I'll have to return to this thread for a more detailed response later, but the early universe has this very confusing property of being in thermodynamic and chemical equilibrium but nonetheless being "low entropy."

This is confusing since most textbooks and classes will lead you to associate equilibrium with high entropy. The simplest explanation, which leaves out a lot of nuance, is that there is also gravitational entropy to be considered, and this being low initially offsets the apparent equilibrium seen in the cosmic microwave background.

But there is a lot more going on. Particles are changing identities incredibly frequently at these energies, the fundemental forces aren't acting like they do normally, the density of particles are changing as the universe expands and temperature shifts. It's a very dynamic model. To make things more confusing, there are arguments that the laws of physics aren't eternal and unchanging, but actually behaved differently in this era.

In any event, some argue that key ways of understanding this period are fundementally flawed, for example: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S135521980600027X

While others have punted and call the low entropy initial conditions a "natural law," of which there can be no further investigation (provided you agree that natural laws don't demand investigation that is).

One Damn Thing After Another, Jodi Taylor, very light time travel sci-fi I'm listening to with my wife.

Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Diarmaid MacCollouch, a very dense survey of the history of the faith begining with ancient Greek and Hebrew culture. Also listening to this with my wife. Actually read this years ago but it's such a wide ranging history that you can't get it all in one go.

Element of the Philosophy of Right - Hegel - suprisingly accessible after the section of abstract right... for a Hegel Book.

Causation: A User's Guide, Hall and Paul. I really wanted to get into this but it is very dry. Might have to return later.

Emma, Austin. Never read it before. Austin brings the delightful dialogue as always. I always like Clueless.

So, I am asking how do you think about making sense in the maze of philosophical pluralism?

I didn't fully discover my love of philosophy until my late 20s. A big part of this was the overwhelming diversity of the field. The field seemed almost impenetrable for the crushingly long list of "great names," each with their own unique systems, each with hundreds, or often thousands, of pages of incredibly dense pages to grapple with.

If I reflect back on my undergraduate classes, and my early periods of self study, the problem was a focus on chronologically pushing through authors. I don't think this is a great way to learn philosophy. This is not how we teach biology or chemistry. Nor is it how we teach mathematics, another abstract field, or literary studies, another discipline within the humanities. In biology, we might describe how certain discoveries were made, review debunked theories and how they were falsified, etc. but we don't slog through the progress of biological theories from Aristotle on.

I bring this up because I began to get a lot more out of my studies when I began using topical books (e.g. Routledge and Oxford companions) on specific areas of philosophy that interested me. After reading those, I'd be able to go out and find journal articles on specific problems that caught my eye and I'd have a better idea of the authors who I wanted to look into.

What these guides gave me was a "lay of the land." Most "Introductions to...", "Companions to...", and SEP entries have a typology of sorts. They map the area in question, and define a rough list of camps. This is reductive and misses nuanced, but it is essential. A developed field has a common nomenclature. It normally has some landmark papers that have helped define the "camps" on a given issue.

This is true in the sciences and it seems even more true in philosophy. Because philosophy is more abstract, with looser borders than pretty much any other discipline, this sort of scaffolding is essential. Philosophy is in many ways a conversation, and a conversation requires a common language.

Moreover, it's a conversation of very complex ideas. Here compression is also essential. Identifiers like "terminators," or "the semantic camp," can act as short hand for an entire complex set of ideas. This sort of compression is essential because the mind simply doesn't have the bandwidth to unpack every idea, you'll lose the thread of an argument doing that, and it will take forever to write it. Logical notation plays a similar role.

I notice this same sort of need to compress data to manipulate it in the programing and database work I do as well.

This is why I don't really like arguments about "blowing up philosophy," or starting from the ground up again. Yes, the field is full of bloated, sometimes quite bad writing, but if you want to effectively communicate on very complex ideas you need to have a shared language and it doesn't make sense to ignore the existing systems for that.

Also, to what extent is reason a quest for reason, a search for personal meaning or connected to power balances or imbalances in social structures?

I think philosophy can be all of these things. Reason itself is more basic. When we seek to understand power imbalances and social structures we use reason. We have to assume these systems are intelligible to us and that within them one thing follows from another in a comprehendible manner, else how could we even say that such imbalances exist?



I don't think I necessarily agree. The problem with the proliferation of access to digital information, and the ability to create and spread digital information rapidly is the potential shift in the signal to noise ratio in our culture. More isn't necessarily better. For example, if a doctor can now have access to 10 times as many studies as she had before, but now 55% are likely to be garbage instead of just 15%, the new technology doesn't seem like a benefit. What we care about is finding out what we want to know, and having more to sift through can be a major barrier to that.

I think the second problem is that truth is not necessarily advantageous for the survival and reproduction of digital information. There are tons of articles, memes, videos, etc. in our digital ecosystem. What reproduces and spreads to more hosts is not necessarily veritical information. Salacious gossip, long debunked partisan diatribes, etc. all seem to replicate very well "in the wild." Sources that are supposed to vet knowledge have problems too, e.g. publication biased, novelty bias, etc.

And since we exist in a sort of epistemic web, a web increasingly shaped by search and content promotion algorithms, where the veracity of one claim is reliant on another source, more voices can just become more noise.

I realize those are mostly revenue raising ideas for austerity, but there are plenty of moves to make on the expense side.

Increasing the retirement age makes sense in the context of increasing life and health spans. Nationalizing healthcare and senior care is a expense reduction idea. Even if the US was still on top for spending, it could reduce healthcare costs by a extraordinary amount by moving costs closer to other nations.

The reason you need to mostly target the income and taxes of the wealthy isn't ideological or moral. I think framing it this way hurts attempts to deal with the structural deficit, making reforms less politically palatable. You go after high networth households for the same reason you rob banks, "that's where the money is." The top 1% has over 15 times the networth of the bottom 50% in the US. The bottom 50% of households hold a fairly insignificant amount of wealth, about, and the next 25% doesn't fair that much better. You simply can't fix the problems by taxing them, only by denying them entitlements and means tested benefits, but here most of the spending is due to seniors, and so arguments that cutting benefits will "make them work more, backfilling lost income," are even more ridiculous.

The above is also why arguments about rising wages for low income service employees driving inflation don't hold water. To be sure, this trend squeezed some industries quite hard, but these aren't even the sectors where prices have risen most rapidly. Overall price level increases can't be wholly due to growing wages for the the bottom half of the income distribution, since they only account for 12-14% of all income and their wage gains only outpaced inflation for a few months. Their real wages have since experienced negative growth.

One can only imagine the huge efforts at tax evasion any such effort to preempt an inevitable large scale crisis would kick off. I sometimes wonder if we are in store for a WWII scale financial conflict of sorts as developed countries are hit by a tsunami of pensioners but are unable to get recalcitrant elites to pay for the cost. Down the road, I can see some sort of international tax collection body existing, but unfortunately not until it is created to respond to a large scale crisis most likely.

