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--></style></head><body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink="#954F72" style='word-wrap:break-word'><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><i>I would add an additional, abd subtle point. That is, if the world exists as a mathematical being, then an infinity of all possible universes exist.<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class=MsoNormal><i><o:p> </o:p></i></p><p class=MsoNormal><i>Then our own consciousness minds, being finite objects of finite complexity, will find our existence compatible with an ever changing, yet infinite set of different such universes (as our memories and conscious experience at any time will always be compatible with many such universes.<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class=MsoNormal><i><o:p> </o:p></i></p><p class=MsoNormal>This is very important. The finiteness of our minds unbinds us to a large degree from the environment. A brain cannot possibly encode all the information residing in the much larger external environment. Therefore many possible environments are compatible with a given state of the brain.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Some believe that, for example, if a person killed you from long range such as with a sniper rifle with a bullet that completely destroys the consciousness faster than a single neuron can fire and your conscious brain state before destruction contains no information about the assassin and the gun, then there is no conscious experience (at all) of being killed. You would simply not experience death and another version of you somewhere else in space and time (another universe, perhaps) identical except the lack of an assassin would simply go about the day as if nothing unusual occurred.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Note that the argument relies crucially on two assumptions: your brain contained no information that would suggest you are about to be assassinated (the assassin choosing a target randomly without warning may sastisfy this) and that the universe, or universes, is expansive enough to contain multiple collections of particles that are exactly the same or “similar enough” to you.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>I do not claim to know that this is true. The two assumptions may be unviable or false and there may be additional important unstated assumptions. There is also the matter of personal identity. I personally see personal identity as a philosophical concept that holds little to no objective weight. If there are two identical collections of particles and one is destroyed without causing any conscious experience of degradation or destruction, does it matter? If a tree falls in a forest and no one experiences it, should anyone care? The situation I described probably causes a negative gut reaction, but intuition often has little to do with deep reality.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><div style='mso-element:para-border-div;border:none;border-top:solid #E1E1E1 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal style='border:none;padding:0in'><b>From: </b><a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org">Jason Resch via extropy-chat</a><br><b>Sent: </b>Saturday, March 12, 2022 8:25 AM<br><b>To: </b><a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org">ExI chat list</a><br><b>Cc: </b><a href="mailto:jasonresch@gmail.com">Jason Resch</a><br><b>Subject: </b>Re: [ExI] Apple Pi</p></div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></p><div><div><p class=MsoNormal>On Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 5:58 AM Rafal Smigrodzki via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:</p></div><blockquote style='border:none;border-left:solid #CCCCCC 1.0pt;padding:0in 0in 0in 6.0pt;margin-left:4.8pt;margin-top:5.0pt;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:5.0pt'><div><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:4.8pt'>I was just musing about why is there something rather than nothing. This question has bedeviled humans since time immemorial. God was invented as an answer, and clever scholastics created whole whirlpools of circular reasoning around the question - like "God is perfect, non-existence is imperfect, so god must exist and he said "Fiat lux", so there we are, something rather than nothing, so praise god".</p><div><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:4.8pt'><o:p> </o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:4.8pt'>But what if we try to dissect the psychology behind our questioning of existence? When we think about anything at all aside from formal systems we use our built-in intuitions. Intuitions are feelings about what is likely to happen, what is likely to be, based on a complex, non-verbalized thought process that develops in our minds from evolved mind forms that interact with sensory inputs and various physical processes in our brains. In creating formal systems we attempt to strip the complexity of intuitions down to almost nothing, until only the inevitable remains, shaped by its internal logic, seemingly unconnected to the complex world around us. The crystalline purity of mathematics is thus chiseled out of the messy swirl of our thoughts.</p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:4.8pt'><o:p> </o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:4.8pt'>Our thinking about the observable world, such as apples, is full of intuitions, rules of thumb imprinted on our mind by what we see. One of the intuitions is the idea of "not being anymore". If you eat an apple, it's not there. It is possible for an apple to not exist. This thought is embedded in an enormous set of assumptions about our world, and not just any world but the world where apples exist and are sometimes eaten. </p></div></div></blockquote></div></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal>"Object permanence" -- the psychological term for the understanding that objects continue to exist even when no longer being sensed -- is learned. Young children don't have it.</p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal>Likely it develops after the brain notices repeated reappearances of objects that formerly disappeared from one's senses. Perhaps this is what the game of peek-a-boo is meant to help teach.</p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal>But as we never encounter objects from the past reappearing in the present, most humans, unless they study relativity, study Parmenides, or develop a taste for Platonism, never come to develop "object permanence" for past and future events. We are fooled into thinking that because we can't see the past or future that they must not exist.