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Shut up and calculate: an extreme mathematical universe

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Re: Shut up and calculate: an extreme mathematical universe

#111

Post by jlg23 »

westoncb wrote: post #109
jlg23 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It baffles me that people ignore the fact that they have subjectivity when making these claims. The author does not ignore that but states his assumption on the first page: The foundation of my argument is the assumption that there exists an external physical reality independent of us humans. EDIT: Clarification: "external physical reality" means to me that we can rule out subjectivity here.

Yes, I thought that part of the article was kind of funny: just because we admit an external reality that is supposed to imply there is no internal reality? Here's the one other part where he references subjectivity/qualia: > In this example, the frog itself must consist of a thick bundle of pasta whose highly complex structure corresponds to particles that store and process information in a way that gives rise to th…

> just because we admit an external reality that is supposed to imply there is no internal reality?

Do we? Were? I don't see that in the essay.

> This is the typical omission made by the many people who have formed similar arguments to Tegmark.

Do you have any links? I'd like to read more.

Re: Shut up and calculate: an extreme mathematical universe

#113

Post by wolfgke »

kingkawn wrote: post #94

a Subset cannot have greater cardinality than the set it derives from. Subjective existence cannot be reduced to Math because it is our explorations in subjectivity that led to math’s invention and refinement

> a Subset cannot have greater cardinality than the set it derives from.

I am not completely certain in the subtleties of non-standard set theory, but at least if we replace the axiom of Choice (AC) by the axiom of Determinacy (AD) - which is perfectly fine, though it is less common to do mathematics in this system - we can partition the real line R by an equivalence relation that has more equivalence classes than elements of R. So at least we can partition R into more disjoint subsets than R has elements.

Source: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1104028/what-are-di...

Re: Shut up and calculate: an extreme mathematical universe

#114

Post by westoncb »

jlg23 wrote: post #111
westoncb wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I thought that part of the article was kind of funny: just because we admit an external reality that is supposed to imply there is no internal reality? Here's the one other part where he references subjectivity/qualia: > In this example, the frog itself must consist of a thick bundle of pasta whose highly complex structure corresponds to particles that store and process information in a way that gives rise to th…

> just because we admit an external reality that is supposed to imply there is no internal reality? Do we? Were? I don't see that in the essay. > This is the typical omission made by the many people who have formed similar arguments to Tegmark. Do you have any links? I'd like to read more.

> Do we? Were? I don't see that in the essay.

Actually, I think you are correct—I misread part of it the first time. He is pretty meticulous about saying this only applies to 'external physical reality,' and the only reference to an internal part is in the excerpt I gave above about the sensation of self-awareness.

However, it's a similar kind of trick. He goes ahead and makes statements like:

> Everything in our world is purely mathematical — including you.

—which isn't really so significant if you are implicitly ignoring any interior aspects.

Instead, it's just kind of a tautology: the 'exterior' aspects of reality (well, the selection of them which we know of/discuss anyway) are precisely the ones approachable to conceptual/linguistic/mathematical formulation. So I don't see much more being said here than "the mathematically describable parts of reality are mathematically describable."

> Do you have any links? I'd like to read more.

I've already spent far too much time on this thread, but if you look around at adherents of digital physics, computational universe, etc. you'll find a similar elision repeating itself: either subjectivity/qualia are ignored completely, or it is assumed that they would be a by-product of some kind of generative mathematical/computational process. I've seen several articles related to the idea just on HN.

Edit: also: this is just a recent manifestation of the idea, which has been around at least since Plato.

Re: Shut up and calculate: an extreme mathematical universe

#115

Post by theoh »

musage wrote: post #106
westoncb wrote: post #49

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…

a comment I made earlier, with Hannah Arendt quoting Heisenberg on the matter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15634222 In the prologue of "Vita Activa" she wrote this: > This future man, whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to…

The "relations are what matters" perspective is a structuralist thing, which can be traced to Saussure's linguistics on the philosophical side of things. Henri Poincaré was among the first to affirm a similar view in the sciences.

