Bruno: 'To be honest I always fear a bit those who want to help me or
others,
but thanks anyway for the good intentions (which pave the way to hell
... :) '
MP: yes, I can relate to that. Be reassured then that as I understand it
[AIUI], helping you and others is very much in my own interest. I must
feel that my life has meaning. Without this, getting up in the morning
would become a terrible effort never mind going to work in the
oxymoronic, Sisyphus-world of bureaucracy. Amongst other things this
entails belief that the things I do contribute to the well being and
survival prospects of those I love and also to the benefit of those upon
whom my children and their children will depend in the future. As I like
to say: the human universe is always potentially infinite, so long as it
exists and we believe it to be so. However I have not met anyone who can
reassure me that the human species has anything much more than a 50%
chance of surviving beyond the next 200 years.
I can see how all the pieces necessary to create sustainable and
enduring social and cultural networks and systems already exist; the
technology has already been invented, the theory has all been written
down. What is not clear to me however is how to ensure that everybody
with the need [effectively everybody on the planet] can access the
information they need to make fully informed decisions about the crucial
issues which affect us. I am pretty much convinced that the answer/s
involves person to person dialogue rather than propaganda and oratory,
and the empowerment of individuals to undertake human sized projects
rather than the regimenting of industrial clone armies in massive
organisations. AIUI the practice of sceptical inquiry is fundamental to
getting things right. In this vein, we all need to help each other to
see on the one hand the formidable danger which affects absolutely ALL
of us, and on the other hand to see the utterly amazing potential for
creatively solving all the practical problems that confront us. Such is
the nature of the modern world as it is transformed again and again by
the fruits of the application of scientific method.
Bruno: 'Then I can explain you with all details why the proposition "we
will all 1-die" is provably "put in doubt" once we assume either just
comp or even just quantum mechanics. With QM this is not wishful
thinking but "terrorful" thinking: a priori the QM immortality is not
fun: each time we die clinically (in a relative third person way), from
our personal point of view we survive in the closer normal comp.
history. A case can been made that this entails a sort of eternal agony.
Of course this can be nuanced too. With comp some weird gap seems to
exist ... '
MP: I do not understand this. I am surprised to notice, however, a faint
resemblance to something I read once concerning the teachings of George
Gurdjieff, an ethnic Armenian who became a teacher of 'esoteric
religion' and some very deep insights into how humans function, in the
early 20 Century. He died in 1952 in France. Gurdjieff was asked what
was the truth about reincarnation, and the reply was along the lines of:
talk of souls transmigrating from body to body over millennia was
misleading, it is more like that if a person could not see what they
were really doing, and what they are, then they [we] are condemned to
live and relive that same life - until we realise what is happening [I
suppose, or some such ... ].
Well once upon a time I was very enthusiastic about George Gurdjieff's
teachings but now I think just that his psychological insights and
practical methods were good but too much of his metaphysics, for want of
a better word, is pre-scientific in origin.
Bruno: 'Have you an opinion on QM interpretation?'
MP: Well, from my particular style of ignorance, I take it that QM is a
descriptive system that allows predictions and explanations to be made
about how things do or will occur at the smallest scales of measurement
that scientists can currently observe. I take with a grain of salt all
statements that the noumenal world, or even parts of it, cannot exist
without an observer. That world - 'The Great It' - I like to call it,
exists whether we know about it or not. We participate and make things
happen, but usually without being very aware of it. Our awareness is
what it is like to be the updating of the brain's model of self in the
world, and this model is a cryptic, or encrypted, analogue system. It is
complex and subtle but classical as opposed to Quantum in nature, in
that the dynamic logical entities which mental objects and so forth are
aggregate effects of literally millions of neuron interactions. I take
it that harmonic resonance and all manner of standing wave effects are
essential to the spatia-temporal structure of perceptions and other
mental objects. So, AIUI, clearly the world described by QM is very
weird from our classical and naive experience view point, but it is so
whether we know about it or not. The world we are normally aware of, or
our experience of it if you like, is our brain's analogue description of
the emergent properties of space-time, energy and matter at our bodies'
order of magnitude.
Bruno: 'Worst, I do believe this assumption is contrary to both
logic+arithmetic (and comp) and with the empirical data'
MP: What data?
MP: Existence entails being somewhere and IMO, except possibly for the
smallest conceivable distances of Planck length, whatever it is that IS
somewhere ENDURES while other things change around it. I have written
before about my Process Physics inspired conception of connections
[called Janus] being ultimately all that is and that particles of matter
and energy are knot-like, self-entangled concentrations of the every
collapsing plenitude of simplifying connections. It just seems to me to
be logically necessary that existence and location are prerequisites for
anything else. Perhaps that should be existence, location and
separation. But anyway, words fail and something like the Chinese Yin
and Yang conception actually makes a lot of sense [thinks: the
interpenetration and eternal separation of two branes might be just that!]
Numbers are written and imagined as existing in their own right
Regards
Mark Peaty CDES
mpeaty.domain.name.hidden
http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/
Bruno Marchal wrote:
> Hi Mark,
>
> (To the other: I will read and comment the remaining posts after next
> wednesday; I am very busy).
>
> Le 08-janv.-07, à 18:31, Mark Peaty a écrit :
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Received on Tue Jan 16 2007 - 07:51:47 PST