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Shut up and calculate: an extreme mathematical universe

arxiv.org

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Re: Shut up and calculate: an extreme mathematical universe

#11

Post by Florin_Andrei »

js8 wrote: post #2

I like the idea that the reality is just mathematics, I thought about it independently, but it gets weird really fast. I yet to have read this essay, but I had two thoughts: 1. Similar to Turing completeness, actual physical reality might not matter for the internal observer. All Turing-complete machines can calculate same things and observer from the inside of the machine cannot determine on what hardware the machin…

> I read the essay, and I disagree that the multiverse is necessary.

Read his book 'Our mathematical Universe', he explains there why these are actual separate multiverses.

I agree it's somewhat a matter of interpretation whether it's truly "multi" or a single entity. But if the domains are separate enough, it's probably best to think of them as different universes.

Re: Shut up and calculate: an extreme mathematical universe

#15

Post by vorg »

The author asks how we could use the mathematical equations which describe all of reality to compute the frog’s view of the universe — our observations — from the bird’s view. Wouldn't we also need to include our self-awareness in those observations, which would make the computation impossible according to Turing's halting theorem, or is it Godel's?

Re: Shut up and calculate: an extreme mathematical universe

#16

Post by _v7gu »

mazsa wrote: post #8
komali2 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand on #2? I don't understand maybe the word "theorem" in this context, or perhaps the meaning of "property of the result."

"The complete proof of 2 + 2 = 4 involves 2,863 subtheorems including the 189 above. (The command "show trace_back 2p2e4 /essential" will list them.) These have a total of 27,426 steps—this is how many steps you would have to examine if you wanted to verify the proof by hand in complete detail all the way back to the axioms." http://us.metamath.org/mpegif/mmset.html#trivia

Oh jeez dude, just use ZFC and you'll get it done in ten minutes

Re: Shut up and calculate: an extreme mathematical universe

#17

Post by jcelerier »

> For example, a sufficiently powerful supercomputer could calculate how the state of the universe evolves over time without interpreting what is happening in human terms.

Hasn't it been understood for a long time that quite a bit of things were entirely non-deterministic ? eg radioactive decay. You could compute a possible state, but the universe is a sequence of state spaces.

Re: Shut up and calculate: an extreme mathematical universe

#18

Post by Koshkin »

lou1306 wrote: post #4

I'm a philosophy noob, but isn't this very similar to Berkeley-style immaterialism?

Not really. Berkeley's idealism contests the objectivity of reality, while here we are presented with another view of the foundation of the (objective) material world.

Re: Shut up and calculate: an extreme mathematical universe

#19

Post by kybernetikos »

js8 wrote: post #2

I like the idea that the reality is just mathematics, I thought about it independently, but it gets weird really fast. I yet to have read this essay, but I had two thoughts: 1. Similar to Turing completeness, actual physical reality might not matter for the internal observer. All Turing-complete machines can calculate same things and observer from the inside of the machine cannot determine on what hardware the machin…

> So there is no need for actual hardware on which the universe runs to exist

You may enjoy the science fiction book Permutation City

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