Clicked on the article because I thought it would discuss the topology of the universe, i.e. whether (a spatial slice of) the universe is open (non-compact and without boundary) or closed (compact[0] and without boundary) or something else. :(
> bizarre imprint of an interpretation of the universe by the universe
It’s an insightful idea. That my mind is both part of the universe, but also able to conceive of the universe, and beyond? Where are the real boundaries?
Your mind does not conceive of the universe in any meaningful way, though. It's not as if a mind can simulate all the particles, light, and physics. What you have is closer to an encyclopedia page: a collection of facts and descriptions which are broadly true, but don't offer much in the way of specific understanding or predictive power.
I mean if dreaming is any indication, the mind is actually pretty good at “simulating all the particles, light, and physics”, with of course some “rendering issues”
Interestingly, the same is true of waking life. Our perception is only loosely representative model of the world we operate in. We see, hear, and feel a tiny fraction of our local environment, and most of what we perceive is filled in by our imagination, and/or highly post processed.
>> Interestingly, the same is true of waking life.
The notion that most of our experience is projection is really fascinating to me. Or rather it's projection combined with inputs at various levels of abstraction, and our attention is diverted to where these two differ. A lot of empirical evidence suggests this is the case. A deep dive in psychotherapy can help one to see this up close. The notion that it applies to visual input seems crazy, but you can also do fun experiments with the "blind spot" in your vision that are pretty convincing.
I love to explore the concept of color as an example. Color represents regions of a continuous EM spectrum. "Green" represents a photon between 495-570nm, but the concept of only exists within the human mind. The color I call green might be the what someone else calls red if we ever had a brain to brain interface.
You know what else lets you explore it in detail? LSD. You'll see exactly how abstraction and pattern extrapolation is superimposed over reality. It likely isn't a coincidence that what you see is like a JPEG artifact but crystals instead of squares.
I think about dreaming more like a movie stage where there is a limited space but within that limited space one can be tricked into seeing an entire Star Trek Universe.
So I think the mind is pretty good at making us think it simulates all the particles and light and physics.
Whooohaaa! Where do you think that the mechanisms that allow us to build atomic clocks and telescopes and quantum computer come from if not from the human mind?! Are angels doing it for us?
It's safe to deduce our brain can't simulate the universe, but only a "less powerful" description/representation of it. Otherwise the assumptions are inconsistent, and a paradox arises.
Obviously, since we don't know how the brain nor the universe work... It's all speculation
I see often what in my view is a conflation of freedom and free will. Freedom can be associated with randomness, or enabled by it, in a way that is conducive to establishing a workable model. But when _will_ comes into play, it implies that a free choice does not only reflect a choice of action but also of result. Will is fundamentally not about the action but about its objective. Therefore, it is incompatible with randomness in the sense that if randomness permeates not only my actions but also their effects, then I am free to choose between randomness and randomness. So while freedom can be associated with unpredictability it does not really amount to much in that case.
On the other hand if we focus on predictability and have that as condition of will then determinism permeates our choices, so will becomes just a projection of laws, their backpropagation on an arbitrary decision model.
We can move to statistical interpretations of the kind that our will is not deterministic but a will of rational expectations etc. but my intuitive feeling is that the separation of intentionality from causality is like a middle ground between two wrongs.
At the end of the day, I believe this paradox is the outcome of what I call “a sock’s theory of the foot”.
Fundamentally, if free will requires both causality-determinism and free choice, I believe it’s only feasible in a model of timeless causality where we can move the dial on the determinism of decisions or intentions or results or all of them at the same “time”. We are deterministic illusions of freedom of timeless intentional agents.
This piece is a bit of a meandering mess. The author uses jargon to obfuscate rather than clarify, makes assertions without proof as he jumps between thought-experiments and descriptions of the universe.
> These freebits also have to be quantum in nature.
Why?
> That means they are also “qubits”—the version of plain old 1 and 0 bits that applies to objects and systems exhibiting quantum behavior. They are fuzzy, undetermined things until called upon and snapped into focus. That’s a complication that I’m going to avoid really dealing with, because it will really make our heads hurt.
Hmmm. I've got plenty of Advil. Try me. What are you possibly trying to say here
> Suppose you want to track back the chain of events that led to a specific incident—something interesting in a physics experiment, or a chicken crossing the road. For some incidents there will be a chain that goes all the way back to the original freebits.
