On 10/7/2012 5:46 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
Stephen,
I'm not sure that there is any real disagreement between your view and
Bruno's. It seems more to be a language thing, if anything. When
Bruno refers to a physics, he means the appearance of a physical world
from the perspective of observers. But observers never see a single
"physical world", they exist in and see an infinite number of
interfering (physical worlds / dreams of numbers).
Hi Jason,
I agree with you! I am trying to go further than Bruno. To do this
I need to carefully examine many of the ideas that we just assume to be
true. One of those is the Church-Turing thesis
<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/church-turing/>.
I sympathize with your view that many (most?) observers exist in
larger mathematical structures that contain multiple observers, but I
don't see that this invalidates step 8.
My argument is that step 8 goes too far in that it completely
severs the connection between the physical world that we experience and
the Platonic Realm. I am interested in building a ladder that can take
us up to (and down from) the beautiful castle that Bruno has discovered
that is floating in the rarefied aether of Platonia, metaphorically
speaking of course. ;-) In my opinion *all* observers must have a
representation within Platonia or else Platonia is not Complete! What
about the "interactions between observers"? It seems to me that
"physical worlds" can be defined in terms of interactions between
observers. This is not a nontrivial derivation!
You say "one that is not ontologically primitive, but to demand this
is to also demand that arithmetics and numbers are not ontologically
primitive as well."
Do you agree that at least something has to be ontologically primitive?
Yes.
If so, what do you think that something is? You referred to
something that has no innate properties, but I don't find much
explanatory power in that.
Existence itself is that "something", but what ever it is it must
be *neutral* with respect to properties. If we claim that it is "number"
then we have to explain why numbers and not, say, polytopes or something
else. We cannot think of it as having some property to the exclusion of
other properties.
I come to this conclusion from my study of the problem of
"substance" as discussed here:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/substance/ Descartes theory of dualism
failed because it assumed that "substance" is ontologically primitive.
Pratt alludes to this in his infamous paper. I agree with you that there
is not much explanatory power in considering an ontological primitive
that "has no innate properties" but this is not quite the case. The
ontological primitive that I am considered has *all possible*
properties, but as Russell Standish explains in his book, it has zero
information content. The totality of all that exists is null and void
and from it all emerges. :-)
--
Onward!
Stephen
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