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I think you're misunderstanding me - let's go back to the comment I made and I think you'll find that I'm saying much the same thing: In other words, I agree that there is no cause for amazement if either a) a life supporting universe is necessary (for some, as of yet, unknown reason) or b)...

My main point of disagreement was that you seemed to disregard the importance of the question "why does a unvierse exist which can support our existence?". Beyond thinking that it is a reasonable question to ask I don't have many commitments regarding whether we live in a...

Nietzsche - King of the Trolls. I like it.

A proletariat uprising involving a lot of Nietzsche related book/webserver burning might do the trick.

Funnily enough I agree with a great deal of what Nietzche says on those counts, depending on the extremity of the interpretation. For example, I take the (Nietzschean, I suppose) nihilistic position that the world has no inherent meaning and that, instead, it is our own personal task to make...

I just thought of something which may (or may not) be of interest to you. There is a good book by the British philosopher Simon Blackburn, which is written for the lay-person whilst still maintaining rigour, called Truth: a guide for the perplexed. In it he devotes a chapter to Nietzsche's...

I have to say, that video has to be one of the poorest examples of evidence for god that I have ever seen. Sure, there is a clear female form - but what reason do we have to believe that a) it is Mary and b) that it is a real apparition. For all I can tell it may as well have been generated in a...

Wind does not move flag. Mind moves.

Haha, to be honest I don't know Nietzsche well enough to say much that is constructive. Sure I have a few of his works on my shelf (as most people who got into philosophy in their teens will) - namely The Birth of Tragedy, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil and Kauffman's companion -...

I still don't think we're on the same page here. Patterns exist in nature, of course. More abstractly, structures exist in nature. Whether information supervenes on these structures depends (using your definition) on meaning ascription. Thus information only exists relative to a population of...

A quote from Quine to rock the boat a little - this is the kind of territory you enter when you start questioning logic etc... : "[W]e cannot detach ourselves from it [that is, our conceptial scheme] and compare it objectively with an unconceptualised reality. Hence it is meaningless, I...

My case really rests on the logic of explanation and, yet again, that ever-handy intellectual tool - Ockham's Razor. The general idea is this: If information is conceived in terms of meaning ascription then in order for something to be information it is enough that we recognise it as such...

Also, on the intelligence debate that Brad and Schro are having: my feeling is that intelligence is too complex a concept to take for granted at the outset of a debate. Naturally I advocate havinh at least a base set of logical, and other, presuppositions at the core of the debate so as to avoid...

That's a neat little list for the purposes of this thread - cheers. Universe A still makes me laugh and then enter a few seconds of existential angst. A close friend of mine, and some scientists it would seem, appear to consider G as a strong contender, which is interesting.

I probably should have explained my reasoning a little more. To a large extent it was rooted in logical analysis of properties. Using some common logical notation: Px - is read as "x is P" or "x has propery P" (e.g. Wx might be 'x is a woman'). Rxy or xRy - is read as "x bears relation R...

Then that's the kind of answer you need to provide to that question - i.e. that the laws governing our universe must be necessary. A solid argument would probably be needed to back up such a claim, however, and would want to take into account current physical theories.

I'm inclined to agree with Sashatheman. The fact that we exist does not diminish the question 'why does a universe which can support life exist at all?', which more or less reduces to 'why does this universe with set 'x' of constants exist?' These questions do not become any less substantial...

Of course, our existence makes our existence possible (to speak in tautology). The big question, however, is why a universe came to exist which can support our existence. If all alternatives are instantiated (as in the MW interpretation?) then it is easy to say why our universe appeared --->...

That seems to be roughly in line with my second suspicion - i.e. that your use of 'information' seems to refer back to intelligent interpreters, making it a problematic relational concept. Naturally I won't hold you to this one definition (you are free to revise it!) but I figure that I will...

The core of it isn't too complicated. Basically certain chemical arrangements are more stable than others (say because they are less prone to random decay than other, unstable arrangments). Such stable arrangements will tend to appear over time. Furthermore, some molecules may be able to...