For some incidents? Shouldn't literally everything have a chain going back to the original freebits?
By all accounts the author seems like a really bright guy, and I can only hope this is a half-assed condensation of a portion of his latest book because this is not good.
‘> These freebits also have to be quantum in nature.
Why?’
Maybe the author is assuming there are no elements in the universe that don’t follow quantum mechanics?
‘ > Suppose you want to track back the chain of events that led to a specific incident—something interesting in a physics experiment, or a chicken crossing the road. For some incidents there will be a chain that goes all the way back to the original freebits.
For some incidents? Shouldn't literally everything have a chain going back to the original freebits?’
It seems like everything should have a chain of causality back to some thing. Except there has to be at least one uncaused causes, or else it’s just an infinite regression and not meaningful.
> Maybe the author is assuming there are no elements in the universe that don’t follow quantum mechanics?
Exactly, the author is assuming the universe is a quantum Turing machine.
> It seems like everything should have a chain of causality back to some thing. Except there has to be at least one uncaused causes, or else it’s just an infinite regression and not meaningful.
It's not necessarily so.
Models that aim to describe the universe before the Planck epoch are speculative. There are known theories that does not include uncaused causes as a necessary condition while being internally-consistent.
They are often self-referential solutions to the Wheeler-deWitt equation.
e.g.: The Hartle-Hawking state and some interpretations of Carlo Rovelli's QLG
I agree it was meandering and a mess in that sense, but I still enjoyed reading it. Normally I'd be bothered due a sense of wasted time but I think these issues are worth thinking through, and even if not everything ties together in the essay I think they're relevant to one another topically. Sometimes I'm ok with many loose ends.
For me, the Knightian uncertainty was interesting to think about in the context of free will and predictability, but it seemed as if the connection wasn't there in the way the author wanted it to be. At some point the author suggests that if Knightian uncertainty holds, "instead of being predictably unpredictable it is simply unpredictable, and cannot be described by straightforward mathematical probabilities. Instead it reflects the free will of a human being."
Isn't Knightean uncertainty more reflective of an epistemological state of an observer/modeler? I mean, you can still assign probabilities to an event even if your model is wrong or extremely simple. Events that are truly random will still have probabilities assignable to them.
I'm also deeply uncomfortable with the argument that seems to be creeping in in this essay and in elsewhere that unpredictability seems to be equated with free will. I do not see them as the same. Just as example, say your decision between A and B is replaced with a truly random event with 30-70% probabilities. Does that mean free will? I would say no. Free will has some other element associated with it, an element I haven't heard articulated very well yet.
To me it isn't the stastical quantum randomness that collapses to free will, it's the fundamental uncomputable nature of predicting the universe, both in our inability to acquire the information per the uncertainty principle, and the fact we can't build a computer big enough or fast enough. We'd need more matter than there us matter to track state, and of course it won't be faster than the universe generates new states and data.
Do in the end if we can't get the data due to scale uncertainty and the speed of light, cannot store it and process it (not enough matter or time), then we fall back to: do people appear to have free will? We cannot perform the computation to refute that, so basically we do.
I guess you are saying that the universe implements a particular BQP function in the minimal QC required to run it on the power that was put into it at the start? What does that mean though, if I write down something like an Eager Beaver function and start to try to solve it?
Given that what reality looks like, including that part of reality that consists of "one's thoughts about reality", depends on how one looks at it. The fundament of reality should probably be considered, not one's thoughts about it, but one's way of looking at it.
If how to pay your bills is everything you want to know about the universe, then have fun with it.
But to many people, including friends and family - the question of the meaning of it all is a frequent and important one. Influencing directly how we live.
The more we know about the universe, the better we can answer. We have gathered very strong indications, negating the old "answer" that life is a bit older than 6000 years, meaning also an effective powerloss for those people in charge, who made society run by the literal guidance of an old myth book.
Going on a tangent, but to be fair I don't think the old answer was ever that the Earth/reality/the universe/all/etc is only 6000 years old.
Isn't that more of a modern misinterpretation of ancient mystical children's stories? You know, saving the pearls from the swine, so to speak?
The powerful have often been caught up in controversies (usually due to misunderstandings) around secret societies and other clubs that tend to carry those philosophical and mystical traditions forward which tend to reject the myth books as anything remotely literal. Except for (forgive my glossing over this part) more mundane fundamentalist uprisings throughout history, a lot of leadership has tended to associate as if they're above the literal tellings.
