From: "Emlyn O'regan" <oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au>
So what I'm saying I guess is that the world of information processing (call
it I? Maybe I want N or some other such beast from computability), is either
distinct from or else a strict subset of the physical world (P?). There are
things that information processing cannot do, which the material world can
do, and that it the direct manipulation of the material world.
### What if we say that there is only one essence - which is matter, form,
movement, space, mind, and algorithm. There is only one, and it is nothing,
and it is everything.
OK, this is really New Agey. Really, I am not sooo fuzzy-brained at all.
Let's try something less fuzzy.
Maybe time and consciousness happen as follows - in the beginning there was
the empty set. It had to be, as it is inconceivable (self-contradictory)
that it would not exist. The existence of this set implies the existence of
a set containing the empty set. You can call it "one". As Claude Shannon
showed, this leads to 2, 3.... All of number theory inevitably follows.
Almost all sets can be derived only from other sets. In fact, for any
collection of sets, there is a much larger collection of sets which can only
be formed by reference to this initial collection of sets. An infinite
explosion of sets from other sets, always pointing away from the small and
simple towards the expanded and more complex, just like time in the whole
universe.
What if our minds were at the edge of this explosion? If the multiverse QM
is true, there is a googolplex of future branches exploding from every
physical object. Maybe every physical object is no more and no less than a
mathematical set, derived from other sets, ultimately derived from
emptiness.
Our conscious minds, whether biologically implemented or running in a
simulation, are always at the edge of infinity. Infinity's beginning is our
past, infinity's newest element is our present, and the rest of infinity has
not derived itself yet.
Our past is a crystalline world of mathematics, which can be brought alive
again if it is reflected (simulated, implemented) in the present, like a
calculation of firing neurons. Our future does not exist, but is inevitable,
just like the derivation of a natural number from its precedent.
It's still fuzzy. I'm sorry for taking your time.
Rafal
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