Re: Rép : The Meaning of Life

From: Tom Caylor <Daddycaylor.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2007 10:00:08 -0800

On Jan 26, 9:22 am, Bruno Marchal <marc....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
>
> > Also, I still don't understand how you will avoid the white rabbits.
>
> By extracting the physical laws from some 1-person machine measure.
> This one can be extracted from some interview of an honest
> self-observing machine. Well, to be sure, I'm saying this since 1973
> but it is only in 1991 that I have find a "formal" clue of the reason
> why the rabbits could disappear: the logic of certainty, corresponding
> to the godelian sort of undeterminateness, allows a formal quantization
> of the true Sigma_1 propositions (= those corresponding to the
> accessible state of the UD). This is by far NOT enough for already
> pretending that comp will avoid the white rabbits, but, imo, it is
> enough to make very plausible they can disappear through purely number
> theoretical reason, so that we don't have to rely on some material
> assumption, which puts the mind body problem (my basic motivation)
> under the aristotelian rug.
>
> But sure, the disappearance of white rabbits with comp is still an open
> problem. Brent seems to believe it is yet open in QM too, which is
> coherent with the fact that most MWI relies implicitly or not on some
> comp assumption. I sum up this sometimes by saying that decoherence +
> MWI avoids 3-person rabbits, but not the 1-person one. Actually I have
> argue that ASSA does the same. Some bayesian stuff seems to be able to
> eliminate the 3-rabbits (or the first plural person one), but hardly
> the first person one (I refer to my oldest post to this list, but I can
> repeat, especially when encouraged, the subject matter is tricky).
>
> Bruno

Why do we need to eliminate first-person white rabbits? For purposes
of science, is not elimination of third-person (or first-person plural)
white rabbits sufficient? So what if we hallucinate, or dream about a
talking white rabbit? We can come back to "scientific reality" through
the third-person or first-person plural, i.e. methods of "objectivity"
(third-person/first-person plural view by our own definition).

By the way, I'm not implying that scientific reality is sufficient for
meaning of life. ;) My above questions are perhaps a bit rhetorical in
this sense. I think the answer is that we long to find meaning solely
through science so that we can control everything, and so we *try* to
erect science as the god over all meaning.

Tom


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Received on Fri Jan 26 2007 - 13:00:16 PST

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