Dear Michael,
Here are my general thoughts on your essay.
I think it was a great idea to start by giving clear definitions of the terms of this year’s essay contest question, whose formulation was, let us say,
somewhat peculiar. By defining mathematical laws/structures as mindless, the question forced you to distinguish (at first) between mathematical structures and ideas,...
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Dear Michael,
Here are my general thoughts on your essay.
I think it was a great idea to start by giving clear definitions of the terms of this year’s essay contest question, whose formulation was, let us say,
somewhat peculiar. By defining mathematical laws/structures as mindless, the question forced you to distinguish (at first) between mathematical structures and ideas, only to later explain that there is only one type of abstraction. As I said in the comment on my essay’s thread, there is no ideal way to refer to this general category of abstractions: you use “idea”, I think I prefer just “abstraction”, but it’s only a semantic difference, we mean essentially the same thing.
The distinction you make between “being” (essence) and “existence” is an important one, but it is difficult to make because of the near synonyms of “to be” and “to exist” in everyday language. It might be clearer to use “to be” or “to exist” as synonyms for something that exists anywhere within the totality of all possible words, and to use “actually exist” to refer to something that exists in our world (like David Lewis does). But once again, it’s only a semantic difference.
Sentences I particularly liked in your essay, in “order of appearance” (!):
“We should stipulate that only self-existent entities are allowed as causative agents in this argument, in order to avoid the problem of infinite regression”.
“Ultimately reality is nothing but Ideas, which have no trouble at all in being.”
“A dream is a universe in which causality and meaning can be seen to be absent.”
“In fact, there are an infinite number of explanations for everything, all of them of equal ontological status.”
“In a meaningful universe, all Ideas have to support each other and fit logically together.”
“There is no dark matter, it’s all gray matter ;-”
If you read my previous FQXi essay, “My God It’s Full of Clones”, you know I believe we exist simultaneously in an infinite number of greater unobservable contexts, so there is indeed an “infinite number of explanations” for anything. Nevertheless, we observe a rigidly lawful and unforgiving world (at least I do, I don’t know about you!). This is not only the reason I agonize so much about the “hard problem of lawfulness”, but also the reason why I find some of the affirmations you make in the latter parts of your essay a little hard to adhere to. Let’s start with your most “outlandish” affirmation:
“In the past, the Ideas that the mind explored were Ideas that seem to our modern perspective to be magic or myth. The earth was flat and there were dragons and gods. This is literally how the world was.”
I enjoy “Game of Thrones” as much as the other guy, but I find this a little hard to make sense of. When you say “in the past”, you seem to imply the “connected past” of our own world, so if what you say is true, the laws of our universe had to gradually change between then and now, dropping some magical aspects and gaining some new “modern-scientific” ones, like the conservation of mass/energy and the laws of fluid dynamics, so that a dragon-shaped and sized animal could not possibly fly in the atmosphere of today’s Earth! That the laws could change so much while allowing for the continuing existence of life on Earth (with its intricate biochemistry) seems rather improbable to me (although, I guess, not
absolutely impossible within an infinite multi/maxiverse…)
In the same way, I would not bet that it’s inevitable that we will eventually have time travel and faster-than-light travel to the stars in
our world… Sure, within the maxiverse, many other worlds have these things, but a given world can still have limitations --- everything does not necessarily have to happen in EVERY world… And some illogical things, like having simultaneously 2 pairs of apples and 5 apples, never happen.
If you were the only mind in your reality, you could certainly define everything relative to you --- if you see flying saucers, sure, they exists --- there is no possibility for you to be deluded. But in a many-minds reality, like ours, can we truly see and believe anything without being deluded? Speaking of which: Donald Trump… just kidding!
Anyway, as I said, I really enjoyed your essay, and I have « bumped » it a little higher in the ratings, in the hope that you get more exposure and get feedback by more people --- which is quite difficult to get when there are so many essays to read and so little time!
When I answer the question you left on my essay’s thread about the ensemble of all abstractions containing no information (hopefully within the next few days), I will also alert you on your thread.
Marc
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Dear Marc . . .
