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Consciousness vs. the Ruliad – Stephen Wolfram Λ Donald Hoffman [video]

9 pointsby ganzuul11 months ago

1 comment

rep_lodsb11 months ago
Even if there is no physical reality, and only one consciousness (your own), space and time must exist <i>a priori</i>, as Kant said. There could be no continuity of experience without time; and without space, the universe observed by that consciousness would have no structure at all - it wouldn&#x27;t consist of anything other than the observer itself. The mere fact that you can conceive of different ideas implies that there must be a <i>separation</i> (i.e. space) between them: if &quot;all is one&quot; - as the strawman hippie would argue - was actually true, you couldn&#x27;t disagree with that statement, or even imagine the possibility of it being otherwise. So because you <i>can</i>, it is certainly false.<p>Although space and time are not the same, there is an obvious connection between them: as things are farther apart in space (whether physical or conceptual), it takes more time for them to affect each other. For the terms &quot;cause&quot; and &quot;effect&quot; to have meaning, the time between them cannot be zero. And at least special relativity has been shown in cellular automata, where both time and space are discrete, so it could be the same in our universe?<p>Wolfram may be a crackpot, and the Ruliad just another multiverse theory that could never be verified or disproven. But I think there is some value in it, straddling the borderline between philosophy and physics.