Pierz, you have said exactly the reason why I am willing to give Bruno's ideas so much time. It's the fact that IF he's right, then he has actually caught sight of the end of the explanatory chain, which otherwise has only ever been grounded in an unsatisfactory deity or a "chain of turtles" - i.e. it's thought to never end - or it ends at a brute fact of some sort, some "shut up and calculate" beyond which we supposedly can't go.
A TOE should start from something that's necessarily so, and so far the only thing I've ever come across that's necessarily so is stuff like 1+1=2, with apologies to Stephen P King and anyone else who thinks we just made that up. But so far there isn't anything else except God, turtles and shut up .... is there? Admittedly we may just not have thought of the correct end-of-chain yet, so this may be like looking for your keys under a lamp-post because that's the well lit part of the street. But it's always *possible* the keys are in the well-lit part.... Hence I give a lot of mental houseroom to comp, and any other theory that starts from something that's grounded in (apparent) logical necessity. Are there any other such theories? I have a feeling that "it from bit" goes in that sort of direction, as does A. Garrett Lisi, Max T of course, Julian Barbour? I guess any TOE which claims that some set of equations is isomorphic to the universe is nodding in that direction, and as Max Tegmark says we just need to reduce the baggage allowance. Even Edgar Owen's computational idea has some merit on the "it from bit" front (although I don't think it's particularly original ... and of course it fails to address about 99% of known physics.) -- 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/d/optout.
