A Brief Explanation of Greg Egan’s Dust Theory • Hacker News Board

Re: A Brief Explanation of Greg Egan’s Dust Theory

#81

Post by Sharlin » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 8:16 PM UTC

croissants wrote: post #22

tomrod wrote: post #2

Interesting article! As linked in the article, Egan posted some FAQ/counterarguments for issues raised here: https://www.gregegan.net/PERMUTATION/FAQ/FAQ.html

Nice, IMO this (short) FAQ has a lot more useful info than the featured article. His claim at the end that creating intelligent life through evolution is deeply immoral confuses me, though -- by all accounts, we arose through that process, and relatively few people seem bothered by it.

Relatively few people have thought through the moral implications of a few hundred million years of nature red in tooth and claw, so that's not exactly surprising. After all, relatively few people have even thought through the moral implications of the fact that they can purchase abundant cheap meat from any supermarket. The thought of starting a simulation that has even a slight chance of creating entities capable of suffering should give anyone a major pause.

Re: A Brief Explanation of Greg Egan’s Dust Theory

#82

Post by echelon » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 8:20 PM UTC

KerrickStaley wrote: post #58

Here is an explanation of Dust Theory from Wikipedia: "[Dust theory states that] there is no difference, even in principle, between physics and mathematics, and that all mathematically possible structures exist, among them our physics and therefore our spacetime...The dust theory implies that all possible universes exist and are equally real, emerging spontaneously from their own mathematical self-consistency." I thi…

So this is some kind of fancy many worlds theory? Except instead of branching on outcomes, we simply fill up possibility space with everything conceivable?

Re: A Brief Explanation of Greg Egan’s Dust Theory

#83

Post by idlewords » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 8:23 PM UTC

There's a philosophical literature on this, which is also known as the "dancing with pixies" argument.

See: https://www.consciousentities.com/2009/07/dancing-pixies/

And: http://www.doc.gold.ac.uk/~mas02mb/Selected%20Papers/2009%20...

Re: A Brief Explanation of Greg Egan’s Dust Theory

#84

Post by zeroonetwothree » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 8:26 PM UTC

maxs wrote: post #74

Greg Egan is my favorite author. My favorite book of his is Diaspora. If you loved Permutation City you may also love Diaspora. The first chapter of Diaspora is brilliant, if you try reading it, and find that you enjoy it, you will then like the whole book.

His short stories are far better than his novels. Not saying that the novels are bad but rather that the short stories are unreal good.

Re: A Brief Explanation of Greg Egan’s Dust Theory

#85

Post by foobarbecue » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 8:28 PM UTC

X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: post #80

foobarbecue wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I enjoyed cryptonomicon but get where you're coming from! I think his books would be way better with aggressive editing. Seveneves was great but so many long lame sections should have been removed.

Imo the third part should have just been a sequel

I think the third part should not have been published at all. That environmental determinist ethnography stuff felt like it was straight out of old school racist colonial philosophy. I did think their naming scheme was great though.

Re: A Brief Explanation of Greg Egan’s Dust Theory

#86

Post by codeulike » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 8:43 PM UTC

croissants wrote: post #22

tomrod wrote: post #2

Interesting article! As linked in the article, Egan posted some FAQ/counterarguments for issues raised here: https://www.gregegan.net/PERMUTATION/FAQ/FAQ.html

Nice, IMO this (short) FAQ has a lot more useful info than the featured article. His claim at the end that creating intelligent life through evolution is deeply immoral confuses me, though -- by all accounts, we arose through that process, and relatively few people seem bothered by it.

He means that deliberately setting up a synthetic evolution process to generate intelligent life would be immoral.

His short story Crystal Nights deals with this. Its a corker of a story.

https://www.gregegan.net/MISC/CRYSTAL/Crystal.html

“What created the only example of consciousness we know of?” Daniel asked.

“Evolution.”

“Exactly. But I don’t want to wait three billion years, so I need to make the selection process a great deal more refined, and the sources of variation more targeted.”

Julie digested this. “You want to try to evolve true AI? Conscious, human-level AI?”

“Yes.” Daniel saw her mouth tightening, saw her struggling to measure her words before speaking.

“With respect,” she said, “I don’t think you’ve thought that through.”

“On the contrary,” Daniel assured her. “I’ve been planning this for twenty years.”

“Evolution,” she said, “is about failure and death. Do you have any idea how many sentient creatures lived and died along the way to Homo sapiens? How much suffering was involved?”

Re: A Brief Explanation of Greg Egan’s Dust Theory

#87

Post by nkingsy » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 8:55 PM UTC

Just finished Diaspora. It made me feel rather stupid, as the analogies it weaves throughout (as way to dumb it down I suppose) were sort of like reading the cliff notes. Okay 6 dimensions, ok 12 sure. And this one is 5 dimensions but they’re all sort of visible or something. But really it’s infinite dimensions and all that science proofing I skimmed was wrong. Great.

I did love the artificial mind part in the beginning. Is this book a deeper dive on that?

Re: A Brief Explanation of Greg Egan’s Dust Theory

#88

Post by chr1 » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 8:58 PM UTC

ajconway wrote: post #77

canjobear wrote: post #50

Very interesting to think about. Here's my interpretation of the argument: Suppose you have some system X whose dynamics are those of conscious agents in a world. For example, maybe X is the real world. Suppose that the agents in X really experience consciousness. Now suppose we apply some one-to-one function f to X, yielding Y = f(X). Then Y contains all the same information as X. So who's to say that the agents in…

If you believe in mathematical realism than the fact that there surely exists a mapping between a random set of data and a simulation with conscious agents in it, that should be enough.

It's not enough if the mapping function does not use the information from the random set. For instance it is easy to construct a mapping from ordered digits of pi to ordered letters of your comment, but all of the information of your comment will be in the mapping.

Re: A Brief Explanation of Greg Egan’s Dust Theory

#89

Post by chrisweekly » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 9:20 PM UTC

ahartmetz wrote: post #37

foobarbecue wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that the one that had hundreds of pages of monks hanging around at the beginning? I got bored and couldn't make it through

Neal Stephenson tends to cram too many side stories into his books, some of them quite boring :/ I kind of regret that I slogged through Cryptonomicon and I would advise anyone to stop reading after 200 pages if bored, the next 700 won't really be better.

Strongest possible disagreement here on your 2nd sentence. I'm not a Stephenson fanatic, but IMHO Cryptonomicon kept getting better throughout.

Re: A Brief Explanation of Greg Egan’s Dust Theory

#90

Post by yourkin » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 9:28 PM UTC

Greg Egan is definitely in the list of authors with the most radically hard science fiction ideas, even more extravagant than those I found in Alfred Bester books.

Speaking of the Dust Theory, this looks very close to concept as Max Tegmark's Mathematical universe hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothes...

Tegmark's book goes over it in a very readable way: https://www.amazon.de/Our-Mathematical-Universe-Ultimate-Rea...