On 15 November 2014 20:27, Peter Sas <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi Russell, thanks for your answer... I will definitely give your book a > closer reading in the near future, if I can get my poor philosopher's head > to understand the mathematics :) > > I hope you don't mind answering some questions in advance. You wrote: > > Exactly. The source of the symmetry breaking is the action of an > >> observer. Symmetry is restored by considering all other observers out >> there in the "Nothing"-verse (more commonly called the Plenitude). >> > > This what I don't get: How can there already exist observers (or at least > one observer) prior to the symmetry breaking, given that it is this > breaking that turns zero-info into info? > I don't think the claim is that the observers exist prior to the Nothing in a temporal sense, an ontological sense, or even a logically prior sense. I think your viewpoint as expressed below, of the form "A must exist in order to cause B" isn't exactly how it works, although I am hard pressed to put this intuition into words. I'm sure Russell can answer you far more precisely, but my feeling is that the Nothing is symmetrical and that the symmetry isn't broken in the physicist's sense, but only because for every observer doing action A there is an "anti-observer" doing the opposite action, and that these cancel out overall (though not locally, and we can only ever observe what's happening locally). To put it another way, if we assume the world is somehow built from information, this is along the lines of each positive number having a negative counterpart. Either that or I need to get a large glass of wine and have a little lie down. > In other words: if you already presuppose an observer, your Nothing is not > absolutely nothing... it is an observed nothing, but in my view we can't > even presuppose an observer if we want to answer Leibniz' question by > starting from nothing... I admit there is some paradox involved in > imagining a 'situation' in which nothing exists, not even an observer... we > have to imagine a situation where we ourselves do not exist... to some > extent that's impossible of course... after all, I have to exist in order > to imagine my own non-existencee... so some observer is always pressupposed > (Kan would call this the transcendental subject)... but in my view we can't > let that presupposed observer interact with the original nothing to cause > symmetry breaking....How do you think about this? > > On a more positive note, I like the idea that nothingness is perfectly > symmetrical.... If we define symmetry as remaining the same under > transformations, shouldn't we then say that nothing is the most symmetrical > entity, since nothing can change it? And if that is the case, then the fact > that nature becomes ever more symmetrical the more we delve into > fundamentals (ever more elementary particles and laws) suggests that we > ultimately arive at nothing since that's the most symmetric.... this is > speculative, of course, but there seems to be some logic to it... > > -- 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.
