John Wheeler saw the tear in reality • Hacker News Board

Re: John Wheeler saw the tear in reality

#171

Post by Kbelicius » Thu, Oct 03, 2024, 8:09 AM UTC

nickpsecurity wrote: post #158

anthk wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bunch of fallacies.

You didn't say that about either the claims in the OP article or prior submissions with less proof of what they say. Your reaction might be emotional, not logical. I encourage you to consider it logically. An easy test would be to find human machines that have 100% reliability without design or maintenance. Then, strong arguments that they'll remain that way for thousands to billions of years with no intelligent inte…

> An easy test would be to find human machines that have 100% reliability without design or maintenance. Then, strong arguments that they'll remain that way for thousands to billions of years with no intelligent intervention. If you wouldn't believe that

This very much might be a failing, short lived universe. Why do you think that it isn't? Keep in mind that when we run simulation we do not usually run them in real time where one of our days equals one day in a simulation.

> If you wouldn't believe that, why would you believe an atheist that says the universe's superior machinery was likewise undesigned, is unmaintained, and is accidentally perfect? That goes against everything we've observed.

It doesn't go against anything we observed. We did not observe that the universe is a machine nor that it is perfect. All that we observed is that the universe is as it is.

> We also have a guess on the computational requirements which are mind-boggling. Just simulating tiny molecular or quantum systems with total accuracy, if it's even happened, takes a ton of computation. Every sub-particle or force in the entire universe running at the same time is unimaginable computation. Plus, the Creator makes them all work exactly as desired with the same, observed patterns. We can't get cellular automata to work like we want but the Creator is directing a universe of simple interactions to cause specific behavior, global and local?

Those computational requirements exists within our universe but if we are talking about a simulation or a creator what seems like an impossible computational requirements... maybe this universe is being ran on a their version of a calculator.

Re: John Wheeler saw the tear in reality

#172

Post by mr_toad » Thu, Oct 03, 2024, 9:06 AM UTC

bumbledraven wrote: post #16

rbanffy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’d need something bigger than the universe to represent everything in the universe.

Not if compression is involved.

As far as I understand it, the pigeonhole principle would mean that you can’t losslessly compress the entire universe.

Re: John Wheeler saw the tear in reality

#173

Post by mr_toad » Thu, Oct 03, 2024, 9:26 AM UTC

joshuamcginnis wrote: post #115

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause. 2. The universe began to exist. 3. Therefore, the universe has a cause. 4. This cause is uncaused, timeless, spaceless, and immaterial. 5. To create the universe, this cause must possess intentionality and decision-making capabilities. 6. Therefore, the cause of the universe is a personal, immaterial being: God.

1 is begging the question, 1 and 4 are contradictory, and 5 and 6 are non-sequiturs.

Re: John Wheeler saw the tear in reality

#174

Post by keshet » Thu, Oct 03, 2024, 10:37 AM UTC

doodlebugging wrote: post #164

rbanffy wrote: post #9

> It is not a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon. It’s more palatable when we consider not the observation, but the information that was collapsed out of the superimposed states at the time of the observation. The universe uses lazy evaluation, and things only happen when they have effects on other things, and what we see as past depends on what we observe now, as both need to be consistent with each other…

If a phenomenon is not a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenom and since the act of focusing on an observation yields information only about the phenomenon that we are attempting to observe, what happens to all the informations pilling out around it that becomes part of the unobserved phenomenon in the defocused region nearest the phenomenon that we are observing with highest focus? Basically, is it true that…

And if I drink alcohol then my world also becomes kind of blurry.. then reality also becomes less defined? It sure feels that way. But not to my friend sitting next to me who chose not to drink. We live in separate realities at least as far as our individual experiences are concerned.

Re: John Wheeler saw the tear in reality

#175

Post by grishka » Thu, Oct 03, 2024, 11:04 AM UTC

saulpw wrote: post #122

grishka wrote: post #78

Who said that consciousness is "private property"? What if it's actually shared between people, like a field of some sort or another dimension, but everyone somehow gets their very own part of it? We know nothing about the nature of consciousness, so let's not assume anything about it. It might arise from the physical processes in the brain and be bounded by our known physics, sure, but it might just as well be somet…

What if awareness is a field instead of a process? Like a moving magnet induces electric current in a coil of wire, decoherence in microtubules could induce qualia in the awareness field. See also: Alan Watts.

Process is something that happens over time. We don't know what time is because it might as well be an artifact of consciousness itself, so this particular distinction between a process and a field feels pointless. Time might arise from us moving in that field for example.

Re: John Wheeler saw the tear in reality

#176

Post by medstrom » Thu, Oct 03, 2024, 11:18 AM UTC

Mattasher wrote: post #151

szvsw wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The simulation framing tends to draw deterministic connotations. I bristle at this because there is obviously a massive amount of probabilistic programming methodology and stochastic simulation techniques out there, but at the end of the day in terms of connotation you are probably correct…

I think there's a case to be made that, if the simulation hypothesis is correct, we are god's dice[1]. We exist as agents to introduce randomness in the form of free will or enough chaos to ensure non-determinism, at least from the perspective of whatever force built this place. [1] https://mattasher.substack.com/p/btf-6-gods-dice

Sounds like anthropocentric bias. If you can implement a true RNG for some things, why not for all things?

