On 18 January 2014 19:12, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > On 1/17/2014 8:28 PM, Jason Resch wrote: > > On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 10:16 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On 1/17/2014 5:40 PM, LizR wrote: >> >> But apparently the brain has a lot to do with those computations in >>> Platonia, c.f. anesthetic. Notice that I'm not a disciple of Platonia. >>> >> >> Me neither, I am agnostic - but within comp it is assumed, so while >> discussing comp we have to assume it (unless we're rejecting comp on that >> basis). But I can see that Platonia makes sense in that 17 does seem to be >> prime idependently of you and me and everyone else, which is (I'm told) >> enough for the whole shebang to come into some sort of existence. >> >> >> I don't think you have to buy the equivalence between (17 is prime) is >> true and (17 is prime) exists. >> > > No, but all statements about programs can be translated into truth > statements about the natural numbers. So you could say "Program X is > conscious of the information Y" is a true statement, and that truth implies > that the conscious thought of X exists. (Just as the primeness of 17 > implies two factors of 17 exist). > > > But where does it exist? X has to be conscious of a location, a physics, > etc. If all this is the same as where I exist, then it is just a > translation of this world into arithmetic. It's the flip side of "A > perfect description of X is the same as X", i.e. "X is the perfect > description of X". If every perfect description is realized somewhere in > arithmetic (and I think it probably is) nothing is gained by saying we may > be in arithmetic. > > Don't we gain less entities, making Occam a bit happier? If we can get the appearance of a universe without having to actually have one, can't we "retire the universe" and just stick with the "appearance-of-one-with-equal-explanatory-value" ? (Not an original idea, of course, I'm fairly sure Max Tegmark said something along those lines regarding his mathematical universe hypothesis -- that if the maths was isomorphic to the universe, why bother to assume the universe was physically there?).
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