Live data from Hacker News

Shut up and calculate: an extreme mathematical universe

arxiv.org

81–90 of 191 posts

Re: Shut up and calculate: an extreme mathematical universe

#81

It baffles me that people ignore the fact that they have subjectivity when making these claims. It makes a certain amount of sense since science itself aims to remove any taint of subjectivity in its practice, so folks who want to be thoroughly 'scientific' in other aspects of their lives (e.g. their personal philosophies of reality) carry over over this ideal. But it's also a contradiction since science scientific m…

> But it's also a contradiction since science scientific methodology demands we check our results empirically: the fact that you have subjectivity (i.e. that qualia exist) and what it's like, is the most direct empirical fact we have access to and which needs reconciling in any discussion of the universe's constitution.

I hereby directly challenge your subjectivity and qualia. It is most absolutely not an empirical fact.

Re: Shut up and calculate: an extreme mathematical universe

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, reality works because reality cannot contain contradictions. But the set of possible structures without contradiction is a superset of what is physically realizable. And mathematics is just discovering and cataloging the set of structures without contradiction. So reality works because math works.

Also, Aristotle invented logic while studying cats (reality). That's what I am telling you: reality is amazing, not math!

[deleted]

Re: Shut up and calculate: an extreme mathematical universe

#83
post #76

It baffles me that people ignore the fact that they have subjectivity when making these claims. It makes a certain amount of sense since science itself aims to remove any taint of subjectivity in its practice, so folks who want to be thoroughly 'scientific' in other aspects of their lives (e.g. their personal philosophies of reality) carry over over this ideal. But it's also a contradiction since science scientific m…

You're right, and I also see how this obvious observation is consistently and elegantly ignored in most scientific or philosophical arguments that try and promote some totally "objective" account of reality. However, it's not really that surprising: Science over the centuries has steadily (and for it's time, justifiably) eroded the role of subjectivity in order to uncompromisingly get at what is consistently true (re…

I agree it's worth looking more closely at the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity, especially the mapping from the 'nearest' objective structure we know to various aspects of subjectivity. I think this could be a decent route to finding a brain structure tightly related to conscious experience.

However, my suspicion is that the experience itself will remain not amenable to conceptual analysis—that it will remain fundamentally incapable of systematizing. For instance what would the mathematical description of the experience of a fever chill look like? (Hint: the definition there requires that you don't take a reductive approach to this: it's not asking about a mechanism which produces or is responsible for the experience, it refers to the experience itself.)

That said, I think it would be very valuable to understand better what the limits of our conceptual faculty are: as impressive as cognition is relative to other things we and other animals are able to do, we're being unduly anthropocentric in assuming it to be boundless in capability. More recently I've come to consider concepts as almost like another sense: they are symbolic patterns consistently formed when we are exposed to certain stimuli (like our experience of smells consistently reappearing when exposed to similar molecules). Our conceptual faculty augments the pure pattern-correspondence of our more primitive senses in that the patterns can be associated with other internal patterns, and in that we can generate new patterns purely from existing patterns (using logical and analogical processes), which at some future time may be usefully associated with some never-encountered external stimulus.

Finding the limits to our conceptual faculty is almost synonymous with find its 'structure', which I think would have clear benefits.

Re: Shut up and calculate: an extreme mathematical universe

#84
post #81

It baffles me that people ignore the fact that they have subjectivity when making these claims. It makes a certain amount of sense since science itself aims to remove any taint of subjectivity in its practice, so folks who want to be thoroughly 'scientific' in other aspects of their lives (e.g. their personal philosophies of reality) carry over over this ideal. But it's also a contradiction since science scientific m…

> But it's also a contradiction since science scientific methodology demands we check our results empirically: the fact that you have subjectivity (i.e. that qualia exist) and what it's like, is the most direct empirical fact we have access to and which needs reconciling in any discussion of the universe's constitution. I hereby directly challenge your subjectivity and qualia. It is most absolutely not an empirical f…

It doesn't matter whether I also have it—as long as at least you have subjectivity/qualia, then it's a part of reality and must be accounted for.

Re: Shut up and calculate: an extreme mathematical universe

#85

It baffles me that people ignore the fact that they have subjectivity when making these claims. It makes a certain amount of sense since science itself aims to remove any taint of subjectivity in its practice, so folks who want to be thoroughly 'scientific' in other aspects of their lives (e.g. their personal philosophies of reality) carry over over this ideal. But it's also a contradiction since science scientific m…

I know of a nice argument against simulationism that I think applies here: If simulated universes can be "real," then we're assuming that there's a mapping between patterns of electrons in a computer (or provable theorems, if you're brave enough), and the real universe they represent. (Say, interpreting two numbers that may be stored very far apart on the chip as the positions of two particles that are, in the univer…

Scott Aaronson wrote a great paper arguing around what you mentioned[1]. He tackles the issue of why a waterfall does not simulate a universe if we transform the waterfall in an appropriate way. He argues that the waterfall would indeed simulate a universe, if and only if the transformation function is of polynomial complexity. However! He argues that it is more likely such a transformation is if exponential complexity, or of an even higher order, and thus the waterfall does not simulate a universe. A polynomial transformation function to turn a grain of sand into a universe existing seems like quite a strong assumption.

