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How to Understand the Universe When You’re Stuck Inside of It

quantamagazine.org

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Re: How to Understand the Universe When You’re Stuck Inside of It

#51

Post by ncmncm »

joe_the_user wrote: post #2

Perhaps "understanding 'intelligence' when you're stuck inside it" is even harder and yet a lot of artificial intelligence research seems very linear and not interested in unknown unknowns. If we are following the "anthropic principle" the two questions might not be entirely unrelated.

It is even less interested in the more consequential unknown knowns, better known as "what you think you know that ain't really so". If Donald Rumsfeld could have understood this concept, we might have stayed out of Iraq.

Re: How to Understand the Universe When You’re Stuck Inside of It

#52

Post by ncmncm »

inopinatus wrote: post #44
iaabtpbtpnn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this sounds profound, I'm unable to figure out what it actually means. Can you explain more?

We are all value objects. Imagine that eat a banana. The contents of your stomach change. You have assumed a new identity. If you grasp/accept this, you are perceiving yourself as having mutated after eating the banana, because you are in temporal lockstep with your stomach. Most of what we consider to be "fact" and "how the world works" is a matter of perception. But I don't mean that in some hippy dippy way. I mean…

And we are all the banana.

Re: How to Understand the Universe When You’re Stuck Inside of It

#53

Post by i4t »

criloz2 wrote: post #37
asplake wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trying to make sense of that last sentence. Putting words in your mouth, but you mean that we live in a simulation, for some definition of 'simulation' that we don't yet fathom?

yeah, I think that simulation is the closest word that we have right now for describing it, like many other times a word tend to be overused to describe multiples related things, till a new word is invented

a simulation of what exactly?

Re: How to Understand the Universe When You’re Stuck Inside of It

#54

Post by kgwgk »

kaycebasques wrote: post #39
iaabtpbtpnn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this sounds profound, I'm unable to figure out what it actually means. Can you explain more?

Your comment reminded me of Reggie Watts’ TED talk where he impersonates an intellectual TED talk by stringing together random big words in a British accent. https://youtu.be/BdHK_r9RXTc?t=55

Micro is macro. Small is big. Up is down. I'm a clown! Digital.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KuTSAeFhdZU

Re: How to Understand the Universe When You’re Stuck Inside of It

#55

Post by danbruc »

inopinatus wrote: post #44
iaabtpbtpnn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this sounds profound, I'm unable to figure out what it actually means. Can you explain more?

We are all value objects. Imagine that eat a banana. The contents of your stomach change. You have assumed a new identity. If you grasp/accept this, you are perceiving yourself as having mutated after eating the banana, because you are in temporal lockstep with your stomach. Most of what we consider to be "fact" and "how the world works" is a matter of perception. But I don't mean that in some hippy dippy way. I mean…

I would raise the following objections.

First, you place a lot of emphasize on perception. What if we kill - or lets say remove - all humans and animals and aliens from the universe so that we are only left with rocks and gas clouds and other stuff we would not usually link to perceiving the universe? Do you really think removing the last entity perceiving the universe would fundamentally change what is going on with all the rocks and gas clouds? What about the moment the first entity perceiving the universe came into existence? Or do you mean perceiving in a more general sense, like in quantum mechanics, where we talk about interactions and - possibly unfortunately, again due to the association with conscious agents - measurements?

Second, you do not seem to be talking about the universe in its entirety, you seem to be talking about a universe evolving in time with time being outside of that universe. This is the very point the article argues - and I think rightly so - against, ultimately there can be nothing outside of the universe, not even time, hence the universe in its entirety must be a - for the lack of a better word - static object not evolving over some time external to it.

Re: How to Understand the Universe When You’re Stuck Inside of It

#56

Post by beobab »

criloz2 wrote: post #38
criloz2 wrote: post #26

I have been working the past two years trying to understand how would be possible to create a simulation of the universe and a lot of what Lee Smolin says resonates with some of the conclusion that I have got at the moment for example, he says that the wave function describes an ensemble of possible states of a system, example an electron, and this is equal for all the other electrons of the universe, I will more spe…

another interesting thing about black holes gravity functor is very easy to communicate, it depends on an accumulator of mass, and it tends to stability, if the black hole is alone, it will be the mass of the black hole or is the black hole is eating matter, the mass of the black hole can be described as a wave function, just to be clear a wave function is any function which only domain is time (the independent varia…

And if you call it with the right parameters, you can fly.

