Haha... a glas of wine and a lie down seems like the appropriate response either way!
But your response is clarifying... It's like the idea of the zero-energy universe but in informational terms... The universe is 'substantially' nothing, and we and our surroundings are 'just' its mutually cancelling parts... I must confess I hadn't look at it this way yet.... There is something Platonic about this view, not just its mathematical Platonism obviously, but also Plato's idea that the sensory world is really nothing because it is in constant flux and therefore never really is anything... I'm also reminded of Buddhism... Do you know his wonderful quote by Isaac Asimov: "Where did the substance of the universe come from? . . If 0 equals ( + 1) + (-1), then something which is 0 might just as well become + 1 and -1. Perhaps in an infinite sea of nothingness, globs of positive and negative energy in equal-sized pairs are constantly forming, and after passing through evolutionary changes, combining once more and vanishing. We are in one of these globs between nothing and nothing and wondering about it." I love that quote! Something else: do you know the philosophy of the 19th century thinker Philip Mainländer? He argued that the universe came into existence through the suicide of some primordial divinity: the cosmos is its decaying corpse, basically the transition from divine being to non-being... This grim vision repeatedly came to my mind when I pondered the idea of the universe being an elaborate form of nothing.... Here is a blog piece I found about Mainländer: http://philosophy-of-redemption.blogspot.com.br/2013/05/the-rotting-god-mainlanders-metaphysic.html for every observer doing action A there is an "anti-observer" doing the opposite action, and that these cancel out overall (though not locally, and we can only ever observe what's happening locally). To put it another way, if we assume the world is somehow built from information, this is along the lines of each positive number having a negative counterpart. > > > Either that or I need to get a large glass of wine and have a little lie > down. > > > -- 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 post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
