On 15 Jan 2015, at 20:58, John Clark wrote:
On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 12:38 PM, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]>
wrote:
> The interesting question is not god exists or not. the interesting
question is "is the physical universe the reality, or is it an
aspect or mode of a deeper/simpler reality".
And that question can never be answered if you don't know what "the
physical universe" is supposed to mean, and you do not.
What? As brent explained we know it by ostension, and extensions of
physical facts. And we can simplify the talk by defining the physical
universe by the content pursued by the physicist.
We don't know its nature, and indeed, we don't know it exists, but we
believe a lot on it, and have a lot or reasonnably staisfying
assumptions.
It is what we see, observe, measure, touch, knock, and for the
Aristotelian, it is the basic reality.
Earlier I asked you to give me examples (NOT DEFINITIONS!) of things
that were part of "the physical universe" and things that were not
part of "the physical universe", and you were unable to do so.
What is in the physical universe?
The Mount Everest, plausibly in many close branches of the mulitiverse.
This cup of coffee.
The black Hole suspected at the center of the Milky Way galaxy,
One of the enzymes beta-galactosidase in the 456,6789th, bacteria in
my mouth (counting from the left).
One of the Englert-Brout-Higgs boson detected recently.
The moon, the sun.
What is not in the physical universe?
The numbers.
The beta-galactosidase enzyme
The notion of atoms,
The ideas,
The models of first order logical theories
The monster group,
The real line,
The digital machines, and their computations,
The persons,
Consciousness,
the dreams of physical universes, ...
... the sharable persistent one,
and the others.
Don't tell me that the number four is in the physical universe, like
those four apples on your table, as this would be a confusion between
a thing and a representation/incarnation of that thing (which will
hide the main problem of relating those things).
Bruno
John K Clark
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