On 26 Mar 2014, at 00:12, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 25 March 2014 16:58, chris peck <[email protected]> wrote:
>>I think you're missing Scott's point. The universe is obviously
isomorphic to a mathematical structure, in fact infinitely many
different mathematical structures, all of which are in Borges
Library of Babel. Almost all of them are just lists of what
happens. Scott's point is that this is not very interesting,
important, or impressive. It's only some small elegant compression
of those lists that's interesting - if it exists. Scott seems to
think that it does. I think it does *only* because we're willing to
call a lot of stuff "geography" as Bruno puts it, aka boundary
conditions, symmetry breaking, randomness...
Hmm, I just read Scott as saying that MUH is scientifically empty in
the sense that it makes no significant predictions, the emphasis
being on the word significant. The predictions it does make are a
little wishy washy. Like, MUH predicts that science will continue to
uncover mathematically describable regularities in nature. what
would a non-mathematically describable law look like? And how is a
mathematically describable regularity in this universe evidence of
the existence of another mathematical universe? He also takes
Tegmark to task on his use of anthropic reasoning because it allows
Tegmark to have his cake and to eat it. The extent to which
regularities are elegantly described by maths will be taken as
evidence for an inherently mathematical ontology. The extent to
which they are not will allow him to invoke the anthropic principle
and say well it would be absurdly lucky that the one universe that
existed just happened to have these wierd constants that supported
life.
I think in Popperian terminology Tegmark's predictions just are not
risky enough. He's guaranteed to hit one or the other every time.
I'll be interested in how Tegmark addresses Scott's last point
concerning the physicality of universes beyond the cosmic horizon.
I can see both points of view. I can appreciate Tegmark's view that
a galaxy 1 light year beyond the cosmic horizon is just like
Andromeda but just a bit further away.
On the other hand I also see Scott's point that if it is just far
enough away to prevent any causal interaction then it doesn't
satisfy a reasonable definition of physical. To be physical is to be
causally relevant. There doesn't seem to be much semantic difference
between a non physical universe and one which is so far away that it
couldn't ever effect us.
An infinite universe (Tegmark type 1) implies that our consciousness
flits about from one copy of us to another and that as a consequence
we are immortal, so it does affect us even if there is no physical
communication between its distant parts.
Yes. Eventually "physical distance", and time emerge from the
consciousness flux (in arithmetic, which defined all possible
computations, with the important redundancies).
Bruno
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Stathis Papaioannou
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