Some of my points have been touched on by other posters - perhaps
Bruno's comments the wisest, but as usual a little cryptic.
My view of the subject (as enounced in my Occam paper) is that all we
can ever know of the universe is a description of that universe. That
description is most likely to be a set (following Schmidhuber's
universal prior argument).
For example, the very mathematics you use to derive the
indistinguishability of points on a very small scale is based on
a Hilbert space, which is a continuous set.
As for what the universe is really like (Bruno's ontological
question), I remain, as ever, agnostic as to whether it is even a
meaningful question.
Cheers
Christoph Schiller wrote:
>
>
> In this discussion list there were several threads
> on what could be the proper description of all of nature.
> Typical approaches are that the universe
> is to be described by mathematical concepts such as some
> special Hilbert space, some special type of category,
> or other very elaborate mathematical structures.
>
> There is a little problem however, which I would like to pose
> as discussion topic.
> All these structures are specialized sets, i.e. sets plus
> special properties and specialized relations between
> their elements.
>
> However, I seem to have a simple argument that the universe
> is not even a set. In short, it goes like this.
> To be a set, nature has te made of elements. Elements
> are distinguishable entities.
>
...details deleted...
>
> Christoph Schiller
> christoph_schiller.domain.name.hidden
>
>
>
> PS.I wrote up the argument in more detail in the file
>
> http://www.dse.nl/motionmountain/C11-LGSM.pdf
> and the preceding
> http://www.dse.nl/motionmountain/C10-QMGR.pdf
>
>
>
>
>
> ---
>
> Have a look at my free physics textbook, written to be
> surprising and challenging on every page:
>
> http://www.dse.nl/motionmountain/contents.html
>
> ---
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> --== Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/ ==--
> Before you buy.
>
>
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Received on Thu Oct 12 2000 - 17:29:35 PDT