I would have said "sell securities, raise rates," three weeks ago, but now it looks like that will risk sending the banking system into a crisis. I would also have said, "you could raise capital requirements, but why bother, since banks have been way above Fed requirements forever," as this was conventional, textbook window that had calcified since 2008.

But of course, if bank capital is offset by unrealized losses of securities, then the capital requirements aren't doing what they should be doing.

I am surprised. I thought rising rates were likely to trigger a crisis, but I assumed it would come from unhealthy corporations being unable to cheaply roll debt, not banks holding on to low yield LTD getting cleaned out. For one, we have had decades of low rates, it doesn't seem like there should be enough high rate issuances to suck up demand, unless they are cloning it again via derivatives. In that case, you'll have a secondary problem of high yield instruments getting cleaned out when rates fall as people do advanced refunding, call bonds, etc.

Also makes you wonder about the credibility of the Fed in a world where rates are high for years considering their gigantic balance sheet of low interest securities accumulated during the Pandemic.

Realistically, what is needed is major tax increases to address distorting levels of wealth and income inequality. No cap on Social Security or Medicare income, making the tax no longer regressive, plus full applicability of these taxes to capital gains, would go a long way. The Federal budget is set to start running a surplus later this decade not considering senior entitlement revenue or expenses, but runs an astounding deficit paying for seniors, who already received half of federal spending.

We also need austerity. It is trivial to cheat Medicaid and Medicare right now and attempts to recoup costs are arbitrary. $500,000 worth of heart surgery at age 85, step right up, that's the right sort of ailment. $500,000 worth of long term care for Alzheimer's? We need to liquidate all your assets to pay for things.

Taking steps to not pay for Medicaid costs is essentially standard now, only poor people get hit with all of it. It's a rent seeking niche. The fact is that if you accumulated $1M is securities and cash and had an expensive house, then you should pay for you care. Chances are that will liquidate much or all of your estate. People have a hard time wrapping their minds around this because senior care, by far and away the most expensive type, is arbitrarily free in some cases and not others. The arbitraryness and uneven burden needs to go, and a good way to do this might be an across the board estate tax on virtually all estates (say over $25,0000) instead of any attempt to recoup costs.

Baby Boomer can't expect $2 trillion plus a year in cash payments later this decade, free healthcare, and that their assets pass on untouched, it's unrealistic and will kill the system for their children.

Or, more unrealistically, they could nationalize healthcare and higher ed and put in cost controls seen elsewhere in the OECD. That will be very painful though and austerity itself as millions of admin staff in colleges and insurance whose positions don't exist in other countries become redundant.

Chronically low interest rates need to go, we now have tons of evidence that they increase inequality. Mortgage interest deductions need to be phased out because favoring homeowners just promoted inequality and any savings get priced into house sales anyhow.

A full carbon/pollution tax would also hit Chinese goods very hard and incentize near shoring, which could help fix some of the supply chain issues.

I am surprised that you went for this explanation, given what you said above about frequentist explanations. This is a textbook case where statistics does not apply because it simply does not exist.

Frequentism seems fine in some contexts, or at the very least, it is at times much easier to explain things in that frame when it doesn't make a material difference. A closer look would indeed show problems with my example. If you accept determinism at all levels of reality, then of course there is only one way a system can evolve, the very way it does evolve, and entropy has to be framed as somehow subjective, or at least relational. The problem with frequentism IMO is that it is generally the only way of understanding probability theory that is taught, and is incoherent when applied to some situations.

Your reasoning applies to an ergodic system that has been evolving for a long time, or an equivalent ensemble. But the early universe is nothing like that. If there is no explanation for the past hypothesis (we don't have a good theory of the universe's origin), then it makes no sense to talk about how likely or unlikely it is, because the universe was and still is far from ergodic, it hadn't been evolving for a long time (ex hypothesi), and we don't have an ensemble (unless some kind of a multiverse theory is true, but that is still very speculative, so we can't take it as given).

You are correct about the nature of the Past Hypothesis; that's a fine answer, but it isn't the argument I get frustrated with. By definition, there are more ways to be in a high entropy state than a low entropy state. Perhaps there is indeed a mechanism at work in the early universe that makes a later low entropy state counterintuitively more likely than a high entropy one. But, barring support for that fact, we are left with the principal of indifference, and this suggests that we weight all options equally, combinatorially if there are a finite number of states. That is, giving equal likelihood to all potential universes of X mass energy existing in an early state with all possible levels of entropy, the high entropy universes outnumber the low entropy ones, barring some other sort of explanation. Appeals to the Anthropic Principle don't address this. The same issue comes up with the Fine Tuning Problem; if we don't know the likelihood of values for constants, indifference should prevail.

If this is the case, then it remains that high entropy states outnumber low entropy ones, and remain more likely.

Positing some as of yet not understood mechanism by which this is not the case is fine, after all, we have empirical evidence that the entropy of the early universe was low (counterintuitively despite being near equilibrium, wrapping your head around negative heat is a doozy). The problem I was addressing is using the Anthropic Principle to address this rather than any appeals to the probability of any observation of the state of the early universe. This is where the problem of triviality comes up.

I think this is a similar problem to that of claims that "everything is explainable in terms of fundemental physics," and then appealing to the black box, brute facts of initial conditions as the origin of many of the most interesting things we'd like the natural sciences to explain. I think the proper response here is: "yes, but we want to know how the particular initial conditions in our past led to X and Y, etc. historically, and if this cannot be explained without appeals to brute facts for a vast array of all natural phenomena, then nature does not reduce to fundemental physics in terms of explanations."

Update: Trump himself has released a statement about his immanent arrest from a warrant to be issued in three days and called for protests and supporters to "take back our nation." Ya love to see it.

Well now it appears law enforcement is prepping for an indictment announcement next week. This is a New York indictment, but a Georgia one also seems quite likely.

Maybe he can stretch it out long enough to win and we'll have the crisis of a President with multiple state warrants out for his arrest in felony charges.

Yes. Since there are more ways to be high entropy than low entropy we should have more worlds with high entropy than low. So why are we in a low entropy world if it is very statistically unlikely?

Some version of the past hypothesis, right? But then seeing a world where the past hypothesis is true is vanishingly unlikely, even if it occurs with probability 1, according to MWI derivations of the Born Rule.

Weyl curvature arguments are ok here, but both MWI and Cosmic Inflation tend to go for the Anthropic Principle to explain this.

"All possible worlds exist. Obviously we exist and our world is possible. And we can only exist in some narrow band of worlds in terms of initial conditions."

