A summary I just wrote for my blog

[Michael Rosefield-2]

I wrote it for my friends, but feel free to criticise!

http://rosyatrandom.livejournal.com/35445.html

_____________________________________

Perhaps it's time I had another go at explaining all that weird stuff I believe in and why.

Well, for those few that don't know, I reckon that all possible universes exist and that everyone's immortal.

I admit, this does sound rather odd. It would have sounded odd to me about 10 years ago, too. Since about the age of 8 I was a pretty hardcore rational scientific naturalist: everything is simply matter and energy, and we but its dreams. What was real? Well, a chair. An atom. Something you can touch. After all, when you think of reality, you think of something... there. Something that sits there, quietly existing to itself.

But what does that mean, really? Everyone knows that matter is almost entirely empty space, anyway - the solidity is just the feather-touch of far-extended electromagnetic fields. Electrons popping in and out of existence as the energy fields knot so charge can be transferred in quantised lumps. Particles do not behave as billiard balls - they are ghosts, obeying strange equations, lacking hard and fast surfaces or reliable locations. Matter, energy, space, time... they all begin to seem a bit ethereal when you look at them.

Time. There's another one. I don't really believe in that, either. Spacetime is just a barely distinguishable fabric woven by the universe. Events do not occur at a time or a place - most of the observables we see arise kaleidoscope like out of an intricate web of possibilities, their form imposed by our own consciousness. And by that, I mean that our minds are embedded within the universe, constructed in such a way that the metaphysical structure of the cosmos is implied by our design - the word without reflects the world within. This has an aspect of the anthropic principle to it - that we observe a world capable of supporting our existence because if it didn't, we wouldn't.

But this still has no bearing on how I started thinking things like this, so I shall get that out of the way.

The short story is that I read some stories by a science-fiction author called Greg Egan. Before you laugh too much, a lot of sci-fi is essentially just window-dressing to convey an idea - the implications of some item of technology, turn of events or scientific/philosophical argument. And Greg Egan is a 'hard' science-fiction author, an ideas merchant. Well, you get the drift.

The first story I read was called Wang's Carpets (later included as a chapter of the book Diaspora), in which some spacefarers (themselves software) find a planet whose major life-form are floating mats that take the form of Wang Tiles - tesselating objects whose patterns can implement a universal turing machine. But that's just the set-up for the idea: when someone analyses the Carpets, by taking various abstract variables (appearance of certain tiles and features, etc) and putting them through frequency transforms, it turns out that the computations the Carpets encode as part of their reproductive habits give rise to a fully realised n-dimensional space containing self-aware creatures.

The thought-provoking part here was not that consciousness could be digitalised and run as software - I had already pretty much accepted that - but that the mathematical transformations necessary to do this could be pretty strange, and come from processes that were essentially plucked arbitrarily from the environment. That,  largely, consciousness could be a matter of perspective.

The second story was the book, Permutation City. A great deal of this book concerns one of the protagonists who wakes up one day and finds he is simply a downloaded copy - and that the 'real' him is running experiments. After being run at different speeds, and distributed in space and time, backwards, in chunks of different sizes, etc., the argument becomes that it doesn't matter what or how the program is run - it is all the same from the perspective of the consciousness being implemented, and that this is so abstract that one can find the relevant computational processes within any physical substrate. That all consciousnesses can be found within a grain of sand. That there is not even any physical bedrock to fall back upon - there is no way ever to verify, even in principle, that one is on the 'fundamental' metapysical level. At the end of the book, the characters have escaped into their own computational world, completely divorced from any physical hardware. Their universe contains a simulation of another world, whose very alien inhabitants find their own physical principles for the cosmos they observe - principles radically different from the computational ones 'running' it, and so compelling they start to take over the character's world, too.

So when you get down to it, I no longer believe in the physical world - or rather, I believe in all of them. While I used to require reasons to believe in the existence of parallel worlds, I now require them not to. Existence, after all, can have no overseers. No arbiters to conjure it from nowhere. Time, remember, is just something created from within our cosmos - on a more fundamental level, nothing changes, nothing is created or destroyed. Things simply are, or are not. Either they satisfy the criteria for existing, or not. Either they are possible, and exist, or they are impossible, and do not.

