On 15 Nov 2008, at 12:12, Michael Rosefield wrote:
> Yeah, I think that was meat to be either short-sightedness,
> racketeering, or just an attempt to push his own reality in a
> certain direction on the character's part.
>
> For me, though, the thing about a stone implementing all possible
> computations is that you end up with no possible way of knowing
> whether you're in the 'stone reality' or some abstraction from it -
> you start off with physicalism and end up with some kind of
> neoplatonism. Of course, you could still argue that you need some
> kind of physical seed, but again what I take from this is that since
> you can perform as much abstraction on the substrate as you like, it
> doesn't matter how small it is - it can even be completely nothing.
> My simplistic version works like this:
>
> 'Nothing' := 'Something' -> 'Everything'
Hmmm... You go to far. Since the failure of logicism, we know that yoy
will be unable to recover even the natural number from nothing, or
even from logic. To have the number, and thus the programs and the
computations, you need at least ... the numbers.
That is why elementary arithmetic is a good starting ontology. Without
the (natural) numbers, you don't get them, and with them, you can get
everything. And if comp is true, you get them with the right measure,
meaning it is just a mathematical problem to derive the SWE, from
which you can derive F= MA, and all the physical laws.
=======================
Stathis wrote also:
>> 'Nothing' := 'Something' -> 'Everything'
>
> Just what I was saying!
OK, I guess you were meaning by nothing: "nothing physical". Of course
this is not "nothing at all". We have to postulate the numbers without
which there is no notion of computations.
Even the UD, seen extensionally as a function, is the empty function
from nothing to nothing, given that it has no inputs and no outputs.
Set theoretically it belongs to nothing^nothing, which gives the set
{nothing}, which is a singleton, not an empty set. Of course, the
deployment is not particularly interesting when viewed extensionnaly.
It is then equivalent with the program BEGIN DO NOTHING REPEAT END.
The interest of the UD appears when viewed intensionnaly: it creates
and executes all programs, in all programming language.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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