1) You generally mention all these inconsistencies and assumptions, but I haven't seen you mention a specific one. Would you?
Ok before I even say anything on this, I would like to set up a little scenario/experiment to explore the word 'impossible'. This is the simplest and easiest to understand analogy I could come up with but do not be fooled, if you stay open minded, it should help you resolve the vast majority of tricky questions
Also keep in mind that 'impossible' only equals to 'limit'.
Challenge: describe the color 'red' to a person of your choice. You are free to use
any means you can think of.
Red is visible light with a wavelength of about 650nm.
Now imagine a world where every living being is color blind and you are the only one to see colors. You would fit in just as you fit in now and you would spend your whole life without ever knowing that you are different. This is an instance of a limit that exists without you ever being aware of it.
In that example, it's possible to become aware of the limit.
Going up a notch, imagine what it is to be a grain of sand (notice that I didn't say 'what it is like') With all of your senses tending to infinity, you are still not able to apprehend the reality of being a grain of sand.
I'm gonna use this picture I've painted as a simplistic but to the point definition of an infinity (i.e something that cannot be apprehended in it's entirety by the senses. You can chase after it forever but will never actually get there)
Okay, I'm imagining. It sounds like you're talking about shared experience...with sand.
Going back to your question, for Langan's theory to even make any sense at all, it is imperative that everything within the universe/reality be brought down from their natural state of being which is infinite.
I'll follow along with this assumption for now.
I find it curious that he says, I quote "Nor, for identical reasons, can we think of the universe as the sum of its parts, for these parts exist solely within a spacetime manifold identified with the whole and cannot explain the manifold itself." and then goes on to say "This rules out pluralistic explanations of reality" Where does he situate himself within his statement?
If he considers himself 'a part of the universe', is he not contradicting himself when he says "cannot explain the manifold itself" and then goes on to explain it anyway?
Obviously, I can't speak for him, nor do I prefer to. However, this passage seems to discuss the issue:
But what if we now introduce a distinction between levels of proof? For example, what if we define a metalanguage as a language used to talk about, analyze or prove things regarding statements in a lower-level object language, and call the base level of Gödel’s formula the "object" level and the higher (proof) level the "metalanguage" level? Now we have one of two things: a statement that can be metalinguistically proven to be linguistically unprovable, and thus recognized as a theorem conveying valuable information about the limitations of the object language, or a statement that cannot be metalinguistically proven to be linguistically unprovable, which, though uninformative, is at least no paradox. Voilà: self-reference without paradox! It turns out that "this formula is unprovable" can be translated into a generic example of an undecidable mathematical truth. Because the associated reasoning involves a metalanguage of mathematics, it is called “metamathematical”[/i].
The analogy that comes to my mind is that of a single living cell on an arm that identifies with the body as a whole but cannot explain the consciousness that its interaction with other cells around it help bring about.
I don't think the analogy holds. Our knowledge of the Universe is born of a linkage between mind and information. Minds process information in a logical way, resulting in an observably consistent Universe. A theory of theories explains the relationship between mind and reality, i.e. theorization. We already partake in this relationship on a continual basis, so it is possible to reflect upon our cognitive relationship via metacognition, thereby objectifying it.
"which simply tells us what we should and should not be considering." How is it even possible to have a complete theory if there are certain things that should not be considered.
Certain things are topically irrelevant. For example, any talk of what might exist outside of reality is irrelevant. If something was real enough to affect reality, it would be included within it. So, hypotheticals, unobservables, unreals...stuff like that.
There are countless other inconsistencies but we'll skip those
Okay.
Ok now to tackle his theory as a whole. The crux of his proposition: he explains everything within reality, (that extends to things he is not necessarily aware of) by a self-including reality.
You don't necessarily need to explain things of which you're not aware if you can explain the nature of conditional phenomena in general. Things which are logically impossible to be aware of are irrelevant.
It is not a stupid idea, I guess some would say it's clever, however all he's done is bypass his own sensory/intellectual limits by empowering reality with sentience.
I think it's self-evident that observation gives rise to definition of real phenomena. A total lack of observation means that information isn't being processed and therefore remains unintelligble, i.e. the information isn't processed into theory.
The important thing he fails to grasp is that he is still not apprehending eternity. He's merely transposed his/the current state from the confines of his physical body/mind to a near-infinite body called reality.
I don't think "apprehending eternity" is any sort of primary consideration of this theory.
The same limitations that apply to him also apply to the self-including reality. It's like the single living cell, giving up it's individuality and empowering its reality (the whole body) with sentience. But then we all know that the body is not everything, because there is the body's own reality. Same thing, different scale. The serpent twisting to eat it's own tail. His all-encompassing reality will never know of it's own limits if it's not aware of it. A limit only exists once you become aware of it.
It seems that most of your rebuttals assume the idea that reality causes mind rather than working in tandem to beget each other. I believe this is an appropriate quote:
Reality, i.e. the real universe, contains all and only that which is real. The reality concept is
analytically self-contained; if there were something outside reality that were real enough to affect
or influence reality, it would be inside reality, and this contradiction invalidates any supposition of
an external reality (up to observational or theoretical relevance).31
While this characterization of reality incorporates a circular definition of relevance, the circularity
is essential to the reality concept and does not preclude a perceptual (observational, scientific)
basis. Indeed, we can refine the definition of reality as follows: “Reality is the perceptual
aggregate including (1) all scientific observations that ever were and ever will be, and (2) the
entire abstract and/or cognitive explanatory infrastructure of perception” (where the abstract is a
syntactic generalization of the concrete standing for ideas, concepts or cognitive structures
distributing over physical instances which conform to them as content conforms to syntax).
It should be noted that any definition amounts to a microscopic theory of the thing defined. The
Reality Principle, which can be viewed as a general definition of reality, is a case in point; it can
be viewed as the seed of a reality theory that we have now begun to build. In defining reality as
self-contained, this “microtheory” endows itself with a simple kind of closure; it calls on nothing
outside the definiendum in the course of defining it, and effectively forbids any future theoretical
extension of this definition from doing so either (this becomes explicit in a related principle, the
MAP).
That's it for today!
Okay