Assuming just our world exists is like, to me, saying just the number 532 exists, and that there is no proof for any other number.

The Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics is like a very diluted version of this. All it says is that the equations of QM and our observations are consistent with the idea that, rather than the myriad possibilities inherent in a quantum system mysteriously collapsing into one observed outcome, all outcomes are realised. At first, this seems a little too much to believe. Where do they come from? Well, the key word there was mysterious. Nowhere in the equations of QM is the collapse predicted. That's our own kludge, inserted to explain the fact that we somehow only see single, classical, outcomes. QM predicts that all these outcomes exist anyway, interacting within the wavefunction. The MWI simply asks: what if they don't stop existing? What if the act of observation simply causes our own wavefunction to split along those pre-existing lines? If those decohered elements don't interact much, we would get precisely what we do see anyway.

Now, if I exist in multiple worlds, how many me's are there? I would say: only 1. My consciousness, such that I observe it, is unique. While it might appear in an infinite number of possibile realities, it is a constant, a fulcrum. I carry along with me a train of all possible universes. So I don't think of myself as existing in 'this world', not really. I am in all of them.

Now: immortality. Or 'quantum immortality', as the idea is known. I am running out of time, so I shall just say this: amongst all these universes I inhabit, there are possible future trajectories that take me into universes in which I am dead. However, I shall not be around to observe this; I can only witness universes in which I am alive. And there will always be possible trajectories into sets of universes in which I am alive. And that is what I will witness: I cannot die. Not in my world, anyway.

Anyway, gotta dash now.

--------------------------
- Did you ever hear of "The Seattle Seven"?
- Mmm.
- That was me... and six other guys.

--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@...
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscribe@...
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

[Pete Carlton-2]

Not too much here that would raise hackles on the everything-list,  
but (IMHO) for the first sentence--

> Perhaps it's time I had another go at explaining all that weird  
> stuff I believe in and why.

The word "believe" can mean many things but in my parlance it means  
to attach a very high confidence to a proposition. I believe that  
eating satiates my hunger, that the Pacific Ocean lies a few miles to  
my west, that if I sit in a chair I will not fall through it to the  
ground, etc. I also from time to time *entertain* notions similar to  
the ones you've written about, and admit the possibility of some, but  
I don't believe any of it with anything like the confidence with  
which I believe that water will freeze at -10°C. I suspect the same  
is true for you too. Or is it really the case that in the few years  
since you've read those stories you have really thought things  
through to the point where you believe it?

-Pete
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@...
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscribe@...
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

[Michael Rosefield-2]

I did think about what word to use there - and while I don't _believe_ believe it, I would be _very_ surprised to be proved wrong :D . And besides, any other word seems like a bit of a fudge. 

--------------------------
- Did you ever hear of "The Seattle Seven"?
- Mmm.
- That was me... and six other guys.

2009/2/10 Pete Carlton <pmcarlton@...>

Not too much here that would raise hackles on the everything-list,
but (IMHO) for the first sentence--

> Perhaps it's time I had another go at explaining all that weird
> stuff I believe in and why.

The word "believe" can mean many things but in my parlance it means
to attach a very high confidence to a proposition. I believe that
eating satiates my hunger, that the Pacific Ocean lies a few miles to
my west, that if I sit in a chair I will not fall through it to the
ground, etc. I also from time to time *entertain* notions similar to
the ones you've written about, and admit the possibility of some, but
I don't believe any of it with anything like the confidence with
which I believe that water will freeze at -10°C. I suspect the same
is true for you too. Or is it really the case that in the few years
since you've read those stories you have really thought things
through to the point where you believe it?