The obvious problem here is that this makes explanations from physics trivial. "Anything observed is physically possible and anything possible occurs so of course you see x even if x is a 1 in quadrillion event," is just "if you see it, it is possible, so it is."

All explanations about how stars, planets, life, etc. evolved in our particular history, the how and why of science, gets fobbed off onto "initial conditions, all of which are true."

Obviously, some cosmologists find this answer very deep, hence the popularity. However, it essentially reduces to "if it's possible it happens and if you see it, it is possible." This isn't a real answer. The answer we want in non-multiverse theories isn't actually addressed, which reformulated for an "all possibilities exist multiverse," is the question "why did our particular history occur such that we see x."

Also, apparently you should be bothered by extremely unlikely events in your experiments if you believe in MWI, since you should care about the Born Rule... except when it comes to identifying that you are in an incredibly low probability universe. Then, when doing cosmology, it is ok to jettison probabilities when making explanations and resort to "everything has to happen with p = 1."

If you follow the epistemological logic used for cosmology at the individual level, you shouldn't be surprised when jumping in front of a train doesn't kill you or standing in front of a firing machine gun leaves you unscathed (ala Tegmark's quantum suicide set up). If you were dead, you wouldn't see anything. Even if being alive is incredibly unlikely, that's all you're going to see, and so the anthropic principle, applied on the individual level, says there is nothing at all notable about throwing yourself into a volcano and surviving, etc.

It seems to me that either low probability events should always be surprising and make us ask questions or they never should, not a too cute mix of both. Just bite the bullet and say the Born Rule is meaningless, a total illusion, in that case.

Of course, he needs to stay out of prison until November 2024 to do that, which could prove difficult.

and Biden cruises into another four terms.

Four terms? Imagine, he'd be a spry 98 years old at the end of it, our own Mugabe.

More seriously, I don't even think he should run for one more term. Age isn't just a number, and he'll be 82 before his second inauguration. The Democrats have plenty of good candidates to run and I can certainly see it benefiting them to put a new face out there given prevailing economic conditions.

Trump will probably win the GOP primary. Desantis is polling well for the same reason almost every Republican in the huge field in 2016 polled well for short periods. He isn't Trump and people don't know much about him. Trump has already opened up a 14 point lead on him and we haven't even seen Desantis embarrass himself by explaining why he is running against Trump even though he claims to believe Trump won the last election in a landslide.

But Trump-lite doesn't bring the out the enthusiasm like the Orange Augustus himself. The "hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory," crowd isn't going to go for anyone else. Like, are they going to vote for Mike Pence? They were chanting about hanging him in 2021. Plus, it looks like the GOP establishment will sabotage themselves by having too many candidates to split votes between again. MTG will quite likely be the VP.

The more frightening thing is that I can totally see Trump beating Biden, probably while losing the popular vote by 9-10 million votes this time, and his platform of revenge policies, for example, making almost the entire federal civil service political appointees, would be disastrous.

Plus, what a cruel irony it would be to see the first female President and for it to be MTG. That is the type of irony fate seems to like delivering lately.

Ahem, unfortunately, the Compatibilist Delegation has moved for a reading of their edits as well...

Some are determined to choose to be determined to believe in "free will".

Some are determined to choose to be determined to believe that "free will" is an illusion.

Some are determined to choose to be determined to believe that "free will" is compatible with being determined.

And some are determined to choose to be determined to think that 'whether or not we have "free will"' is a distinction that does not make a significant practical difference in our everyday lives.

However, the delegation seems split in:

"Some choose to be determined to choose to..." and "some are determined to choose to be determined to..." We may need to adjourn while they discuss the compromise position of "some choose to be determined to be determined to choose what they are determined to choose to be determined to..."

Some choose to believe in "free will".

Some choose to believe that "free will" is an illusion.

Some choose to believe that "free will" is compatible with being determined.

And some choose to think that 'whether or not we have "free will"' is a distinction that does not make a significant practical difference in our everyday lives.

We, of the Voluntarist Delegation, are willing to agree to 90+% of this statement, with some minor edits (see above). All in favor of moving the question, choose to say "aye."

I'm not sure I follow. Religion and nationalism clearly exist in the world, so why would they be necessarily supernatural in any respect?

"Ukraine," "communism," "the universal church," don't not exist or only exist supernaturally just because their existence is diffuse in space or time, and hard for us to locate.

There is a reason that, when totalitarian states want to erase a culture, they destroy books and architecture, kill members of that culture or take their children away for re-education, etc. rather than hiring sorcerers to magic the culture out of existence, and presumably this is because cultures, nations, etc. are natural.

I see it now. Yes, I am aware of that solution, and while clever, it doesn't seem satisfactory. The whole Sleeping Beauty problem class seems to be misused in a lot of physics scenarios, IMO, in part because rational agent based models aren't reversible. For example, this is where Tegmark's first book (mentioned ITT) begins to start going off the rails. He starts talking about the Doomsday Problem, and "what are the chances that you would randomly be the nth member of X sentient species ," in terms of frequencies.

This is an area where frequentism starts to become incoherent if you apply it this way. MWI is deterministic. The person you are and the time you exist in history isn't random or independent, it is entirely determined in MWI. You can apply frequentism in plenty of physics cases and get away with it, but using it here in the context of cosmic inflation or MWI makes absolutely no sense.

In the Doomsday Scenario for instance, any early human would have been just as justified in thinking humanity will die out before even 5 billion people are born as Tegmark is today worrying about humanity going extinct before 250 billion people. But obviously, when one lives is not i.i.d. He's obviously a smart guy, and I enjoyed most of the book, but this and some Born Rule explanations could be part of a public awareness campaign called "this is your brain on frequentism. Just say no! (to calling probability and frequency identical)"

You can turn the Born Rule into an argument about which bets a person should place, but that doesn't answer why those bets are likely to be good ones except in terms of empiricism when the derivations of the Born Rule are circular (e.g. when using axioms originally added just for the Born Rule). It becomes a sort of hybrid frequentist-QBism in some solutions, which I don't even think is coherent if it is unpacked.

Or, to let someone else say it:

From these axioms they conclude that rational agents should bet on the outcomes of a quantum experiment with probabilities given by the Born rule. Who cares? Should we really believe that the statistics of an experiment will be constrained by rationality axioms? And conversely, if you can show that the statistics of a quantum experiment follow the Born rule, doesn’t it become obvious that rational agents should bet that they do, making the whole decision-theoretic argument superfluous? It’s worth noting that this same criticism applies to my derivation, as it is just a cleaned up version of the Deutsch-Wallace argument...

