On Friday 25 January 2008, Ben Goertzel wrote: > Fans of extremely weird and silly speculative pseudo-science ideas > may appreciate my latest blog post, which posits a new > model of the universe ;-_)
Interesting post. I wonder, are you familiar with cosmological natural selection and the likes of Lee Smolin? (Other names to latch on to are John Baez, Kauffman and Brockman (the publisher), but only Smolin deals with CNS). Selection principles can be integrated into your idea somehow, to sprinkle in some anthropic thought as well as cellular automaton laws at the same time, etc. What interested me was your idea that consciousness would then mean work that shifts one into another realm of possibilities. > I don't posit this hypothesis all that seriously, but I'm going to > throw it out there anyway: It seems possible to conceive of > consciousness as a faculty that facilitates movement between > multiverses! You change realities: but do you change the fundamental laws by which it operates? I have sometimes wondered what it would mean if I end up making a certain choice in a binary option. Would it mean that I have influenced the laws of physics and that it is my novelty that has led me to the result? Or am I somehow limiting myself by leading myself down a path of (what you call) multiverses to a land where the laws mandate my death? > Could the difference between physical action and mental action be that > the former has to do with movement between sibling Yverses, whereas > the latter has to do with movement between parent and child Yverses? Hm. I admire that you are dealing with an idea that otherwise might seem unworthy of note, but it is fun to deal in ideas and figure out what may or may not be useful, and I think there may be some things that we can usefully extract from this subject in general. The mindset that I am trying to apply to your yverse model is from Egan's Luminous short-story, the one that Baez once quoted (week123): > "Think about it. Once you start trying to prove a theorem, then even > if the mathematics is so `pure' that it has no relevance to any other > object in the universe... you've just made it relevant to yourself. > You have to choose some physical process to test the theorem - whether > you use a computer, or a pen and paper... or just close your eyes and > shuffle neurotransmitters. There's no such thing as a proof which > doesn't rely on physical events, and whether they're inside or outside > your skull doesn't make them any less real." (Somehow there would have to be a generative force allowing the development of 'theorems' just out there in an abstract landscape, for all things must be based on simpler things all the way back to the primal source (an open force?). This is probably where the cellular automata comes in at.) Egan also describes how physical events can pioneer mathematics, like mathematicians shuffling around neurotransmitters, or even supernovae that produce processes that also test various theorems of mathematics. To integrate this into your yverse model, re: consciousness, perhaps each thought that you have is an expression of a mathematical theorem (of the sort Egan is talking about), and is particularly adding to the rules and laws of the universe, building up theorems. In the story, (spoiler alert), the heroes try to rapidly close the border so that no 'evil' theorems can enter the landscape and shuffle everything up, via intense computational work to go over all sorts of theorems to tie up the border between 'taken' and 'untaken' theorems. This is, perhaps, somewhat like what you are proposing for consciousness (except without MWI- which you are free to sprinkle in if you want). So, in this interpretation, consciousness is not the only thing that is able to facilitate the elucidation of the laws of the local reality, but really anything is, and consciousness just happens to be a neat way to get quick results of complex theorems and so on (even if the math we write on paper is simple, our neurons in our brain are wired in trillions of different ways, proving all sorts of theorems in graph theory). Thoughts? - Bryan ________________________________________ Bryan Bishop http://heybryan.org/ ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=4007604&id_secret=90167672-80d674
