Eric Hawthorne writes:
> My big focus, albeit with informal intuition only at this point, is to
> posit that all but a tiny subset of such mathematical-structured universes
> will be "in principle, unobservable" because their form and evolution is
> such as to not permit the creation or presence of intelligent observers.
>
> Only those universes whose rules permit the self-organization of stable
> emergent systems (and which have things like consistent notions of
> locality and metric space etc) will ever be "in-principle observable"
> universes. I believe that the non-observable universes should be written
> off as uninteresting, and we should focus on learning what is the most
> general form of "emergent system evolving" universe.
>
> This is NOT an anthropocentric argument. It is a "mathematical/physical
> requirements for self-organization" based argument. What are those
> minimum requirements?
>
> Does Tegmark himself have anything to say on this issue?
This is very much in keeping with Tegmark's ideas, as expressed in his
"theory of everything" paper at
http://www.hep.upenn.edu/~max/toe.html.
That page is a good starting point as it also points to this list and
to Schmidhuber's pioneering paper.
Max Tegmark defines the notion of "self-aware subsystems" or SASs, similar
to what I think you mean by "stable emergent systems". Only those
mathematical structures which are able to contain SASs can ever be
perceived as universes. He then goes through and analyzes a number of
physical parameters of the universe, including the number of space and
time dimensions (yes, you could in principle have more than 1 dimension
of time!), and the values of various fundamental physical constants.
For the most part he shows that the values we see are the ones that
seem most likely to promote the formation of SASs, consistent with the
all-universes-exist model.
Hal Finney
Received on Sat Apr 19 2003 - 15:22:38 PDT