Re: How did it all begin?

From: Stephen Paul King <stephenk1.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2005 13:47:18 -0400

Hi Bruno,
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Bruno Marchal
  To: everything-List List
  Sent: Thursday, September 01, 2005 8:54 AM
  Subject: Re: How did it all begin?




  On 01 Sep 2005, at 00:40, Stephen Paul King wrote:
     Does it truly make sense to assume that Existence can have a Beginning? We are not talking here, I AFAIK, about the beginning of our observed universe as we can wind our way back in history to a Big Bang Event Horizon, but this event itself must have some form of antecedent that Exists. Remember, existence, per say, does not depend on anything, except for maybe self-consistency, and thus it follows that Existence itself can not have a "beginning". It follows that it is Eternal, without beginning or end.


  [BM]

  I would even say that it is out of time and space consideration.

[SPK]

    I agree completely. Space and time are, at least, notions that involve relationships. Existence, in itself, can have none of these relationships. Otherwise it would be dependent on something "else"...

  [SPK]

     IMHO, Tegmark's paper, like the rest of his papers, is not worth reading if only because they misdirect thoughts more than they inform thoughts.


  [BM]



  You are hard. Tegmark paper is interesting, except that he still (like many physicists) put the mind-body problem under the rug, and so he misses the impact of incompleteness, and the fact that at the level of mathematical platonism, the physical world is not just a mathematical structure among others. With comp, although physics is secondary, the physical world is not just a mathematical structure among others, but a very special mathematical structures emerging from existing relations among a vast set of mathematical structures.

[SPK]

    I would expect the same criticism if I engaged in behavior like that of Tegmark! Those omissions that you point out are some, but not all, of my compliant. But it is the way that a broad brush is used to dismiss possibilities, thus a prejudicial attitude is engendered in those that control the purse-strings of money going to research. I recall an exchange that I had with some one that is high up in the NSF, that used Tegmark's doctrine to dismiss out of hard any serious inquiry into quantum mechanical effects in human brains...
    We may disagree on the verisimilitude of Idealism, but I find your work to be, at least, very interesting and thought provoking.

    BTW, could you see if you can set the settings of your Email program so that the font is not so small? It is hard to read your HTML postings.

Onward,

Stephen
Received on Thu Sep 01 2005 - 13:49:05 PDT