On Sunday, May 24, 2015 at 7:13:01 PM UTC+10, Liz R wrote: > > The stability of natural laws is also the simplest situation, I think? > (Isn't there something in Russell's TON about this?) Natural laws remain > stable due to symmetry principles, which are simpler than anything > asymmetric (although physics contains some asymmetries, of course, like > matter vs antimatter). > > I'm not sure about this "person in an empty room" - surely they experience > all sorts of phenomena that can ultimately be traced to the laws of > physics? An obvious one is the pull of gravity (or lack thereof). >
Sorry if it wasn't clear. That paragraph was rather muddled as I tried to write my way from dim intuition to clear logic. It's probably best to ignore the empty room guy and just focus on the argument I finally got clear(er) in this paragraph: "Observers and their experiences, including physical laws, can't be kept apart by physical or temporal space, but only by differences in the computational states that define them. Physics is emergent from the computational properties of observers, and therefore any difference in physics experienced by different observers is a function of their mathematical configuration. If we find that there are observers in other universes who experience different physics, then it must be the case that the substitution level for those observers includes their entire universe." > But I have to admit I can't see how one gets from the UDA to physics. The > notion that physics "falls out of" all the computations passing through a > specific observer moment seems approximately as difficult to explain as how > physics operates if one assumes "primary materialism" > I don't think so. Physics in primary materialism is just "PFM" (Pure F#&%ing Magic). Easy enough to explain what the laws are. Impossible to explain how they came to be what they are. Comp at least gives a mechanism for a possible explanation. Of course it's of about the same value for actually deriving equations as Monty Python's lesson on how to cure all known diseases (Well you become a doctor and then you discover a wonderful cure and then jolly well tell everyone what to do and there'll never be any more diseases ever again!). > - but of course physics based on primary materialism comes with the > benefit that for 100s of years, people have believed the ontology to be > correct, and they have slowly built up a body of knowledge on that basis. > Hence comp finds itself doubly disadvantaged in that no one has worked out > how it might work in practice, and also in that most people react with an > "argument from incredulity" because they've been taught that physics is > based on primary materialism. > > This is a bit like the situation with cars that run on something other > than petrol, or subcritical nuclear reactors. No one has put in a century > of research to work out how (say) alcohol driven cars might work, or 50 > years of research on how thorium reactors might work. Or 300 years of > thinking on how reality might be derived from computations. > > Quite. Materialism has something of a head-start. -- 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.