Re: John Wheeler saw the tear in reality

#177

Post by medstrom » Thu, Oct 03, 2024, 11:36 AM UTC

wholinator2 wrote: post #67

dustingetz wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

which experiment proves the universe uses lazy evaluation? this seems like interpretation

It is an interpretation, the Copenhagen interpretation. There are other possibilities and nobody knows the real ground truth yet. All our speculations are just that

Speculations done correctly can have a good chance to arrive at truth. That's also known as reasoning. There's probably no experimental confirming or disconfirming this, ever, but that doesn't mean all theories stand on equal ground.

After almost a century of discussions between smart people, the physics consensus has steadily inched away from Copenhagen.

That said, that doesn't mean lazy evaluation isn't happening. You just can't use lazy evaluation to "explain" wavefunction collapse, it's more the other way around, that collapse can be a lazy evaluation trick. It'd describe only this simulation and say nothing about outer reality (thus no longer works as evidence for or against the simulation hypothesis, it's just a consistent part of the story given that it's true).

Re: John Wheeler saw the tear in reality

#178

Post by JPLeRouzic » Thu, Oct 03, 2024, 12:31 PM UTC

james_marks wrote: post #100

meowkit wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the other comments point out... most things are dynamical systems that respond to chaos theory (small inputs, big divergence in output). Many of the possible states can be reduced down to two or so poles (e.g. skepticism vs acceptance vs outrage vs indifference in our potential responses) Trying to determine when or why a dynamical system like this goes to a specific state is Sisyphean if I put a word to it. Novel…

I’ve noticed in round table discussions where everyone is expected to comment, an idea will emerge early and then dominate future responses. Sure, many of us seek acceptance from the group, but also, as an idea gets traction, I think it just gets harder to have an original idea. It’s like trying to remember how a song goes while another one is playing, and I see it on HN threads (like this one!) often.

I would appreciate a HN filter that would systematically remove the first thread.

Re: John Wheeler saw the tear in reality

#179

Post by Vecr » Thu, Oct 03, 2024, 12:33 PM UTC

joshuamcginnis wrote: post #148

Vecr wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you don't think there's there's a singularity (or singularity-replacement) in the future. Maybe against Wheeler? I can't remember. But anyway, if there's a singularity (or suitable singularity-replacement) in both the future and the past you might be able to use something like Hawking's No-Boundary Condition theory to claim P2 is false. Not that I do, but P2 is not rock-solid from a logic standpoint.

In layman terms, what are the current cohesive and logical arguments for existence having no beginning?

1) We exist (or at least you do, Cogito, ergo sum, "I think, therefore I am")

2) Since we exist, something had to have lead to us

3) The thing that lead to us was either lead to in turn, or "just existed"

4) If you don't accept that something can "just exist", that leads to infinite regress (before A there was B, before B there was C... on to infinity)

5) It's not too presumptuous to prevent infinite regress by saying "the universe" is what "just existed".

Since the possibility of the universe "just existing" was established by the previous reasoning, you can think if that's a reasonable stopping place when it comes to predictive power.

Hawking suggested it was though the "projection" he used for making the argument was complex and and don't fully understand it.

As far as I can tell, his argument was that the universe appearing to have a beginning was "merely" thermodynamic, and in the final quantum theory the beginning and the end would be closed, making the universe fully self contained. (Something about gravitational entropy fully canceling out all other entropy, making the universe sum to zero, with both the "beginning" and the "end" summing to the exact same value as each other (zero)).

Re: John Wheeler saw the tear in reality

#180

Post by n4r9 » Thu, Oct 03, 2024, 12:35 PM UTC

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'm guessing you're referring to my HN comment here (and the resulting discussion): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41696559

Well... not all hypotheses are equal! I'm not necessarily a fan of Wheeler's "participatory universe" either, but I would note a few important differences:

- Orch-Or claims to explain the origins of consciousness and free will. This overlaps with philosophy, which is concerned with what it means to explain consciousness. And philosophers generally have responded with serious criticisms.

- Orch-Or relies on specific biological assumptions e.g. about the robustness of quantum coherence in brain matter. In fact it is not merely metaphysical but is in principle falsifiable, which is a good thing! However, physicists and neuroscientists have found a lot of these assumptions to be unreliable.

- Orch-Or appears to be based on a misunderstanding of Godel's Theorem and computationalism, as has been pointed out by mathematicians and computer scientists.

- The Participatory Universe is effectively an interpretation of quantum theory. It just guides us in understanding the ontological statuses of the object in the theory. In this it is similar to Everettian (many worlds) type hypotheses. Orch-or goes much further and I would regard it as a modification of quantum theory. In this it is similar to objective collapse type hypoetheses.