</p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div><div><div><blockquote style='border:none;border-left:solid #CCCCCC 1.0pt;padding:0in 0in 0in 6.0pt;margin-left:4.8pt;margin-top:5.0pt;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:5.0pt'><div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:4.8pt'>There is a lot of complexity here, including the notions of time, identity, space, hunger and deprivation. We think about the non-existence of apples as something important in part because we have evolved to care about having access to food. We think about our death because ancestors who had an abstract fear of death were better able to use abstractions to solve long-term challenges to their existence and thus gave us the genes for thinking and the genes for fearing death. Everything that we think about apples and us is highly theory-laden and sits on top of enormous complexity.</p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:4.8pt'><o:p> </o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:4.8pt'>By contrast, formal systems are simple. They might impose a psychological burden on us because we are not evolved to think specifically about them, which is why there are so few mathematicians but by cutting off the complex intuitions built into our minds we investigate entities that appear to be inevitable, that have structures independent of our quotidian intuitions. Take the number pi. It's defined in a very simple way yet its decimal extension is an infinity of digits, unpredictable except by laboriously computing them, every one of them in its place, too large to be stored in any mind or computer but still inevitable. The mathematician exposed to thinking about pi and other such entities soon develops the intuition of timeless existence, Platonic form, something that is intangible but unavoidably true. Mathematicians do not obsess about why pi is the way it is, because pi is as it must be. They don't worry about pi not being there, because the intuition tells them it cannot disappear and that's it. Case closed.</p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:4.8pt'><o:p> </o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:4.8pt'>So we have the high-level intuition about physical objects being able to just be gone and we have the mathematical intuition about entities that are outside of time, inevitable and thus beyond the question of cause and effect. Pi is. It must be. God didn't invent pi. The question "Why is there pi?" is ill-posed. Which intuition is true? Well, both, as long as you apply the correct intuition (or rule-of-thumb) in the right context. You can run out of apples, which may be important for survival, but you can't run out of pi.</p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:4.8pt'><o:p> </o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:4.8pt'>The nagging feeling that there must be a cause for existence in general and the worry that it could just stop being comes from applying the intuition we have about apples to the whole world, the sum-all of everything we can think of, and then some. But is Being like an apple, or is it like pi?</p></div></div></blockquote></div></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal>I think all being is of the same kind: the necessary, mathematical, platonic kind.</p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal>It is easier to understand our universe as a kind of platonic object once you come to see it as a static four dimensional object, and time as a subjective illusion for some substructures embedded within it. I write about this in more detail here:</p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><a href="https://alwaysasking.com/what-is-time/">https://alwaysasking.com/what-is-time/</a></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div><div><div><blockquote style='border:none;border-left:solid #CCCCCC 1.0pt;padding:0in 0in 0in 6.0pt;margin-left:4.8pt;margin-top:5.0pt;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:5.0pt'><div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:4.8pt'><o:p> </o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:4.8pt'>Men much cleverer than I, such as Stephen Wolfram, Joscha Bach and others say that the world is a formal system, a mathematical Being, and I feel they are right, and have felt this way for many decades. </p></div></div></blockquote></div></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal>I would add an additional, abd subtle point. That is, if the world exists as a mathematical being, then an infinity of all possible universes exist.</p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal>Then our own consciousness minds, being finite objects of finite complexity, will find our existence compatible with an ever changing, yet infinite set of different such universes (as our memories and conscious experience at any time will always be compatible with many such universes.</p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal>So we cannot really speak of our universe being any single formal object, but rather we may have to speak of an infinite collection of different formal objects. There's now strong reasons to believe this as it apparently can explain many previously unanswerable questions concerning "why quantum mechanics?"</p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal>I write about this here:</p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><a href="https://alwaysasking.com/why-does-anything-exist/#Why_Quantum_Mechanics">https://alwaysasking.com/why-does-anything-exist/#Why_Quantum_Mechanics</a></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div><div><div><blockquote style='border:none;border-left:solid #CCCCCC 1.0pt;padding:0in 0in 0in 6.0pt;margin-left:4.8pt;margin-top:5.0pt;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:5.0pt'><div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:4.8pt'>All rules are applied, the ruliad exists like pi because it is not possible for mathematical things not to be. We are embedded in this formal system and we create the intuitions we need to deal with our immediate vicinity but these intuitions are ill-suited to the formal system itself. You need to clear your mind of thoughts about apples and think about the world like mathematicians think about numbers.</p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:4.8pt'><o:p> </o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:4.8pt'>The world is not an apple, it is pi. Something exists. It must.</p></div></div></blockquote></div></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal>Very well said, I agree!</p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div></div><p class=MsoNormal>Jason</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div></body></html>