----- Original Message ----- From: "Chuck Grimes" <cgrimes at rawbw.com>
So I went to Deutsch's website and did manage to sort of read mathematical physics for New Years.
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Another problem is something I think of as Hegel's mistake. The mistake is to conflate the phenomenology of mind with the phenomenology of the world. This makes the assumption that the world and its processes are knowable because there is no meaningful difference between the world and the mind that experiences the world. The two are somehow reciprocally interchangeable. The problem here is, if this assumption is accepted, then there is no method available to distinguish between, what I consider two distinct realms: the world, and the mind (or in collective terminology, then the human and physical worlds). This solves the problem of knowledge by subjectifying the world, or conversely objectifying the mind.
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Well, Hegel did try to pry open the door onto the issues of reflexivity and self-reference, but he didn't have the logic tools etc. we've got today. He was the last of the 'Great Chain of Being' theorists who 'start' with mind and then deduce the world. La Mettrie and Lamarck being among the first in the West to invert the whole damn thing and assert that mind needs to be explained rather than serving as the explainer.
Deutsch' work really tightens the links between QT and computability theory and, following Wheeler, connects this with a theory of observership that is a great non-chemical way of flirting with insanity!
What makes it fascinating with regards to What Varela and GSB were trying to do connects with good ole' reflexivity and self reference since Cantor, Russell and Godel and how it all connects with the argument over the anthropic principle.
There's a great little quote by Richard Feynmann--echoing a playful allegory by Schrodinger which I can't find about God painting himself into his painting, which is the world. It also speaks to an issue dear to some Hegelians.
Feynmann:
"The next great era of awakening of human intellect may well produce a method of understanding the qualitative content of equations. Today we cannot. We cannot see that the water-flow equations contain such things as the barber pole srtucture of turbulence that one sees between rotating cylinders. Today we cannot see whether Schrodinger's equation contains frogs, musical composers, or morality--or whether it does not."
It's that last sentence that beckons a deeper understanding of recursion; that we must somehow be in any 'ultimate' set of equations we create-discover. Observers finding themselves in Hilbert space and the Lambda calculus observing Hilbert space and the Lambda calculus.....Like Escher and Magritte....It's that metaphysical Narcissism that, I think, connects modernist notions of science as a quest for god; imago deo. It surely seems to motivate people like GSB, John Barrow, Hawking and others even though it's a secularization of God a la Whitehead.
"If we cannot theorize the objectively real in terms of what is invariant such that we may represent ourselves as among its objects, then it may be significant parts of metaphysics, methodology, and regulatory modeling of cognitive processes will have to be modified." [Clifford Hooker, "Reason, Regulation and Realism"]
The transposition of this mistake into the case of mathematical models is that there is no meaningful distinction to be made between the mathematical models of the world (activities of mind) and the physical world itself (processes of material reality). In other words, advanced physical science makes the same romantic mistake as its arch rival, the great grand-daddy of postmodernism his own bad self, George Wilhelm Fredrick.
To my thinking, David Hawking has reached the terminal phase of this mistake, when he postulates what he calls the strong anthropic principle, ``We see the universe the way it is because we exist.'' [124p. Brief History of Time]. He later extrapolated this idea into a potential argument for the existence of god in some subtly about the infinite, but bounded universe, that escapes me at the moment. If you re-read Deutsch above, you will see a permutation on a similar anthropic principle.
In some intuitive sense, I see all these problems and even Deutsch's multiverse (world as information) as symptoms of a cultural terminus on the plateau of reason, the postmodern turn, the horizon of the knowable. On the other hand, I don't want to launch immediately into some bizarre and convoluted discussion of meaning and linguistics, or get lost delving into some other hermeneutic realm as an alternative.
It seems to me, that it is possible to simply hold all of this in suspension, as potentials none of which have yet crystallized into anything resembling what we might later look back on and call science, art or history.
Chuck Grimes
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Time will tell......
Patterns and randomness...
Ian