Dear Jesse,
ashamed for breaking my decision NOT to babble into this discussion with my
personal common sense, here is something to your position from my problems:
(First a bit of nitpicking, as an appetizer)
> >>For example, in every world where X and Y are simultaneously true, >>>it
is also true that X is true, even if no one notices this.'
how can an unnoticed truth be included into noticed (mutual) truth?
*
Time. I tackle a timeless (atemporal) system. The problem is "change".
What does a timeless change mean? One has to eliminate 'sequence', the
result of a change, or: Hal's All is static and includes both ends of all
changes.
Hi John--I would say the idea of timeless changes makes a kind of sense, like how the value of f(x)=x^2 "changes" as x increases. Basically it just means that as you vary one thing, another thing varies along with it. And if you have a t coordinate marked "time", you can say that the state of physical systems in 3D space varies as t varies, while at the same time believing spacetime as a whole is a "timeless" entity. See this article by physicist Paul Davies on this subject:
http://www.american-buddha.com/myster.flow.physics.htm
You used the 'static' cop-out: > >> static relationships between static truths, relationships that would > >>exist regardless of whether anyone contemplated or "discovered" them. * Of course a 'change' is meaningless in this case. We speculated a lot about "Process", where change is involved between the endpoints of process. If All is not static, change is there (time?) if it is static, it is meaningless as a world. In that case it is a nirvana, static timelessness = eternity for nothing.
I disagree--if you have a movie film laid out before you, you can see all the different frames in a "timeless" way, but the people on the film seem to be perceiving the world in a sequential way. Of course the idea of distinguishing first-person perception vs. third-person "objective reality" brings up a whole 'nother set of tricky philosophical questions surrounding the nature of "consciousness", but without getting into that right now, I think my view would be that time exists on a first-person level but not at the level of an objective description of "the All".
I am afraid, although I never studied formal logic, I have an inherent sense
of 'human' logic in my speculations and cannot get over it.
Human logic (formal or formless) is one aspect of nature, not necessarily
the one covering All (of it). (The 1 = 0 case?)
*
Your discussions reached Taoistic levels, the format where not even the
contrary or other variants of a statement may be true.
Well, note that I don't actually believe contradictory statements can both be true, I was just arguing that *if* Hal Ruhl does not believe that the laws of logic apply to reality as a whole, then he has no reason to deny they could be. It was meant as more of a reductio ad absurdum than anything else.
I do have some interest in mysticism and in particular the Buddhist notion of "relative and absolute truth", described at http://tinyurl.com/5eaco , but I don't think this notion of "two truths" expresses an actual logical contradiction (two opposite statements which are both true in *exactly the same sense*), my feeling is it's something more like the philosophy "complementarity" in quantum physics, two different descriptions of the same reality. But what do I know, I'm not a mystic...
Jesse
