On Thursday, October 3, 2013 7:36:10 PM UTC-4, Pierz wrote: > > > > On Friday, October 4, 2013 4:10:02 AM UTC+10, Craig Weinberg wrote: >> >> >> >> On Thursday, October 3, 2013 9:30:13 AM UTC-4, telmo_menezes wrote: >>> >>> On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 6:10 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> >>> wrote: >>> >>> > >>> > I think that evil continues to flourish, precisely because science has >>> not >>> > integrated privacy into an authoritative worldview. As long as >>> subjectivity >>> > remains the primary concern of most ordinary people, any view that >>> denies or >>> > diminishes it will be held at arms length. I think it secretly erodes >>> > support for all forms of progress and inspires fundamentalist politics >>> as >>> > well. >>> >>> I agree. Taking privacy literally, this is in fact one of the most >>> creepy consequences of total surveillance: denial of privacy is, in a >>> sense, a denial of the right to existence. Can one truly exist as a >>> human being as an undistinguishable part of some mass? No secrets, no >>> mysteries, what you see is what you get to the extreme. This sounds >>> like hell. >>> >> >> Right. I think that it is no coincidence that the major concerns of >> ubiquitous computing revolve around privacy, propreity, and security. >> Computers don't know what privacy is, they don't know who we are, and they >> can't care who owns what. That's all part of private physics and computers >> can only exploit the lowest common denominator of privacy - that level >> which refers only to itself as a digitally quantified object. >> >> >>> >>> >>> >>> > Once we have a worldview which makes sense of all phenomena and >>> > experience, even the mystical and personal, then we can move forward >>> in a >>> > more mature and sensible way. Right now, what is being offered is 'you >>> can >>> > know the truth about the universe, but only if you agree that you >>> aren't >>> > really part of it'. >>> >>> I believe more than this is being offered in this mailing list. I feel >>> your objections apply mostly to mainstream views, and to that degree I >>> agree with you. >>> >> >> I agree, I wasn't really talking about specialized groups like this. >> >> >>> >>> >>> > >>> > Why would MWI or evolution place a high value on leadership or >>> success? It >>> > seems just the opposite. What difference does it make if you succeed >>> here >>> > and now, if you implicitly fail elsewhere? MWI doesn't seem to >>> describe any >>> > universe that could ever matter to anyone. It's the Occam's >>> catastrophe >>> > factor. >>> >>> Highly speculative and non-rigorous: >>> You can see it differently if you can assume self-sampling. Let's >>> assume everything is conscious, even rocks. A rock is so simple that, >>> for it, a millennia probably feels like a second. It does not contain >>> a variety of conscious states like humans do. Then, you would expect >>> to find yourself as a complex being. Certain branches of the >>> multiverse contain such complex beings, and this would make evolution >>> appear more effective/purposeful than it really is, from the vantage >>> point of these branches. >>> >> >> Even so, why would uniqueness or firstness be of value in a universe >> based on such immense and inescapable redundancy as MWI suggests? >> >> > The universe doesn't seem to be too fussed about immense and inescapable > redundancy. Have you noticed all the *space* out there?? >
Sure, there's a ridiculous amount of most things, but even so, the idea that every step that every boson or fermion needs its own collection of universes for every interaction it has seems to be really bending over backward. It seems to me like an excuse for your teacher "I need to be excused from having to explain the universe, because the universe could just be one of a fantastic number of universes being created constantly, none of which I can explain either." > The progress of scientific knowledge has proceeded so far in the same > direction: the revelation of a context ever vaster and more impersonal. > Statistically that pattern is no more likely to continue than it is to be reversed. I think that Relativity gave us the chance to reverse, but since that time we have overshot the mark and pursued a path of unrealism and arithmetic supremacy that has already become dysfunctional but we are in denial about it. > MWI does strike me as quite horrifying too. But that is based on a false > perspective in which one imagine occupying all the branches of the universe > and feels naturally appalled. But nobody experiences the multiverse as such > thank god. > In my understanding, if nobody can ever experience the multiverse, then the multiverse is identical to that which can never exist. The idea of a context which simply 'is' without being described as an experience is just the default image of a God that is inverted to become the Absolute object. It's a confirmation bias rooted in how soothing it is for us to imagine that there is a reliable universal machine which we can learn to exist within using intelligence. As for what has value, again that is a matter for the first person > perspective, the limited horizon of thoughts and feelings of the > individual. From the god's eye view, any individual entity is utterly > insignificant. > Only if you assume individuality as isolation. If individuality is instead considered to be significance itself, only temporarily masked, then value is not dwarfed by insignificance. Insignificance is a floating qualifier - purely a local shadow of every individual perspective's significance. > You can't look to a cosmological theory for validation of personal > significance. > I think I already have? > You're posing the same argument against MWI as Christians posed against > Darwinism and before that the Copernican revolution. "What is > *my*significance in this picture of the world?" Well sorry bud, but the news > ain't good... > What is the significance of the world without any individuals? What would be the difference between a world that is senseless and one that does not exist? > >>> >>> >> >> >>> >> >> > Thanks, >>> >> >> > Craig >>> >> >> > >>> >> >> >> >>> >> >> >> >>> >> >> >> Cheers, >>> >> >> >> Telmo. >>> >>> -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
