On 11/07/07, Torgny Tholerus [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
One exemple of a possible world is that GoL-universe, of which there is a
picture of on the Wikipedia page.
One interesting thing about this particular GoL-universe is that it is
finite, the time goes in a circle in that universe. That universe only
consists of 14 situations. After the 14th situation follows the 1st
situation again.
This GoL-universe exists, but it is a non-reflexive world, I can not see
anything reflexive in that universe.
I don't understand why, despite everything I've said to the contrary,
you still see GoL as non-reflexive. Perhaps you mean that no
evolutionary stage of 'GoL-Universe' is in fact sufficiently complex
to support conscious participants? But that in itself doesn't make
GoL constitutively non-reflexive - i.e. lacking self-access - merely
too simple in actual structure to manifest this in the form of
conscious agents. I get really confused when you jump about between
GoL and your original B-Universe story. I have no quarrel with GoL.
It's the B-Universe that I suggested wasn't possible, because you
*specified* it to be non-reflexive in just the sense I've discussed:
i.e. that despite it having the same structure and behaviour as the
A-Universe, it is supposed to lack all self-access. My point is just
that any 'universe' described in such a comprehensively inaccessible
way may just be a misconception that doesn't deserve to survive the
cut of Occam's razor. We can't observe it, it can't observe itself:
in what further sense is it 'possible'?
My whole point in being so tediously explicit about 'reflexivity', as
I said to Brent, was because I doubted that everyone shared the
intuition that 'existence simpliciter', as he put it, given sufficient
complexity of structure, just *entails* equivalent complexity of
self-access: IOW what ultimately we term consciousness. You seem
indeed not to share this intuition, and as a result, in various ways,
you've either denied that you yourself are conscious, or postulated
'identical' universes which mysteriously lack this 'extra ingredient'.
I don't believe such claims make much sense.
David
David Nyman skrev:
On 11/07/07, Brent Meeker [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
(quite contrary to the premise of the everything-list, but one that I'm
glad to entertain).
For what it's worth, I really don't see that this is necessarily
contrary to the premise of this list. The proposition is that all
POSSIBLE worlds exist, not that anything describable in words (or for
that matter mathematically) 'exists'. My analysis is an attempt to
place a constraint on what can be said to exist in any sense strong
enough to have any discernible consequences, either for us, or for
any putative denizens of such 'worlds'. So I would argue that
non-reflexive worlds are not possible in any consequential sense of
the term.
What do you mean with a POSSIBLE world?
One exemple of a possible world is that GoL-universe, of which there is a
picture of on the Wikipedia page.
One interesting thing about this particular GoL-universe is that it is
finite, the time goes in a circle in that universe. That universe only
consists of 14 situations. After the 14th situation follows the 1st
situation again.
This GoL-universe exists, but it is a non-reflexive world, I can not see
anything reflexive in that universe.
--
Torgny Tholerus
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