91–100 of 155 posts
So I'm sad that when I tried to recreate the elephant scatter plot, I haven't been able to. Anyone find exact parameters that work for tau and alpha?
Just wish they'd given a complete list of the decimal places for those animals. It would've been something to plot them yourself.
This reminds me of a joke idea I read somewhere: You can encode the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica using a single mark on a simple stick! Just encode the text as a ascii codes after the decimal dot of a zero. (0.656168.. etc). Then just mark that ratio of the sticks length and you're done...
I don't see this as a joke, but a radical and important point. Reality, in being geometrical, is infinitely informationally dense (with a discrete conception of information). This distinction between geometrical space and time, and discrete algorithmic computability is unbridgeable. And hence there is an extemely firm footing on which to reject: AI, brain scanning readers, teleporters, etc and most sci-fi computation…
That can't possibly be true, because then there would be no point to space and time. If a single location could hold an infinite amount of information, then the rest of reality would be redundant.
>hence there is an extemely firm footing on which to reject [the Matrix]
This seems to be the opposite of the conclusion that your premise implies. I'm the one that doesn't believe in matryoshka simulated universes, but infinite information density is what would make it possible, no?
If we lived in a non-discrete universe, why would computation be unable to exploit it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or use a larger stick. Every doubling of the stick length gives another bit of information. A stick of one light-year length would add about 53 bits.
The main point I'm making is that the information density of the physical world is not unlimited as GP suggests. But I think that example just shows how few bits you can really get out the exercise!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just wanted to add that reality being a non-discrete geometric thing is still an assumption - we don't know for sure that it isn't discrete and a lot of quantum stuff points more toward a discrete reality than a continuous one. So assuming continuous space/time and discrete information then I'd agree, but as far as we know space/time aren't continuous, but just appear that way to us. It doesn't seem like we know fo…
I think for my purposes defining continuous = unmeasurably discrete produces the same results. Ie., there is an irreducible geometrical continuity in the sense that no discontinuity can ever appear. The state density is maximal. via this route we reporduce the same point: computationalism/simulation'ism' is then just the thesis that computers qua measurably discrete systems can realise dense unmeasurable discrete sys…
I disagree that this necessarily implies any difficulty for the possibility of brain scanning and AI.
Just as things sampled faster than the nyquist frequency (or twice it or whatever) of a uh, band limited thing, can be perfectly recovered, (I mean there’s still discritization of the amplitudes but I hear this can also be handled), I don’t see why uh, arbitrarily high frequency (in space and time) should be necessary in order to model the behavior of a brain to the point of long-term indistinguishability.
(That being said, I don’t particularly expect whole brain emulation to ever be achieved, I just don’t see “spacetime is continuous (or well approximated as continuous)” as being a strong argument for it being impossible.)
I’m not sure what you mean by computationalism.
If you mean the idea that the way the world works is computable in the abstract sense (not requiring any practical bounds on the computational resources needed), then the idea that the world is discrete and finite, merely with extremely fine grains, then this poses no issue for computation in that abstract sense (just make the imaginary computer even bigger).
If you mean like, an accurate simulation of the past of the world being run within the world, yeah that doesn’t work.
This reminds me of a joke idea I read somewhere: You can encode the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica using a single mark on a simple stick! Just encode the text as a ascii codes after the decimal dot of a zero. (0.656168.. etc). Then just mark that ratio of the sticks length and you're done...
That is from the novel "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" by Haruki Murakami[0]. [0]: https://everything2.com/title/Encyclopedia+on+a+toothpick
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see this as a joke, but a radical and important point. Reality, in being geometrical, is infinitely informationally dense (with a discrete conception of information). This distinction between geometrical space and time, and discrete algorithmic computability is unbridgeable. And hence there is an extemely firm footing on which to reject: AI, brain scanning readers, teleporters, etc and most sci-fi computation…
Planck length and the speed of light define the limits. It's also a resolution of Xeno's Paradox.
This reminds me of a joke idea I read somewhere: You can encode the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica using a single mark on a simple stick! Just encode the text as a ascii codes after the decimal dot of a zero. (0.656168.. etc). Then just mark that ratio of the sticks length and you're done...
I don't see this as a joke, but a radical and important point. Reality, in being geometrical, is infinitely informationally dense (with a discrete conception of information). This distinction between geometrical space and time, and discrete algorithmic computability is unbridgeable. And hence there is an extemely firm footing on which to reject: AI, brain scanning readers, teleporters, etc and most sci-fi computation…
You might be interested in the Bekenstein bound (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound):
> In physics, the Bekenstein bound (named after Jacob Bekenstein) is an upper limit on the thermodynamic entropy S, or Shannon entropy H, that can be contained within a given finite region of space which has a finite amount of energy—or conversely, the maximal amount of information required to perfectly describe a given physical system down to the quantum level.[1] It implies that the information of a physical system, or the information necessary to perfectly describe that system, must be finite if the region of space and the energy are finite. In computer science, this implies that there is a maximal information-processing rate (Bremermann's limit) for a physical system that has a finite size and energy, and that a Turing machine with finite physical dimensions and unbounded memory is not physically possible.
Lots of math works out well that as a continuous approximation, eg the Navier-Stokes differential equations seem to describe fluids well on everyday scales. But we know very well that water is made of molecules, so we know that this particular continuous approximation will fail at small enough scales.
By the way, the closest thing we have come to for teleportation is cutting-and-pasting of quantum states. So no classical, digital computers involved there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see this as a joke, but a radical and important point. Reality, in being geometrical, is infinitely informationally dense (with a discrete conception of information). This distinction between geometrical space and time, and discrete algorithmic computability is unbridgeable. And hence there is an extemely firm footing on which to reject: AI, brain scanning readers, teleporters, etc and most sci-fi computation…
I used to think there must be something 'special' to brains to distinguish us from computers. There isn't. Brains encode finite amounts of information (quantum mechanics seems to imply bounded local information). We are a huge information network ourselves -- that's what consciousness is (with some added bits like self-identity and various particulars structures that dictate the character of our experience). But that…
I agree with the latter, but the former? Classical Newtonian mechanics is easy enough to imagine.
What baffles me a bit is that quantum mechanics seems to be linear, but we seem to see chaos in the real world. (And exactly that (mathematical) chaos is also what the article exploits.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In theory, pi has infinite digits. You could publish a book of a trillion digits of pi, and you have barely scratched the surface: in fact you published a precisely 0.00000% of all digits of pi. In practice, you "only" need ~42 digits of pi to draw a circle spanning the entire known universe (diameter of 8.8 * 10^26 m) and it will deviate from the ideal circle by less than the size of a proton (0.8 * 10^−15 m). Havin…
Every number has infinite digits or can be made to have infinite digits for a given representation, but that's not the same as a number having an infinite amount of information. PI represents a finite amount of information, as opposed to say a number like Chaitin's constant which represents an infinite and irreducible amount of information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin%27s_constant
Earlier quoted context omitted.
information here, ie log of a probability, is a continuous notion -- it is real-valued, as not least, log is a transcendental fn -- i specifically said with a /discrete/ conception , geometry is infinitely dense (of discrete states)
In all physical theories, any finite system has a finite number of distinguishable states. So it is not infinitely informationally dense, especially when working with discrete bits of information. Not to mention, the finer the distinctions between two states of a system, the more energy you need to distinguish them. So, the less impact these differences can have, unless the system is extraordinarily energetic (and ev…