I need to get caught up on new developments regarding Wheeler's "Participatory Universe" to find out if anyone else is thinking along these lines, but if observation does result in existence becoming--wave function(s) collapsing into the truly concrete--then essentially the history of the Universe occurred instantly when the first observation of it was made? I don't know where that conscious observer would have been located. Earth? A planet like it? Perhaps on every world (simultaneously of course) where the retrocausal positioning of conscious entities made sense?
To John Wheeler, the race to explain time was personal
31–40 of 53 posts
Re: To John Wheeler, the race to explain time was personal
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another possibility is simply that they've got wildly more resources than we can imagine. It's ferociously expensive to run the universe on a classical simulation of QM, but finite. We have no particular reason to believe this "higher reality" doesn't have this level of resources. I've often pondered our universe as the moral equivalent of an elementary school demonstration; what if we're some metaphorical elementary…
I can't help but find it unsettling listening to a subject of the universe describe it as "relatively simple". Simple relative to what?! Some arbitrary more complex system? Well Sure! Frankly, I don't think it's a question of complexity, or even expressivity, but more one of encapsulation and information hiding.
"I can't help but find it unsettling listening to a subject of the universe describe it as "relatively simple". Simple relative to what?!"
For one, simple relative to every universe we've ever created, such as Minecraft, World of Warcraft, Second Life, etc., all of which are megabytes upon megabytes (if not gigabytes) of ad-hoc rules, specifications, hard-coded geometry, etc. Even if we ignore the visualization aspects, they are all very complicated.
It is very likely that whatever the ultimate Theory of Everything is would fit comfortably into kilobytes. Very dense kilobytes, kilobytes you could spend your entire life understanding, but kilobytes. Certainly the entire Standard Model could be packed into kilobytes even starting from a fairly simple axiomatic mathematics, with a half-decent encoding. Its complexity comes from the number of particles interacting under its rules, and the fact our human brains aren't particularly suited to running QM calculations and confuses that difficulty with "complexity", since very few people have a grasp on what complexity truly is [1]. Most of the complexity of the Standard Model would actually be building up from the simple axioms and defining imaginary numbers and the other basic mathematic operations; once that was done, the fundamental equations to evolve state and the table of constants would not be very large. (Assuming that the parameters are not infinitely complicated real numbers, and that we can cut them off safely aften 40 or 50 decimal places without noticing a difference.)
The real universe's complexity does not appear to stem from its core building blocks necessarily, but from the staggering amount of space it occupies and the amount of computation it does, with both the Planck space and Planck time constants being staggeringly low on the one end, and the age of the universe and the expected age it should be able to survive staggeringly large on the other.
[1]: Defining it correctly is way beyond the scope of this post. But to get an idea, go here, look at the initial state, and then hit "start": http://pmav.eu/stuff/javascript-game-of-life-v3.1.1/ It looks like all sorts of complicated stuff is happening, right? However, the rule set is a small rule about what cells live or die based on neighbors, that small initial state, and if we're getting really technical, the iteration counter. What is on your screen may be visually complicated, but mathematically, it's very, very simple.
What's really shocking is that the Life rule set is probably sufficient to describe our universe. It's Turing Complete, and there's a sense in which any TC set of rules is equivalent to any other. However, it is also very likely that running our universe on Life rules would also require a massively complicated initial state, making it an unappealing theory to explain the real universe for that and several other reasons. We'd like to see something where the sum total of the complexity of the rule set and the initial state isn't that great, or is at least proportional to the amount of "stuff" the universe seems to have started out with.
Re: To John Wheeler, the race to explain time was personal
#33> The faster you go, the slower time goes. If you could go as fast as light, you’d see time come to a halt and disappear. No, you wouldn't. Someone observing you would. Am I getting relativity wrong?
You are getting relativity wrong. The layman phrase being used here 'time come to a halt and disappear' encodes what would happen from a relativity perspective. Everything that you would be seeing relative to you, would appear as if time had stopped if you were traveling at c.
If you were traveling at C you would not really see anything [external] at all. Length contraction would be such that everything around you would appear as a single motionless point.
Any incoming light would be blue shifted to infinity, or red shifted to zero, so if any actually touched you there would be infinite energy there. Luckily no light can actually reach you - nothing can. You would have no incoming sensory information at all.
Because of length contraction there's no distance between the start and and of your journey, so from your POV it doesn't take an time at all, since the distance was so short.
