On 03 Mar 2014, at 23:44, LizR wrote:
On 3 March 2014 20:27, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote:
I find Tegmark's metaphysical speculations interesting, because he
is at least trying to get his head around the big questions, like
why is there something rather than nothing? In fact his is the only
satisfactory answer to that question I've ever come across, which
is quite an achievement, imho, even if it proves to be wrong.
Tegmark fails to see that his "hypothesis" is a very old (even if
ignored) "theorem".
You mean Plato's idea? If so, he has updated it somewhat. Or if
not...?
I meant UDA (published in 1991, made public ten years before).
Mathematicalism, even arithmeticalism, is a consequence of comp (and
some small amount of Occam).
But you are right, that was also an idea defended by the greek
"mathematicians", which at that time meant "mathematicalists", like
Xeusippes who asked Plato to fire Aristotle from the academy!
And physics is not a mathematical structure among others, but a
psychological/theological phenomenon arising from computer-science
laws, that is arithmetical laws.
Well, imho Tegmark has a problem with consciousness in his theory,
which he seems to rather brush over. (But in that he's doing no
worse than the materialist, is he?)
He do better, except in his last paper, which is almost as "anti-
everett" than Chalmers use of Everett to defend dualism.
It is a physicist progress in the comp's consequence, but we are far
in advance, in this list, to which Tegmark participated, but he
missed both philosophy of mind and logic.
If Max participated in this list then his theory doesnt look quite
so clever! I didn't realise that. But he is at least popularising
ideas that I assume are fairly esoteric for most people, even
physicists and philosophers? Which I would think is a good thing?
Popularising is good. It would easily be better if it was fair in
references. You know, the FPI is still the thing "officially" not
recognized by the mainstream, and is still supposed to be the reason
why "I am a crackpot". Here John Clark is far better than the
academics, because he tries (at least) to find a flaw in it.
Then a mistery: his last paper on consciousness regresses a lot from
his paper and book. He seems to still miss the FPI, even if Jason's
quote of Tegmark seems to show he get the step 3 that is the FPI,
(but I explained it to him, so his lack of reference is a bit sad
from the human pov. He follows a common tradition here, like
Chalmers).
You mean his idea about consciousness as a state of matter?
Yes.
I read the paper but I didn't really take much away from it in the
end. He seemed to go off on a tangent (or several) and I got a bit
confused.
Especially from someone who seem to grasp the FPI, and Everett. In
fact that paper seems to imply that Tegmark has not yet really
understood the relation between Everett and computationalism.
Bruno
--
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.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
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.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
