Always nice to take pictures in the woods helping nature to achieve purpose and then re-entering the ruliad matrix posting the pictures with overlay save the forest memes thus taking part in the awesome work defining what humans want and completing one of the great circles that great minds run in.
How to Think Computationally about AI, the Universe and Everything
61–70 of 81 posts
Re: How to Think Computationally about AI, the Universe and Everything
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
The universe most certainly has a mysterious affinity with mathematics. Is that really true? Could it be more fair to say that mathematics has a (not so) mysterious affinity with the universe? Specifically, where do our 'axioms' come from? Why did people spend centuries trying to prove the parallel postulate? Partly, I'm being rhetorical, but, also, partly I'm really not. I would certainly not categorically dispute w…
I think it's more just the fact that our universe seems to fit extremely rigid, unbreakable rules definable by math. If we lived in a simulation for example, you could have phenomena that "break" these rules at any given time.
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Re: How to Think Computationally about AI, the Universe and Everything
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
You might really enjoy All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace. He wasn’t the first to try this, and many failed before him. Most people don’t know that the entire concept of the “ecosystem” comes from a computational view of ecology. It’s bigger problem than just to this. It’s that we’ve based everything off the Club of Rome style mindset of society and it’s all failed. But we haven’t figured out another way. S…
figure out the computational stable state of society Hahahaha!! That's so "psychohistory" ... it suggests such, almost 'individual'-like intention. Also, none of it has failed. That's an absurd interpretation of where we are. The real problem is that everything we do ... all the day-to-day problems we solve, all the systems we build that fit and do a 'good job' helping us, say, in some respect, ... set us up to need…
It’s failed if it doesn’t accomplish its stated goal. Don’t get lost in deconstructionism then declare all goals meaningless. It failed to create a stable state. That’s all.
Re: How to Think Computationally about AI, the Universe and Everything
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
The universe most certainly has a mysterious affinity with mathematics. Is that really true? Could it be more fair to say that mathematics has a (not so) mysterious affinity with the universe? Specifically, where do our 'axioms' come from? Why did people spend centuries trying to prove the parallel postulate? Partly, I'm being rhetorical, but, also, partly I'm really not. I would certainly not categorically dispute w…
I think it's more just the fact that our universe seems to fit extremely rigid, unbreakable rules definable by math. If we lived in a simulation for example, you could have phenomena that "break" these rules at any given time.
But wouldn't we just interpret that "break" as more rules for us to learn and study and build world models around? Why would we think "the simulation has broken" and not "physics is weird huh? Especially in edge cases like absurdly high energies or absurdly tiny scales."
(I don't think the universe is a simulation, to be clear.)
Re: How to Think Computationally about AI, the Universe and Everything
#65Its harsh to say it, but Wolfram tried his best at a computational theory of everything and failed. We didn't know this is in the eighties, when the first cellular automata ideas were conceived. So it was a worthy thing to explore in earnest. But it did not work. There is nothing to show for it. It did not strike a vein. These things happen. All the time. You have a great startup idea but no market fit. In this case…
Here's the fundamental problem with Wolfram's approach: he 1) came up with a model of physics (which is fine), 2) noticed that it reproduced many of the normal things that are necessary in a viable theory of everything, like the basic results of quantum physics and relativity (also fine), and 3) declared success, taking 2) as an indication that he's absolutely right and this is the real theory of everything and we're…
I of course agree with most of what you say. The thing that impresses me about this whole ruliad business is that it seems to operationalize computational version Tegmark's mathematical universe hypothesis: all sets of mathematical axioms plus their computable consequences equally well have the secret fire of existence, our SU(3) x SU(2) x U(1) world is not the only realized one.
But it's also slightly different; in Tegmark's description of the MUH there's not a meaningful connection between the universe that realizes (let's say) Euclid's axioms and our universe. They're just separate places in the Platonic realm; they way we learn about Euclidean geometry is by computing, using some little Turing-complete region to simulate geometry. If I understand correctly, the ruliad says no, it is possible, in principle, to navigate through the hell of a mess and actually find the place in the hypergraph, not disconnected from the place that describes our lived experience, that is Euclidean geometry. It's sort of the ultimate reading of the Copernican principle: the laws we see around us are not particularly special and aren't privileged over other laws.
I find that to be a pretty beautiful philosophical idea while also thinking it's not a very practical one for doing actual science. If it contains representations all possible consistent axioms, well, how would you ever make a prediction about an actual experiment nearby? In the framework of relativistic QFTs we can make a bunch of different models and test them, settle on one, and use it to make predictions. Or find that actually it was just a low-energy EFT all along, falsifying our model. But the ruliad can never be falsified; the claim is that every possible universe is in there. How do I use it to make predictions about physics beyond the standard model? Or even just SM physics? Unclear.
