[ExI] Zero to Infinity: The Foundations of Physics

Bryan Bishop kanzure at gmail.com
Sat Oct 25 17:23:22 UTC 2008


Damien,

I glanced over the first chapter and found myself liking the concept
of the infinite degeneracy of nothingness. But I am a little alarmed
at how readily he jumps into 'advanced' systems. In particular I would
have expected something along the lines of metamath.org, where you see
the construction of the known integers and the laws of arithmetic from
a chosen set of 6 or 11 axioms. It is not my intention to claim that
these axioms must be addressed in any treatment attempting to do what
the author of "Zero to Infinity' is attempting, but rather at least
some compensation such as why so many thousands of steps are
effortlessly done away with. It is possible that metamath.org and
similar axiomatic treatments to basic mathematics are completely
wrong, and that there's a much simpler path of steps and proofs,
although even this isn't addressed. Perhaps someone else on the list
has a few thoughts on this.


I am sure that anyone "in bed with" transhuman concepts can nod to the
ideal of rewrite rules. When I first read the opening paragraphs I
thought that it sounded like the author had submitted one too many bug
reports to mod_rewrite, an apache web server module very commonly used
to rewrite URLs to make pretty URLs turn into more memorable and
pretty strings. Too, the entire struggle known as the regexps in
programming circles. My recent introduction to (formal) grammar rules,
in the sense of graph rewriting, is a nice connection to explore, but
again it has been my understanding that there's more layers behind
graph theory, number theory and the theory of categories and algebraic
structures than there are to the cisco routing standards.

- Bryan
512 203 0507
http://heybryan.org/



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