On 09 Oct 2011, at 20:28, meekerdb wrote:
On 10/9/2011 3:05 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Depends on what you mean by "the whole of physics".
Good question. When physics is inferred from observation, there is
no conceptual mean to distinguish physics from geography, except
for a fuzzy level of generality.
But UDA explains where the observation and observable comes from,
and physics can be defined as what is invariant for all the
observer. If the material hypostases did collapse, it would have
mean that physics, as such would be empty, and that all observable
truth would be geographical.
But it seems that everything theories and the string theory
landscape and Tegmark's all of mathematics threaten to do exactly
that - make of all of physics geographical, an accident of where you
find yourself with the anthropic principle as the all-purpose
explanation.
here you are summing up well my critics of Schmidhuber and Tegmark
which I have done when entering in this list discussion.
This has given the big debate between ASSA and RSSA (the absolute and
the relative Self-Sampling-Assumption).
DM, or comp, does not work with the ASSA, which indeed would make the
physical as a sort of geographical. In a sense, comp rescues physics
from such approaches, and it introduces a new invariant (the change of
the phi_i, or the change for the initial ontic theory). But comp also
rescues consciousness and persons from the materialist tendency to
eliminate them.
Anthropic principles are not completely evacuated, some defense of
them and variants are still possible, especially for the cosmological
history and for some explanation of geography. But the laws of physics
are not anthropic. They might be said in a loose sense to be universal
machine-thropic, or Löbian-Thropic, but not in the Bayesian sense. The
probabilities and their rôle are derived from the first person
indeterminacy.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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