If you follow threads of mysticism in any form back through human history, it seems the overarching theory has remained pretty similar with the middling details a little murky and swapped around. Hell, some of the concepts strike me as uncannily close to what we continue to unravel and discover with physical sciences.
There are still freaks around, who take the bible literal and some are even in position of power. They used to control the western welt, until new ideas negated their source of power: offering people answers. But people saw other ideas (science) made more sense.
Those are the mundane fundamentalists I noted. They're not the sole bearers of power throughout history. Probably the minority, since they're usually responsible for reductions in their own power, and the power of the people they rule.
Not even Christian philosophy began with Constantine.
edit: My comments may sound muddier than I thought. I'm saying that human cosmological theory and understanding did not go from Holy Bible -> Science.
No, before we had the godkings of egypt, babylon, ..
I am not a historian, but from what I know the base of power of many if not most states(empires) was based on religious beliefs (and soldiers enforcing it). From my layman understanding, the most successful states were the ones practicing the most tolerance. But then usually some egomaniac wanted to maintain his power and went into theocracy, where the priests legitimated his power. And then there maybe was stability for a time, but seldom any progress.
I think you're talking about something completely different now.
I was just picking on your line about going from the "old answer" that the earth was 6000 years old to the "new answer" of science-based reasoning. I didn't mean to come across as confrontational—like I said, just going on a tangent.
So I'm saying that timeline never happened. Animism and universal consciousness, various planes of existence and dimensional properties are concepts that appear to stretch throughout human history. Most leadership participated on a more esoteric level of mysticism throughout human history (even if they themselves didn't fully grasp it). Dogmatic religion was a convenient teaching tool that grew to overpower its creators and operate on its own accord (another tangent). It's best not to mix up its use as a allegorical teaching tool and tool of exercising power and what humans at large have considered a well-considered cosmological model—something that hasn't really fundamentally changed, even with the aid of science. And not out of ignorance, but that sciences like physics have even hinted at some of the old models being consistent. Enough so that it made some real interesting characters out of people who had a sound grasp of chemistry and quantum theories like Jack Parsons who could never extricate the old models with his own growing understanding, even if it was not accurate or complete. It's pretty fascinating to read about.
"I think you're talking about something completely different now."
I meant the same theme:
That thinking about the universe beyound materialistic advantages can indeed have other advantages - by helping create us societies, closer to our true nature. And not let some dogmatic priest declare that for us.
No confrontation ;)
And sure, there is no single timeline. I think some ancient philosophic concepts might be closer to the truth, than some mathematic approximations we use today. But mathematic based science is a very powerful tool, for getting verification. So it is indeed fascinating, to see where we are heading.
I think a crucial important first step in a discussion of the type "is X a Y or a Z" is that we have very clear definition of X, Y and Z.
Unfortunately the article isn't very clear about any of this, so then the discussion becomes a discussion about definitions. Which is useless. There's no objective definition of a term. Terms are artificial symbols designed to mean whatever we want them to mean. And they're often incredibly overloaded, or underspecified.
Also coming to a thread about the nature of reality and talking about how there's no point in discussing the nature of reality is a contradiction of your own advice.
Intellect addiction is an interesting way to put it. Because the brain has so much capacity you have 1 of 2 options. Use your brain to explain nature or disconnect and absorb and have nature connect with you automatically. I’d argue you’re putting yourself into connection with the universe when you don’t put your mind to it (that much).
[0]: In particular, it would be of finite volume.
It’s an insightful idea. That my mind is both part of the universe, but also able to conceive of the universe, and beyond? Where are the real boundaries?
The notion that most of our experience is projection is really fascinating to me. Or rather it's projection combined with inputs at various levels of abstraction, and our attention is diverted to where these two differ. A lot of empirical evidence suggests this is the case. A deep dive in psychotherapy can help one to see this up close. The notion that it applies to visual input seems crazy, but you can also do fun experiments with the "blind spot" in your vision that are pretty convincing.
So I think the mind is pretty good at making us think it simulates all the particles and light and physics.
Meaning no solid base physic model.
Whooohaaa! Where do you think that the mechanisms that allow us to build atomic clocks and telescopes and quantum computer come from if not from the human mind?! Are angels doing it for us?
