Carlo Rovelli on the ‘greatest remaining mystery’: The nature of time • Hacker News Board

Re: Carlo Rovelli on the ‘greatest remaining mystery’: The nature of time

#71

Post by redial » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 3:57 AM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #66

redial wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All those options are the same: they are either part of a shared experience or they are not. Nothing is preventing a demon from deceiving me right now, in fact one can come anytime I'd love to meet him, preferably her.

If experiencing something that's not shared is the only qualification for solipsism, then we're all solipsists, as (arguably barring the possibility of telepathy) our experiences are all private. But that's not what solipsism typically means. Solipsism usually refers to the position that only you (or perhaps only your own mind) exist. By that commonly accepted definition, one could be mistaken or deceived in any of t…

I meant to say shared context. Everything you said is part of a shared context or not, those are the only two options.

Re: Carlo Rovelli on the ‘greatest remaining mystery’: The nature of time

#72

Post by redial » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 4:06 AM UTC

md224 wrote: post #32

pmoriarty wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Nature of Life (we are still nowhere near understanding how it arose or how living organisms work in all their intricate detail)." Not only that, but do you have an existence before you are born? This might be a religious question to some, or perhaps involve a religious answer, but religion need not be involved. It's possible that in some not yet understood way an individual might exist before they're born and are s…

It says a lot that you felt the need to hedge against the assumption that you were talking about religious beliefs. These days it seems like there’s a materialist mindset that assumes anyone who questions certain assumptions about consciousness (e.g. that it is a creation of the brain that begins and ends when the brain does) has ventured into the terrain of religion, the supernatural, or “magic” (whatever that’s sup…

The problem is one of humility. If you admit that something is at this point inexplicable then that is where you should stop explaining it. Sometimes I don't know is the only real answer. Because if you want to make this statement:

> It doesn’t seem to occur to people that consciousness itself is completely inexplicable and therefore all bets are off regarding its true nature.

You have to, ahem, explain it.

Re: Carlo Rovelli on the ‘greatest remaining mystery’: The nature of time

#73

Post by mindcrime » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 4:08 AM UTC

andrepd wrote: post #49

_8j50 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not informed well enough to answer you but can you point me in the right direction on anything that associates time being a physhical matter? How would relativity change if one looks at time as "perceived universal change'?

I'm not sure what I would recommend as an introduction to relativity. If you're mathematically minded and have a lot of time on your hands, and actually want to learn the physics, a superb book is "Spacetime and Geometry" by Sean Carrol. As for a layman introduction, I'm not sure what to recommend. As succinctly as I can put it, in our current understanding spacetime is a 4-dimensional space whose curvature is relate…

Two books on relativity that I found pretty accessible and enlightening were:

Spooky Action at a Distance: The Phenomenon That Reimagines Space and Time—and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything[1] - George Musser

and

What Is Relativity?: An Intuitive Introduction to Einstein's Ideas, and Why They Matter[2] - Jeffrey O. Bennett

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23848266-spooky-action-a...

[2]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17938849-what-is-relativ...

Re: Carlo Rovelli on the ‘greatest remaining mystery’: The nature of time

#74

Post by mikec3010 » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 4:10 AM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #2

Not to nitpick, but I'm not sure the nature of time is so indisputably the greatest remaining mystery. The nature of consciousness, life, and death can all certainly give it a run for its money. Incidentally, would anyone happen to have a direct link to a version of this article that could be read without enabling javascript?

I dont think time is any more mysterious a concept than space. Asking "what is time" is just as enigmatic as "why are there 3 dimensions and not 1,2,4 or many more?"

How can you have a thing that is "left" or "up" of another thing? How come "all the things" aren't in the same place?

Re: Carlo Rovelli on the ‘greatest remaining mystery’: The nature of time

#75

Post by pmoriarty » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 4:36 AM UTC

redial wrote: post #71

pmoriarty wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If experiencing something that's not shared is the only qualification for solipsism, then we're all solipsists, as (arguably barring the possibility of telepathy) our experiences are all private. But that's not what solipsism typically means. Solipsism usually refers to the position that only you (or perhaps only your own mind) exist. By that commonly accepted definition, one could be mistaken or deceived in any of t…

I meant to say shared context. Everything you said is part of a shared context or not, those are the only two options.

Even if there is some sort of "shared context" (more commonly known as "objective reality") your view or understanding of it could still be deceived, hallucinating, simply mistaken, insane, etc. These are not solipsism. What they are are possible obstacles to your connection to any shared context or objective reality.

Re: Carlo Rovelli on the ‘greatest remaining mystery’: The nature of time

#76

Post by perl4ever » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 4:36 AM UTC

codethief wrote: post #14

perl4ever wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, but here's some food for thought: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortalit...

This is hardly casting doubt on the nature of (human) death. This is purely a question about quantum mechanics, I'd say. On a side note, I fail to see how the experimenter is supposed to survive with probability 1 in Everett's many-worlds interpretation and thus be able to distinguish the latter from the Copenhagen interpretation. Yes, there will be one world where he survives but in the "vast majority" of worlds he…

The idea is that everybody else dies with certainty, from your observation point, but you yourself can't, because the denominator of the probability fraction consists only of those futures where you exist.

It happens to be a vivid idea to me, because a long time ago I read a short story that was more fantasy/horror than science fiction, but resembled it a little in spirit. It was about a kid in a small town who discovered that the grave digger for the town seemed to know ahead of time who would die, and dug the graves in advance. The kid thought this was just mildly interesting as long as it was just elderly people he didn't care about, until one day his parents were in a car accident and because one grave was ready, he knew one was going to die. He killed the grave digger and buried him in the open grave instead, and from then on, people stopped dying. Which turned out to not be a blessing.