Let’s move on to Vaidman, Carroll, and Sebens. Their derivations differ on several important points, but I’m interested here in their common point: they passionately argue that probability is about uncertainty, that a genuine source of uncertainty in Many-Worlds is self-locating uncertainty, and that locality implies that your self-locating uncertainty must be given by the Born rule. Arguing about whether probability is uncertainty is a waste of time4, but their second point is well-taken: after a measurement has been done and before you know the outcome, you are genuinely uncertain about in which branch of the wavefunction you are. I just don’t see how could this be of fundamental relevance. I can very well do the experiment with my eyes glued to the screen of the computer, so that I’m at first aware that all possible outcomes will happen, and then aware of what the outcome in my branch is, without ever passing through a moment of uncertainty in between. Decoherence does work fast enough for that to happen.5 What now? No probability anymore? And then it appears when I close my eyes for a few seconds? That makes sense if probability is only in my head, but then you’re not talking about how Nature works, and I don’t care about your notion of probability.

https://mateusaraujo.info/2021/03/12/why-i-am-unhappy-about-all-derivations-of-the-born-rule-including-mine/

I don't have these same concerns, but I think it is important than many proponents of MWI do list similar concerns about other theories in quantum foundations.

I like MWI for itself elegance; no ad hoc collapse. But there is a problem where theory is elevated above empirical results (i.e. the observation of apparent collapse), but then a crucial element of collapse, is then explained in terms of epistemology. Why prefer shifting the squishy part of the theory from one place to another?

This is also the issue of "splitting" versions of MWI. In these, there isn't one universal wave function that we see part of, but instead the universe actually "splits," during measurement. The problem is that, while physics is time asymmetrical as a whole, parts under consideration are not, making the "causal" relationship between measurement and "splitting" another thing that begs explanation (and this is true even if you argue "cause" is just another name for description). Splitting then seems as ad-hoc as collapse, whereas a seeming benefit of non-splitting versions is that such collapse/splitting is only an appearance.

Furthermore, because MWI is fully deterministic, it seems like we should have a block universe. But do we have a growing block universe where splits occur in the direction of time's passage? That is what the splitting versions of MWI seems to suggest. But if each world is its own four dimensional object then it seems we need a new, fifth, "time" dimension for the multiverse in which splitting occurs, this being true even if we take an eternalist view of such splits as having already occured/existing eternally. There is a state of the multiverse M1 before a split occurs where it has fewer branches than M2, the multiverse at a later time, but this change cannot occur across the same time dimension as the time dimension that each individual universe has, since a split is necessarily the spawning of a new, complete four dimensional object.

Then we have to consider that, if we have an eternalist view of things, why is it that, by reversing the direction of time, we have a universe where many universes begin to merge into a smaller number of universes? Is the direction of splitting the true arrow of time? If so, why (and why are there so many physicists who embrace eternalism, claim physics is ultimately reversible, and embrace MWI?) If the physics in question is reversible, why do we posit a splitting universe instead of a merging one, aside from the fact that having it split in both directions (forwards and backwards in time) is incoherent?

Perhaps whenever we make a measurement we merge universes, such that we progress by such merges to one of many potential end points, final conditions, of the universe, assuming ad hoc that it has an end? This might work, but it blows up the rational-agent based derivations of the Born Rule. Rational agent models are not reversible, we don't say, "given what I observe now, what must have happened in the future, what endpoint must I be most likely to be converging on?"

The problem might be worse, since splits occur vis-á-vis a parent, such that we can arbitrarily pick any starting point and then see a family tree descending from that current universe. If we have two such family trees, does it work to say that splitting in both occurs across the same dimension? I'm not sure it does, given the "multi-fingered" nature of time in our one observable universe, in which case you need even more time dimensions.

I only skimmed this thread, but has the Born Rule problem really not come up?

To bring up the example before, it is like someone's spouse is either in spot A with probability 30% or spot B with probability 70%, except, get this, she is also in BOTH spots with probability 100%. Explaining that satisfactorily is going to be a doozy, and I don't think Dutch Book arguments really solve the problem.

There is also the issue of worlds existing where large systems, perhaps the whole universe, decrease in entropy over time. I can see why, if you're committed to reduction, it is tempting to kick the Second Law out to the status of "initial conditions," but I have never seen a satisfactory explanation of why we should find ourselves in the world that has increasing entropy, except in an appeal to the anthropic principle. This is a weak appeal though, as it is hard to show conclusively how sentient observers are only likely to exist in worlds with increasing global entropy.

The real problem here is with the notion of "the present universe". What Einstein reveals with the relativity of simultaneity is that "the present" is frame dependent. So the whole idea that there is such a thing as "the present universe" is an unsound premise because "the present" is something created by the observational perspective.

When we realize that "the present" is purely subjective, and we try to imagine an objective universe, independent from any observer, we have no place to insert "the present", because this would be an artificial insertion, therefore the creation of an observational perspective. Then we cannot possibly imagine such a universe, without a designated temporal perspective, (a point in time of now), because all things would exist everywhere, without some way of determining a specific point in time in their motions.

Relativity shows simultaneity is local, not that it is somehow arbitrary. It is not the case that relativity in any way prescribes eternalism, although this has not stopped popular science authors from making this claim (or others from continually coming along to debunk it; I have not seen the debunking debunked in turn however, and it convinced me).

No one present is privileged, but you can have a "many fingered time," with multiple time variables.

Not sure if that's what you meant by "subjective," but that is certainly a common misconception. That there are issues with positing the world as it is sans observers is quite true, but it is true even ignoring SR/GR.

Just to chime in, I think organized religions' insistence on supernatural explanations and supernatural language is part of the reason for their decline.

There is, in the Christian context, no reason to assume that anything supernatural occurs in the Bible. Setting a bush ablaze can be done through natural means. Bringing someone back to life can also be accomplished. Revelations doesn't show people coming back to life in some sort of spirit world, but instead being brought back with bodies, in the new Earth. "Everything is made new," not "everything is made magical." A sufficiently advanced 3D printer could accomplish this, provided consciousness is caused by physical system states.

Likewise, the Big Bang and evolution of Earth are explained in natural terms already.

The insistence on the supernatural seems to turn God into somewhat of a trickster, a deity who shows us a rational world guided by certain invariant principles, but who then uses magic at any key moments.

Even a God who exists outside the sphere of our observable universe isn't necessarily anti-naturalist. God can be behind an epistemic viel without being behind a magical one.

But there is nothing explicitly to rule out Christian naturalism, and indeed, Aristotle's somewhat enchanted naturalism was Catholic doctrine for centuries.

EZPZ, just claim time is illusory and that the universe is an eternal object, then one up Hume and claim cause isn't just reducible to something simpler to understand, but non-existent. Wala! You've solved the cause problem.

Tegmark's own theory does this.

I just have a hard time figuring out how people who see themselves as dedicated empiricists also reconcile themselves to the non-existence of change, but it apparently can be done.

