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> This relational framework captured Smolin’s imagination, as did Leibniz’s enigmatic text The Monadology, in which Leibniz suggests that the world’s fundamental ingredient is the “monad,” If this is not evidence that Haskell is the language of the Gods, I don't know what is...
Surely all those are different monads though.
All matter is information, all information is functional, and perception is therefore the lazy evaluation of the universe.
In this Quanta interview, Amanda Gefter writes:
"Leibniz argued (against Newton) that there’s no fixed backdrop to the universe, no “stuff” of space; space is just a handy way of describing relationships. This relational framework captured Smolin’s imagination, as did Leibniz’s enigmatic text The Monadology, in which Leibniz suggests that the world’s fundamental ingredient is the “monad,” a kind of atom of reality, with each monad representing a unique view of the whole universe. It’s a concept that informs Smolin’s latest work as he attempts to build reality out of viewpoints, each one a partial perspective on a dynamically evolving universe. A universe as seen from the inside."
For some reason, my mind went to the idea of "nodes and edges" of a graph; with the nodes being these "monads" and their relationships being the "edges", and then later in the interview...Smolin notes:
"The event has relations with the rest of the universe, and that set of relations constitutes its “view” of the universe. Rather than describing an isolated system in terms of things that are measured from the outside, we’re taking the universe as constituted of relations among events."
I don't know for sure if what I was thinking is the same thing as what he expresses here, but I think I might be close. Regardless, I now wonder something else:
Could the colloquial concept/idea of "6 degrees of separation" apply here? If so, what implications might that have for Smolin's theory?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation#Math...
I won't pretend to have any answers here (again, assuming anything I wrote above means anything)...
All matter is information, all information is functional, and perception is therefore the lazy evaluation of the universe.
Does the universe require perception in order for there to be existence? If so, does the perception require consciousness? Is consciousness constrained to the universe, or orthogonal to it?
Quanta Magazine has been producing a lot of stories that have been appearing on HN lately. An interesting aside it that Quanta was started by James Simon’s Foundation. James Simons is an interesting person. He doesn’t get the publicity of a Gates, Buffett, or Bezos. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Harris_Simons https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNznD9hMEh0
The Numberphile YT channel managed to get a rare interview with Mr. Simons. https://youtu.be/QNznD9hMEh0
the TED interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5kIdtMJGc8) is also good, despite the host's frequent vapid questions. in that interview, simons elaborates on his funding of origins of life studies and efforts.
Some of it you can only understand from inside the universe. It would be difficult at best to guess at the Born rule from a simulation.
> This relational framework captured Smolin’s imagination, as did Leibniz’s enigmatic text The Monadology, in which Leibniz suggests that the world’s fundamental ingredient is the “monad,” If this is not evidence that Haskell is the language of the Gods, I don't know what is...
All matter is information, all information is functional, and perception is therefore the lazy evaluation of the universe.
Does the universe require perception in order for there to be existence? If so, does the perception require consciousness? Is consciousness constrained to the universe, or orthogonal to it?