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John Wheeler saw the tear in reality

quantamagazine.org

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Re: John Wheeler saw the tear in reality

#101

Post by ricksunny »

sameoldtune wrote: post #92
ricksunny wrote: post #48

It's interesting we have such receptivity in the HN community here on physicist-proposed metaphysics (yay!), yet in an entirely similar light - an article covering physicist Roger Penrose's 'microtubules' on HN a couple days ago, we get the reflexive "but experts say this is bunk' treatment. Personally I don't know from Sam on either hypothesis. I'm just wondering for all things seeming equal, when do we get receptiv…

Penroses theories about cognition smell like bunk and I only got a physics undergraduate degree. I’m glad he has found things to do in his old age but there are not a lot of physics departments jumping to put those theories to the test. This isn’t a “both sides” issue, it’s two separate physicists and two separate theories about different areas of physics.

> it’s two separate physicists and two separate theories about different areas of physics.

They're both touching on consciousness. Wheeler's participatory universe (least several paras of the article) & Penrose's (& coauthor's) microtubules.

Penrose was (just days ago) on Theory of Everything talking about whether consciousness affects observation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPH-SzWF46w&t=83s (tl;dw: he doesn't think it does.) Later in the same video, he actually comes down pretty hard on the participatory universe, without naming Wheeler or using the word 'participatory' (at least post-editing): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPH-SzWF46w&t=287s

Re: John Wheeler saw the tear in reality

#102

Post by anthk »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #99
bwood wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been compiling a list of ways in which physical reality is similar to game engines or mechanical simulation in general. Here's my list so far: - The observer effect, quantum entanglement and wavefunction collapse --> lazy evaluation - Speed of light --> speed of causality to resolve the object interaction problem O(n^2) - Quanta of energy, Planck's length --> discretization of reality to limit computational prec…

Add a few more observations: 1. The laws of the universe require unimaginable power, knowledge, and precision to implement. Its Creator must have these traits. 2. It doesn’t fail. Everything humans build requires maintenance but still fails. That this universe runs with a 100% reliability rate shows its maintainer’s power, knowledge, and perfection. It also shows He is sustaining us every second. He’s thinking about…

That's a bunch of fallacies.

Re: John Wheeler saw the tear in reality

#103

Post by ricksunny »

szvsw wrote: post #80
ricksunny wrote: post #48

It's interesting we have such receptivity in the HN community here on physicist-proposed metaphysics (yay!), yet in an entirely similar light - an article covering physicist Roger Penrose's 'microtubules' on HN a couple days ago, we get the reflexive "but experts say this is bunk' treatment. Personally I don't know from Sam on either hypothesis. I'm just wondering for all things seeming equal, when do we get receptiv…

It can be pure chance. Who commented first, who happened to click the article, the time of day it was posted, the style of the website the article was hosted on, etc etc. it’s easy to get sucked into the illusion that the commenting population is a stationary distribution when in fact it might be highly multimodal and each thread is not a representative sample of the overall population. Having said that, your questio…

>chance Yes I suppose I should find some serenity in the pure chance of things.

>monolithic

Yes it would be unfair of me to interrogate as if the comment-base was a monolithic whole. So perhaps not monolithic, but still probably manifesting more shared responses to stimuli than the wider population at large. I definitely feel there's a distinct HN 'meta-personality', as I believe another replier re. organelles was alluding to. While forum moderation probably also shapes that to a degree, the meta-personality feels more the result of shared professional technical training (and knowing that others in the community are of like training, very very broadly speaking).

Re: John Wheeler saw the tear in reality

#104

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

kps wrote: post #21
MichaelZuo wrote: post #2

Having every ‘observer’ also ‘participate’ seems to just make it even more intractably complex? Since presumably ‘participators’ can influence each other simultaneously. So I just don’t see how any of these theories are attractive prospects, the infinite regress seems even more severe than superdeterminism theories. It’s quite a shame this man got stuck on something that may be literally impossible to prove.

There is no other kind of observation. You observe a photon when it and your retina (or device) participate in a physical interaction.

Define "you."

