Re: An All/Nothing multiverse model
Hal Ruhl wrote: At 11:41 PM 12/18/2004, you wrote: Hal Ruhl wrote: 'The laws of logic need not be thought of as rules of discovery, they can be thought of purely as expressing Expressing seems to be a time dependent process. I don't think it needs to be. When we say a certain set of symbols expresses something, in the most abstract sense we're just saying there's a mapping between the symbols and some meaning. That would be static information within a kernel. So are you agreeing it makes sense to talk about the laws of logic expressing some truths without this being a time-dependent process? static relationships between static truths, relationships that would exist regardless of whether anyone contemplated or discovered them. As are my kernels of information. 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.' Sure, That is a kernel. Observation does not make a kernel a kernel. OK, but this isn't really relevant to my question, namely, why does any of this require time? A kernel does not need a set of rules to make the informational relationships within it what they are. The very words rules, laws and the like carry the implication of a process where the rules and laws are consulted and followed. This is a hidden assumption of some ordered sequence - time. I do not know how to be clearer than that. I agree that world/kernels don't need to consult the laws of logic in order to avoid logical contradictions. I'm just saying that if you look at the facts of each world/kernel and translate these facts into propositions like all ducks have beaks (within this particular world/kernel), then you will find that no proposition or collection of propositions about a single world/kernel violate the laws of logic--for instance, you won't find that a proposition and its negation are *both* true of a single world/kernel, in exactly the same sense (ie applying to the same 'domain' like I talked about earlier). Likewise, you didn't address my point that I can't think of any historical examples of new mathematical/scientific/philosophical ideas that require you to already believe their premises in order to justify these premises, I do not believe that Cantor would be sympathetic with that. I think you need to believe in infinity in order to justify working to understand it and thus justify it. Why do you say that? Cantor's ideas about infinity could be justified in terms of existing commonly-accepted mathematical notions. For example, mathematicians already thought the idea of sets made sense, so he defined the notion of special sets called ordinals, each of which was a set of smaller ordinals, with the smallest ordinal being the empty set. Then, since there seems to be no obvious contradiction in considering the set of all countable ordinals, it's easy to see that this set is itself an ordinal but cannot be a countable one, so its cardinality must be higher than the countable ordinals--he defined this cardinality as aleph-one. Then if you consider the set of all ordinals with cardinality aleph-one, this must be an ordinal with cardinality higher than aleph-one, which he called aleph-two, and so on. See my post at http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m4919.html for a little more explanation. All this could be described in terms of preexisting ideas about set theory, he wasn't requiring anyone to already believe his ideas about infinities in order to prove them. I believe Bruno said that some information systems included a set of beliefs. As I recall the premises are these beliefs. Justification comes from emotions [based on other beliefs] surrounding the resulting system such as simplicity, elegance of apparent explanation etc. So it seems to me that justification is part of belief. My point is that if I want to demonstrate the truth of some statement X to you (without appealing to new empirical evidence), I look for some set of premises that we *already* share, and then try to show how these premises imply X. I can't think of any historical example where someone's new idea is accepted by other people without the person appealing to common premises they already share. Can you? See above re infinity. Well, see my comments above, I don't think that's a valid example. and you didn't address my question about whether you think there could be a world/kernel where a vehicle simultaneously Again time inserts itself as the notion of simultaneously. Simultaneously shouldn't be taken too literally, X and Y are simultaneously true is just a shorthand way of saying that X and Y are truths that both apply to exactly the same domain, whether same domain means same universe, same time, or whatever. For example, if I say Ronald Reagan was President of the U.S. in 1985 and Bill Clinton was President of the U.S. in 1995, these are two non-contradictory truths that apply to the domain of U.S.
Re: An All/Nothing multiverse model
John M wrote: 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
Re: An All/Nothing multiverse model
Hi Jesse: I do not think the conversation re: I can't think of any historical examples of new mathematical/scientific/philosophical ideas that require you to already believe their premises in order to justify these premises, has a valid place in this thread. Can you tell me why you do? Hal
Re: An All/Nothing multiverse model
Hal Ruhl wrote: I do not think the conversation re: I can't think of any historical examples of new mathematical/scientific/philosophical ideas that require you to already believe their premises in order to justify these premises, has a valid place in this thread. Can you tell me why you do? Because you have said that your theory has this feature, and I was trying to understand if I might be misunderstanding you by asking you for other examples of theories that you think had this feature--I thought perhaps we might be understanding the idea of having to believe the premises in order to justify the premises differently, so that you might not actually be asking people to accept the tenets of your theory on blind faith. But if there is no misunderstanding, and you are indeed saying there is absolutely no justification for believing your theory in terms of any preexisting concepts we might have, then I suppose there is no further need to discuss this question. I still have the feeling that this is not quite the case though, since you are asking for comments/critiques of your theory, but what possible basis could comments/critiques have unless you believed we all had some shared standards for judging the merits of the theory? I think if you are able to figure out what standards you are using to judge the various elements of the theory, and what standards you expect others to judge it by in order to have useful comments about it, then if you can articulate these standards you may be able to give a clearer explanation of why you think it makes sense to accept your theory. For example, one of these standards may be the a theory of everything should have no arbitrary elements idea, which I think is shared by a lot of people on this list (I described this as the 'arbitrariness problem' in my post at http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m2606.html ), and which you call the no information rule. Jesse
