> On 27 Jan 2020, at 05:08, Alan Grayson <[email protected]> wrote: > > When I offered my theory of a hyper-spherical universe, I was accused of > being "Aristotelian". But why?
I might oversimplify all this to be clear and simple, but the main difference between Aristotle and Plato is that Aristotle believes in an ontologically primitive physical reality. He believes in a Universe (a physical universe), and his criteria of reality is in seeing, touching, measuring, observing. It has led to physicalism, i.e. the metaphysical assumption that physics is the fundamental science. The god/non-god debate hides the original question of the greek theologians, which was about the ontological existence of the physical universe. I did not wait Mechanism to develop doubt about this. I don’t remember having believe in”real universe out there" even one second. It does not stand the (antic) dream argument, especially when you realise that all computations are implemented in arithmetic. Aristotle: Reality is what we see. Plato: what we see might be the shadow of a simpler reality (mathematical, musical, theological, …). Science is really born from that important platonic doubt. The idea that physics has to be the fundamental science is just due to the fact that the Church has institutionalised religion, and has used a lot of Aristotle metaphysics, although Judaism, Christianism and Islam have had some intense, usually short, (neo)Platonic period, and indeed those periods were peaceful, prosper and contributed a lot to science and technology. But we have fall back in Aristotle, and today, in metaphysics, Aristotelianism, or weak materialism (the belief in some primary matter) is the main current theological paradigm. It has never been my religion. > My primary assumption was IF the universe had a start or beginning, that > "time" must of been characterized by zero volume. My reasoning is that IF had > non-zero volume, it must have begun earlier; hence, this situation wasn't its > start or beginning. My prejudice, if that's what it is, is that the creation > event, if there was one, couldn't have "started" without some time-requiring > process. So, if there was something, rather than nothing at the beginning, > the time-requiring process must have began earlier, thus contradicting the > idea of a beginning with some thing already existing, say some volume of > space. The logic here is sort-of a proof by contradiction. Whether you agree > or not, what has this to do with Aristotle? TIA, AG It presupposes some physical reality, like space, time, … I cannot explain to you why I do not believe in this, but I can prove you that the amount of mechanism needed to make sense of Darwin theory of evolution is enough to understand that the physical reality is something emergent and evolving from a non physical reality: namely elementary arithmetic (or anything Turing)-equivalent to it). If you are patient and interested, I can prove this to you. With Digital Mechanism (an hypothesis in the cognitive science), physicalism cannot work. Even if “real”, a physical universe cannot select a computation and make it more or less conscious than another in arithmetic, nor can it influence the first person indeterminacy in arithmetic, without adding some magic abilities in matter, or invoking actual infinities, which leads to abandoning Mechanism (and Darwin, …). Bruno > > -- > 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] > <mailto:[email protected]>. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/cb0b0b7f-e107-428a-8dd8-6be57170932c%40googlegroups.com > > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/cb0b0b7f-e107-428a-8dd8-6be57170932c%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>. -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/80415017-846F-4993-81D6-8136331DDFFE%40ulb.ac.be.
