[Fis] Fis Digest, Vol 23, Issue 24

[Bruno Marchal]

Dear Malcolm,


On 21 Feb 2016, at 22:51, Malcolm Dean wrote:

> All worldviews begin in a miracle. No exceptions.
>

I agree. Nevertheless, we should, and can, minimize the miracle.

With the digital mechanist assumption, the miracle can be limited to  
the axioms of elementary arithmetic (or combinatory algebra or any  
Turing Universal System) + at the meta-level, the assumption that  
consciousness is an invariant for some digital functional substitution.

So the "origin" can be taken as being elementary arithmetic (or Turing- 
equivalent).

God created "only" the natural numbers together with the laws of  
addition and multiplication. This, then, can be explained as being  
something that we cannot derive from anything else (except some Turing- 
equivalent theory), which confirms somehow your idea that at least one  
miracle is needed, but this illustrates that it can be kept quite  
minimal.

Eventually, this makes Mechanism testable, as it gives no choice for  
the physical laws(*), and until now, thanks to quantum-mechanics- 
without-collapse, it looks like nature confirms quite well the digital  
mechanist hypothesis. This fits very well with the information based  
approaches, notably your own work, even if the starting motivation and  
the intended applications can be different.

Best,

Bruno

(*) I am not pretending this is obvious, but that is explained in my  
papers, notably the recent one in the issues of the Progress in  
Biophysics and Molecular Biology under discussion.



> Malcolm
>
> On Feb 21, 2016 3:00 AM, <fis-request at listas.unizar.es> wrote:
> >-------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Message: 1
> > Date: Sun, 21 Feb 2016 07:37:09 +0100
> > From: "Loet Leydesdorff" <loet at leydesdorff.net>
> > To: "'Pedro C. Marijuan'" <pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es>, "'fis'"
> >         <fis at listas.unizar.es>
> > Subject: Re: [Fis] _ Re:  Maxine?s presentation
> > Message-ID: <001801d16c72$4a89c730$df9d5590$@leydesdorff.net>
> > Content-Type: text/plain;       charset="utf-8"
> >
> > Dear Maxine and colleagues,
> >
> > It seems to me that the assumption of an origin takes a heavy load  
> on this theory. We know that order can emerge from chaos. Any order  
> will also disappear in the longer run.
> >
> > Why would one wish to make such assumptions? Meta-physical?
> >
> > Best,
> > Loet
>
>
> Malcolm
>
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http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/



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