On 9/20/05, daddycaylor.domain.name.hidden <daddycaylor.domain.name.hidden> wrote:
>
> OK, you said All comments welcome. You asked for it.
>
> First, there's a lot to read here, so I assumed you were presenting the
> basic gist of your ideas in the first few paragraphs, and so I have a
> few comments about those paragraphs.
>
> I commend you for trying to explain values as part of the framework.
> I've whinced before when I've read some thought experiments on this
> list that depended on accepting the existence of such ideas as good and
> bad. I believe in the existence of good and bad, but one needs to
> support his/her belief in good and bad and not take them as a given.
>
> It seems that your limitation of reality to meaningful existence is
> actually rejecting Mathematical Platonism. Why is consciousness
> required to make a mathematical truth real? I thought that you are
> trying to deal with all of existence, not just meaningful existence,
> since your theory tries to explain "how the most fundamental properties
> of existence facts fit together into a unified metaphysical framework."
> And yet here you limit existence to what we can perceive.
>
> >> The core assumption is that existence without perception is
> meaningless. Reality requires not only raw data but something to
> *interpret* that data, to supply meaning to it. This can only be done
> by consciousness of *some* kind. If something was hypothesized to exist
> that could in no way directly or indirectly affect the conscious
> perceptions of *any* possible observer, then in what sense could it be
> said to exist at all? Even if it could be successfully argued that it
> did have some kind of abstract philosophical existence, it could never
> have any possible value to sentient minds. For the purposes of
> understanding general intelligence, it suffices to define that which
> exists as that which could directly or indirectly ( i.e. in principle)
> affect the perceptions of *some* possible conscious observer.
>
> So you've eliminated the whole realm of "unperceived reality" in the
> superset of existence. You've eliminated the motivation to bring
> unperceived reality into the realm of perceived reality, since the
> former does not exist.
>
> Reading these metaphysical theories doesn't really impress me when I
> realize that these theories really don't have anything new in them that
> the ancient Greeks (for instance) didn't have.
>
> Of course the big gap in all of these theories, which I believe will
> never be filled, is the integration of consciousness (in general) into
> physics. Even if we integrate human consciousness into it (which I
> don't think is going to happen), that doesn't cover the whole gammit of
> what consciousness is in the whole universe. Who knows, there's so
> much we don't know about stars (and they are so big) that perhaps some
> stars have consciousness of some kind that is outside of the definition
> of how we would define it, but may be even more "enlightened" about the
> universe, and yet we may never know.
>
> Tom
>
>
What I wrote there may be misleading.
By 'perceivable' I don't necessarily mean 'perceived by humans', what I
mean is 'perceivable *in principle* (i.e. by some mind, somewhere in the
universe). Reality can only ever be understood from the perspective of a
mind. Therefore only things capable of (in principle) making a difference to
perceived reality need to be taken into account when devising ultimate
theories of metaphysics.
If you read what I wrote I made it pretty clear that I believe in a kind of
mathematical Platonism. My proposed noumenon (raw fabric) of reality was
something I called 'Mathematico-Cognition' (a hybrid of mathematics and
information processing).
I don't think the 'perceivable in principle' requirement contradicts
mathematical Platonism. What makes you think that mathematical objects
aren't perceivable? True, most *humans* can't perceive mathematical things,
but that's probably just a limitation of the human mind. I think that a mind
sufficiently talented at math *could* in principle directly perceive
mathematical objects. Kurt Godel claimed that it was possible to directly
perceive mathematical objects. He even thought the mind was capable of
directly perceiving infinite sets.
--
Please vist my website:
http://www.riemannai.org
Science, Sci-Fi and Philosophy
---
THE BRAIN is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside.
-Emily Dickinson
'The brain is wider than the sky'
http://www.bartleby.com/113/1126.html
Received on Wed Sep 21 2005 - 17:10:07 PDT