Academician, what you are explicitly not saying is that the aspects of reality that give rise to consciousness can be described mathematically. Well, parts of your post seem to imply that the mathematically describable functions are what matter, but other parts deny it. So it’s confusing, rather than enlightening. But I’ll take you at your word that you are not just a reductionist.
So you are a “monist” but, as David Chalmers has described such positions, in the spirit of dualism. As far as I am concerned, you are a dualist, because the only interesting distinction I see is between mathematically describable reality vs. non-MD reality—and your “monism” has aspects of both.
Your argument seems to be that monism is simpler than dualism, so Occam’s Razor prefers it, so we should believe it. Hence, you define the stuff the world is made of as “whatever I am” and call it one kind of stuff.
I don’t see that as a useful approach, because what I want to know is whether MD stuff is enough, or whether we need something more, where ‘something more’ is explicitly mental-related. Remember, we want the simplest explanation that fits the evidence. So the question reduces to “Does an MD-only world fit the evidence from subjective experience?” That’s a hard question.
I am planning to write a post on the hard problem at some point, which I’ll post on my blog and here.
Ata, there are many things wrong with your ideas. (Hopefully saying that doesn’t put you off—you want to become less wrong, I assume.)
I have indeed independently invented the “all math exists” idea myself, years ago. I used to believe it was almost certainly true. I have since downgraded its likelihood of being true to more like 50% as it has intractable problems.
Of course. (Well, it might be better to say that multiple guys like you are experiencing their own lives.)
Otherwise, it would mean that all types of people have the same measure of consciousness. Thus, for example, the fact that people who seem to be products of Darwinian evolution are more numerous would mean nothing—they are more numerous in terms of copies, not in terms of types, so the typical observer would not be one. So more copies = more measure. A similar argument applies to high measure terms in the quantum wavefunction. None of these considerations change if we assume that all math structures exist.
You assume that this would make no difference to our consciousness, but you don’t actually present any argument for that. You just assert it in the post. So I would have to say that your argument—being nonexistent—has zero credibility. That doesn’t mean that your conclusion must be false, just that your argument provides no evidence in favor of it. The measure argument shows that your conclusion is false—though with the caveat that Platonic computers might count as real enough to simulate us. So let’s continue.
So you are abandoning the question of “Why does anything exist?” in favor of just accepting that it does, which is what you warned against doing in the first place.
If all math must exist in a strong Platonic sense, then obviously, it does. If it merely can so exist as far as we know, or OTOH might not, then we have no answer as to why anything exists. “Nothing exists” would seem to be the simplest thing that might have been true, if we had no evidence otherwise.
That said, “everything exists” is prima facie simpler that “something exists” so, given that at least something exists, Occam’s Razor suggests that everything exists. Hence my interest in it.
There’s a problem, though.
Good question. There is an argument based on Turing machines that the simplest programs (i.e. laws of physics) have more measure, because a random string is more likely to have a short segment at the beginning that works well and then a random section of ‘don’t care’ bits, as opposed to needing a long string that all works as part of the program. So if we run all TM programs Platonically, simpler “laws of physics” have more measure, possibly resulting in universes like ours being typical. Great, right?
But there are problems with this. First, there are many possible TMs that could run such programs. We need to choose one—but such a choice contradicts the “inevitable” nature that Platonism is supposed to have. So why not just use all of them? There are infinitely many, so there is no unique measure to use for them. Any choice we can make of how to run them all is inevitably arbritrary, and thus, we are back to “something” rather than “everything”. We can have a very “big” something, since all programs do run, but it’s still something—some nonzero information that pure math doesn’t know anything about.
That’s just TMs, but there’s no reason other types of math structures such as continuous functions shouldn’t exist, and we don’t even have the equivalent of a TM to put a measure distribution on them.
I don’t know for sure that there isn’t some natural measure, but if there is I don’t think we can know about it. Maybe I’m overlooking some selection effect that makes things work without arbritrariness.
Ok, so suppose we ignore the arbritrariness problem. The resulting ‘everything’ might not be Platonism, but at least it would be a high level and fairly simple theory of physics. Does the TM measure in fact predict a universe like ours?
I don’t know. Selecting a fairly simple TM, in practice the differences resulting from choice of TM are negligable. But we still have the Boltzmann brain question. I don’t know if a BB is typical in such an ensemble or not. At least that is a question that can be studied mathematically.