On 3/10/2018 7:50 PM, Russell Standish wrote:
On Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 07:14:16PM -0800, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 3/10/2018 5:19 PM, Russell Standish wrote:
On Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 04:14:13PM -0800, Brent Meeker wrote:
We want POVI. We look for symmetries, which are no more than patterns, that
we can build theories around. The fact that we're only satisfied with
theories that don't depend on particularities, i.e. are as general as
possible, doesn't mean we can make them out of whole cloth, independent of
observation.
So in effect, you are claiming it is possible for an environment to exist that
doesn't have any patterns, under any transformation of variables,
whatsoever.
I suppose that is logically possible...
You didn't answer the second corollary part, which is the implication
that a rocks does not compute all computations under suitable
interpretation of its state variables.
I'm not sure what you're getting at? If the state evolution of the rock
is truly random then there will be no way to determine what
transformation will converse some variable, except the trivial ones of
simply ignoring the rock and outputting the conserved value.
Brent
although I don't see how one could
exist in such an environment.
Probably by inventing POVI by suitable variable transformations
But it's not what I said. I was answering
Bruce's concern that if one imposes POVI our theories would have no
empirical content. I look at as selecting for POVI, not imposing it.
I was never claiming there was no empirical content. Evolution would
have fashioned us to see the environment in a patterned way, so it
become unsurprising that we will see some patterns in empirical
data. Those patterns will not be predictable ab initio, as it will
depend on the tortuous path that evolution took.
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