Re: John Wheeler saw the tear in reality

#105

Post by titzer »

minism wrote: post #62
titzer wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Quine is a thing.

Right, but isn't it a problem that a quine also requires the information contained in the language's compiler/interpreter to be fully meaningful? This would be "outside the universe" so to speak.

A minimal quine just prints itself out as "source" code. You can choose the source language to be whatever you like, such as a minimal Turing complete combinator. So all you need is an interpreter for the base level, which could be something as simple as Rule 110[1].

It really doesn't matter what Turing-complete language you choose; they can all be implemented in terms of each other, so as soon as you have your quine one language you could as well do it any other.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110

Re: John Wheeler saw the tear in reality

#106

Post by titzer »

nonameiguess wrote: post #72
akira2501 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compilers are just translators. Which is why it's not too hard to write a compiler in the language that the compiler itself implements. An assembly quine is an odd thing to even ponder.

Sort of. The very first compiled binary of any new language has to first be written in a language that already has a compiler, and the very first compiler of any high-level language at all had to be written in assembler. Ultimately, if you can't write a Quine directly in logic gates, which you can't because no microprocessor can output another microprocessor, you need something external to the "universe" of the langu…

> has to first be written in a language that already has a compiler

You only need an interpreter for that language.

Re: John Wheeler saw the tear in reality

#107

Post by Vecr »

collingreen wrote: post #15
excalibur wrote: post #14

Seriously, this article brings to mind the classic short story about a simulated universe: https://qntm.org/responsibility And also the wildly speculative conjecture that our universe will be retroactively created by a super intelligent AI in the precise manner necessary to facilitate its own existence, from which it follows that we exist for the express purpose of creating it. (If anybody knows the source I might ha…

There is a dark version of this (with some pascal's wager thrown in) called Roko's basilisk. Maybe that's what you're thinking of? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk

Roko's basilisk isn't retrocausal, maybe you're thinking of some Nick Land thing? But even there it's hard to tell how literal he is being with the Terminator analogies (if you haven't seen the movie it has time travel in it), the sanewashed version of his thesis revolves around thermodynamics, chaos theory, and strange attractors.

Re: John Wheeler saw the tear in reality

#108

Post by Vecr »

excalibur wrote: post #14

Seriously, this article brings to mind the classic short story about a simulated universe: https://qntm.org/responsibility And also the wildly speculative conjecture that our universe will be retroactively created by a super intelligent AI in the precise manner necessary to facilitate its own existence, from which it follows that we exist for the express purpose of creating it. (If anybody knows the source I might ha…

Maybe you're thinking of some strange version of the Omega Point idea?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Point

Re: John Wheeler saw the tear in reality

#109

Post by xpl »

airstrike wrote: post #95
rbanffy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An empty universe would not have any information, or state change, and wouldn’t trigger any computation, therefore, it wouldn’t exist.

But if I include it as a variant in my Universe enum, then doesn't it exist anyway, at least as a concept, even if it's never constructed?

Then it's not a real universe but a mere symbol, I'd say. "Map vs. territory"

And in order for that symbol to exist (be expressed / thought of / conceived), it must be a part of some other existing universe that allows that...

Re: John Wheeler saw the tear in reality

#110

Post by aardvark179 »

ricksunny wrote: post #48

It's interesting we have such receptivity in the HN community here on physicist-proposed metaphysics (yay!), yet in an entirely similar light - an article covering physicist Roger Penrose's 'microtubules' on HN a couple days ago, we get the reflexive "but experts say this is bunk' treatment. Personally I don't know from Sam on either hypothesis. I'm just wondering for all things seeming equal, when do we get receptiv…

I think I am more likely to accept Wheeler’s path compared to Penrose’s because, although I think they may have both made category errors, Wheeler seems to have known that consciousness wasn’t the actual thing, and he wanted to work out what the actual thing was.

I think Penrose is almost in the same bucket as the panpsychic philosophers: assuming that consciousness is the important thing and trying to construct a universe in which it is emergent in certain complex things in a more concentrated way.

Personally I don’t think we even have a definition of what consciousness is and we are using it as a place holder for some property of observation that we haven’t quite nailed yet.

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