Ask A Genius 128 – Infinities, Infinities, Everywhere
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/03/25
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So in IC, we have termed something the “Tower of Minds” or the “Ladder of Minds.” It is the idea that information spaces contain one another like Russian dolls, like a Matrioshka situation.
Rick Rosner: Or like ‘turtles all the way down,’ but it is mind spaces all the way up.
SDJ: Exactly, so it’s an infinite up, and a finite down, or a functionally infinite up, and a definite finite down.
RR: That whole thing seems problematics. In our experience of the world in a reasonable stance towards the world,the world can’t contain infinities. In every aspect of our world, everything is finite. The universe appears to have a finite age – though under IC we’d claim that to be much older than the apparent age of the universe, but the universe is finite in space, finite in the particles it has, and finite in the interactions among these particles.
There are no actual infinites in the world as far as we know. There are theoretical infinities that you can use in various ways to do math and physics, but those infinities help you get a solution to your equation, but not perfectly something infinite in the world itself. So when you have this structure under IC, call it the “Subject World”; that is, a thing perceiving a wider world. We each have a Subject Worlds in our heads.
Information worlds that function to perceive the greater outer world. So you have a Subject World and the Object World. A thing that is perceiving, our consciousnesses, and the information processing in our brains that can abstracted as a mind space, as an information space, and that this mind space or Subject World reflets or analyzes an Object World external to the Subject World.
To extend it further, the Object World consists of matter, which is itself information that is part of a Subject World that implies yet another Object World and that Object World can be assumed to be made out of information that is a Subject World looking at yet another Object World. So that each Object World is actually a Subject World looking at yet another probably vastly larger Object World.
Our minds are supported by our brains. Our conscious experience wouldn’t be possible if we didn’t have the hardware, which is our brains, and the world that surrounds our brains. Our conscious world would not be possible without that hardware, which is the world and the universe. And then we further extrapolate the universe as made up of the same stuff that our mind space is made of, and that stuff wouldn’t be possible without an exterior world that has the hardware that contains that information world.
So we’re left with infinite chains of worlds being contained in each other. And that’s a really troublesome infinite. That we can’t exist, and the that the universe can’t exist, without an infinite chain of further universes containing each bigger universe and each bigger universe containing the one below. It seems unwieldy and reflecting of an insufficiently developed understanding of what things might be that we need this infinite just get the existence of our minds and the universe that contains them.
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