Hi Roger,
I will interleave some remarks.
On 8/11/2012 7:37 AM, Roger wrote:
Hi Stephen P. King
As I understand it, Leibniz's pre-established harmony is analogous to
a musical score with God, or at least some super-intelligence, as
composer/conductor.
Allow me to use the analogy a bit more but carefully to not go too
far. This "musical score", does it require work of some kind to be
created itself?
This prevents all physical particles from colliding, instead they
all move harmoniously together*. The score was composed before the
Big Bang-- my own explanation is like Mozart God or that intelligence
could hear the whole (symphony) beforehand in his head.
I argue that the Pre-Established Harmony (PEH) requires solving
anNP-Complete computational problem
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NP-complete_problems> that has an
infinite number of variables. Additionally, it is not possible to
maximize or optimize more than one variable in a multivariate system
<http://www.wellesley.edu/Economics/weerapana/econ300/econ300pdf/lecture%20300-08.pdf>.
Unless we are going to grant God the ability to contradict mathematical
facts, which, I argue, is equivalent to granting violations of the basis
rules of non-contradiction, then God would have to run an eternal
computation prior to the creation of the Universe. This is absurd! How
can the existence of something have a beginning if it requires an an
infinite problem to be solved first?
Here is the problem: Computations require resources to run, and if
resources are not available then there is no way to claim access to the
information that would be in the solution that the computation would
generate. WE might try to get around this problem the way that Bruno
does by stipulating that the "truth" of the solution gives it existence,
but the fact that some mathematical statement or sigma_1 sentence is
true (in the prior sense) does not allow it to be considered as
accessible for use for other things. For example, we could make valid
claims about the content of a meteor that no one has examined but we
cannot have any certainty about those claims unless we actually crack
open the rock and physically examine its contents.
The state of the universe as "moving harmoniously together" was not
exactly what the PEH was for Leibniz. It was the synchronization of the
simple actions of the Monads. It was a coordination of the percepts that
make up the monads such that, for example, my monadic percept of living
in a world that you also live in is synchronized with your monadic view
of living in a world that I also live in such that we can be said to
have this email chat. Remember, Monads (as defined in the Monadology)
have no windows and cannot be considered to either "exchange" substances
nor are embedded in a common medium that can exchange excitations. The
entire "common world of appearances" emerges from and could be said to
supervene upon the synchronization of internal (1p subjective) Monadic
actions.
I argue that the only way that God could find a solution to the
NP-Complete problem is to make the creation of the universe
simulataneous with the computations so that the universe itself is the
computer that is finding the solution. This idea is discussed by several
people including David Deutsch, Lee Smolin, Roger Penrose and Stuart
Kaufman in their books. This implies that God's creative act is not a
singular event but an eternal process.
I suppose that this accords with Leibniz's belief that God,
whoc is good, constructed the best possible world where
as a miniomum, that least physics is obeyed.
Yes.
Hence
Voltaire's foolish criticism of Leibniz in Candide that how
could the volcanic or earthquake disaster in Lisbon be
part of the most perfect world ?
Voltair was a poor fool that could not understand the simple idea
that only one variable can be maximized. Perhaps he was not a fool and
knew the facts but wanted to discredit Leibniz's superior ideas.
Thus, because physics must be obeyed, sometimes crap happens.
Indeed. One might even argue that the existence of evil in the
world is a consequence of choice; that only in a world completely devoid
of choice might it be possible for crap to never occur. But this can be
shown to have a vanishingly small probability or even zero chance of
actually occurring, as 1) the NP-Complete problem would have to first be
solved and 2) there would have to be a very happy "accident" where no
one ever happen to be doing the actions which would lead them to see
evil - given that evil is a valuation that occurs in our minds and is
not an actual extant state of the world.
* As a related and possibly explanatory point, L's universe
completely is nonlocal.
Indeed! I argue that L's monadology almost exactly anticipated the
concept of a quantum mechanical system, since a QM system by definition
is a windowless monad that never exchanges substances with others and is
"simple" by L's definition. All notions of interactions in QM are
defined internal to single QM systems as the scattering states of its
Hamiltonian. This latter idea was explored and written about by Prof.
Hitoshi Kitada as found here: http://www.metasciences.ac/Articles/works.html
Roger , [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
8/11/2012
----- Receiving the following content -----
*From:* Stephen P. King <mailto:[email protected]>
*Receiver:* everything-list <mailto:[email protected]>
*Time:* 2012-08-11, 01:56:41
*Subject:* Re: Where's the agent ? Who or what does stuff and is
aware of stuff ?
Hi Roger,
I have noticed and read your posts. Might you write some
remarks about Leibniz' concept of pre-established harmony?
On 8/10/2012 8:53 AM, Roger wrote:
Hence I follow Leibniz, even though he's difficult and some say
contradictory. That agent or soul or self you have is your
monad, the only (alhough indirectly) perceiving/acting/feeling
agent in all of us, but currently missing in neuroscience and
neurophilosophy.
--
--
Onward!
Stephen
"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."
~ Francis Bacon
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