Yeah, I think that was meat to be either short-sightedness, racketeering, or
just an attempt to push his own reality in a certain direction on the
character's part.
For me, though, the thing about a stone implementing all possible
computations is that you end up with no possible way of knowing whether
you're in the 'stone reality' or some abstraction from it - you start off
with physicalism and end up with some kind of neoplatonism. Of course, you
could still argue that you need some kind of physical seed, but again what I
take from this is that since you can perform as much abstraction on the
substrate as you like, it doesn't matter how small it is - it can even be
completely nothing. My simplistic version works like this:
'Nothing' := 'Something' -> 'Everything'
2008/11/15 Kory Heath <kory.domain.name.hidden>
>
>
> On Nov 14, 2008, at 5:09 PM, Michael Rosefield wrote:
> > Take this level of abstraction much further and what you have
> > essentially is the 'dust theory' from Greg Egan's Permutation City.
>
> Actually, I think my formulation already goes further than the theory
> outlined in PC. Although it's a subtle point, I get the feeling that
> reality in PC is still "materialist", in the sense that at the root
> there still is material stuff which is different than bare
> mathematical fact. I think the idea is more like the idea that a
> physical stone implements all possible computations. As long as
> there's some physical stuff to work with (implies the novel), that
> stuff is enough to represent all possible computations. And the
> computations representing conscious beings are scattered like dust
> throughout those computations. Another way to look at it would be to
> say that, if the physical universe is infinite, then at the moment of
> my death, there is some pattern of molecules somewhere which is enough
> like me to count as a continuer. It doesn't matter that it's causally
> disconnected from me. Those states may be scattered like dust through
> space and time, but as long as they're there, I'll continue to exist.
>
> One can believe all of this, yet still retain the standard (in my
> opinion ill-formed) materialist conception of physical existence. One
> can still believe that some kind of physical universe has to exist in
> order for the "dust" to exist. It's different (and more extreme) to
> suggest that mathematical facts-of-the-matter by themselves play the
> role that "physical existence" is supposed to play.
>
> Maybe Egan did mean to imply that more extreme version, but it's hard
> to know, because he wrote a novel rather than a concise essay. For
> instance, I don't understand why the main character of the novel felt
> the need to "jump start" the universe he wanted by performing the
> initial computations. If the dust theory is true, nothing needs to be
> jump-started.
>
> -- Kory
>
>
> >
>
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Received on Sat Nov 15 2008 - 06:12:48 PST