-Pete

--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@...
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscribe@...
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

[Kim Jones-2]

We only live once, but we live forever

There is no afterlife - only life eternal

Kim Jones

On 11/02/2009, at 4:27 AM, Michael Rosefield wrote:

I wrote it for my friends, but feel free to criticise!

http://rosyatrandom.livejournal.com/35445.html

_____________________________________

Perhaps it's time I had another go at explaining all that weird stuff I believe in and why.

Well, for those few that don't know, I reckon that all possible universes exist and that everyone's immortal.

I admit, this does sound rather odd. It would have sounded odd to me about 10 years ago, too. Since about the age of 8 I was a pretty hardcore rational scientific naturalist: everything is simply matter and energy, and we but its dreams. What was real? Well, a chair. An atom. Something you can touch. After all, when you think of reality, you think of something... there. Something that sits there, quietly existing to itself.

But what does that mean, really? Everyone knows that matter is almost entirely empty space, anyway - the solidity is just the feather-touch of far-extended electromagnetic fields. Electrons popping in and out of existence as the energy fields knot so charge can be transferred in quantised lumps. Particles do not behave as billiard balls - they are ghosts, obeying strange equations, lacking hard and fast surfaces or reliable locations. Matter, energy, space, time... they all begin to seem a bit ethereal when you look at them.

Time. There's another one. I don't really believe in that, either. Spacetime is just a barely distinguishable fabric woven by the universe. Events do not occur at a time or a place - most of the observables we see arise kaleidoscope like out of an intricate web of possibilities, their form imposed by our own consciousness. And by that, I mean that our minds are embedded within the universe, constructed in such a way that the metaphysical structure of the cosmos is implied by our design - the word without reflects the world within. This has an aspect of the anthropic principle to it - that we observe a world capable of supporting our existence because if it didn't, we wouldn't.

But this still has no bearing on how I started thinking things like this, so I shall get that out of the way.

The short story is that I read some stories by a science-fiction author called Greg Egan. Before you laugh too much, a lot of sci-fi is essentially just window-dressing to convey an idea - the implications of some item of technology, turn of events or scientific/philosophical argument. And Greg Egan is a 'hard' science-fiction author, an ideas merchant. Well, you get the drift.

The first story I read was called Wang's Carpets (later included as a chapter of the book Diaspora), in which some spacefarers (themselves software) find a planet whose major life-form are floating mats that take the form of Wang Tiles - tesselating objects whose patterns can implement a universal turing machine. But that's just the set-up for the idea: when someone analyses the Carpets, by taking various abstract variables (appearance of certain tiles and features, etc) and putting them through frequency transforms, it turns out that the computations the Carpets encode as part of their reproductive habits give rise to a fully realised n-dimensional space containing self-aware creatures.

The thought-provoking part here was not that consciousness could be digitalised and run as software - I had already pretty much accepted that - but that the mathematical transformations necessary to do this could be pretty strange, and come from processes that were essentially plucked arbitrarily from the environment. That,  largely, consciousness could be a matter of perspective.

The second story was the book, Permutation City. A great deal of this book concerns one of the protagonists who wakes up one day and finds he is simply a downloaded copy - and that the 'real' him is running experiments. After being run at different speeds, and distributed in space and time, backwards, in chunks of different sizes, etc., the argument becomes that it doesn't matter what or how the program is run - it is all the same from the perspective of the consciousness being implemented, and that this is so abstract that one can find the relevant computational processes within any physical substrate. That all consciousnesses can be found within a grain of sand. That there is not even any physical bedrock to fall back upon - there is no way ever to verify, even in principle, that one is on the 'fundamental' metapysical level. At the end of the book, the characters have escaped into their own computational world, completely divorced from any physical hardware. Their universe contains a simulation of another world, whose very alien inhabitants find their own physical principles for the cosmos they observe - principles radically different from the computational ones 'running' it, and so compelling they start to take over the character's world, too.

So when you get down to it, I no longer believe in the physical world - or rather, I believe in all of them. While I used to require reasons to believe in the existence of parallel worlds, I now require them not to. Existence, after all, can have no overseers. No arbiters to conjure it from nowhere. Time, remember, is just something created from within our cosmos - on a more fundamental level, nothing changes, nothing is created or destroyed. Things simply are, or are not. Either they satisfy the criteria for existing, or not. Either they are possible, and exist, or they are impossible, and do not.

