By the way, Tegmark has a new book coming out Jan 14, I do recall.
-----Original Message----- From: LizR <lizj...@gmail.com> To: everything-list <everything-list@googlegroups.com> Sent: Sun, Dec 1, 2013 7:28 pm Subject: Re: How can a grown man be an atheist ? On 2 December 2013 12:51, Jesse Mazer <laserma...@gmail.com> wrote: To add to my last comment, the article at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz-modal/ mentions that Leibniz was among those philosophers who distinguished between necessary and contingent truths, and only granted God the power to change contingent ones. Here's a relevant bit from the article: Consider the way Leibniz distinguishes necessary and contingent truths in ยง13 of the Discourse on Metaphysics. The one whose contrary implies a contradiction is absolutely necessary; this deduction occurs in the eternal truths, for example, the truths of geometry. The other is necessary only ex hypothesi and, so to speak, accidentally, but it is contingent in itself, since its contrary does not imply a contradiction. And this connection is based not purely on ideas and God's simple understanding, but on his free decrees and on the sequence of the universe. (A VI iv 1547/AG 45) So, what's wrong with adopting Tegmark's solution which takes our universe as a Platonic mathematical structure, so that all truths about it are necessary ones too? Then there would be no need for a creator God, though one might still talk about a sort of Spinoza-esque pantheist God (especially if one also prefers panpsychism as a solution to the metaphysical problem of the relation between consciousness and third-person objective reality) I am of the same opinion, that reality is probably in some sense emergent from logically necessary truths - however, possible objections include: The Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH) doesn't make testable predictions (Tegmark claims it does, about the gerenicity of the universe we should expect to find ourselves in, but there have been objections that this isn't quantifiable, etc). Various objections by materialists - for example, they have been known to object that there aren't resources available in the universe to "do the maths" and similar level confusions. This tends to come down to "I don't believe it!" (usually expressed as something like "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" etc, but that's what they mean). These need not concern us too much, because they are basically religious objetions - they don't like their metaphysical premises being questioned. The MUH doesn't address the nature of consciousness. Tegmark describes consciousness as (somethnig like) "what data feels like when it's being processed" but this bit of hand-waving fails to explain qualia etc. Bruno will perhaps have more to say on this. -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