You might be interested in Black Hole Cosmology, which does propose a cause of the Big Bang. Our universe is just what a Black Hole singularity looks like on the inside. Black holes we observe are the births of other universes. Natural selection implies that universes that produce more black holes are selected for over time, and this is even more true if the parent universe somehow passed traits on to its offspring. This can in turn address the "fine tuning" argument to some degree. It just so happens that the values for many constants that support life happen to be the same ones likely to generate black holes, of which we have tons.

There is some interesting evidence to support this theory, but it is for the moment unfalsifiable and not directly discernible from theories where the Big Bang is unique.

He addresses this at some point. The main point, if I recall, is that he is arguing for not-P. One does not need to prove P to prove not-P, he only needs to show that the view he is attacking is very unlikely to be accurate. Following Dennett, he also takes natural selection to be a basic ontological heuristic suggested by parsimony, Ockham's Razor, rather than something unique to evolutionary biology.

IMO this is a big miss, because natural selection also applies to all physical systems, and I think there is a lot we can learn about the world by looking at how a tendency towards greater entropy causes selection effects to shape the surviving systems we see around us. (Whitehead talks about this in The Function of Reason to better effect).

In any event, I don't think the defense of our sense of logic and reasoning abilities is particularly strong (it takes up all of a few sentences despite being crucial). The rationality of the world, and our belief that we can apprehend it, has to be posterior to any empirical theories; I don't think he addresses this adequately.

Yes, freedom as a concept presupposes its own negation. In making any choice, the choice itself is a constraint. You can move up and down; have your cake and eat it too.

Freedom as pure abstract freedom from constraint is contradictory. Hegel's Philosophy of Right covers this quite well in the Introduction, I think after the opening sections on the will (so probably after section 8 at least, you can find it free online, but the writing is pretty bad).

Freedom also requires rationality. One cannot choose if one thing in the world doesn't follow from another, i.e. if relations are arbitrary. If tying my shoes sometimes results in my legs disappearing, and at other times teleports me to Paris, then I cannot make any choices based on my actions because my actions entail nothing consistent. Choices must have logical consequences for there to be freedom. This is why Liebnitz developed the principle of sufficient reason as a precondition of free will, although today it is more popular to see it as presupposing the illusory nature of free will.

Suppose I argue that free will is illusory, and you wish to show that you are free by waving your hand. Even if we assume that mind is not necessarily causally tied to the external world, you would still be moving your hand because of what I had said. This is a causal connection, but that doesn't presupposes a lack of freedom, rather it is a requirement for it. Pure arbitrariness is not freedom.

More specifically, when we talk about freedom in the practical sense, we often care about freedom from certain things, freedom from hunger, freedom from oppression.

But we also care about a positive freedom, freedom to choose rationally, not driven by instinct, desire, or arbitrariness. Positive freedom necessarily constraints, since it comes with duties. One cannot choose be a soldier without agreeing to follow certain duties. One cannot become a carpenter without others who want you to build or repair things for them in some sort of contractual arrangement. Thus freedom requires constraint and social relationships (which in turn constrain).

I think Frankfurt was on to something with the wanton/person distinction. Very briefly, persons are defined by their ability to want to have certain desires, e.g., someone wants to want to be an attentive parent (even if they aren't). This ability to reflect on and have desires about our desires is key to a certain type of freedom. I don't think his theory is complete though.

If time is flowing, that is moving relative to different states of the universe, then it must be doing so over some sort of second time dimension. Some philosophers have accepted this and posited an infinite regress of time dimensions, but it seems unappealing to most.

Second, under special relativity, the order in which events occur can be different for different observers. This makes it unclear as to how any time flow could occur.

I found someone making the same argument.

https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/10.1142/9789814295482_0004

I did not realize that Collier was the advisor of Scott Mueller. I thought his dissertation "Asymmetry: The Foundation of Information," was excellent.

Unfortunately, I feel like this is an article where the formalism hinders the argument more than it helps it. Formalization is great when it can demonstrate logical connections that are hard to follow otherwise, and even more so when it allows for practical calculations (Kolmogorov Complexity is a great example), but sometimes it can make it harder to grasp the core issue.

Philosophy of information, being at times considered a sub branch of philosophy of mathematics, does seem quite big on formalism. This isn't necessarily a good thing, because people can agree on equations, or understand how to use them in some cases, while disagreeing on the conceptual underpinnings, or having contradictory understandings of the formalism.

Why do you assume reality is such that there exist external objects? I get why, I guess, but I think that assumption has to be argued for

Very briefly, the agreement of people and instruments on key facts about the seemingly external world suggests to me that such a world does exist. I know there are maneuvers around this, but I am not a fan of Berkeley's "God does it all," explanation. It seems to me that subjective idealism requires a level of skepticism that should also put the existence of other minds and the findings of empiricism in doubt, in which case it becomes only arbitrarily distinct from solipsism.

How would computation work in an idealistic reality? Would that solve some of the confusion here?

It would depend on the system. In Kastrupt's system, external objects are indeed external to us, they are just composed of mental substance. I don't think anything changes here. As individuals, we are dissociated parts of a mental whole, and the differences that give rise to information, and thus computation, DO exist externally.

I think it still works the same way in something like Hegel's system, which is in some aspects foreshadows information theory. From Pinkard's "Hegel's Naturalism:"

Thus, in Hegel’s rigorous (but rather obviously nonstandard) terminology, the finite is always that which is intelligible in terms of or is explained by its reference to something else, its “nega- tion.” For something, x, to be finite, means that it can only be grasped in terms of its contrast with y.

All due respect, I think the error you're making is that of metaphysical naturalism - the assumption that the world would exist, just as it seems to now, were no humans present within it. But even that apparently empty world is still organised around an implicit perspective. Take that away and you can't imagine anything whatever.

I don't make that mistake though. Without life, there is no color, no texture as such, perhaps no space-time as we understand it.

My objection is to the idea that fundemental differences in external objects somehow do not exist or change within the object when conscious observation occurs. I think the mechanisms which allow topsoil to record the passage of water, or passing light to record the existence of far off exoplanets, are the same mechanisms that allow eyes or cameras to record light, that the same mechanisms that make rocks vibrate due to pressure waves are involved in hearing, etc.

I don't want to get into the hard problem of consciousness, but simply the means by which sensory organs can record incoming data and neurons can subject that data to computation aren't qualitatively different from other natural phenomena.

So, my objection is to differences, of which information is composed, not existing simpliciter in external states. If mind is required to create them, then how to minds come to agree so much on that information? Why posit external objects at all if the fundemental source of all knowledge of them is only created by conscious observation?

Our differences might be on definition. I see information arising from fundemental ontological difference. Although I don't much like Floridi's overall theory of information, I find his arguments against popular conceptions of digital ontology in physics quite compelling (Chapter 14 of the Philosophy of Information). Quite simply, a universe without difference is impossible. Even a universe consisting of a two dimensional plane must have points whose coordinates differ from one another.

