Re: What We Can Know About the World

From: Aditya Varun Chadha <adichad.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2005 04:06:46 +0530

Whoa!

A simple question that just opened up SO many things in my mind!
(maybe a few screws too:-) ) Blabber on I shall!

[LC]:
> By "event" do you mean an event that leaves a record? Just
> wondering.

"leaves a record" is the same as saying "affects/causes/interferes
with other events".

Side Note: Beware the pitfalls of visualizing this as a temporal
cause-effect relationship though, we are talking of events, which
happen in space-time, not space. Better to understand it as
"interference".

I think that if we consider an ENTIRE intricate interference-connected
web of events, we are in fact considering one equivalence class from
the partition called "multiverse". The equivalence relation creating
this partition is the "interferes with" relation. And each equivalence
class is a "universe".

Side Note: If you are following till here, then please help me a bit
with the reflexive part of the "interferes with" equivalence. How does
an event interfere with itself? I am going the base the rest of the
post on this assumption, and unfortunately I currently cannot
substantiate it.

But now this is a perfect example of something that our brain can
"define" but not model. Because from our perspective, until and unless
an event "interferes with" our universe, it is in "some other
universe" which we have no way of describing.

Therefore yes, for us the "knowable universe" at any time can only
have events that leave records in our universe, or events that form
part of our interference web.

BUT, since "coming to know" is itself only an event, it is ALWAYS
possible that even our notion of "knownable universe" is incomplete.
This is because we ALWAYS have the potential to be "unlucky enough" to
not "feel" some interference from an event that we currently believe
is in "some other universe" and therefore "unknowable". It is just a
matter of not being in the right place at the right time.

So although I cannot say for sure whether there even exist events that
"do not leave a record", but if they do exist, then they are
unknowable. By their very definition they do not "affect" us in ANY
way, and therefore can be ignored in a ToE. But the problem is, we
have NO way of knowing that an event SURELY does NOT leave a record!

Having said this, the universe seems to be at BEST only recursively
enumerable to us, not recursive. Because while we CAN observe what's
INSIDE it, we have NO way of saying what's OUTSIDE (yet INSIDE the
"multiverse"). So my concluding claim is this: We may some day have a
ToE that is in fact Consistent and Complete (finally TRUE), but we
will NEVER be sure that it is so.

[LC]
> Thanks for a nice try at clearing up what Jesse, at least,
> and I were discussing.

Maybe now I have managed to complicate things again:-)

-- 
Aditya Varun Chadha
adichad AT gmail.com
http://www.adichad.com
________________________________
Received on Sat Jul 30 2005 - 18:38:09 PDT

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