Hi Jesse:
"Meaning" can not be assigned as an inherent component of the All. That would be a selection. "Meaning" can only be assigned if at all within the wave of "physical reality" associated with an evolving Something. Evolving Somethings will eventually encompass pairs of counterfactual and self counterfactual kernels of information thus making their future evolution which is an individual journey to completeness inconsistent with their past evolution. Thus the All is filled with inconsistent and non selected [random] activity. Its internal dynamic is random and inconsistent. Are these both not required for a global non selected activity? Random could still be consistent which would be a selection.
Hal
At 09:10 PM 12/10/2004, you wrote:
Hal Ruhl wrote:
A kernel of information is the that information constituting a particular potential to divide.
The All contains all such kernels.
The All is internally inconsistent because it contains for example a complete axiomatized arithmetic as well as an infinity of other such kernels of information.
So a set of all statements generated by an axiomatic system would qualify as a "kernel of information"? Even if you allow inconsistent axiomatic systems (as opposed to just consistent but incomplete ones), I still don't see why this makes the All inconsistent. After all, an axiomatic system is just a rule for generating strings of symbols which have no inherent meaning, such as "TBc3\". It is only when we make a mapping between the symbols and a *model* in our head (like 'in terms of my model of arithmetic, let T represent the number two, B represent addition, c represent the number three, 3 represent equality, and \ represent the number five') that we can judge whether any pair of symbol-strings is "inconsistent". Without such a mapping between symbols and models there can be no notion of "inconsistency", because two meaningless strings of symbols cannot possibly be inconsistent. And if we do assign symbol-strings a meaning in terms of a model, then if we find that two strings *are* inconsistent, that doesn't mean the symbols represent an inconsistent model, it just means that one of the statements must be *false* when applied to the model (for example, the symbol-string 7+1=9 is false when applied to our model of arithmetic). The model itself is always consistent. So unless you believe that inconsistent axiomatic systems represent true facts about inconsistent models, I don't think you can say the All must be inconsistent based on the fact that it contains rules which generate false statements about models as well as true ones.
Jesse
