On 11/07/07, Torgny Tholerus <torgny.domain.name.hidden> wrote:
> One exemple of a possible world is that GoL-universe, of which there is a
> picture of on the Wikipedia page.
>
> One interesting thing about this particular GoL-universe is that it is
> finite, the time goes in a circle in that universe. That universe only
> consists of 14 situations. After the 14th situation follows the 1st
> situation again.
>
> This GoL-universe exists, but it is a non-reflexive world, I can not see> anything reflexive in that universe.
I don't understand why, despite everything I've said to the contrary,
you still see GoL as non-reflexive. Perhaps you mean that no
evolutionary stage of 'GoL-Universe' is in fact sufficiently complex
to support conscious participants? But that in itself doesn't make
GoL constitutively non-reflexive - i.e. lacking self-access - merely
too simple in actual structure to manifest this in the form of
conscious agents. I get really confused when you jump about between
GoL and your original B-Universe story. I have no quarrel with GoL.
It's the B-Universe that I suggested wasn't possible, because you
*specified* it to be non-reflexive in just the sense I've discussed:
i.e. that despite it having the same structure and behaviour as the
A-Universe, it is supposed to lack all self-access. My point is just
that any 'universe' described in such a comprehensively inaccessible
way may just be a misconception that doesn't deserve to survive the
cut of Occam's razor. We can't observe it, it can't observe itself:
in what further sense is it 'possible'?
My whole point in being so tediously explicit about 'reflexivity', as
I said to Brent, was because I doubted that everyone shared the
intuition that 'existence simpliciter', as he put it, given sufficient
complexity of structure, just *entails* equivalent complexity of
self-access: IOW what ultimately we term consciousness. You seem
indeed not to share this intuition, and as a result, in various ways,
you've either denied that you yourself are conscious, or postulated
'identical' universes which mysteriously lack this 'extra ingredient'.
I don't believe such claims make much sense.
David
>
> David Nyman skrev:
> On 11/07/07, Brent Meeker <meekerdb.domain.name.hidden> wrote:
>
>
>
> (quite contrary to the premise of the everything-list, but one that I'm
> glad to entertain).
>
> For what it's worth, I really don't see that this is necessarily
> contrary to the premise of this list. The proposition is that all
> POSSIBLE worlds exist, not that anything describable in words (or for
> that matter mathematically) 'exists'. My analysis is an attempt to
> place a constraint on what can be said to exist in any sense strong
> enough to have any discernible consequences, either for us, or for
> any putative denizens of such 'worlds'. So I would argue that
> non-reflexive worlds are not possible in any consequential sense of
> the term.
>
> What do you mean with a POSSIBLE world?
>
> One exemple of a possible world is that GoL-universe, of which there is a
> picture of on the Wikipedia page.
>
> One interesting thing about this particular GoL-universe is that it is
> finite, the time goes in a circle in that universe. That universe only
> consists of 14 situations. After the 14th situation follows the 1st
> situation again.
>
> This GoL-universe exists, but it is a non-reflexive world, I can not see
> anything reflexive in that universe.
>
> --
> Torgny Tholerus
>
> >
>
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Received on Wed Jul 11 2007 - 05:49:27 PDT