Assuming just our world exists is like, to me, saying just the number 532 exists, and that there is no proof for any other number.

The Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics is like a very diluted version of this. All it says is that the equations of QM and our observations are consistent with the idea that, rather than the myriad possibilities inherent in a quantum system mysteriously collapsing into one observed outcome, all outcomes are realised. At first, this seems a little too much to believe. Where do they come from? Well, the key word there was mysterious. Nowhere in the equations of QM is the collapse predicted. That's our own kludge, inserted to explain the fact that we somehow only see single, classical, outcomes. QM predicts that all these outcomes exist anyway, interacting within the wavefunction. The MWI simply asks: what if they don't stop existing? What if the act of observation simply causes our own wavefunction to split along those pre-existing lines? If those decohered elements don't interact much, we would get precisely what we do see anyway.

Now, if I exist in multiple worlds, how many me's are there? I would say: only 1. My consciousness, such that I observe it, is unique. While it might appear in an infinite number of possibile realities, it is a constant, a fulcrum. I carry along with me a train of all possible universes. So I don't think of myself as existing in 'this world', not really. I am in all of them.

Now: immortality. Or 'quantum immortality', as the idea is known. I am running out of time, so I shall just say this: amongst all these universes I inhabit, there are possible future trajectories that take me into universes in which I am dead. However, I shall not be around to observe this; I can only witness universes in which I am alive. And there will always be possible trajectories into sets of universes in which I am alive. And that is what I will witness: I cannot die. Not in my world, anyway.

Anyway, gotta dash now.

--------------------------
- Did you ever hear of "The Seattle Seven"?
- Mmm.
- That was me... and six other guys.

--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@...
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscribe@...
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

[John Mikes]

Kim,

 

I presume you have clear ideas about what 'life' may be (to live?) and the a-temporal distinction of 'ever'. (It is definitely not = 'a long long time').

I paraphrase you wisdom as:

time in our opinion goes as long as we live(?) so 'after that' is not identified.

 

My reasons for not including afterlife or reincarnation (or even the other sci-fi concepts on this list (replicas, teleportation etc.) is my view of the 'existence' (also a hard word): the 'world' (use whatever is you beef: nature, totality, even existence) is a complexity of everything in relational unity. We observe parts of it (according to our capabilities, we can't encompass all) and select 'models' for our views. In our understanding (limited as it is) we identify our relation to such models ('our' is similarly a figment to be explained - person, self, you name it) and realize (partial) complexities constituting "our world, our life, ourselves". When relations change by interference from (maybe even out of model) participants,  we talk about a process. Maybe in form of a 'zipp'.

 

When a complexity reorganizes in a major(?) process it vanishes (=death) and there is no further continuation of the complexity that was reorganized.  

The complexity "us" is more than physically describable (Aris-total) and by major reorganization all is gone as identifiable as pertinent to the vanished - reorganized - complexity (us). (3rd person memories ABOUT are not to be mistaken for the complexity's 1st person assignable processes.)

 

Forever means "it just stopped dead". It stepped out from the time concept.  Time is a coordinating factor how our universe 'orders' its happenings and space is the other one.

All this pertains to my NARRATIVE (not theory!) to make our world a bit easier to handle logically (commonsensically) in our mind(?).

If you like it, use it, if not, delete.

 

So a less verbose reflection to your pretty laconic maxim:

there is one instance for the entire complexity 'us' to function (processes) - whith the major instrumental components in unchanged relationships. Once such relationships are changed the process-complexity is over. Time space) are our coordinating figments to make relational changes palatable for our limited understanding. 

 

JohnM

 

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 6:04 AM, Kim Jones <kimjones@...> wrote:

We only live once, but we live forever

There is no afterlife - only life eternal

Kim Jones

 

--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@...
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscribe@...
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---