bruno is correct when assuming that there is no _lowest_ level). It needn't even be a pure idealism, but rather Russelian neutral monism - some states more or less conscious - the degree of consciousness depending on the degree of self-reflexivity (see for instance here for a theory of consciousness which works well with COMP: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-higher/) Back to the ontological problem of the "grounding": materialism is in essence the thesis that there is, at bottom, a "substance", which has no independent properties, but serves as instantiator for other properties. But why should such a strange thing exist? Why not let the relations stand for themselves? Especially for an MWI-theorist; if you only accept a single world, matter does seem much more plausible - going through diverse transformations, that being all there is, and located somewhere in an otherwise empty spacetime or whatever - but those are all very naive intuitions which modern physics has moved beyond (and all the more so critical reflection on the results of modern physics). A big question: why should there be such a thing as a lowest level, a grounding? While for a materialist, the imagination of "turtles all the way down" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down is quite strange, computations all the way down is very intuitive. Well, awe-inspiring intuitive ;-)) Think of the fractal video Bruno sent out a little while ago. What explanatory power does matter hold? None, I conjecture. Please give at least one so we can discuss. Cheers, Günther --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
