I'm of the all-things-that-can-exist-do-so stripe; it might seem unnecessary
and indulgent to posit all these extra possible realities, but for me
existence is the easy part and stripping away the chaff is hard.
You have this big set of Things What Exist; it's atemporal and eternal, and
nothing changes. There's no reason why there should be just one overarching
set of rules for constructing it, or one criteria for things to be in it.
I'd imagine that there's lots of equivalent principles that can all be used
to describe it, with no way of assigning fundamentality to any of them.
Abstraction and equivalence are really the most important concepts here -
without a basis of physicality, all interpretations and transformations are
valid, and what you see is - as you stress - mostly a function of how you
look.
Our consciousnesses are embedded throughout this uber-reality in an infinite
number of ways. There is no particular universe(s) to which we are attached
- we're in all of them. All we can do is make observations and winnow away
those that were impossible to begin with or decohere and shift the
possibilities of the rest.
As to consciousness (this p-consciousness thing is a new one on me)... I'd
consider that a highly abstract thing anyway; it's not reliant on the
specifics of underlying ontologies, but whether they can at some point
higher up give rise to processes than can be abstracted in a certain way.
There's lots of ways to build a computer, but they all rely on some way
create processes that are the equivalent of logic gates.
I'll stop aimlessly rambling now :D
2008/10/14 Colin Hales <c.hales.domain.name.hidden>
> Michael Rosefield wrote:
>
> And of course you could always add <ASPECT 0> - all possible instances of
> <ASPECT 1>....
>
>
> Yeah.. a new 'science of universe construction'? I wonder if there's a
> name for something like that? unigenesis?
>
> As I said in my post to Jesse:
> - - -- - - - - -
> <aspect 1> is NOT underling reality, but a description of it. There may be
> 100 complete, consistent sets, all of which work as well as each other. We
> must live with that potential ambiguity. There's no fundamental reason why
> we are ever entitled to a unique solution to <aspect 1>. But it may turn out
> that there can only be one. We'll never know unless we let ourselves look,
> will we??
>
> <aspect 2> is NOT underling reality, but a description of its appearances
> to an observer inside a reality described structurally as <aspect 1>. 100
> different life-forms, as scientists/observers all over the universe, may all
> concoct 100 totally different sets of 'laws of nature', each one just as
> predictive of the natural world, none of which are 'right' , but all are
> 'predictive' to each life-form. They all are empirically verified by 100
> very different P-consciousnesses of each species of scientist....but they
> *all predict the same outcome for a given experiment*. Human-centric 'laws
> of nature' are an illusion. <aspect 2> 'Laws of Nature' are filtered through
> the P-consciousness of the observer and verified on that basis.
> - - -- - - - - -
> Aspect 0> is not relevant just now, to me...Being hell bent on really
> engineering a real artificial general intelligence based on a human as a
> working prototype...The only relevant <aspect 1>s are those that create an
> observer consistent with <aspect 2>, both of which are consistent with
> empirical evidence. i.e. <aspect 1> is justified only if/because the first
> thing it has to do is create/predict an observer that sees reality behaving
> <aspect 2>'ly. The mere existence of other sets that do qualify does not
> entail that all of them are reified. It merely entails that we, at the
> current level of ability, cannot refine <aspect 1> enough. IMHO there is
> only 1 actual <aspect 1>, but that is merely an opinion... I am quite happy
> to accept a whole class of <aspect 1> consistent with the evidence - and
> that predict an observer..."Predictability" is the main necessary outcome,
> not absolute/final refined truth.
>
> I'm not entirely sure if your remark was intended to support some kind of
> belief in the reality of multiverses... in the dual aspect science (DAS)
> system belief in such things would be unnecessary meta-belief. <aspect 0>
> might correspond to a theoretical science that examined completely different
> universes.... fun, but a theoretical frolic only. Maybe one day we'll be
> able to make universes. Then it'd be useful. :-)
>
> cheers
> colin
>
> >
>
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Received on Tue Oct 14 2008 - 12:41:00 PDT