Given the assumptions, we need to count in the fundamental limits on computation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_of_computation
It's safe to deduce our brain can't simulate the universe, but only a "less powerful" description/representation of it. Otherwise the assumptions are inconsistent, and a paradox arises.
Obviously, since we don't know how the brain nor the universe work... It's all speculation
On the other hand if we focus on predictability and have that as condition of will then determinism permeates our choices, so will becomes just a projection of laws, their backpropagation on an arbitrary decision model.
We can move to statistical interpretations of the kind that our will is not deterministic but a will of rational expectations etc. but my intuitive feeling is that the separation of intentionality from causality is like a middle ground between two wrongs.
At the end of the day, I believe this paradox is the outcome of what I call “a sock’s theory of the foot”.
Fundamentally, if free will requires both causality-determinism and free choice, I believe it’s only feasible in a model of timeless causality where we can move the dial on the determinism of decisions or intentions or results or all of them at the same “time”. We are deterministic illusions of freedom of timeless intentional agents.
Edited:for clarity of timelessness argument
> These freebits also have to be quantum in nature.
Why?
> That means they are also “qubits”—the version of plain old 1 and 0 bits that applies to objects and systems exhibiting quantum behavior. They are fuzzy, undetermined things until called upon and snapped into focus. That’s a complication that I’m going to avoid really dealing with, because it will really make our heads hurt.
Hmmm. I've got plenty of Advil. Try me. What are you possibly trying to say here
> Suppose you want to track back the chain of events that led to a specific incident—something interesting in a physics experiment, or a chicken crossing the road. For some incidents there will be a chain that goes all the way back to the original freebits.
For some incidents? Shouldn't literally everything have a chain going back to the original freebits?
By all accounts the author seems like a really bright guy, and I can only hope this is a half-assed condensation of a portion of his latest book because this is not good.
‘> These freebits also have to be quantum in nature. Why?’
Maybe the author is assuming there are no elements in the universe that don’t follow quantum mechanics?
‘ > Suppose you want to track back the chain of events that led to a specific incident—something interesting in a physics experiment, or a chicken crossing the road. For some incidents there will be a chain that goes all the way back to the original freebits. For some incidents? Shouldn't literally everything have a chain going back to the original freebits?’
It seems like everything should have a chain of causality back to some thing. Except there has to be at least one uncaused causes, or else it’s just an infinite regression and not meaningful.
Exactly, the author is assuming the universe is a quantum Turing machine.
> It seems like everything should have a chain of causality back to some thing. Except there has to be at least one uncaused causes, or else it’s just an infinite regression and not meaningful.
It's not necessarily so.
Models that aim to describe the universe before the Planck epoch are speculative. There are known theories that does not include uncaused causes as a necessary condition while being internally-consistent.
They are often self-referential solutions to the Wheeler-deWitt equation.
e.g.: The Hartle-Hawking state and some interpretations of Carlo Rovelli's QLG
For me, the Knightian uncertainty was interesting to think about in the context of free will and predictability, but it seemed as if the connection wasn't there in the way the author wanted it to be. At some point the author suggests that if Knightian uncertainty holds, "instead of being predictably unpredictable it is simply unpredictable, and cannot be described by straightforward mathematical probabilities. Instead it reflects the free will of a human being."
Isn't Knightean uncertainty more reflective of an epistemological state of an observer/modeler? I mean, you can still assign probabilities to an event even if your model is wrong or extremely simple. Events that are truly random will still have probabilities assignable to them.
I'm also deeply uncomfortable with the argument that seems to be creeping in in this essay and in elsewhere that unpredictability seems to be equated with free will. I do not see them as the same. Just as example, say your decision between A and B is replaced with a truly random event with 30-70% probabilities. Does that mean free will? I would say no. Free will has some other element associated with it, an element I haven't heard articulated very well yet.
Do in the end if we can't get the data due to scale uncertainty and the speed of light, cannot store it and process it (not enough matter or time), then we fall back to: do people appear to have free will? We cannot perform the computation to refute that, so basically we do.
What I already knew:
The Big Bang happened everywhere at once.
The expansion of the universe is accelerating and will ultimately die in a Big Rip.
The total universe is presently about the size of 390 - 1.5e7 observable universes (Hubbles).
The total universe likely has a flat and open geometry.
