Comment by otakucode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by otakucode | Hacker News Reader

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>This assumption explains why our universe is oddly complex

That is, to me, a weird mixing of scales. The universe only seems complex to us because of the scale at which we experience it in terms of time and physical extent as well as the convoluted way our own systems of understanding developed and then were later mutated and stretched into different forms to be better suited, etc. By definition the universe itself can't really be more or less complex than anything. At least not anything we can experience.

The idea of a geometric computer is surprisingly close to things I've been considering recently, but 'position of objects can be determined with infinite precision' seems strange. It may be just that I don't understand what is fully meant when you say 'geometric computer' but I would expect 'position' would be mostly meaningless in that space except as an emergent/illusory 'property'... and I don't think arbitrary precision would necessarily be implied either.

I think the universe could easily be less complex if you would simply remove everything below Newtonian physics and basic chemistry. We would have evolved in pretty much the same way. But our universe is also complex in that the currently most fundamental laws of physics depend on a lot of seemingly arbitrary constants that are finely tuned (i.e. they become incompatible with our observations if they would be set slightly differently). Of course, it could be that we are missing a much simpler unifying theory, but currently it seems to have a quite high entropy such that we cannot explain it by saying it is in some sense canonical, i.e. that it is the only way a universe can be. That is also supported by the fact that we can build tiny universes in our computers (e.g. video games and Convey’s Game of Life).

I understand that perspective, but to me it seems a failure of history. If we had simply thrown out all of our previous knowledge when we discovered 'lower level' understandings and reformulated them in those terms, we would see no 'special values'. Those values would be 1. And all else would be derived from them, and the things at our scale would look complex and maddening. Temperature measured in Kelvin, velocity measured in ratios off the speed of light, distance based on the planck length, things like that (although I know you're talking more about the fine structure constant and things of that nature, but I think it could be done with them as well).

The question, in my mind at least, is how to show that the quantum understanding leads, on the macro scale, to the emergent phenomena we observe and once thought unitary. That's a great degree of precision and division between entities to arise out of the nonlinear interactions of bunches of 'particles'. And given the scale on which such things emerged (the universal one), clearly a proper system of understanding would make the emergence of things like atoms, molecules, chemistry, astronomy, geologies, planets, solar systems, galaxies, stars, and all those things self-evident. But... save for a few exceptions (more all the time though which is encouraging!) we rarely even look at things en-masse. It's all well and good to know how 2 bodies interact under gravitation. But when your system falls apart with 3, and you really need to be able to toss in a trillion with dozens of other nonlinear relationships... It really ought to be more obvious, I would think, that we're missing something.

What I gather from discussions about fine-tuning, it would not be enough to define all the constants as 1 to simplify the picture. In fact, this is already often done in physics. The universe still appears to be oddly fine-tuned.

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