On 5/24/2015 2:12 AM, LizR 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).
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" - 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.
Well actually cars running on alcohol raced on U.S. tracks through most of the 20th
century. A thorium reactor was built and operated in the 50's. I think a more accurate
analogy would working out how cars would run on trigonometry or philology.
Brent
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