How to Understand the Universe When You’re Stuck Inside of It
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
for example, he says that the wave function describes an ensemble of possible states of a system, example an electron, and this is equal for all the other electrons of the universe, I will more specific and say that there is a Functor that describes all the possible states of the surface of any observable system and it behaves as a wave function when that system tends to the stability. (this can be related with holographic theory)
Lee Smolin that the universe is looking for maximum variability, which I think is not correct, the universe is looking for maximum stability in all matter hierarchies because it allows describing any possible surface with a Functor, and makes the simulation more easy to carry.
this is big because it means that is not necessary to simulate every electron on the universe to create a good simulation of itself, or every atom, or every molecule, or even so every planet, imagine the natural numbers, we don't need to create all the sets of the natural number in memory in order to use them and we can peek at any moment at any region of the natural numbers, while the memory support it, and we will be able to make any computation over them, so why the electron can not work like that, or any kind of matter?
those functors, are passed between two systems when a system observe to another system using what we have called photons. also when the universe can't describe the surface of the system with a functor that can easily be transported to the observer, this system appears as a black hole.
I am 100% sure that we live in a simulation, not necessarily made by "gods", but it could be a fundamental way in which the universe behave
example when we walk, we tend to transform our walk patterns to a wave function, till some unexpected change in the ambient appears, this frees our brain and allow us to think in another thing. try to walk with a pattern that does not tend to stability, while that you will never be able to use your brain to do another task, just like you brain wants stability the universe also want it.
this phenomenon not only happens when we walk, we do this all the time at multiples level in the hierarchy of the mental models that we use for describing the world or our actions, which some times result in bad predictions but allow us to the think in other complex problems on a higher level of abstractions.
Here's the relevant video: https://youtu.be/rtR63-ecUNo
but in reverse it works, you can get a wave function of the probabilistic states of your cell just observing your surface, if you are dead, they will be dead just a simple example
we can observe the whole surface of the sun and get an idea when it will die (because we have access to its wave function), also we can make valid conjectures about the probabilistic state of every atom and subparticle inside the sun.
gravity functor is very easy to communicate, it depends on an accumulator of mass, and it tends to stability, if the black hole is alone, it will be the mass of the black hole or is the black hole is eating matter, the mass of the black hole can be described as a wave function, just to be clear a wave function is any function which only domain is time (the independent variable)
while light needs to interact with a mass in a very complex way (reflection), if the inner system of a black hole is so unstable that the reflection cannot be collapsed to a wave function that will explain black holes
so if you believe me the functor that communicates the light will disappear, but the functor that communicate the gravity will be still there
can this mean that there is a system where the gravity functor is not stable?
If we are following the "anthropic principle" the two questions might not be entirely unrelated.
An interesting aside it that Quanta was started by James Simon’s Foundation. James Simons is an interesting person. He doesn’t get the publicity of a Gates, Buffett, or Bezos.
the TED interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5kIdtMJGc8) is also good, despite the host's frequent vapid questions. in that interview, simons elaborates on his funding of origins of life studies and efforts.
In this Quanta interview, Amanda Gefter writes:
"Leibniz argued (against Newton) that there’s no fixed backdrop to the universe, no “stuff” of space; space is just a handy way of describing relationships. This relational framework captured Smolin’s imagination, as did Leibniz’s enigmatic text The Monadology, in which Leibniz suggests that the world’s fundamental ingredient is the “monad,” a kind of atom of reality, with each monad representing a unique view of the whole universe. It’s a concept that informs Smolin’s latest work as he attempts to build reality out of viewpoints, each one a partial perspective on a dynamically evolving universe. A universe as seen from the inside."
For some reason, my mind went to the idea of "nodes and edges" of a graph; with the nodes being these "monads" and their relationships being the "edges", and then later in the interview...Smolin notes:
"The event has relations with the rest of the universe, and that set of relations constitutes its “view” of the universe. Rather than describing an isolated system in terms of things that are measured from the outside, we’re taking the universe as constituted of relations among events."
