Re: Introduction (Digital Physics)

From: Brent Meeker <meekerdb.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 21:35:16 -0700

On 17-Jun-01, Russell Standish wrote:
> Joel Dobrzelewski wrote:
>> I stand by my original claim:
>>
>> Any successful human Theory of Everything must recognize the discrete
>> nature of the human intellect, and our inability to express or engage
>> the continuum in any meaningful way.
>>
>
> That is a particularly extreme way of putting it. All descriptions
> must be discrete, but this doesn't mean the continuum is not
> engaged. For one thing, it does not require a discrete space
> time. There are plenty of examples of non-discrete countable sets (eg
> the rational numbers), and plenty of examples of discrete descriptions
> of continuous objects, albeit incomplete ones.
>
> Cheers

Not only that, I think Joel is placing far to much emphasis on
computational theory. People draw pictures and imagine images which
are continuous in 2D. I know that these can always be digitized and if
done on a sufficiently fine level the result is indistinguisable from
continuous - but this doesn't prove that there is no continuum. Even
quantum mechanics still relies on a continuous psi functions defined
over continuous space-time. It may be possible to *represent* this
discretely, but even if that is possible it doesn't mean it is
impossible to represent it using a continuum or that there is no
underlying continuum. The argument that our understanding or our
descriptions must be discrete is not convincing because it is equal
true (or false) that our descriptions must be finite and even *small*.

Brent Meeker
  Seven is the most belivable number.
      --- Joe Semonian
Received on Sun Jun 17 2001 - 22:42:16 PDT