From: Simon Gordon (sim_dizzy@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Aug 12 2004 - 20:45:10 MDT
--- Eliezer Yudkowsky <sentience@pobox.com> wrote:
> Suppose I ask you to imagine and describe the events
> in a fairytale universe. You are a physical >
entity, physics is math, thus I can model the
> events in the fairytale universe using math.
Why would you ask me to imagine it? All you would get
is my interpretation of the fairytale as described in
the storybook or whatever medium is supplied to me.
But the fairytale itself goes beyond the imagination
of any individual or even the collective imagination
of the human race. The fairytale exists as an
independent abstraction in the same way that another
spacetime universe with different physics to our own
universe exists independently and abstractly to us.
> If you write a computer program to model the >
fairytale universe in more detail, the computer is
> composed of particles and the particles are math.
This goes against the grain of what i was saying.
There are no details. The fairlytale is only described
in words; we cannot construct a computer program if we
dont know the math behind it, that is obvious. Perhaps
i should have dropped the phrase "fairytale universe"
and stuck with "fairytale" to make the concept
clearer.
> I can't even imagine a universe with a simplest
> explanation that wasn't math. It might exist, but >
I can't imagine it.
I think you are using the visual parts of your brain
too much when trying to imagine something. It might
work very well in most cases, but specifically not in
this case. To imagine "hansel and gretal" or
"goldilocks and the three bears" using visualisation
alone is flawed, because there is no unique 3(or
otherwise)dimensional space in a fairytale. You have
to use the literary parts of your brain to imagine
them. Its not mathematics, its literature!
Simon Gordon.
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