Hello Moshen and welcome.
I think it is a very good question, and succinctly put.
I have been trying to ask the same question and get a plain-English
answer, but without success. Of course, I could be missing 'the point'
too, and it wouldn't be the first time by a long shot. :-)
If there was simply nothing, utterly and absolutely nothing, well that
would be the end of it: 'No problemas!' as the cool dudes say. But there
seems to be something, because I seem to be here, at the moment anyway,
and I have this distinct belief that I was here yesterday living in this
same house with all these recalcitrantly individualistic people who all
play along with a story about being my wife and children. Appeals to
solipsism degenerate into incoherent babbling; I really am here, even
though my grasp of the facts about my existence gets shaken loose every
so often. And you are here too, except you are over there. In short
there IS a universe and it seems to be remarkably self-consistent.
I, like you, am confronted by the manifest existence of an objective
reality. Being educated and impressed by the successes of the
application of scientific method we are quite well equipped to accept
certain problematic statements about the parts of the world we normally
take for granted as 'real'. We have learned that the *appearances* of
solidity, power, enduring nature, and so forth, which we experience as
*qualities* of those things, are not the full story; that in fact the
'*true* nature of things is that if you try and find absolute objective
boundaries to things you can't and if you try to make any other kind of
measurement, you have to make do with an approximation. Indeed, the more
you wish to precisely specify anything about the location or motion of
anything then the more you must accept a complex statistical description
about the rest of its characteristics.
Well and good; normally we don't have to worry about this too much. It
is only when we start persistently asking *How does it all work?* that
the seemingly intractable problems begin. And for each of us there is
some kind of recursive process: we read and interact with others
[indeed some lucky people can apparently just wander into the next room
and straight away *talk* on the topic with someone who is interested!],
and then we cogitate and imagine things and some of you scribble arcane
arithmetic and run mathematical 'what-ifs' on computers; finally we
reach some kind of internal stability of viewpoint that allows a
reassessment of things previously held to be clear, or problematic
perhaps. But after some time, doubt sets in, we think something far
enough through and see a problem or, more likely, we read of some new
viewpoint which challenges what we believe and we feel we must take it
seriously because of its apparent validity, consistency, etc, or it is
presented by someone we respect. Either way we have to work to either
assimilate it or uncover valid reasons for rejecting it.
The mathematicians who contribute here seemingly have no problems with a
totally 'insubstantial' existence of numbers. Unlike me who has
*ultimate* problems wrapping my head around the idea. I have not yet
succeeded. You asked about 'assumptions' in you 'Joining' thread, but
here by definition the only one is the existence of Many Worlds, which
is hugely problematic because nobody really knows what it means. In my
case it is obvious why, but in the case of those who *espouse* the
Many-Worlds hypothesis, I have absolutely know idea how they can account
for the purely logical - and therefore mathematically necessary, yes? -
consequence of the problem you have so succinctly put. As I reason it,
this 'continuous' aspect of location, even if it is only 'virtual'
guarantees that the Many Worlds are always proliferating at a rate which
must effectively be an infinity times an infinity of infinities. [I fear
I might have underestimated the speed there, but as I say, my maths is
not all that good!] In other words it seems to make no sense at all!
Why? [Grin!] well because *my* world seems to be just one story. What
keeps it together? It can't be any inherent smartness on my part! [Grin
again; no false modesty there mate!] So *IT*, what I call 'The Great
IT', is just doing IT'S thing.
Nobody here has yet explained in plain-English why we have entropy. Oh
well, surely, in the Many Worlds, that's just one of the universes that
can happen! Except that, for plain-English reasons stated above, there
are *and always have been* infinity x infinity x infinity of entropic
universes.
It doesn't make sense. Call me a heretic if you like, but I will 'stick
to my guns' here: If it can't be put into plain-English then it probably
isn't true!
:-)
Regards
Mark Peaty CDES
mpeaty.domain.name.hidden
http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/
Mohsen Ravanbakhsh wrote:
> I don't know if in the hypothesis of simulation, the conflict of
> Countable and Uncountable has been considered.
> When we're talking about a machine with an infinite power of
> computation, we're considering a TM which has a countable number of
> states, even if it's running an undecidable problem to produce the
> infinite possible outputs and even we're considering time to be
> infinitely compressed to allow for the infinity of the power of our
> machine, at the end the possible states of a TM is Countably infinite.
>
> But as one might notice we have some continuous and therefore
> Uncountable parameters in our universe, like the measures of distance
> which are not reducible to countable ones even considering the concept
> of precision. They are naturally Uncountable.
>
> Now the question is: can that kind of infinitely powerful machine
> simulate this infinite reality?
> Am I missing a point?
> --
>
> Mohsen Ravanbakhsh,
>
>
> >
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Received on Mon Mar 05 2007 - 09:03:30 PST