Re: Carlo Rovelli on the ‘greatest remaining mystery’: The nature of time

#77

Post by perl4ever » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 4:45 AM UTC

beesmum wrote: post #24

perl4ever wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you accept that other people are conscious like yourself, it seems like you have accepted the physical origin of consciousness. If you don't accept that the subjective experience of consciousness is just a product of physical events, then how do you avoid viewing yourself as the only conscious entity? You can be a solipsist or not, but you can't have it both ways. Experiencing thoughts from outside yourself is a c…

While I think it's an interesting argument, I don't agree that accepting that some other being than me can be conscious leads to having to accept the physical origin of consciousness a priori. If you look at Buddhism or any esoteric system, they essentially posit that consciousness is a unified field from which everything manifests, like light refracted through an (infinitely) complex array of lens. The spots of ligh…

Are you or are you not experiencing my consciousness right now? Either you claim to, in which case you're lying or delusional, or you don't claim to, in which case you can't say anything about its experiential nature without contradiction. I can say I am conscious all day, but that's just something I say - it can't prove anything to you. If I was being tortured, and I didn't communicate it to you, would you notice?

Logical incoherence starts with lying to yourself. That's not wisdom.

Edit: I can be a solipsist today and a materialist tomorrow - I'm not criticizing either viewpoint, just saying you can't reason based on believing in both simultaneously.

Re: Carlo Rovelli on the ‘greatest remaining mystery’: The nature of time

#78

Post by acqq » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 4:57 AM UTC

dyukqu wrote: post #35

Some tangential thoughts: even though I like these popular science (physics, to be precise) books, I have hard times to imagine their writers as a real scientists . Tyson, Greene, Carroll, Kaku, Rovelli... So many writers author so many books about these hey-look!-so-fascinating! things. It looks like a bandwagon and more and more scientists (yes, physicists especially) are getting on it - like they don't have any im…

> humble 2 cents

Sadly, not humble, and, from my point of view, uninformed, that is, exactly what would be expected from an otherwise uninformed reader of the newspaper articles about the topics touched, especially from one not understanding how science actually works.

In reality, the "failed" fulfillment of some expectations when the best experiments up to now are performed is also what advances our knowledge, greatly, you can read, for an example, here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17363056

Look from this perspective: not only that what some theoretical scientists whose direct "expectations" came to be unconfirmed by the LHC experiments "expected" would remain just a "plain imagination" without a huge investment in extremely advanced experiments, the same would remain for any scientist having some other ideas.

We need so advanced experiments because anything else is already known. And what we know today we wouldn't without the experiments, especially such producing "unexpected" results. There's is not an actual "crisis" in science advancing, exactly by doing experiments never before done the science does advance. The experiments like LHC are indeed a precondition for any new advancement.

For every complex problem there exists a nice and easily understandable solution... that is wrong. Even the basic explanation in many articles written about the science the authors get wrong, and the casual readers get even more wrong.

The typical complaint is that the experiments "cost much" and then the wishes of some aren't "confirmed"? Well they cost peanuts compared to the investment in military.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...

"Program cost US$1.508 trillion (through 2070 in then-year dollars), US$55.1B for RDT&E, $319.1B for procurement, $4.8B for MILCON, $1123.8B for operations & sustainment (2015 estimate)"

Compare with the total budget of LHC experiment of just €7.5 billion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider

You'd get surely more than 200 LHCs for just one type of a military plane.

Also, the expected cost of measuring gravitational waves from space, the way that would also give us a new and otherwise inaccessible information about the Universe is 1000 times smaller than the cost of the above military plane.

The typical complaint goes on with the idea that the if scientists work on something, and it's unconfirmed by the experiment, it was unnecessary work. That's also not true at all. Most of hypotheses of what is behind the limits of our current experiments will not be confirmed by definition. If we knew, we wouldn't need to perform the experiments.

Re: Carlo Rovelli on the ‘greatest remaining mystery’: The nature of time

#79

Post by perl4ever » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 4:58 AM UTC

simondedalus wrote: post #19

perl4ever wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you accept that other people are conscious like yourself, it seems like you have accepted the physical origin of consciousness. If you don't accept that the subjective experience of consciousness is just a product of physical events, then how do you avoid viewing yourself as the only conscious entity? You can be a solipsist or not, but you can't have it both ways. Experiencing thoughts from outside yourself is a c…

there's a gulf as big as the ocean between acceptance and explanation. we have good reason to assume that consciousness (whatever it is) depends on the physical. great, but what is it?

I wasn't taking sides on whether it's physical or not, so I wouldn't particularly agree with your statement.

I'm only trying to say that if you don't accept that consciousness is physical, you aren't accepting the symmetry between you and other minds, and can't reason from the assumption they have the same experience.

Once you contradict the known fact that you experience your own thoughts and not others, you descend into incoherence. It seems to me kind of like the issues people have with quantum weirdness. People are accustomed to assuming they know things for the sake of argument, but assuming you know the unknowable can sabotage your reasoning.

Re: Carlo Rovelli on the ‘greatest remaining mystery’: The nature of time

#80

Post by redial » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 5:02 AM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #75

redial wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant to say shared context. Everything you said is part of a shared context or not, those are the only two options.

Even if there is some sort of "shared context" (more commonly known as "objective reality") your view or understanding of it could still be deceived, hallucinating, simply mistaken, insane, etc. These are not solipsism. What they are are possible obstacles to your connection to any shared context or objective reality.

Sure, but they don't change the fact those are the only 2 options.

And in the "shared reality" option, consciousness is somewhat measurable.