An ontology of fundemental difference is maximally "portable," in that it can fit with many other ontologies, be it flavors of idealism, dualism, or physicalism.

I would, however, agree with the physicists who push digital ontology on the idea that information is ontologically more basic than physical structures. These fundemental differences are a necessary condition for physical structures to arise. And in any event the "physical structures" we understand we only know as abstractions of mind, so in a both an ontological and epistemological sense, information is prior to physical state differences, not something that emerges from an interaction of mind and physical systems.

In my computation = cause thesis, which I am not very committed to, elementary elements of physics would be akin to numbers in formalist interpretations of Peano Arithmetic, while the more essential logic and relations are informational in nature. The axioms define the numbers, just as, in a universe with different constants, an electron would not be an electron and would behave differently. If I wanted to be even more speculative, I would say these "axioms" in physics are unlikely to be arbitrary brute facts existing as seemingly eternal laws, but rather the result of dialectical processes through which contradictions are resolved, and that this might explain the presence of mind in a teleological sense (sort of what Nagel has in mind for a project in his Mind and Cosmos). This is very speculative though, something like Basarab Nicolescu's book on Jacob Boehme and modern physics.

Perhaps our disagreement is on definition though. Semantic information or "meaning" appear to require mind and often times this is taken as synonymous with information, while I prefer the bare mathematical definition.

I will have to give this one some more thought.

Doesn't that imply that a discerner is a necessary condition for "discernible differences"?

Yes, but not a conscious observer. For example, an indivisible "particle" alone in its own universe would transmit no information, and since it has no proper parts, no information transfer occurs within it. It cannot be interacted with. Can such a thing be said to exist? It would have no existence outside of some bare haecceity proposed as unobservable brute fact.

Scott Mueller's Asymmetry: The Foundation of Information has some good examples of relative indiscernibility in physical systems. We can usefully distinguish between "all possible discernable differences," and "all possible discernible differences vis-á-vis one systems interactions with its enviornment."

For the purposes of modeling physical systems, you can ignore "possibilities" that aren't relevant, but philosophically they seem relevant. Most people would like to avoid saying that differences go in and out of existence depending on what the system is interacting with. I think the idea that information only exists in the context of conscious observers is just a more specialized version of that unappealing view.

I would argue that information exists "in the wild," as discernible differences. If information only existed when observed we would have to posit that observation somehow changes state differences into information, a change in the object, or that all information only exists in the minds of observers. So a riverbed wouldn't store information of the passage of water, but then its physical state, which seems identical to the total information that can be taken from it, is somehow different?

I think a lot of confusion comes from "one thing having different meanings." As in the example of the text shuffler above, such meanings do not come from the information source. Rather, they would come from the observers' knowledge of the meanings of certain arrangements of symbols, which has arisen through history and presumably been taught to them. This is the interaction of information in the signal and previously received, stored information in the individual, which requires computation. So, the Roman numerals VII doesn't store information about the number 7 explicitly itself, but rather it does so in the context of that relationship already having been transmitted to the observer and stored internally.

From the perspective of quantitative theories of information, which are used to define computation in physical systems, the text shuffler can only tell us information about the nature of the algorithm and how it shuffels the text, leaving aside information about the physical aspects of the computer. It doesn't have information on how to cure cancer, alternate endings to War and Peace, although it can produce text that can be interpreted in that way. This does set up a potential Gettier Problem in information theory though, although I haven't seen anyone write about it.

Having information rest solely in the minds of observers seems at risk of becoming subjective idealism. The information has to correspond to and emerge from external state differences or else how can we discuss incorrect interpretations of any signal?

Interpretation doesn't need a conscious observer though. Plenty of industrial systems are set up in such a way that the same signal is meant to represent different things in different contexts. This is true in software too.

If it is state, there is certainly state without interpretation.

Exactly. Books in a library have information because of their states. And notably, interpretation is also a question of states. If I tell one person "if you see me raise my hand it means go start the car," and another person "if you see me raise my hand I want you to grab my bag," my act has two different meanings because it is being computed in the context of previously exchanged information that resulted in state changes in my interlocutors.

In the case of two distinct gases, an act of mixing is required, and this requires time and energy. In the case of the gases being the same, it appears like the gases have already mixed as soon as the separation is removed. That's just an illusion, mixing has not occurred, as marking the molecules would reveal.

Yes, that was sort of Gibbs' original point in the case of ideal gasses. You need a non-extensive entropy to deal with that the problem.

Jayne's big point is summed up in the introduction: " We argue that, on the contrary, phenomenological thermodynamics, classical statistics, and quantum statistics are all in just the same logical position with regard to extensivity of entropy; they are silent on the issue, neither requiring it nor forbidding it."

And, counter intuitively, non-extensive entropy actually tends to model many real systems better (e.g. Tsallis entropy).

Jaynes paper does a better job explaining why this was generally been considered a genuine paradox. Distinguishability is, in an important sense for predicting/describing physical interactions, relational.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/statphys/jaynes.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwih8Im-ic_9AhXhIjQIHdJVBWMQFnoECA4QAQ&usg=AOvVaw2au7z1gIQKaFakPez7h4r7

Not just that.

Again take a box with a partition in it, with gas A on one side, gas B on the other side, and both gases are at the same temperature and pressure. If gas A and B are different gases, there is an entropy that arises once the gases are mixed. If the gases are the same, no additional entropy is calculated. The additional entropy from mixing does not depend on the character of the gases; it only depends on the fact that the gases are different. The two gases may be arbitrarily similar, but the entropy from mixing does not disappear unless they are the same gas - a paradoxical discontinuity...

As a central example in Jaynes' paper points out, one can develop a theory that treats two gases as similar even if those gases may in reality be distinguished through sufficiently detailed measurement. As long as we do not perform these detailed measurements, the theory will have no internal inconsistencies. (In other words, it does not matter that we call gases A and B by the same name if we have not yet discovered that they are distinct.) If our theory calls gases A and B the same, then entropy does not change when we mix them. If our theory calls gases A and B different, then entropy does increase when they are mixed. This insight suggests that the ideas of "thermodynamic state" and of "entropy" are somewhat subjective.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbs_paradox#The_mixing_paradox

I don't agree with the use of the term "arbitrary" in the Wiki article, at least not in an important sense.

This paradox has a special place in my heart because when I began reading a lot more on statistical mechanics and doing problems on it I realized this problem myself somewhat early on. I thought to myself "holy shit, maybe I could be really good at this, look what I uncovered, this is air tight too!"

I finally got over the fear of someone stealing my great insight and posted a question in Stack Exchange. Within a few hours someone asked, "do you mean the Gibbs Paradox?"

