Hi Kory,
nicely put (the below), it captures my current metaphysical position
quite accurately :-)
Cheers,
Günther
> Imagine again the mathematical description of Conway's Life applied to
> the binary digits of PI. Somewhere within that description there may
> be descriptions of beings who have built their own computers (which
> would ultimately be made out of "gliders" and so on). In that mundane
> sense, those beings "perform computations" and "implement programs"
> within that world. Even if those beings accepted what I'm calling
> Mathematical Physicalism, they could still talk about un-implemented
> programs, but they'd just mean "unimplemented by us in this particular
> world".
>
> The same goes for "existence" and "non-existence". As a Mathematical
> Physicalist, I believe that "everything exists" (at least, everything
> that's mathematically describable). But it's still convenient to say
> things like "Unicorns don't exist", by which I just mean that they
> (probably) don't exist in my particular world. (And by "my particular
> world", I really mean the cloud of worlds represented by all my
> possible future states and all my possible past states. And so on.)
>
> -- Kory
>
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list.domain.name.hidden
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscribe.domain.name.hidden
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
Received on Sun Nov 16 2008 - 16:34:47 PST