Originally posted by phoenixthoth
let me ask you a question. something I'm trying to figure out. suppose that everything that is in the "potential realm" has already been "created" but the process of creation is really a process of revelation, the revelation of "creation" to our awareness. what do you think?
. . . well, let's pretend as in the paper that tegmark is correct and mathematical existence is physical existence.
ponder this: do we create math or do we discover math?
do you see the implications behind that question?
under the hypothesis, if we can create math, then that means we can create physical existence. if we discover math that is already there, then "creation" has always been there just waiting for someone to reveal it to us.
this ties into my original question about there really being no potential: it's all all there already, waiting to be discovered. that's the direction i lead towards, that we discover math rather than create it. but if we can create math, then that's also interesting!
The way I would put it is that we discover potentials. If something is not manifest, then to me it doesn't yet exist (althought the potenial for it might exist). If you are saying that the potential for all possible manifestation already exists, then I might agree.
Regarding the idea of math being physical existence, to me that seems like an incomplete idea. Matter (and the physical laws which bring about matter) is not math even if physical behavior can be described and predicted by math (although, as I am sure you know, there are aspects of physical movement which cannot be precisely predicted). I suspect math is ultimately determined by the universe's oscillatory nature. Everything, without exception, oscillates, and it does so rhythmically. The pervasiveness of oscillation is the only "foundational" area of existence I can see that could serve as a basis for math; that is, the predictiablity of rhythm and the symmetry of oscillatory effects (such as polarity) could be what math represents.
Oscillation and oscillatory effects might be foundational, but could they be the "absolute potential" I spoke of? It seems to me that the "most" foundational thing is some sort of substance which can arise from pure potentiality to take many shapes. Some people have suggested atoms or energy as most foundational, but I Iike light as a candidate for what's most foundational (for this idea to work, light has to have a formless "ground state").
Atoms disappear all the time, in stellar fusion for example, and scientists estimate even protons, the stalwart spine of atoms, will decay in something like 10^50 years. If atoms have a life span, we would assume that in their demise they lose all structure, or form. But what is a formless atom—energy?
In science, energy is more of a mathematical and measuring tool of movement than anything actual. The thermodynamic law that states energy is “never created or destroyed” is really meant to support calculations that gauge and record the path of movement power. However, after work is done, where is all that energy just used? Maybe it wasn’t destroyed, but it is gone from the system and it is gone for good. If it did survive, no one knows where it went, or even what that movement power actually was in the first place.
While atoms and energy disappear, the same cannot be said of light. The discovery of cosmic background radiation in 1964 has since led to the conclusion it is left over from the earliest moments of the universe. After billions of years this radiation has not lost its nature as light; it has, however, lost energy and oscillatory enthusiasm because as the universe expands, it “stretches” the wavelength of that cosmic background radiation and slows down its oscillation rate. Another interesting tidbit is that the proportion of light to nuclear particles is hugely in favor of light, and growing more so every moment. Steven Weinberg has estimated the comparative densities to be, “. . . depending on the actual value of the particle density . . . between 100 million and 20,000 million photons for every nuclear particle in the universe today.” And yet one more tasty fact is that by colliding two powerful light beams, matter has been created (as particle-antiparticle pairs).
And then, what is consciousness? Might it be an evolved form of light?
