Reddit reviews Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality
We found 5 Reddit comments about Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
You'd probably like this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DXKJ2DA/ref=dp-kindle-redirect
Also the book Our Mathematical Universe, by the cosmologist Max Tegmark, is a non-religious proposal for the Explanation for Everything, with a lot more substance and plausibility to it than the religious ideas.
>If 99% of all possible observers are in worlds without property X, then being in a world with property X is fairly strong evidence that modal realism is false.
Yes, assuming omniscience, but this presumption cannot ever be justified. Setting aside the objection that 1% is not altogether unlikely on the scale of cosmological fine tunings, the modal realist can always say:
"Though you may think that property X should only appear in the universe to 10^-10^10 % of conscious observers, much more likely is that you are simply mistaken as to what demands must be met in order for physical laws to be compatible with conscious observers in any particular universe."
>So either there's something special about consciousness that only allows it to arise in universes which have lots of structure everywhere, we need some less naive way to quantify over possible worlds that massively increases the density of worlds with sensible physical laws, or modal realism is almost certainly false.
It seems like you've slipped in a commitment to non-haeccitism about personal identity. If you are capable of experiencing multiple worlds at once, the existence of Boltzmann brains should pose no problem for you. While the majority of "worlds" containing mathematical substructures isomorphic to particular brain states corresponding to the course of your own life will not be stable, what you experience must be (says the modal realist) an emergent quasi-classical universe, for whatever reason to do with how the large scale structure of the mathematical universe tracks personal identity over isomorphic substructures.
This is a greatly underserved area of philosophy, but there is some work broaching the edge. Here are some good resources.
Thanks for your response. My understanding and phrasing came from these sources:
Yes, I read all of those. Several of them more than once. I've been reading about inflationary cosmology for a little less than a decade. Wikipedia's page on eternal inflation is also an interesting read, though brief. Regarding ontology, I'd welcome any argument you'd like to make. I'm not an expert in the scholastics, but I've been reading apologetics on and off for a couple of decades. I was treating ontology as being "the study of what there is," to quote the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. If that's too broad for you, please make an argument, or clarify what you're claiming.
> we often think that experience teaches us something about a mind-independent reality.
Wouldn't you say that idealism is quite distinct from solipsism? I mean Berkeley was also an empiricist and defended such arguments in favor of verifiability of experience. Idealism tells us that the workings of universe have their foundation in perception, not that the universe consists of fleeting experiences.
> One difficulty for idealism involves its analysis of perception.
Isn't perception ultimately a process? And isn't a process, in b-series time, ultimately a structure? I would say the occurrence (possibility?) of such a structure is what re-ifies existence - and being a structure would necessitate the "order" that Berkeley said would underpin what is real.
Also, there may be other constraints on this structure if, for example, reality is inherently mathematical.
Thoughts?