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Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else

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Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...so you're just using "Brahma" to refer to the computer that is running the simulation that is the universe. And when the simulation becomes aware of its own condition, it becomes conscious? This is just rephrasing of the symulation hypothesis in mystical terms and is just as useless as the symulation hypothesis itself (regardless if it's "true" or not). There's some valuable deeper stuff in hindu and buddhist phil…

> ...so you're just using "Brahma" to refer to the computer that is running the simulation that is the universe. That "Brahma" isn't a computer; the model doesn't suggest that the universe is a simulation. You seem to have wedged in an interpretation that is fundamentally materialist, which sort of misses the point; according to this model, consciousness is fundamental. That is what was being discussed. I agree that…

> I agree that it's "mystical" to postulate that consciousness is fundamental; but it's equally mystical to assume that matter is fundamental.

Sure using "matter" like this without defining it is equally mystical. That's why we'd take 'computation' to be "fundamental" or 'the wave function'. "Matter" is just a higher level emergent property of what we perceive.

> I happen to take the view that consciousness exists, and is not an emergent phenomenon

OK, now I see why my viewpoint would sound so "off" to you, we're probably on different extremes of the thinking spectrum :) I don't discard you're viewpoint, it's just so so so so far from mine:

I take most of what we label "reality" to be emergent properties from some kind of fundamental computation (and by "computation" I don't imply a "computer" like we know, just "math that `can run`") whose math is probably too complicated and strange for us to intuitively understand (we can just hope to get to calculate better approximations of it). I don't just see consciousness as an emergent phenomenon. I see matter as an emergent phenomenon. And also space-time itself as an emergent phenomena inside our emergent consciusnesses. The "fundamental" could just very well be something like the simplest celular automaton with non-periodict behavior or maybe something too strange for our ape-minds to ever be able to comprehend (or too simple to understand how it could be the basis - there could be enough complexity/structure in just 'the distribution of all the prime numbers' or 'the digits of pi' to contain our entire universe with its infinite past and future "inside of it").

And to clarify, "simulation" is also quite generalizable - a simulation is just something that runs as an informational phenomenon on top of some physical substrate, but is fully independent of that susbstrate to the extent that it could be "ported" from that substrate to another completely different substrate that just happens to also preserve the subset of mathematical laws required for the computation. Eg. "software" that can be "ported" so it's independent of the actual nature of the hardware. Digital/discrete (as opposed to analogical) computation gives you this magical "divorce" of computation from substrate. It doesn't have to be something like our current day software running on something like our computers - any kind of "portable discrete/digital computation" is "a simulation".

Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a physicist; but the GP mentioned consciousness as an alternative to matter as the fundamental "substance". Well, I've come across that idea before; in certain kinds of Buddhism, consciousness is considered fundamental, the senses are created by consciousness, and the material world is projected by consciousness through the senses. Well, this was explained to me in the context of a particular type of tantric…

...so you're just using "Brahma" to refer to the computer that is running the simulation that is the universe. And when the simulation becomes aware of its own condition, it becomes conscious? This is just rephrasing of the symulation hypothesis in mystical terms and is just as useless as the symulation hypothesis itself (regardless if it's "true" or not). There's some valuable deeper stuff in hindu and buddhist phil…

It’s not particularly exotic; it’s phenomenology aka continental philosophy.

(Many kinds of Buddhism known to the west are actually repackaged European philosophy; this was intentionally done in Asia so it’d be easier to sell back to us.)

Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else

#283
post #228

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Quoted post unavailable.

Hey, can you please not fulminate on HN? It sounds like you might know quite a bit about the field (or some of it), but commenting like this degrades discussion and evokes worse from others. If you would make your substantive points thoughtfully, and share some of what you know, that would be much better. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Apologize, I did get carried away. And thanks for keeping folks like us in check!

Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else

#284
post #274

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the more posts are banned and shadowbanned the more like reddit this website becomes, aka a boring place for boring people to say boring things. interesting people don’t like censorship

I think if the GP had written something relevant about their personal experience in a scientific field, that would have been much more interesting, as well as not breaking the site guidelines. The trouble with your argument "interesting people don't like censorship" isn't that you're wrong—it's that there are also a lot of people (many more, actually) who post dreck. If you want a forum that doesn't get overrun with…

Be more interesting. Ok, is it worth me writing a rebuttal to all this? Seems I struck a chord.

Edit: reading some of the comments and seeing venom and vitriol. They're the opposite of the feedback I've gotten from elsewhere.

Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else

#285
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've received feedback from some very smart people who laughed out loud and knew exactly what I meant by having a good look . Two of them are physicists and many more are engineers. They said they have found many metaphorical couches and there's a lot of nothing. They've also found quite a few interesting metaphorical paperclips and other debris. But that there's so many more places to look. They also think there's a…

Ok, then where should they look if you're so smart? You think people who have dedicated their lives to studying this subject haven't considered the concept of looking everywhere possible, and that you're adding something to the discussion by trotting out this 'clever' metaphor?

[deleted]

Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else

#287
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given current predictions we would need colliders the size of the Solar System. Something bigger than Neptune orbit. We are ~12 orders of magnitude away from the grand unification energy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_unification_energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_(particle_physics)

Is there some reason to think that the only way to get higher energy collisions is by scaling the accelerators? Is there any possibility that we may be able to get to higher energies with earth-scale experiments?

Ultra-high-energy cosmic rays are possible candidate. For example, Oh-My-God particle had energy of a baseball traveling at 100 km/h. 40 million times higher than particle energies of terrestrial accelerators.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh-My-God_particle

Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else

#288
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In 1973, professor Sir James Lighthill was asked by the UK Parliament to evaluate the state of AI research in the United Kingdom. His report, now called the Lighthill report, criticized the utter failure of AI to achieve its "grandiose objectives." He concluded that nothing being done in AI couldn't be done in other sciences. He specifically mentioned the problem of "combinatorial explosion" or "intractability", wh…

In retrospect it was at least arguably the right call, no? Suspend most research and resume when available processing power was orders of magnitude greater, a process that was independently driven by demands other than (and much greater than) AI research. Playing devil's advocate only slightly, maybe particle physics should similarly pare down to a bare maintenance level of research (or even mostly teaching) for a fe…

They were right; modern ML doesn’t use any of the ideas the previous generation of AI people were pursuing. It turns out no expert system is a match for just doing a bunch of matrix multiplications.

Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else

#289
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given current predictions we would need colliders the size of the Solar System. Something bigger than Neptune orbit. We are ~12 orders of magnitude away from the grand unification energy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_unification_energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_(particle_physics)

Is there some reason to think that the only way to get higher energy collisions is by scaling the accelerators? Is there any possibility that we may be able to get to higher energies with earth-scale experiments?

The limiting factor is the strength of magnetic fields you can achieve. The more momentum the particles have, the stronger a field you need to bend them into a circular orbit. The attainbale strength is determined by material properties and there is nothing to suggest that we can get orders of magnitude improvement here. The improvements have been quite linear for decades, see the figure here:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01869-1

And you eventually run into rather fundamental problems of tearing your atoms apart with the magnetic field you create. But I am not up to speed on how close we actually are to these limits.

Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Maybe there's nothing else to discover This is fundamentally wrong. We know the Standard Model is not the final theory of Physics so there are still things to discover.

If you think the Simulation Hypothesis has any merit whatsoever, you should consider the possibility that the Simulation does not have a fully-consistent engine, just one that was "close enough". Note, of course, that the same could be true in a coincidentally-generated universe, as well as a deistic or theistic one (the latter two being effectively indistinguishable from a Simulation).

It must have a pretty good physics engine since we don’t see any strange artifacts in the sky from the times pre-cosmic inflation. In particular, it can’t be very quantized or we’d see giant “upscaling” artifacts.

It also appears to give us exactly enough computational power to build quantum computers, but not any more than that. That seems like a pretty inconvenient choice for us and the simulators.

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