RE: Reality

From: Ben Goertzel (ben@goertzel.org)
Date: Sat Dec 28 2002 - 14:32:53 MST


Simon,

I agree, the multiple conflicting universes posited in "QED in curved space"
do not exhaust the full spectrum of universes that may be seen to exist from
a more general perspective. For one thing, they are only universes where
the physics theory of "QED in curved space" is a good approximation, but
there may be other universes with very different sets of "physical laws"...
(a reference to John Wheeler's notion that in the beginning there were no
fixed physical laws, and then physical laws evolved. Perhaps, in fact,
different physical laws evolved in different "reality-streams" from the
primordial atemporal lawless beginning-point...)

***
On a slightly personal note, how much knowledge have you personally gained
from
watching and teaching your own children from babies, and in what ways has
this
affected your work in learning processes? Also, I will not dare to assume
that
studying the learning processes can only be done by observing babies, but
also
old people, and even senile people.
***

I learned a great deal about learning from watching my kids learn. However,
it's hard to know when one is being over-anthropomorphic in modeling ideas
about AGI-learning on observations of human-child learning...

You also learn a lot about shifting subjective realities from watching small
children. A baby's subjective reality is not much like a 4-year-old's,
there is a heck of a lot of reality-building going on in the interim ... and
contemporary psych. science does not tell us much about the
subjective-reality-building process. It is nice if a parent is sometimes
able to almost enter into their child's reality..

-- Ben G



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