[1] https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf

Re: Shut up and calculate: an extreme mathematical universe

#86

It baffles me that people ignore the fact that they have subjectivity when making these claims. It makes a certain amount of sense since science itself aims to remove any taint of subjectivity in its practice, so folks who want to be thoroughly 'scientific' in other aspects of their lives (e.g. their personal philosophies of reality) carry over over this ideal. But it's also a contradiction since science scientific m…

I strongly suspect that I can dramatically affect or entirely 'turn off' your experience of qualia through purely physical means, so I think your objection is much more to do with your skepticism that mathematical or computational processes can generate physical processes than anything to do with qualia.

Of course, you only have to have a virtual object thrown at your head in VR to discover that your brain will mistake computational processes for physical ones rather easily.

Re: Shut up and calculate: an extreme mathematical universe

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible to think about the complexity of going between encoding schemes, but unless you've got a special representation blessed as the right way to write things, you won't be able to build a tier system where some encoding schemes are more awkward than others. Normally we have no problem doing this because we can recognize a well-written answer when we see it, but that's based on no more than the way our own br…

Even encoding schemes themselves have an information theoretic entropy level regardless of universe. Encoding schemes with less entropy can be considered more 'natural' - it's possible to come up with a measure of the 'naturalness' of encoding schemes in a pure mathematical sense without having to take into account entities beyond the mathematical realm.

If my understanding is right, a bijective function won't change the entropy of the strings it acts on. So, as long as I can find enough states in my grain of sand (quite possibly undoable, so imagine I'm talking about a few photons in space instead!), I can map them on to my universe and be no worse-off, from an information entropy standpoint.

Re: Shut up and calculate: an extreme mathematical universe

#88
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know of a nice argument against simulationism that I think applies here: If simulated universes can be "real," then we're assuming that there's a mapping between patterns of electrons in a computer (or provable theorems, if you're brave enough), and the real universe they represent. (Say, interpreting two numbers that may be stored very far apart on the chip as the positions of two particles that are, in the univer…

Scott Aaronson wrote a great paper arguing around what you mentioned[1]. He tackles the issue of why a waterfall does not simulate a universe if we transform the waterfall in an appropriate way. He argues that the waterfall would indeed simulate a universe, if and only if the transformation function is of polynomial complexity. However! He argues that it is more likely such a transformation is if exponential complexi…

Aaronson is one of my favorite philosophers.

But, what if there's a law of physics inside of the simulated universe that solves exponential problems in polynomial time? You could pack a more limited universe inside of that one, if you didn't want your inhabitants to have access to it. I think that computational complexity absolutely does determine how useful a simulation is to us, but it's not meta-universal enough to do this kind of philosophy with.

Re: Shut up and calculate: an extreme mathematical universe

#89
post #80

It baffles me that people ignore the fact that they have subjectivity when making these claims. It makes a certain amount of sense since science itself aims to remove any taint of subjectivity in its practice, so folks who want to be thoroughly 'scientific' in other aspects of their lives (e.g. their personal philosophies of reality) carry over over this ideal. But it's also a contradiction since science scientific m…

> It baffles me that people ignore the fact that they have subjectivity when making these claims. Do they? Everyone is entitled to their unquestioned assumptions as long as they state them outright and describe their parameters. I have yet to see dualists (which ultimately is at the base of this whole line of argumentation) admit that they posit subjective experience _without evidence_, since they equate asking quest…

> The fact remains that no entity can successfully prove to another entity that it has inner experience, so how would proving you have subjectivity to _your own mind_ work?

If you are trying to 'prove' subjectivity, in the sense of providing an argument for it, then you are missing the point: you already experience it directly by definition, so there is nothing to prove.

> This is a bizarre and unsupportable statement. Clearly physical processes can carry out computation, which is a special case of mathematics ...

I am arguing against the idea that the computation (i.e. the math part) carried out the physical process—not the other way around.

Re: Shut up and calculate: an extreme mathematical universe

#90
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you read the paper or the author's book? Because you're distilling a rather rich and refined argument down to a simplistic description. The author doesn't argue the universe is "made" of math.

I read 75% of the article, until he'd made enough unfounded statements that there was no point continuing with his inferences from them. Also, his assertion is as simple as I've suggested, although I won't bother with a detailed rebuttal of it (I've dealt with several others, and generated my own in the past), largely because the blog my previous reply was about already handles that. Some excerpts from the article: >…

Thanks for clarifying your thoughts. I actually just finished Tegmarks new book Life 3.0, which touches on consciousness and qualia in the context of understanding AGI, and I think he'd actually argue that qualia is an "emergent property" of certain categories of information flow, much like waves are an emergent property of certain types of phenomena. I'm don't think that is a sufficient argument to explain subjective experience, but it's an interesting train of thought and would provide clearance for having his argument about a mathematical universe being consistent with qualia -- the qualia is an emergent property of information flow, several layers of abstraction detached from the underlying media of the multiverse. In other words, citing qualia as incompatible with the MUH would be much like citing waves as incompatible with the theory of atoms -- two totally different domains. Under this theory, you could arguably get qualia to emerge in other media, like a bunch of logic gates, without having anything to do with what those logic gates were composed of.
Post reply on HN