On 8/20/2014 5:38 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 18 Aug 2014, at 20:11, meekerdb wrote:
On 8/18/2014 1:49 AM, Pierz wrote:
On Monday, August 18, 2014 5:33:19 AM UTC+10, Brent wrote:
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.
I'm not sure how much more explanation it requires. The anthropic principle plus
multiverse will do it, won't it?
Stenger's approach to physics is that it is based on point-of-view-invariance, i.e. we
want physical laws to hold for everyone in every time and place and direction and state
of motion, and...whatever else we can include. It's sort of what we mean by "physical
law" in contrast to geographical or historical accident. He shows that we can get a
suprising amount out of this (at least surprising if you don't already know who Emma
Noether was).
... or if you don't know the consequence of comp, where physics is
1) invaruant for all universal machine
But within comp that's just a definition of "physics". It doesn't tell you what the
invariants are. Noether's theorem relates symmetry in a Lagrangian to a conserved quantity.
2) invariant for all choice of TOE rich enough to define a universal machine
I'm not sure what is meant by "choice of TOE". Who is doing the choosing? Under comp
we've already assumed a universal dovetailer.
Emmy Noether stiil needs a notion of space, or direction, and time ..., or some
physical universe; but she makes indeed already a good deal in the derivation of
physical laws from "first principle", notably that the laws should be invariant for the
observer in a universe (still assumed).
It's a theorem of mathematics so it applies to any theory based on Lagrangian mechanics.
The physics is in finding what Lagrangian applies.
Brent
Comp generalizes this in the extreme. Note that all this is in the line of Galilee,
Einstein, Noether, and Everett (and others).
Bruno
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