Yeah, someone had the idea first, over a century ago, pretty much as soon as Boltzmann published. So much for my genius lol. I felt better about this after reading Max Tegmark describe "discovering" decoherence as a first year PhD student, only to learn he'd been scooped by several years. At least that was somewhat close in time though.

Yes, the English "eternal life" is used frequently for translating the Greek ζωὴν αἰώνιον, a pairing of the verb aionios and noun zoe, which I believe only shows up in the Gospel of John. More literalist modern translations use "continual," and others use "everlasting," while "eternal" is also common.

The use of eternal is a bit confusing since aionios means "eternal" in modern Greek, but meant "for a lifetime," or "for an age," at the time John was writing."

Zoe is "life," in the sense of "existence," and "substance." In John, we see this phrase referring to God's "everlasting substance" throughout, starting with the opening. I think Jesus uses the word zoe once to refer to biological life, in a contrast of life and death, a turn of phrase in use since Homer.

In John's description, Jesus brings this everlasting substance, life eternal, to man to share in, but this is not a change that appears to have anything to do with "this life," or "this world," it comes from the Spirit (John 6:63), which one can have while living in this current biological life both in John and the rest of the Bible.

A common conflation is this use of this word translated as "life," and translations of bios, biological life, and psuche, first person experience.

For example, psuche is used here in Luke:

"For whoever wants to save his life shall lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake shall find it.”

The key difference here is that the "everlasting living substance," is something from God man can share in now, no need to wait for the end of days or one's death in "this life." It doesn't disparage the current life. One can receive the Spirit now (and this is even better than having a living Jesus around according to Jesus himself). In Romans 7, a quite biologically alive Paul talks about his resurrection (from a death of personhood in sin), in a similar vein.

What Luke is talking about is more: "don't worry about dying now, because there is the (personal) resurrection."

When the Bible talks about the next life, that's resurrection, anastasis, coming back to life in your/a body on the new Earth. Obviously, John, and even more Revelations can also be taken symbolically, but these two books were either written by the same person or the same early tradition created by the same person, so the difference in use of terms is also less likely to be just stylistic habits.


This distinction exists in Baptist theology, although popular religion really blurs the lines at times. Now arguably, John I was meant as a more Gnostic commentary, this is certainly what Gnostics believed, and there are ancient Gnostic commentaries in I Corinthians we've found too. But in the wide net of Nicean orthodoxy, creation is good and this lifetime not a barrier to rebirth in the Spirit and eternal substance.

For most Protestants, this life is even more important because they reject Purgatory and often the conversion of the dead mentioned in I Peter 4 and arguably the whole section on the resurrection in Revelations.

Sounds like a Christian value system at work here. E.g., the only life which matters is eternal life not the filthy, degraded thing we have here on earth

Maybe Gnostic Christianity, but that sounds more like Neoplatonism. Christ promises everlasting life in the Gospels, not eternal life. Revelations portrays people coming back to life changed, but in this world, not some spirit world of the eternal, having bodies, living in a new Jerusalem, etc.

Even for very literalist Evangelicals, perhaps even moreso for them, this life is of paramount importance because it is only during this stage that choices of everlasting consequence can be made.

Actually, after all that, I think I might agree with the basic idea that in a way, information, at least in terms of say, what we get from looking at a written page, doesn't exist when it is not observed. Discernible difference defines information at any one place and time. Information transfer, computation, only occurs locally.

So, I would agree that there is an important sense in which differences/meanings that are only discernible for human beings do not exist when no human being observers them. That is, their existence or non-existence is identical for describing reality for some given period P. But, in an important way the information must exist during P, in that its potential is always there.

First, isn't it the case that digital computers obey all the physical laws we know about? Hence why knowledge of physical laws has been essential to creating them in the first place.

The oscilloscope doesn't discern the same differences. For example, it is going to present instructions like "open this program and interpret the following in terms of this software," as simply a line, and the instructions as variations in that line. It is unable to discerned how prior signals can change the interpretation of later signals or how later signals can modify the context of earlier ones. Essentially, it lacks an ability to discern differences in signals over time, because it lacks memory.

Obviously part of what makes computers so useful is their ability to take new information/instructions and combine them with information already encoded in the computer itself. So, discernablity of inputs isn't the only important thing, there is also the ability to take on more discernibly different states that, importantly, will correspond to changes in their macrostate.

Computers are very low entropy, which means in terms of a Boltzmann distribution and how their micro constituents are organized, they can take on much fewer distinct microstates states that align with their current macrostate than say a rock or a volume of gas. But what is important is that these state differences are such that the systems they interact with can discern between the state changes, and in turn that these state changes can be transformed into discernible macrostate changes.

Letters or video appearing on a monitor, a human doing a dance or picking up a guitar, these are all discernible macro changes resulting from micro changes. Throw either of these amazing systems into a magical blender that mixes up the constituent molocules and you're extremely unlikely to get any microstates that produce macro changes by chance.

Of course, if you smack a computer monitor and a rock together, the result is identical regardless of what the monitor was displaying. But for us, the output on the screen matters quite a bit. I think this is what you and Wayfarer are getting at. The problem there is that there are plenty of other differences in the physical world we can think of that are completely indiscernible for us, but which radically alter how some other, presumably non-concious system responds to them. This is just the relational nature of information.

Interesting that the only place outside human activities and animal communications that something like transmission of information occurs is in living organisms and DNA, isn't it?

Is this the case? Doesn't water eroding topsoil generate information about its passage in the form of riverbeds? This seems to be why we can comment on the age of the Grand Canyon and the history of its formation, precisely because water encodes information on sandstone. Likewise, we can discover things about the atmospheres of distant planets because changes in light from far off stars due to the interactions between the light and the planets' atmospheres encodes information about these planets.

The Vortex optic/fire control system for the US Army's new 6.8mm rifle can instantly zero itself onto any target. It does this by symbolically representing inputs from a built in range finder and atmospheric sensor, which are then analyzed by the ballistics computer. SHARP, a full fire control solution goes a step further, by recognizing targets for the user. It is able to process symbols that represent something else (the target) well enough that a user only has to hold down the trigger continuously to place accurate fire. The weapon will only discharge on a calculated hit (reducing recoil and decreased volume of fire concerns that come with using a full power cartridge).

It will accomplish this symbolic representation even if mounted to a drone, with no immediate conscious observer.

but the mind is never a direct object of perception.

Aren't our own minds the objects of direct perception? Arguably this is the only thing we observe directly, depending on how you define direct. Light, apples, cars, these are all filtered through the mind, Kant's old trancendental and all.

I'm curious on this line of inquiry though, do you think artificial intelligence could generate such meaning? Do dogs experience it?

