John M wrote:
>
>Dear Jesse,
>ashamed for breaking my decision NOT to babble into this discussion with my
>personal common sense, here is something to your position from my problems:
>(First a bit of nitpicking, as an appetizer)
> > >>For example, in every world where X and Y are simultaneously true,
> >>>it
>is also true that X is true, even if no one notices this.'
>how can an unnoticed truth be included into noticed (mutual) truth?
>*
>Time. I tackle a timeless (atemporal) system. The problem is "change".
>What does a timeless change mean? One has to eliminate 'sequence', the
>result of a change, or: Hal's All is static and includes both ends of all
>changes.
Hi John--I would say the idea of timeless changes makes a kind of sense,
like how the value of f(x)=x^2 "changes" as x increases. Basically it just
means that as you vary one thing, another thing varies along with it. And if
you have a t coordinate marked "time", you can say that the state of
physical systems in 3D space varies as t varies, while at the same time
believing spacetime as a whole is a "timeless" entity. See this article by
physicist Paul Davies on this subject:
http://www.american-buddha.com/myster.flow.physics.htm
>You used the 'static' cop-out:
> > >> static relationships between static truths, relationships that would
> > >>exist regardless of whether anyone contemplated or "discovered" them.
>*
>Of course a 'change' is meaningless in this case. We speculated a lot about
>"Process", where change is involved between the endpoints of process.
>If All is not static, change is there (time?) if it is static, it is
>meaningless as a world. In that case it is a nirvana, static timelessness =
>eternity for nothing.
I disagree--if you have a movie film laid out before you, you can see all
the different frames in a "timeless" way, but the people on the film seem to
be perceiving the world in a sequential way. Of course the idea of
distinguishing first-person perception vs. third-person "objective reality"
brings up a whole 'nother set of tricky philosophical questions surrounding
the nature of "consciousness", but without getting into that right now, I
think my view would be that time exists on a first-person level but not at
the level of an objective description of "the All".
>
>I am afraid, although I never studied formal logic, I have an inherent
>sense
>of 'human' logic in my speculations and cannot get over it.
>Human logic (formal or formless) is one aspect of nature, not necessarily
>the one covering All (of it). (The 1 = 0 case?)
>*
>Your discussions reached Taoistic levels, the format where not even the
>contrary or other variants of a statement may be true.
Well, note that I don't actually believe contradictory statements can both
be true, I was just arguing that *if* Hal Ruhl does not believe that the
laws of logic apply to reality as a whole, then he has no reason to deny
they could be. It was meant as more of a reductio ad absurdum than anything
else.
I do have some interest in mysticism and in particular the Buddhist notion
of "relative and absolute truth", described at
http://tinyurl.com/5eaco ,
but I don't think this notion of "two truths" expresses an actual logical
contradiction (two opposite statements which are both true in *exactly the
same sense*), my feeling is it's something more like the philosophy
"complementarity" in quantum physics, two different descriptions of the same
reality. But what do I know, I'm not a mystic...
Jesse
Received on Mon Dec 20 2004 - 15:15:03 PST