> I'm well aware of relativity. But I don't see how you can invoke it when
> discussing all possible, i.e. non-contradictory, universes. Neither do I see
> that list of states universes would be a teeny subset of all mathematically
> consistent universes. On the contrary, it would be very large. It would
> certainly be much larger than that teeny subset obeying general relativity or
> Newtonian physics or the standard model of QFT in Minkowski spacetime.
You said: "So universes that consisted just of lists of
(state_i)(state_i+1)... would exist, where a state might or might not
have an implicate time value."
I was trying to express that the universe in which we reside isn't
separable into a set of lists of states. It's more mathematically
complex than that.
Some mathematical models are self-contradictory, and some are not.
This is true regardless as to how you formulate a foundation of
mathematics, and it forms the basis for understanding and proving
mathematical truths. I believe that a mathematical structure complex
enough to capture the entire set of events that define a universe must
be non-self-contradictory to be a truthful model for that universe.
There are mathematical structures which are self-contradictory because
they are predicated upon axioms which ultimately contradict
themselves; these structures are not well-defined and cannot be a
basis for existence. Such a basis would make existence itself
ambiguous, because all things would have to exist and not-exist at the
same time, and not in the quantum way--with no discernable structure
or foundation at all.
I'm not certain what you're trying to argue, but it seems like you
think that anything you can imagine must have a well-founded
mathematical basis...? You can imagine all you like, but it won't
bring into being a universe where Godel's incompleteness theorems
don't hold, for example. The fundamental things that we know about
mathematics itself transcend any particular realization of the
universe.
Anna
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Received on Sat Nov 08 2008 - 16:41:47 PST