[extropy-chat] Continued from wta-talk: 'Beating Eliezer' ;)

Marc Geddes m_j_geddes at yahoo.com.au
Tue Sep 27 06:53:00 UTC 2005


Mike,

 

I was delineating mental events and physical events.  Information in the sense of computational processes (functional systems) is, as you rightly point out, really equiavlent to physical causality.

 

But high level mental events, even though they are completely *dependent* on low level physics, are not neccesserily completely *reducible* to low-level physics.  New concepts are required for high level explanations, concepts which are not a part of the physics level of explanation.  That's my justification for delineating mental and physical causality.

 

 Consilience I define to mean the integration of two different seperate kinds of knowledge into a single explanatory framework.  So I mean 'Unification' 

 

As to Stephen Hawking's 'Imaginary Time', despite the name 'Imaginary', there is no reason for believing that Imaginary Time is any less real than ordinary physical time.  The reason Hawking called it 'Imaginary' is because the concept uses imaginary numbers from mathematics , not because it's not real.  Imaginary numbers are every bit as real as real numbers.  If the Imaginary Time conjecture is correct there are really *two* time dimensions - our ordinary physical time, and this Imaginary Time.

 



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