Been distracted by other housekeeping tasks for several days but reacted to this on Twitter last week, and now bring it forward here:
Although I don’t subscribe to constructor theory per se, this has two key components I hold. “Atomic” components of the cosmos are the limits of conceivability. All else (physical and psychological) are constructed from those “bits” of information. https://t.co/zIhYjdJHUq
— Ian Glendinning (@psybertron) July 5, 2019
As a fan and regular attender at the IAI’s “How The Light Gets In” festivals, I’ve met and talked with Chiara Marletto, but I’m not sure if this course and outline of Constructor Theory is from May this year or from a couple of years ago. However the summary reflects exactly what I’ve picked-up along he way, especially Deutsch’s original focus on the conceivable (*) in my more recent fundamental information-based metaphysics.
“… information, they say, is missing in the modern conception of science, but it is essential to a proper understanding of our universe and the laws of nature … and … the benefits of understanding physics in terms of the possible and the impossible … [the need for] information needs to be a part of the laws of physics …
The Limits of Possibility – Is information fundamental to reality? How do bits, evolution and life fit with the laws of fundamental physics?”
Reconstructing Reality – How does abstract information take hold of the physical world?
This is exactly the point I was making in an epistemological ontology in the Huw Price piece. It’s not a matter of taking an epistemological or an ontological view, it’s a matter of ensuring knowledge is part of your ontology of the real world modelled by physics – a very fundamental part it turns out.
(*) (2005) “Didn’t I also recall something in both Chalmers and Deutsch (quite separate work in separate fields) about nothing being possible in a “virtual” world that wasn’t also possible (ie didn’t violate fundamental physics / metaphysics) in the real world ? As if impossible and inconceivable were really the same thing. Am I digressing ?”
Seems I wasn’t.
No possibility is inconceivable.
Fundamental reality is conceivable possibility.
Nothing in physics without information – the knowable.
One thought on “No Possibility is Inconceivable”