On 8/17/2014 5:43 AM, Pierz wrote:
Thank you Bruno for your response. Honestly I don't know if I'd say yes to the doctor.
It's cowardly of me, but I think I'd like to see the device work on someone else first.
If they appear to be fine after the operation then I guess I'll go under the knife - and
have to swallow the logical consequences whole! Your reply helps. I suppose what I feel
is missing from the account is the *necessity* of qualia, because it seems to me that
everything that exists, necessarily exists, and as it stands in the comp account, the
necessity for there to be an interior to mathematics remains mysterious. My guess is
that comp is wrong, but it may be that it is still a whole lot more right than
materialism. It may be wrong in the same way that general relativity and QM are "wrong",
i.e., correct, but to some limit. My next step is to read the Amoeba's Secret and see if
I can start to wrap my head around the S4Grz and the []p & p - the maths is still
largely a mystery to me.
However I wanted to put some less argumentative and more curious questions to you about
the way you imagine the comp-driven universe to be (yes, there's no universe, I know,
but I lack words: this apparent "space" we inhabit?). The question comes up in the comp
account about the physical explanation for the origin of the Löbian organism the
self-consistency of whose mind creates the appearance of matter (allegedly). Liz and
Brent were throwing around this "if a tree falls in the forest" question on the MGA
thread. The account whereby the observer arises out of the long, deep history of matter
sure looks convincing. What is the status of this alternative origin story if the
observer is actually grounded in Platonia? I seem to recall you talking about the idea
that the observer's self consistency demands that it also find a consistent account of
itself in the "material hypostases". OK, I can go with that, but something here still
troubles me. We can't surely dismiss these origins as fictive any more than we can
dismiss the other observers we find in our environment as fictive. How do you see the
relationship between these accounts (the exterior physical and the machine
psychological)? It occurs to me that in some ways the anthropic explanation of the fluky
coincidences of the laws of nature resembles the machine psychology account - in that
the requirements of existing as a complex self-aware machine in a sense "cause" the laws
of the universe to be what they are. The need for logical consistency constrains the
environment and its laws in very specific, complex ways. It's almost strange that it's
taken us so long to realize just how extraordinary it is that the "laws" work, that they
are capable of creating the complexity and beauty we see.
Check out the book "The Comprehensible Cosmos" by my friend Vic Stenger. It goes *part*
way in explaining this.
Only a huge, unfathomable amount of selective work could lead to a structure like the
calabi yau manifolds etc, with its staggeringly elegant capacity to generate complexity
from simplicity. So... that work I describe would be the infinite computations in the
UD, and just as all the complexity in the UD is surrounded by a vastly greater region of
garbled junk, so the physical account relies on a similar surrounding region of
incoherence. Which makes me wonder: are the two accounts just mirror images somehow? Are
the garbled, dead, sterile, incoherent universes the reflection of those infinite
sterile computations? Is there an observer of these dead regions? Or are the observers
like fleeting Boltzmann brain or quantum fuzz in the void: incoherent, fleeting, barely
aware, but just there enough? I hope I make sense...
Now a second thing. Comp suggests, or predicts, Many Worlds, and says physics arises
from the measure of the observer computations. But string theory suggests many
physics(es!). So this is intriguing. Are we humans (and other animals in this
multiverse) bound to one set of physics as it were, while perhaps other (more complex?)
observers occupy a world with different laws? Because it seems we have only one of two
options. Either the other possible physics are all sterile, or there is something about
the types of mathematical structures that we are that keeps us bound to this particular
set of observer states, not letting us "slip over" into universes with different laws?
Might we not be capable of a kind of mathematical state change that would see us
metamorphose, wake up in a world with different laws? Might death and birth not be such
state changes? (This last suggestion no doubt getting too mystical for many whose
self-appointed job it is to crush any idea that smacks of the Big Guy Upstairs who we've
had so much trouble with in the past, but you're not afraid of the G-word it seems, so I
ask anyway (not that survival of death has to bring God with it, but some people are
sensitive about these things.))
Given that you don't remember any past life (though some people claim to) the question is,
what survives? Is there a kind of soul that is independent of memory but is a "person"?
My own pet idea at the moment is a simple rule that seems at the least strongly
suggested by scientific experience to date and to me just intuitively compelling. It is
simply that there are no brute facts. Or another way of saying this is that there are no
"hard" ontological boundaries, no places where that which exists nakedly abuts
non-existence, in the way that a brute fact is encased as it were in a boundary of
nothingness beyond which one cannot travel. So far, wherever we look we find that
apparently hard boundaries are illusions. Every apparently closed system turns out to be
incomplete (yes Gödel again),
But the integers were not even apparently closed, ex hypothesi every number has a
successor, and it's this infinity that leads to incompleteness.
to be contained as a special case within some more encompassing whole. I believe this is
true infinitely and in all "directions". And so when people pin their hopes on string
theory as a Final Explanation, I don't believe it, just as I don't believe the spatial
dimensions will stop at the current count of 11. They can't, if my idea is correct,
because that 11th dimension would be a hard boundary. The flower of knowledge will keep
opening and opening.
But you're looking at our theories as reality. If you look at them as models we invent to
explain the world then it's not so mystical and it's easy to understand that not only does
the flower of knowledge open, it also gets discarded and replaced.
Brent
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