On 03 Jan 2015, at 06:05, 'Roger' via Everything List wrote:
Even if the word "exists" has no use because everything exists, it
seems important to know why everything exists.
But everything does not exist. At the best, you can say everything
consistent or possible exist.
Anyway, as I said, the notion of nothing and everything, which are
conceptually equivalent, needs a notion of thing. That notion of thing
will need some thing to be accepte
It is often ambiguous in this thread if people talk about every
physical things, every mathematical things, every epistemological
things, every theological things, ...
So, we cannot start from nothing.
We light try the empty theory: no axioms at all. But then its
semantics will be all models, and will needs some set theory (not
nothing!) to define the models. The semantics of the empty theory is a
theory of everything, but in a sort of trivial way.
Computationalism makes this clear, I think. We need to assume 0 (we
can't prove its existence from logic alone, we need also to assume
logic, if only to reason about the things we talk about, even when
they do not exist).
Then once we have the numbers, the addition and multiplication axioms,
we have a Turing universal system and all its relative manifestations,
i.e. all computations or all true sigma_1 sentences, and the physical
reality is an illusion coming from the internal statistics on the
computations.
How is it that a thing can exist?
With computationalism, we cannot answer that question, but we can
entirely explain why. We need to assume one universal system (be it
numbers, fortran programs, or combinatirs, ...). Then the physical is
a sum of all the computations.
What I suggest is that a grouping defining what is contained within
is an existent entity.
That is similar to some comprehension set theoretical axioms. The
origianl comprehension axiom (by Frege) was shown to be inconsistent
by Bertrand Russell, and this leads to the sophisticate set theory,
like ZF (Zermelo-Fraenkel) or NBG (von Neuman Bernays Gödel).
Note that set theories assumes much more than arithmetic. Set theories
are handy in math, but is a bit trivial in metaphysics. It assumes too
much. It contains Quantum mechanics, and all possible variants,
including non linear QM, Newtonian mechanics, etc.
Then, you can use this to try and answer the other question of "Why
is there something rather than nothing?".
You reduce existence to set existence. You will need to assume the
axioms of some set theory. It is more precise than Tegmark, but it
will lead to the problem of where does those set comes from, and why
that set theory and not another. The problem with set is that there is
no clear notion of a standard model of set theory. With
computationalism sets are just a good mind tool for the numbers or the
machines.
Bruno
On Thursday, January 1, 2015 12:17:37 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:
On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 11:36 PM, 'Roger' via Everything List
<[email protected]> wrote:
>>> propose that a thing exists if it is a grouping or relationship
present defining what is contained within.
>> If nothing is contained within then that is very well defined,
therefore nothing exists. Something obviously also exists, but if
both something and nothing exist then there is no contrast and the
word "exists" is drained of all usefulness.
> What I was trying to get at is that the most fundamental unit of
existence and the most fundamental instantiation of the word exists
is the existent entity that is, I think, incorrectly called the
"absolute lack-of-all".
Existent entity? But something that has the existent property is
something that exists, and round and round we go. Once again the
word "exists" is drained of all usefulness.
John K Clark
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