I doubt that meaning, existence, creation, purpose makes sense when applied to the mathematical nature of the external reality. I think that these concepts only makes sense when though by a mind. So either we reject these concepts when thinking about the universe (and this makes reasoning almost impossible when taken seriously) or else, we implicirtly are assuming that we are figuring out what a metamind in a metatime was thinking when He fired up equations into existence. that is, we are trying to know the mind of God in which we implicitly believe.
Purpose, for example, implies a goal and a goal implies some actions in order to reach the goal either at the beginning (at the creation of the drama) or at the course of the action. In the first case, it is assumed that the purpose-creator had freedom to bring existence or not of different things depending on the purpose. In the second case, it supposes miracles. In the case of Smolin, like many others, they try to be as close as possible to the null hypothesis, where this Mind is progressively more and more lazy, so he creates more and more weird things in a single act in order not to think and not to waste time for sleep: And the God of Smolin said: "Let's be String theory with a lot of free parameters, so may be black holes populate each universe or not. And he saw it good, so He return to sleep". Why not "lets everithing into existence"?. That is the null hypothesis. But existence again, is meaningless without an observer, a metamind, because is the mind the one that observe existence. We have an implicit Observer. The same could be said about the concept of "beginning" and, in fact, almost any concept of the language. So we need a metamind, in a metatime. an extremely lazy metamind. But his "creation" is undistinguisable from a more focused metamind which may bring into existence just a strech set of alternatives in order to produce the same number of observer minds. In any case we need -or our reasoning implicitly assumes- a mind to fire-up. What we know is that the external mathematical reality supports for the existence and communicability of minds. And these minds and groups of minds create their own realities, that do have purposes and create and infer meaning. We can only reason with the concepts of minds about other minds. 2013/2/5 Kim Jones <[email protected]> > So does this explain the PURPOSE of the universe or merely a dominant > FUNCTION? The blind exercise of function doesn't seem to me to include the > global concept of purpose. The use of this word is about my only gripe with > it. I could be wrong. > > Cheers, > > K > > > > > On 05/02/2013, at 6:47 PM, Russell Standish <[email protected]> wrote: > > > By contrast, Smolin's idea is taken very seriously by this list. For > > example, it is mentioned not once, but twice in my book (page 49 and > > 102). > > > > Cheers > > > > On Tue, Feb 05, 2013 at 06:16:59PM +1100, Kim Jones wrote: > >> > http://io9.com/5981472/what-is-the-purpose-of-the-universe-here-is-one-possible-answer > >> > >> > >> OK - so rip into it and say why it's all nonsense. > >> > >> > >> Kim Jones > >> > >> -- > >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "Everything List" group. > >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send > an email to [email protected]. > >> To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > >> Visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. > >> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > >> > >> > > > > -- > > > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) > > Principal, High Performance Coders > > Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] > > University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > > > -- > > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "Everything List" group. > > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send > an email to [email protected]. > > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en > . > > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > > > > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > > > -- Alberto. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
