Re: this very moment

From: Brent Meeker <meekerdb.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Mon, 15 May 2000 20:13:50 -0700

Hello Marchal

On 13-May-00, Marchal wrote:
> I agree except that I don't see the need to postulate a physical external
> world. The physicalities (time, space, ...) are modalities coming from
> the way the monad "see" (with comp, "see" is in the artificial
> intelligence
> sense, to simplify) each other, ... So these monad, if AI works, are
> numbers ...
>
> Not only time, *all* physical modalities are internal indexicals.

I (actually Bertrand Russell and before him Leibniz) don't postulate a physical
external world. Rather they postulate a world of only one kind of thing which
they called monads. Russell thought of them as events plus relations (to other
events). A person is a set of these monads which related in such a way that
they form a mental life. But some of the monads that enter into the mental
life of a person also are related to monads which are not part of a mental
life. These other kinds of relations are what tie together our perceptions so
that we can agree that we share an external physical world. Whether the
person, the mental life, the external physical world *really* exist, seems like
a semantic question as to what you mean by *really* exists. Whether you think
of them as *really* existing (which I do) or not, your theory must at least
explain why they seem to exist to some sentient beings who also seem to exist.
The alternate universe hypotheses discuss in this forum seem to extend the idea
of monads by making them a little more explicit, by supposing the monads are something like information (bits, numbers, theorems)
and then by supposing that all possible such monads exist that the existence of
something like ourselves becomes highly probable.

Brent Meeker
Received on Mon May 15 2000 - 23:05:07 PDT