On 15 Nov 2014, at 13:44, Peter Sas wrote:
Haha... a glas of wine and a lie down seems like the appropriate
response either way!
But your response is clarifying... It's like the idea of the zero-
energy universe but in informational terms... The universe is
'substantially' nothing, and we and our surroundings are 'just' its
mutually cancelling parts... I must confess I hadn't look at it
this way yet.... There is something Platonic about this view, not
just its mathematical Platonism obviously, but also Plato's idea
that the sensory world is really nothing because it is in constant
flux and therefore never really is anything... I'm also reminded of
Buddhism...
Do you know his wonderful quote by Isaac Asimov:
"Where did the substance of the universe come from? . . If 0 equals
( + 1) + (-1), then something which is 0 might just as well become +
1 and -1. Perhaps in an infinite sea of nothingness, globs of
positive and negative energy in equal-sized pairs are constantly
forming, and after passing through evolutionary changes, combining
once more and vanishing. We are in one of these globs between
nothing and nothing and wondering about it."
Computationalism is more simple: there is just no substance. It is
like in matrix (with some imporatnt difference though): an infinity of
"video gams" which interfere statistically. No need of assuming time,
particles, energy, nor space, observers, etc. You can derive physics
from any theory you want, as long as that theory is Turing-complete.
I love that quote!
Something else: do you know the philosophy of the 19th century
thinker Philip Mainländer? He argued that the universe came into
existence through the suicide of some primordial divinity: the
cosmos is its decaying corpse, basically the transition from divine
being to non-being... This grim vision repeatedly came to my mind
when I pondered the idea of the universe being an elaborate form of
nothing.... Here is a blog piece I found about Mainländer: http://philosophy-of-redemption.blogspot.com.br/2013/05/the-rotting-god-mainlanders-metaphysic.html
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.
This gives a substance view of numbers, but that is playing with the
words. (N,+,*) is already Turing complete: it generates all dreams.
You can use (Z,+,*), but that would already be like copying nature.
So, with computationalism at least, the best image is the indian-greek
image of the dreams. negative numbers can already put in the dreams.
To be sure, I realize that my explanation of the locality preserving
MW view of the singlet state might be incoherent with this. I have to
think more on this.
Bruno
Either that or I need to get a large glass of wine and have a little
lie down.
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