Re: To John Wheeler, the race to explain time was personal
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
My colleagues and I used to get these "nut letters" occasionally even as unknown grad students. They were quite a treat to read: the human imagination is a marvel, and curiosity knows no bounds. If they'd taken slightly different paths than they had, some probably would have even been with my colleagues reading those letters instead of writing them.
I wonder if any of these nut letters have ever yielded useful scientific discoveries or advances. I figure one or two must have, even if only by accident, or indirectly.
Maybe not the "nut" letters, which are frequently very nutty, but random letters can.
In this episode of Tested Joe DeRisi describes how a random letter from a snake owner led to some interesting published results in molecular biology.
https://www.tested.com/old-categories/podcasts/854328-scarie...
Re: To John Wheeler, the race to explain time was personal
#35On observers creating the universe, I’ve sometimes wondered if given the simulation hypothesis, that simulating quantum mechanics is so computationally expensive that it isn’t done unless we’re looking at it, and that the high energy levels required to probe smaller and smaller length scales is an artifact of the computational requirements of simulating it.
That's an interesting thought. It it's true, it seems to have some implications: * Whoever is running the simulation cares about whether we're looking. * They had a good reason for going with quantum mechanics rather than something that would be easier to simulate. I know some people would say that's because they're interested in simulating conscious life and quantum mechanics is essential for consciousness. However,…
There is a theory that says that everytime somebody is close to understanding the structure and mechanics of the universe, the universe would immediately be replaced by something even more strange and incomprehensible. Another theory says this already has happened several times.
This would explain both our progress in physics and the strangeness of QM, and give credence to the idea that we are in a simulation.
Re: To John Wheeler, the race to explain time was personal
#36What irks me in articles like this is the term observer. Define observer. Sure, a human is an observer. But can a dog be an observer? A plasmodium? A virus bumping into a molecule and changing its course? Is observing shorthand for any interaction that can collapse a wave function? In that case it seems highly unlikely to me that a photon can travel billions of light years unperturbed.
Re: To John Wheeler, the race to explain time was personal
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's an interesting thought. It it's true, it seems to have some implications: * Whoever is running the simulation cares about whether we're looking. * They had a good reason for going with quantum mechanics rather than something that would be easier to simulate. I know some people would say that's because they're interested in simulating conscious life and quantum mechanics is essential for consciousness. However,…
There is a theory that says that everytime somebody is close to understanding the structure and mechanics of the universe, the universe would immediately be replaced by something even more strange and incomprehensible. Another theory says this already has happened several times. This would explain both our progress in physics and the strangeness of QM, and give credence to the idea that we are in a simulation.
You could make a humorous extension to that theory re: a priorly flat earth.
Re: To John Wheeler, the race to explain time was personal
#38> He Revolutionized Physics
Did he, really?
Re: To John Wheeler, the race to explain time was personal
#39On observers creating the universe, I’ve sometimes wondered if given the simulation hypothesis, that simulating quantum mechanics is so computationally expensive that it isn’t done unless we’re looking at it, and that the high energy levels required to probe smaller and smaller length scales is an artifact of the computational requirements of simulating it.
That's an interesting thought. It it's true, it seems to have some implications: * Whoever is running the simulation cares about whether we're looking. * They had a good reason for going with quantum mechanics rather than something that would be easier to simulate. I know some people would say that's because they're interested in simulating conscious life and quantum mechanics is essential for consciousness. However,…
Whoever is running the simulation cares about whether we're looking. They had a good reason for going with quantum mechanics rather than something that would be easier to simulate.
The power running the Universe doesn't have infinite CPU/GPU/RAM resources at their disposal, any more than a game developer at this level of reality does. Some optimizations (or hacks, to be less charitable) are necessary. Quantum behavior is one of those hacks, part of the code that manages the potentially-visible set. It would be wasteful to render or run physics on particles that nothing is interacting with.
The only questions are whether God is an Nvidia fanboy or an AMD die-hard, and if He signed an exclusive deal with Sony or Nintendo at some point in the future.
Re: To John Wheeler, the race to explain time was personal
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if any of these nut letters have ever yielded useful scientific discoveries or advances. I figure one or two must have, even if only by accident, or indirectly.
Maybe not the "nut" letters, which are frequently very nutty, but random letters can. In this episode of Tested Joe DeRisi describes how a random letter from a snake owner led to some interesting published results in molecular biology. https://www.tested.com/old-categories/podcasts/854328-scarie...
Wow, that's one of the best guests I've heard on that podcast (and in general!). I'm a few months behind, so I hadn't heard this one yet, so thanks.
The title isn't wrong, either, this one is terrifying (so far).