Re: How to Understand the Universe When You’re Stuck Inside of It

#57

Post by basq »

criloz2 wrote: post #34
criloz2 wrote: post #26

I have been working the past two years trying to understand how would be possible to create a simulation of the universe and a lot of what Lee Smolin says resonates with some of the conclusion that I have got at the moment for example, he says that the wave function describes an ensemble of possible states of a system, example an electron, and this is equal for all the other electrons of the universe, I will more spe…

I will extend me a little and say that this is also important for AI, a good AI should be able to detect those "systems" and automatically transform then in wave functions example when we walk, we tend to transform our walk patterns to a wave function, till some unexpected change in the ambient appears, this frees our brain and allow us to think in another thing. try to walk with a pattern that does not tend to stabi…

What you've written is extremely interesting. Not sure how much of it I truly understand, but I wanted to add that your explanation for everything as a wave function reminded me of oscilloscope music, ie. depicting images with waveforms. A tutorial I watched demonstrates the drawing of a mushroom, then animates it by modulating with a larger wave. In my laymen's head model, Spacetime is like a very large wave that everything else is being modulated by.

Here's the relevant video: https://youtu.be/rtR63-ecUNo

Re: How to Understand the Universe When You’re Stuck Inside of It

#58

Post by inopinatus »

danbruc wrote: post #55
inopinatus wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are all value objects. Imagine that eat a banana. The contents of your stomach change. You have assumed a new identity. If you grasp/accept this, you are perceiving yourself as having mutated after eating the banana, because you are in temporal lockstep with your stomach. Most of what we consider to be "fact" and "how the world works" is a matter of perception. But I don't mean that in some hippy dippy way. I mean…

I would raise the following objections. First, you place a lot of emphasize on perception. What if we kill - or lets say remove - all humans and animals and aliens from the universe so that we are only left with rocks and gas clouds and other stuff we would not usually link to perceiving the universe? Do you really think removing the last entity perceiving the universe would fundamentally change what is going on with…

> Or do you mean perceiving in a more general sense

Yes. I'm using it to mean evaluation as the fundamental causal process. I don't believe consciousness is orthogonal to the universe, ergo it must emerge from the processes within it. Sorry, the term perception is a bit loaded in this regard. But here's the thing: I also don't want to exempt a complex emergent arrangement of functions from evaluating its neighbours. Which is to say, I don't want to be excluded from looking at things.

> Do you really think removing the last entity perceiving the universe would fundamentally change what is going on

It's a good question. To me this scenario only occurs when nothing exists.

> the universe in its entirety must be a static object

Do you mean the conclusion that the universe is a rigid block of spacetime? I used to accept that as an undergrad, eventually rejecting it for the most common reason of all: the denial of free will, justifying this to myself on the grounds it conflicts with the halting problem. Unfortunately the problem then arises, "what fucking axioms do you believe then?". Here's the thing I like: if the universe is functional, then its laws may evolve as it evaluates, including the laws by which it evaluates. That provides an irreversible causal arrow, which is incompatible with a block universe.

Not actually sure I could glean that from this article though.

In the Greg Egan edition of this theory, the speed of light then emerges as a property of evaluative propagation through a functional universe, and new forms of consciousness are encountered living within the Lisp machine of the cosmos.

Re: How to Understand the Universe When You’re Stuck Inside of It

#59

Post by Retra »

criloz2 wrote: post #37
asplake wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trying to make sense of that last sentence. Putting words in your mouth, but you mean that we live in a simulation, for some definition of 'simulation' that we don't yet fathom?

yeah, I think that simulation is the closest word that we have right now for describing it, like many other times a word tend to be overused to describe multiples related things, till a new word is invented

'Simulation' has already been invented, and it pretty much exclusively refers to things that are not fundamental to how the universe works. So it would seem like the opposite of the closest word we have for describing how the universe fundamentally works.

Re: How to Understand the Universe When You’re Stuck Inside of It

#60

Post by Retra »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #25
state_less wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does the universe require perception in order for there to be existence? If you use big bang theory, the universe existed prior to observers perceiving it. So there was existence and no perception. Perception appears to have evolved out of existence. The story of the big bang is sort of neat. It looks like many fundamental particles didn't exist until the time was right for them to come into being.

> If you use big bang theory, the universe existed prior to observers perceiving it. That would depend on the definition of perception. Does a nail perceive being struck by the hammer? To say otherwise would presume that humanity's form awareness is somehow special, and not simply a more complicated interaction between ourselves and the universe than is the nail's with the hammer.

That's why physicists talk about interaction rather than perception.
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