Saturday 1 December 2018

Infinite and eternal

Here I describe an approach to metaphysics based on what I call the principle of metaphysical discrimination. The goal of this principle is to focus on dividing phenomena into clear meaningful distinct categories based on the kinds of limits that can be expected to originate from the continuum between the observed nature of ones own existence and all other existence (further from self). Supernatural postulates like God, being void of predictive utility, are ignored.

We could start by trying to address the question of what is consciousness and how can it exist in a world which seemingly appears to be nothing but a Turing machine (at least to the first order), but that might be waste of time and has been more or less fruitlessly done many times before. Instead, let's start by taking for granted that something we call consciousness exists, we know this because that's us. Whichever way consciousness works, cosmos contains everything that is needed. Let us also note that there exists a kind of limitation we might call a private experience or a qualia which exists for all consciousness we are aware of. This limitation appears to prevent us from knowing what (if anything) it feels like to be someone else.


This sort of limitation resembles a phenomena of complementarity in quantum mechanics which in its simplest form is a limitation on the information any single observer can possess about certain pairs of physical observables such as position and momentum. In this context we can remain agnostic about whether these variables even have an exact simultaneous fundamental existence, and instead simply note that even if they do, the nature of our existence prevents us from ever gaining such knowledge.

The existence of this sort of complementarity in nature leads me to consider the possibility that perhaps private experience is simply another facet of all existence and ultimately no more mysterious than any other observation. Then perhaps postulating that "there is more to things" is just a kind of superstition and ultimately everything simply boils down to observing the kinds of things that exist. One could bring up the experience of time evolution of "now" as another mysterious aspect of consciousness, but time too might be nothing more than another dimension of existence.

If there in fact is nothing more to existence than existence itself (is there really an alternative?) then there can be no reason for existence. Asking for such a reason isn't even coherent, reasons are just correlations in "the set of all existence". In the spirit of Gödel's incompleteness theorems, it probably remains forever impossible to exactly prove such to be the case, but it never the less can be true and the most reasonable conclusion.

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