Re: How to Think Computationally about AI, the Universe and Everything
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
One might use computational irreducibility to says that the only way to predict your behavior is to observe your behavior. Any system that could predict you must first recreate you. For those that see determinism as undermining free will, this gives one way to conceptualize the idea that you have ownership of your choices despite determinism.
Not sure this allows a meaningful definition of free will, since if nothing can predict me neither can I.
You can predict your planned actions, but not the interactions of those actions with reality, or the consequences thereof.
Re: How to Think Computationally about AI, the Universe and Everything
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. Here's his dissertation: https://thesis.library.caltech.edu/2597/ Does it maybe read a bit different from the post above? Roger Penrose has a Nobel Prize in physics. But his consciousness collapse interpretation and "consciousness arises from microtubules" interpretations aren't taken very seriously, nor is his fecund universes cosmology. And his work on those things is arguably much more rigorous relative to…
Just accept you made a weird and disingenuous comparison. It doesn't matter what it reads and it doesn't matter what you think of it. So what, a PHD in physics isn't enough to post about theories ? You don't have to believe or like his theories but your Jordan talk makes no sense here.
Did Wolfram spend the 40 years following that PhD in a physics career? Or a math and computer science career kicked off by his interest in cellular automata, which led him initially to his A New Kind of Science and now this?
He didn't play in the major leagues of physics over the past 40 years, and quite a lot has happened since 1980 in that field.
So for him to go from the field where he had meaningful success and spent almost the entirety of his career and adult life to one he'd not been a part of for four decades is very much like Jordan going from basketball to baseball.
It wouldn't really have mattered if Jordan had played baseball in college. It's not where he made a name for himself and the quality of his play when he switched to it after his basketball career was subpar. Just as most physicists find Wolfram's current work: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-critic...
Sorry you don't find it a good analogy, but I'm pretty happy with it.
Re: How to Think Computationally about AI, the Universe and Everything
#68A classic philosophical question is "why is there something rather nothing?" The follow up question "why is there something but not everything?" is the domain of physics. If the universe is computable, then there is a program in any model of computation that reproduces our observed physics. Why is one model of computation (Wolfram's) considered deeper or more fundamental than another (Turing machine)? Is it more useful because it is easier or more natural to encode the known laws of symmetry in the "program"? There seems to be a lot of theories of everything that have the issue of predicting a lot more than we can possibly observe, where everything we consider real physics is a small point in a massive parameter space. Be its string theory with its landscape of vacua, or flavors of inflation, or many worlds. Our universe in the theory is underdetermined. Somewhere in the parameter space is our observed universe but also a lot of dream worlds sitting side-by-side inaccessible to us. Some take it as deep and profound insight but I am skeptical that it is in the spirit of physics. I think deeper principles await to rule out this embarrassment of ontology
Re: How to Think Computationally about AI, the Universe and Everything
#69I think that the "ruliad" concept here is pretty interesting. I'm not too sure how to apply it to real life, though. "Ruliad" represents the abstract and unique object that arises from the application of all possible computational processes or rules; the totality of all potential computational processes, an infinite, complex network of all possibilities that can ever exist. Wolfram explains that our perceptions of th…
Not a physicist and my time would be better spent learning phyics than speculation, but:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Wigner_i...
I like to think it's literally an observation that creates the universe, otherwise the entire universe is just one giant superposition.
An interesting thing is also the Quantum Zeno paradox, in that a consistently observed thing is less likely to do the unlikely (by collapsing the wave function according to the Copenhagen interpretation, many worlds by another).
So: - observers contain the possible states of the universe but only with those which they are consistently interacting with - observers interact and enter superposition with the thing they observe to an outside observer (shrodingers cat) - an observer can only be defined by another observer through observation (when we open the box)
Which leads to: The universe was not created until it was observed to have been created, which is the observer-created universe.
Re: How to Think Computationally about AI, the Universe and Everything
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just accept you made a weird and disingenuous comparison. It doesn't matter what it reads and it doesn't matter what you think of it. So what, a PHD in physics isn't enough to post about theories ? You don't have to believe or like his theories but your Jordan talk makes no sense here.
Did Wolfram spend the 40 years following that PhD in a physics career? Or a math and computer science career kicked off by his interest in cellular automata, which led him initially to his A New Kind of Science and now this? He didn't play in the major leagues of physics over the past 40 years, and quite a lot has happened since 1980 in that field. So for him to go from the field where he had meaningful success and s…
Like I said, none of what you've said matters. You do you.