Re: anthropic arguments in Tegmark's paper

From: Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Mon Jun 7 03:31:51 1999

Christopher Maloney wrote:

>He [Tegmark] kept referring to us as existing firmly inside one
>mathematical structure, and just not being sure which one that
>is. But isn't it true that if multiple structures admit a
>substructure identical to us, that we really exist in all of
>those?

Indeed. There is no sense (IMHO) in referring to us as existing inside one
structure and not being sure wich one it is.
Our consciousness, or more simply our expectations, are *linked* to sets
(with infinite cardinals) of branching and fusing computationnal
histories. Even this way of talking is a little misleading ...
The point
here is that Tegmark ascribes consciousness to "physical processes" but
also
defines "physical" by referring to SSA in sufficiently rich mathematical
structure. In this way neither the term "consciousness" nor the term
"physical" will ever be explained.


Christopher Maloney wrote:

>I think that anthropic arguments are interesting because it
>has always seems to me that they imply multiple universes. That
>is, unless one is arguing that the universe was created
>especially for us, how else could we find this amazing
>coincidence of circumstances which allows us to be here? How
>else but that a variety of universes really do exist?

This is exactly the point of Leslie's book "UNIVERSES" (published by
 routledge book).
Leslie gives in that book an argument showing that "either
God exists or all universes exist". It is a curious fact that
this book has been seldomly cited (if ever
at all) in this list.

Bruno
Received on Mon Jun 07 1999 - 03:31:51 PDT