Re: An All/Nothing multiverse model

From: Jesse Mazer <lasermazer.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2004 20:48:19 -0500

Hal Ruhl wrote:

>I will go over the thread and try to clear things up but I am having eye
>surgery in the morning and ran out of time.

Take your time, there's no hurry...hope all goes well tomorrow morning.

>
>Why would mathematics be the only thing in the All? Is that not a
>selection?

That's an interesting question...but if it's true that our own world is just
a piece of mathematics, then I'm not sure if we can conceive of anything
that is *not* mathematics, in some sense, so maybe there isn't really a
selection here. Also, even if there were "nothing rather than something",
wouldn't a statement like 1+1=2 still be true? The truth of the statement
does not seem to require that there actually are two objects anywhere, it
can be understood more like a hypothetical claim that if you *did* have one
object and another, together there would be two...

>>It is controversial that mathematics contains any information in the first
>>place--by the most commonly-accepted definition of information in
>>information theory, I don't think it would, simply because there is no
>>room for multiple possible answers to a given question.
>
>Then does not all information include multiple possible answers?
>

I think it does, at least as it is defined in information theory. So by this
definition, mathematical statements do not really contain any information.

Jesse
Received on Mon Dec 13 2004 - 21:22:43 PST