From: Chris Phoenix (cphoenix@CRNano.org)
Date: Fri Aug 20 2004 - 18:24:39 BST
hampday@earthlink.net wrote:
> Chris wrote:
>>From Ham to Chris, Thursday, Aug. 19
>
> Hi, Chris, and thank's for answering my question to David concerning
> multiple universe systems.
You're welcome.
>>DQ is the creation of yet-to-be-filled evolutionary niches. Possibilities.
>>Empiricism, I think, has trouble dealing with possibility.
>
> This is certainly true, and your proposition is significant to my own thesis
> and very well developed.
Thanks!
> Now that I know that you and David are not proposing a theory of "multiple
> universes", let's focus on "possibility" as it relates to future events. In
> your last note to me you said: "Since a niche can't
> be detected until it's filled, there's no way of knowing which niches
> exist." But can a niche be said to exist prior to its being experienced as
> reality?
To empiricists, it can't be said to exist. And I don't have enough
philosophic background to explain why "possibility" is different from
"Easter bunny." It's common-sense obvious that they are different. But
I'm not sure it's easy to explain.
As I think about it further, it seems that "possibility" can only be
understood in terms of time, and time is something that even physicists
have trouble with. Time is what happens when physics transitions from
reversible (quantum) to irreversible--in other words, entropy. But DQ
is the opposite of entropy.
When we think of particular possibilities, we're attaching meaning and
significance (a form of value?) to particular examples of future
optional patterns. Have I managed to derive the concept of the observer
causing quantum-mechanical collapse? It's tempting to think so, but I
suspect it's just a misleading analogy. It's far too easy to mis-apply
dimly understood physics concepts. So I'll leave this paragraph
undeleted, but I'll caution that it's *worse than useless* unless a real
physicist finds a way to formalize it.
> In other words does "potentiality" infer existence? This is the
> problem I'm having with your proposition, and I suspect that it may also
> have exposed some ambiguity in the MOQ.
I'd say limitatation (and did say it) rather than ambiguity.
> In my Philosophy of Essence, I place "Essence" beyond the realm of empirical
> reality and maintain that it is the a priori Source rather than an
> "existent". From a logical perspective, this avoids having to deal with
> conflicting or opposing factors that apply to a dynamic system (DQ?). I'm
> quite aware that my thesis is regarded as "supernatural" by the MOQ
> participants for this reason, but I don't think it violates Pirsig's central
> idea that Quality (or Value) transcends the duality of empirical reality
> (SOM) providing an esthetic link between man and ultimate reality. While I
> have not fully grasped the teleological aspects of your "possibilities"
> concept, and its implications relative to individual Freedom, I think you
> may be on to something.
See what you think after reading the above... (BTW, I wrote it before
visiting your site.)
> Among other things, I would like to see how you explain Free Will in the
> context of cause-and-effect determinism. (You might be interested in seeing
> how I've handled this in the Freedom section of my own thesis at
> www.essentialism.net. No one has raised questions about the concept
> outlined there, which probably means they haven't read it or don't consider
> it relevant to MOQ). I'd be very interested in your
> thoughts on this, Chris.
Whoa. Where did cause-and-effect determinism come in? And where did I
promise to explain free will?
Despite my flirting with physics above, I think I'm talking about a
metaphysics, not a physics. And I think the deepest questions of free
will should be answerable by physics. And I only have time right now to
give the briefest skim to your site.
That said, I find it interesting that possibilities are, in a very
significant sense, unknowable until they are filled by patterns. When
we predict them, we are building and manipulating a simplified model; we
can't *really* know a possibility exists until we try it. Conversely,
by demanding certainty we shut off all investigation of possibility.
So, speaking metaphysically, I'd say that everything
evolutionary--everything that is an interplay between DQ (the appearance
of new niches or possibilities) and SQ (filling niches and thus making
substrates for new niches)--is unpredictable and nondeterministic.
Since our thought is evolutionary, possibly on multiple levels (see
William Calvin for evolution on the neural-signal level), then it would
appear that our thought is non-deterministic.
Of course, there may be a higher level in which it's possible to know
exactly what possibilities exist and how evolution will go. So it may
be that whether we have free will or not depends on which level you look
from: the human level where we play metaphysics, or some hypothetical
higher level.
Godel's Incompleteness Theorem proves that interesting systems contain
ideas the truth of which is unknowable within that system. A richer
system could exist that would be able to evaluate the truth of things
that the original system can't--but of course would have its own
unknowabilities.
I found a paper that seems to confirm this interpretation. "And if such
is the case, then we (qua mathematicians) are machines that are unable
to recognize the fact that they are machines. As the saying goes: if our
brains could figure out how they work they would have been much smarter
than they are. Gödel’s incompleteness result provides in this case solid
grounds for our inability, for it shows it to be a mathematical
necessity. The upshot is hauntingly reminiscent of Spinoza's conception,
on which humans are predetermined creatures, who derive their sense of
freedom from their incapacity to grasp their own nature. A human, viz.
Spinoza himself, may recognize this general truth; but a human cannot
know how this predetermination works, that is, the full theory. Just so,
we can entertain the possibility that all our mathematical reasoning is
subsumed under some computer program; but we can never know how this
program works. For if we knew we could diagonalize and get a contradiction."
http://www.columbia.edu/~hg17/godel-incomp4.pdf
You talk about the alternative to free will as being a state of knowing
everything. But such a state is impossible for any computational
system. (A claim that we are not computational systems must appeal to
non-standard science.) I can't tell, from my limited reading, whether
that confirms your argument or renders it irrelevant.
Chris
-- Chris Phoenix cphoenix@CRNano.org Director of Research Center for Responsible Nanotechnology http://CRNano.org MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org Mail Archives: Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/ Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at: http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
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