It seems to me that this risks conflating the concept of information, which seems to be widely applicable to the natural world, with the presence of first person experience, which is on the one hand everywhere (all objects are subsumed in it) but also generally presumed to only be connected to a small fraction of all the external objects in intersubjective reality. I don't think the former is necessitated by the immediate presence of the latter, although perhaps the existence of information does require the potential of experience.

I say this because I think it's likely the case that light carried information about far off planets to the Earth even before the Earth had life one it. If it didn't, I don't know why we shouldn't just take the extra step of saying the Earth didn't properly exist until life did.

Definitionally, the eternal doesn't change. E.g., the number two doesn't change into another value or take on new relationships in terms of things like x/2 changing its value. Likewise, a triangle always has three sides, or if you follow Plato, the Good is likewise unchanging.

If a triangle gains sides it becomes a different shape. That has more to do with the common definition of eternal than anything empirical.

I think maybe you're thinking of things that are transcendent as opposed to eternal, i.e. not subject to physical limitations, without place or position, etc. Lots of things taken to be transcendent are also eternal, but not all. The transcendent can change, as in theology where God interacts with the immanent world. I have mixed these two up quite a bit, it doesn't help that the two get used synonymously in translations at times.

I think changelessness implies timelessness and vice versa. Zeno's paradox of the arrow is a good example here. He asks us to imagine an arrow shot from a bow in flight. Now imagine the arrow frozen in time at any single moment. Is it moving? Nope. Now imagine all the moments corresponding to its flight (which according to Zeno are infinite). Does it move during any of these moments. Nope.

So if the arrow's flight is defined by all the moments in between its being shot and it landing, and it moves during none of these, how can we say it moves at all?

The mistake here, which Aristotle was the first to point out, is a fallacy of composition. Velocity is a relative change in position over time. Time itself emerges from change. Time is the dimension in which change occurs, such that if we want to imagine three dimensional space over time we would add a four dimensional object. The time slider on a video is a good example of this dimension, if you envision it as a second X axis.


I would say that change implies time, but it does not necessarily imply the linear time we are used to. We can think of something that passes back and forth between two states existing in a sort of circular time. Or more abstractly, change requires an additional dimension to defining any process.

What makes you an expert on the eternal to make such a blanket statement. I have no idea myself perhaps you could elaborate?

That's just the definition of the word eternal in English. "Lasting or existing forever, without beginning or end, valid for all time, essentially unchanging."

This is generally why theologians maintain that God has both an eternal and immanent nature.

I was going with that. How can you have unchanging experience?

Would it be fair to classify what you've put forth as a sort of austere nominalism? I.e., pain is just "a name for certain types of experience."

I think the problem with that sort of nominalism is that it bleeds into ontological nominalism. So, the experience of seeing a triangle is just a name for similar experiences, etc.

But this seems to run into the problem of explaining the similarities and differences that create these different names in the first place.

This reduces the very scientific theories and findings that are supposed to make us believe that physicalism is the case to either mere language games, statements about other statements/fictions, or outright incoherence.

My guess is this is why most nominalists who are into this thing enough to write about it tend to embrace trope theory, concept nominalism, etc.

I think the problem is that the considerations that motivate people to embrace physicalism are often the same sorts of considerations that cause them to embrace nominalism, but the two don't play particularly well together.

I would highly recommend Nagel's take on the Absurd. I think some of his conclusions are wrong, but he makes many excellent points.

Would your life be more meaningful if you lived to 180? If you were president or PM of your country? How long would you have to live for your life to be meaningful? Would the ruler of a galactic empire who reigned for 40,000 years have a meaningful life? After all, they rule just one of innumerable galaxies, for what is the blink of an eye on the time scales of the universe.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://philosophy.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/The%2520Absurd%2520-%2520Thomas%2520Nagel.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiv9sHPic39AhUbRjABHTK5AHkQFnoECAoQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1CdbUWlHJRrzwgiaCWZH1N

The eternal is unchanging. I don't think the eternal alone can support consciousness. How can one experience variety in the context of timelessness? What are the contents of a frozen instant of thought? Manifestations of the eternal in our changing world of becoming, seem essential for the eternal itself to exist. After all, if the eternal is unknown, in principle, in what sense does it exist? But to be known it must manifest in a world where it can be known.

I don't agree with Nagel because I think some folks, particularly Jacob Boehme, had very good, if difficult answers to the above, which give being plenty of meaning.

Regardless, Nagel does a good job showing how absurdity can creep into any life, not just our own. The only place his argument seems weak is when he tries to take on the naive theistic interpretation. It seems to me that if you really believe God is asking you to do X and live Y life, that would be meaningful. The larger problem is the question of "has God actually done that?"

Upon reflection, I think this definition might be simply too loose.

If you assume people are generally rational, then it collapses into historicism, i.e., conventional morality at time X was rational given the information constraints of the era. If you don't allow information constraints to play a central role it becomes deontological morality with less punch.

I would like to say things like: "slavery was wrong even though the people of eras that embraced it were constrained by historical conditions."

But I should also like to say, "morality isn't groundless because rationality is part of the essence of man, and so exists at all periods," and that people who embraced their epochs' flawed morality were nonetheless rational.

And as a bonus, I would like a theory that explains the progression of morality and growing 'circles of inclusion," in moral calculus, from the self, to family, to the clan, to the state, to the species, to all life. That is, why humans kill each other vastly lower rates than in the past (or in existent pre-state societies), why freedom has advanced (the end of slavery and serfdom, the emancipation of the Jews and later women). In other words, the icing on the cake would be a teleological explanation.

Isn't this guilty of the same division?

Humans are part of nature. Human minds presumably have natural causes and thoughts/subjective meaning are part of this natural world. The stick representing the number seven is a fact of nature, something empirically observable and testable.

That the sticks don't signal "7" to someone ignorant of Roman numerals or a dog is simply due to the relational nature of information. Having mind "create" new attributes seems to me to be falling into the same sort of (artificial) dualism.

You have the same problem within subjective experience when someone mistakes a fire alarm for a carbon monoxide detector or a burglar alarm. The information is substrate independent, but not arbitrary. If I mistake my fire alarm for a burglar alarm that does not turn the one into the other, regardless of the meaning I take from the signal. I can discern this if I trace the origins of the source.

And is this the case for all universals? I can't say I find that to be an attractive position.

For one, look at the Chinese Room thought experiment. There it certainly seems like one can have computation without understanding. Or, in the example of the China Brain, you would have conscious entities carrying out computations they weren't aware of and couldn't ascribe meaning to.

In any event, I don't think this solves the pancomputationalism problem even if we accept your premise. The pancomputationalism problem/hypothesis arose because conscious philosophers and physicists observed computation everywhere. So the problem is still defining a non-arbitrary definition of computation, even if we bracket computation to just observed phenomena.