I DID read your “My God It’s Full of Clones” essay! And liked it very much. This was when I first learned of the essay contest, so I was reading a few previous contest winners to get a sense of what it was about. I didn’t realize that was your essay until now. Great work!
Thank you for your thoughtful perceptions of my essay. I also prefer the term...
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Dear Marc . . .
I DID read your “My God It’s Full of Clones” essay! And liked it very much. This was when I first learned of the essay contest, so I was reading a few previous contest winners to get a sense of what it was about. I didn’t realize that was your essay until now. Great work!
Thank you for your thoughtful perceptions of my essay. I also prefer the term "abstractions," but "ideas" seems friendlier to start with. As for "being" and "existence," I feel there is a critical distinction that needs to be reinstated in general understanding. The link in my essay to New World Encyclopedia explores this distinction more deeply.
And thank you for pointing out some ideas in my essay that should be clarified. It’s true that some of my claims appear to be outlandish. But that is a natural result of my 2 basic axioms, that
everything is an idea, and
the Mind is the activator of ideas. (The Mind being one idea in the Ideaverse; a necessary idea, as
all ideas are.)
In this view, then, the reason we seem to see a “rigidly lawful and unforgiving world,” is that the idea of Mind is a singular idea. All ideas are singular. So it is a single Mind that has activated the ideas which form this universe. And those ideas all fit together in this Mind in a reasonable and rational, logical way, to make a somewhat stable, lawful universe.
So in this perspective, the Mind is the “creator” of all perceptible universes. Without the Mind’s agency, ideas remain just abstractions. It is the Mind which focuses on certain ideas and activates them. This is not an arbitrary assignment I have given the Mind, it is merely an observation of my own mind, which is the exact same idea as the singular Mind.
I say a somewhat stable universe because that Mind has also activated the idea of many separate individual minds (you and I and everyone else). This makes a much more interesting universe, with many more interactions and relations possible, as the “separate minds” usually activate conflicting ideas about things, things that will not disturb the basic stability of the universe. But they may cause ripples in that universe, for example, the ideas of flying saucers, cold fusion, healing and miracles. Some minds believe in and see these things, other minds don’t. I don’t think this world is as “rigidly lawful” as it might seem. But it is the greater portion of the Mind which lends its relative stability to the universe.
And the Mind that has activated this gestalt of ideas that form our universe can continually activate different ideas. This universe is the construction of the Mind that has imagined it, it has absolutely no causative power of its own. It is the
Mind which is the cause of all physical manifestation, including forces and laws. This is why I have said that dragons and a flat earth were literally existent. And to make an even more outlandish claim, it could be that people at that time did not have hearts or brains or blood or bones. They were essentially images, playing out a world of ideas. They did not need interior structures.
Perhaps a simple way to see this is through the analogy of a dream. In our dreams at night, there is no stable universe. The mind activates or “dreams” whatever it wants to. The people in our dreams do not have hearts or brains or intricate biochemistry. They do not see or hear. There are no atoms in our dreams or laws of conservation of mass/energy (unless we’re a physicist).
So that is essentially the perspective of this hypothesis. A Mind is dreaming, or activating, as I prefer to call it, a universe. It activates a single cohesive universe at a time, modifying it through time. I think you are right in saying that everything does not necessarily have to happen in EVERY world. But there is absolutely nothing
preventing it from happening. Even illogical things can “happen.” I can certainly imagine 2 apples and 5 apples in the same place at the same time, or a six-legged lizard with 9 legs. Does he have 6 legs or 9? Which is it? Well, I can hold my mind in a state of peaceful ambivalence about that; does every question have to have a single answer? As Walt Whitman wrote, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”
I got carried away and wrote a mini-essay, didn’t I? But it is certainly enjoyable conversing with a mind that is activating many of the same ideas that I am. To believe that we are both the same abstraction also dissipates all fear and judgment. It's actually a relief to know that my differing ideas are no more privileged than the ideas we share. Ten thousand years from now, what ideas will we hold? The play of beautiful abstractions, that’s the joy of it . . .
Michael
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