On 10 May 2017 6:45 a.m., "Brent Meeker" <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I'm not so concerned about the measure being non-zero. I'm sure
fans of "everything" will just appeal to self-selection: the
anthropic principle applied to the UD.
It seems to me that that is just an appeal to some sort of magic. If the
threads supporting consciousness are of zero measure, how does there
come to be a consciousness in the first place? To self-select anything?
It makes consciousness the primary self-existing thing, and the supposed
underlying computations merely derivative.
My point is that the computations in the threads supporting some
consistent consciousness will necessarily be computing also a
consistent physics...that there cannot be JUST conscious thoughts.
They must be embedded in a physical world, whether that world is
made of arithmetic or something else.
I agree completely.
It is this physics environment that makes it possible to define
"consistent continutation" as Bruce notes. So then Bruno's theory
doesn't seem so different from what Tegmark and other physicists
seek in a TOE. From the physics-first perspective, he has just
hyposthesized which computations that are instantiating a physics
also instantiate consciousness.
It seems difficult to avoid that conclusion. Or, to put it the other way
around, the computations that support consciousness necessarily also
instantiate the underlying physics. Does that render physics otiose? It
seems to put physics on the same level as consciousness, so which one is
seen as more important is a matter of arbitrary choice.
Bruce
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