On Fri, 30 Jul 1999, someone wrote:
> This is from Tegmark's paper (although I think he was paraphrasing
> Tipler from Physics of Immortality):
>
> In fact, since we can choose to picture our Universe
> not as a 3D world where things happen, but as a 4D world that merely
> is, there is no need for the computer to compute anything at all --
> it could simply store all the 4D data, and the "simulated" world
> would still have PE.
I haven't read that much of Tegmarks paper. Obviously he's not a
computationalist, but so far sounds like a structuralist.
> Clearly the way in which the data is stored
> should not matter, so the amount of PE we attribute to the stored
> Universe should be invariant under data compression.
But at this point he no longer sounds like a regular stucturalist.
What he says above seems silly.
> Now the ultimate question forces itself
> upon us: for this Universe to have PE, is the CD-ROM really needed
> at all? If this magic CD-ROM could be contained within the simulated
> Universe itself, then it would "recursively" support its own PE.
> This would not involve any catch-22 "hen-and-egg" problem regarding
> whether the CD-ROM or the Universe existed first, since the Universe
> is a 4D structure which just is ("creation" is of course only a
> meaningul notion within a spacetime).
Here he doesn't answer his own question.
> In summary, a mathemtaical
> structure with SASs would have PE if it could be described purely
> formally (to a computer, say) -- and this is of course little else
> than having mathematical existence.
A case for that can be made and has been on this list, but not in
the quotes from his paper above.
- - - - - - -
Jacques Mallah (jqm1584.domain.name.hidden)
Graduate Student / Many Worlder / Devil's Advocate
"I know what no one else knows" - 'Runaway Train', Soul Asylum
My URL:
http://pages.nyu.edu/~jqm1584/
Received on Sat Jul 31 1999 - 16:45:58 PDT