71–80 of 203 posts
“Hope produces space and time?” The longer I live the more I appreciate Kurt Gödel’s proof that we can never know everything about the universe. https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-godels-proof-works-202007...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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 language.
> 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…
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…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not if compression is involved.
This is why I have a totally unhinged belief that it might be possible to emulate the universe inside the universe itself.
As those black holes degrade via Hawking radiation over however many quadrillions of quadrillions of year, without gravitationally bound superstructures of any kind, eventually all fundamental particles will be causally disconnected from all others, permanently.
What then does it mean to "emulate the universe inside the universe itself?" How do you emulate a single fundamental particle with only a single fundamental particle? What is the distinction between the emulation and the real thing? The real thing has nothing else to interact with, so it can't compute. It's state can't be measured because there is nothing to measure with.
In short, I hesitate to speculate about what can and can't be done with the universe because what the universe even is will change quite drastically over long enough spans of time.
How can there be a tear in reality, surely, what's behind the tear is more...reality?
> 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…
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…
Having said that, your question still stands, I suppose I’m just thinking it ought to be phrased differently? why does one article trigger more engagement than others, and why does one article trigger more engagement with certain subsets of the HN population? (Whereas your phrasing could seem to suggest there are monolithic grand narratives that describe what “The HN community thinks”)