On 13 November 2014 20:38, Peter Sas <[email protected]> wrote:
> I've read it... well I've read parts of it anyway... I downloaded a copy > from the net, I don't know if that's also the final book version of his > Theory of Nothing... The problem is I'm not too good with mathematical and > logical formalisms (I have dyscalculia, I mix the symbols up)... So what I > understood from Russell's book is rather limited, I'm sad to say... Anyway, > I printed a copy of Russell's book but it's storeda way now since we are in > the middle of moving... I intend to delve into Russell's book more > extensively later... What I gather from Russell is that he too starts with > an information-theoretic account of nothing.... I appreciate his argument > that an informational nothing is equivalent with a state of infinite > complexity (Babel's library) where it is impossible to find relevant info > and so the informational content is zero... It is unclear to me, however, > how he is able to derive reality from such a situation... Does Russell's > scheme, too, involve something like a spontaneous symmetry breaking of the > informational nothing? > > Obviously Russell can answer your questions far better than I can! But maybe getting an outside perspective will be of some interest (if only because it shows how I can get things wrong...) I believe you have to assume that elementary arithmetic and logical relations exist, in the sense that it is impossible that, in any universe, 1 + 1 would not be equal to 2. One also has to make various postulates about what observers are, i.e. that they are information processors of some type, and that the abstract relations that exist in elementary arithmetic are equivalent to computations. From those assumptions (or ones fairly like them, if I got them wrong) one can postulate that what really exists are abstract computational and arithmetical relations, and that observers and the physical world can be derived from these. These are also the bases from which Bruno derives "comp", which I believe is trongly related to Russell's "theory of nothing" (although perhaps Russell's version is more accessible to those of us who get the symbols confused, as I often do). -- 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.