The question of whether it's a workable perspective or not is way above my pay grade. Some call it differential ontology http://www.iep.utm.edu/diff-ont/

The joke about category theorists being unable to distinguish isomorphic objects seems relevant (saying that as an appreciator of category theory). Also relevant is the hoary question of the identity of indiscernibles. If every distinguishable entity must stand in a unique relation to the universe, couldn't that solve the apparent ontological problem?

Re: Shut up and calculate: an extreme mathematical universe

#116

Post by Koshkin »

otakucode wrote: post #108
Koshkin wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> calculates ... the end result It does not do that, either. (Because there is no "end result" to calculate.)

If you are looking for the future position of a particle, the future position of that particle is by definition the result sought. I think I might not understand your meaning.

According to the modern physics view, the "future position" is undefined in principle; the only position that is known is the position just measured.

Re: Shut up and calculate: an extreme mathematical universe

#117

Post by placebo »

westoncb wrote: post #83
placebo wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

>However, my suspicion is that the experience itself will remain not amenable to conceptual analysis

I'm in total agreement with this as well. When I suggested looking into what is it that objectivity and subjectivity arise from, I wasn't referring to the "physical" explanation (which I assume will eventually be resolved, though not in the near future) but to the core of the hard problem of consciousness. My take on this is that when looked at closely, it will not be found within the domain of anything that can be conceptualised simply because it precedes concepts. Any concept requires consciousness to exist but not vice versa. Of course the usual argument at this point is something in the line of "so the sun didn't exist before any thinking animals existed?" To which my answer is that the sun as a concept didn't exist. Neither did hydrogen, electrons or wave functions. Only pure pre-concept reality existed, neither objective nor subjective, "waiting" for a mind to evolve and eventually form subjects. objects and concepts that with increasing accuracy describe how this reality functions, and then proceed to confuse this description of reality with reality...

Re: Shut up and calculate: an extreme mathematical universe

#118

Post by Houshalter »

I can't even comprehend what the alternative viewpoint would be. The the universe isn't mathematical. A universe that doesn't obey any system of logical rules.

A universe with true randomness might satisfy that literally. But random variables can be incorporated into a mathematical model. But what would it even mean for a universe to not be describable by any kind of math at all? I don't think such a concept is coherent or discussable.

Re: Shut up and calculate: an extreme mathematical universe

#119

Post by Houshalter »

followmeon wrote: post #38

If our reality consists of mathematical programs and the multiverse theory holds, then the theory of everything is a simple incrementing binary counter. Every possible binary string is ran on a Turing machine in a different universe. The halting problem (endless loops) is sidestepped by being contained to a single universe. Also, apparently our universe got lucky as we get to live in an ordered universe, and not diss…

I think you've confused the representation with the computation. Sure maybe that binary number could represent a universe state in some encoding. But there's no computation happening to it. It's static.

>I believe that mathematics is a mental construct, mathematics does not exist without brains

Brains evolved through natural selection to survive in the universe we exist in. Ideas similarly "evolved" to be good at modelling the universe. If mathematics didn't exist outside of our head, it would be useless. If there are two apples on the ground, and two more fall of a tree, then there are four apples on the ground. This is true whether or not a human is there to observe it and count them.

Re: Shut up and calculate: an extreme mathematical universe

#120

Post by westoncb »

placebo wrote: post #117
westoncb wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

> However, my suspicion is that the experience itself will remain not amenable to conceptual analysis I'm in total agreement with this as well. When I suggested looking into what is it that objectivity and subjectivity arise from, I wasn't referring to the "physical" explanation (which I assume will eventually be resolved, though not in the near future) but to the core of the hard problem of consciousness. My take on…

Heh, yeah, that's pretty much exactly how I think of it :) I didn't mean to state my previous comment as a disagreement, just an elaboration.
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