Re: on simply being an SAS

From: Alastair Malcolm <amalcolm.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Tue, 21 Dec 1999 18:25:26 -0000

----- Original Message -----
From: Christopher Maloney <dude.domain.name.hidden>
> > [AM:] Under AUH, unfortunately it is neither *necessary* for a SAS to
perceive
> > totally law-like behaviour, nor try to fit all observed behaviour to
laws.
> > Firstly, there will be a relatively few unlucky SAS's who *do* perceive
> > dragon/WR events in any AUH (some will have more than can be explained
away
> > as hallucinations etc); secondly, it is the case that the majority of
SAS's
> > on this planet would ascribe at least some paranormal events that they
see
> > or think they see (like miracles, angels, or nde's) to divine, rather
than
> > law-based, explanations - this doesn't disqualify them from being SAS's.
>
> I don't like the description of this problem as the "dragon" problem
> or the "flying rabbit" problem. As someone (Fred, I think) posted
> recently, a dragon or a flying rabbit would not indicate lawless
> behavior, but rather, would indicate strange, complicated, different
> laws at work.

The point about dragons/WR's is that they represent a relatively small
deviation from the normal physical laws as we know them - sufficiently large
to be noticeable, but not so large as to make the existence of SAS's
impossible. I agree that dragons/WR's would only indicate lawless behaviour
from the point of view of our known physical laws, but not from a
bird-viewpoint.

> I think that really what is being discussed (by all means speak up
> if you disagree) is the question of why we experience any physical
> laws at all. It seems to me that either we should expect the
> universe to be lawful, or we should expect our senses to provide
> pure white-noise static from this instant onward. I still can't
> get past the nagging conviction that I got a few weeks ago that
> none of the discussion I've read so far does anything to justify
> the expectation of law over chaos.

What convinces me that good credibility can be given to the expectation of
law over chaos (including an expectation of no WR's), is that whenever the
world is viewed under an AUH in a way that attempts to be totally free from
anthropic bias (for instance, see my web site, Russell's paper, and my posts
of July 12th and October 16th - giving four variations in total), a solution
to the WR problem (ie the chaos problem) straightforwardly falls out
(basically this is the same kind of solution for all variations).

Alastair
Received on Tue Dec 21 1999 - 10:32:54 PST