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Old 01-14-2010, 12:26 AM   #31
TraineeHuman
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Join Date: May 2009
Location: Sydney, Australia
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Default Re: Imagining the tenth dimension

10thdim: To expand on my previous comments to you, the question of “What are all the kinds of universes that there are or could be?” is very much a philosophical question. So let me describe how professional philosophers go about exploring such questions. (Warning: some Forum members may find the following too abstract-sounding to be interesting.)

Firstly, believe it or not, the answers you will get to any questions like the above are well known to depend very much on what ontology (what “story” and “policy” you adopt regarding what sorts of “things” you pre-assume to exist in the universe/multiverse) and what epistemology (i.e., what your “story” is regarding how we acquire knowledge of things).

There are only a few possible choices regarding your ontology. In this case, you have clearly chosen a positivist ontology. (You may perhaps not be aware that throughout all your account you’re assuming this ontology to be “the only reality”, but I believe you are.) A positivist ontology is well-known to give rise to a much more limited version of reality than any rival ontology. Clearly, because of its narrowness the choice of a positivist ontology is --surely? -- inappropriate for investigating “What are all possible universes?”

A positivist ontology also commits one to assuming in advance that everything in the universe is effectively a “closed system”, for instance. It also totally ignores and “non-exists” all forms of contextuality. Yet in recent decades in the West (and for thousands of years in the ancient East) it has become clear that basically almost all meaning is contextual. What I mean by “contextual” is that it varies according to each individual situation (and person). In other words, consider how the word “I” or the word “this” refers to depends on who or where it is said. Well, it turns out that almost every word, or event, or action actually varies in meaning in a similar way. Meaning isn’t uniform; it’s unique in each situation.

I don’t know what epistemology you’re implicitly adopting. However, one thing I deduce about it is that it seems to be strictly quantitative. In other words, whether you realize it or not, I believe you are implicitly “non-existing” everything that isn’t quantifiable. Again, such an assumption will be useful if we want to work out what kinds of worlds we could find robots on, but surely it’s inappropriate for investigating what “all universes” are like? Your epistemology is also strictly reductionist, I believe. Again, surely, inappropriate for investigating this topic?

It would be necessary to write a small book to explain the implications of some of these things in terms easy to understand. Philosophical distinctions may be abstract and seem hair-splitting, and initially seem boring. But because they are very subtle, they are also very powerful, and imply totally different versions of “reality”.
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