On 9/09/2017 9:36 am, Russell Standish wrote:
On Fri, Sep 08, 2017 at 05:08:39PM +1000, Bruce Kellett wrote:
OK, proper time is taken from SR and applied only locally, so the
concept is not ruled out by GR. The problem is still that you have
simply introduced a time parameter out of thin air. If you are to
have time in the picture, it must emerge from the timeless
bitstrings, and you have given no account of how this might happen.
I think you are imposing a requirement for theory completeness I do
not impose myself. After all, my theory is not a "theory of
everything", but a theory of "Nothing".
You are right, that ultimately, we would like to know how subjective
time arises - whether it is via Barbour's time capsules, or some other
stitching of observer moments, or the natural connection between
machine states during a computation in a computationlist account.
However, my approach is - OK - we're probably not going to solve this
problem any time soon - so let's just assume that psychological time
is necessary, and see where that takes us. That is my TIME
postulate. If the results are nonsense, then we need to reexamine the
various assumptions. So far, they're not nonsense.
This is not really what you propose in your book:
"Our descriptions are so detailed that perhaps it no longer makes sense
to ask Stephen Hawking’s question “what breathes fire into them?”[59].
Putting Hawking’s question aside, a question that has no answer in
conventional ontologies, we note that the collection of all possible
descriptions has zero complexity, or information content. This is a
consequence of algorithmic information theory, the fundamental theory of
computer science. There is a mathematical equivalence between the
Everything, as represented by this collection of all possible
descriptions and Nothing, a state of no information. That some of the
descriptions must describe conscious observers who obviously observe
something, gives us a mechanism for getting Something from Nothing:
Something is the “inside view” of Nothing. Hence my book’s title /Theory
of Nothing/."
That seems to commit you to finding consciousness in the infinite set of
all possible bitstrings. And if you are to find consciousness there, you
must, as a preliminary, at least find a decent theory of emergent time
there.
It seems that as difficulties arise, you shy away from the grand scheme
as outlined in the introduction to your book.
Bruce
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