Free will, like religion, is a human psychological construction opiate to distract from the limits of existence.
So what does this article add?
Universe is open ended. Knowledge is open ended. Void is open ended. Math is open ended. Physics is open ended. Atomic physics is open ended.
It is not just with the universe its a common pattern. (side note- Some smart lad will reply back your brain is open ended)
and few others will come with simulation theory. Which is also true.
Coming to the real question, whats the point of knowing all these ?
These are all the moves by an intellect addict.
If these arent' true then what is ? Have fun with friends, take care of family. That's all.
These knowledge would't pay your bills, well off course, you can create a gimmic tech toy and get some business running and get someone employed.
Just educate yourself that will pay for your bread and butter.
In other words, ones who escape from reality (friends and families), are the ones who experience reality ticking. :D Atleast a good conclusion.
But to many people, including friends and family - the question of the meaning of it all is a frequent and important one. Influencing directly how we live.
The more we know about the universe, the better we can answer. We have gathered very strong indications, negating the old "answer" that life is a bit older than 6000 years, meaning also an effective powerloss for those people in charge, who made society run by the literal guidance of an old myth book.
Isn't that more of a modern misinterpretation of ancient mystical children's stories? You know, saving the pearls from the swine, so to speak?
The powerful have often been caught up in controversies (usually due to misunderstandings) around secret societies and other clubs that tend to carry those philosophical and mystical traditions forward which tend to reject the myth books as anything remotely literal. Except for (forgive my glossing over this part) more mundane fundamentalist uprisings throughout history, a lot of leadership has tended to associate as if they're above the literal tellings.
If you follow threads of mysticism in any form back through human history, it seems the overarching theory has remained pretty similar with the middling details a little murky and swapped around. Hell, some of the concepts strike me as uncannily close to what we continue to unravel and discover with physical sciences.
There are still freaks around, who take the bible literal and some are even in position of power. They used to control the western welt, until new ideas negated their source of power: offering people answers. But people saw other ideas (science) made more sense.
Not even Christian philosophy began with Constantine.
edit: My comments may sound muddier than I thought. I'm saying that human cosmological theory and understanding did not go from Holy Bible -> Science.
I am not a historian, but from what I know the base of power of many if not most states(empires) was based on religious beliefs (and soldiers enforcing it). From my layman understanding, the most successful states were the ones practicing the most tolerance. But then usually some egomaniac wanted to maintain his power and went into theocracy, where the priests legitimated his power. And then there maybe was stability for a time, but seldom any progress.
I was just picking on your line about going from the "old answer" that the earth was 6000 years old to the "new answer" of science-based reasoning. I didn't mean to come across as confrontational—like I said, just going on a tangent.
So I'm saying that timeline never happened. Animism and universal consciousness, various planes of existence and dimensional properties are concepts that appear to stretch throughout human history. Most leadership participated on a more esoteric level of mysticism throughout human history (even if they themselves didn't fully grasp it). Dogmatic religion was a convenient teaching tool that grew to overpower its creators and operate on its own accord (another tangent). It's best not to mix up its use as a allegorical teaching tool and tool of exercising power and what humans at large have considered a well-considered cosmological model—something that hasn't really fundamentally changed, even with the aid of science. And not out of ignorance, but that sciences like physics have even hinted at some of the old models being consistent. Enough so that it made some real interesting characters out of people who had a sound grasp of chemistry and quantum theories like Jack Parsons who could never extricate the old models with his own growing understanding, even if it was not accurate or complete. It's pretty fascinating to read about.
I meant the same theme:
That thinking about the universe beyound materialistic advantages can indeed have other advantages - by helping create us societies, closer to our true nature. And not let some dogmatic priest declare that for us.
No confrontation ;)
And sure, there is no single timeline. I think some ancient philosophic concepts might be closer to the truth, than some mathematic approximations we use today. But mathematic based science is a very powerful tool, for getting verification. So it is indeed fascinating, to see where we are heading.
Unfortunately the article isn't very clear about any of this, so then the discussion becomes a discussion about definitions. Which is useless. There's no objective definition of a term. Terms are artificial symbols designed to mean whatever we want them to mean. And they're often incredibly overloaded, or underspecified.
Also coming to a thread about the nature of reality and talking about how there's no point in discussing the nature of reality is a contradiction of your own advice.