I don't know for sure if what I was thinking is the same thing as what he expresses here, but I think I might be close. Regardless, I now wonder something else:
Could the colloquial concept/idea of "6 degrees of separation" apply here? If so, what implications might that have for Smolin's theory?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation#Math...
I won't pretend to have any answers here (again, assuming anything I wrote above means anything)...
Well, I initially started writing this comment because of the quote »Leibniz argued (against Newton) that there’s no fixed backdrop to the universe, no “stuff” of space; space is just a handy way of describing relationships.«. According to Rovelli - he talks about this in the lecture series mentioned above - Newton was fully aware [3] that his notion of space and time are just abstract notions and that space and time are fundamentally relational. But due to the success of using abstract space and time in science and engineering this got somewhat forgotten and those abstract notions were and are considered much more fundamental than they are. This in lectures two (space) and ten (time) which both provide an overview about the philosophical evolution of the concepts and should be - at least the first part of the lectures - accessible without [almost] any background.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mp4fpwl9loQ&list=PLwLvxaPjGH...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6rWqJhDv7M
[3] I just skipped a bit through the second lecture on space and I may have somewhat overstated Newton's awareness but I will leave this as first written. It is more like he was aware that we only have access to relational space and time but we can infer from that a true abstract notion of space and time. I really recommend to just watch the lecture for a more nuanced picture, it starts out very non-technical and this very discussion.
Some reading in this direction:
"How Hume and Mach Helped Einstein Find Special Relativity", Norton
"Range", Epstein. Ch 1 discusses Bool's influence on Shannon for the discovery of information theory. Ch 5 includes anecdotes and research for "Thinking Outside Experience", including the methods of analogy used by Keppler regarding theories of planetary motion.
> Then there was this pragmatic turn, where the dominant mode of physics became anti-foundational, anti-philosophy.
Related papers:
"Analytic and Continental Philosophy, Science, and Global Philosophy", Tieszen
"Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy", Hanna
The instrument can be thought of very loosely as representing a monad where force, reason, intent and all these other things go in and then "phenomena of type music" comes out. If the universe were monadic the way he describes, there is probably some information theory-meets-ontological limit that has to do with whether you can ever get "upstream" of these monads, of which our universe is the effect.
Other than perhaps being able to discover and reproduce them.
If so, does the perception require consciousness?
Is consciousness constrained to the universe, or orthogonal to it?
Imagine any given configuration of the universe. Of all possible changes to a new configuration (think Levenshtein distance) from that configuration there’s a large set of “equivalent” (in the aggregate) configurations, let’s call those the future. There is a smaller set of configurations which we would ascribe some special character too, such as being somewhat orderly let’s call those the past. the set of possible configurations encoding a broken pot are larger then the set encodings an unbroken one. But the state brokenness of the pot is entirely a subjective things, without that interpretation of the encoding they are equally random
Now if you are a “process”, a kind of pattern that can be identified as the same entity in several of those configurations, it would seem necessary for that pattern to follow some rule in which most of those “future” configurations would retain its unique characteristic.
So if you throw a dart into this mess of configurations and hit such an entity, selecting any direction to move from that point at random would most likely give you a configuration with higher entropy, but in which this particular pattern would be retained.
Some patterns would have a higher chance than other of being traceable along those changes, perhaps they encode a kind of anticipation of likely futures yielding a rules set which a higher likelihood of existing from one configuration to the next. Let’s call this patterns “living”
If you use big bang theory, the universe existed prior to observers perceiving it. So there was existence and no perception. Perception appears to have evolved out of existence. The story of the big bang is sort of neat. It looks like many fundamental particles didn't exist until the time was right for them to come into being.
That would depend on the definition of perception. Does a nail perceive being struck by the hammer? To say otherwise would presume that humanity's form awareness is somehow special, and not simply a more complicated interaction between ourselves and the universe than is the nail's with the hammer.
I was using the more traditional definition of perception.
You have, er, nailed it
When it comes to the question of whether consciousness is orthogonal to existence. I'm inclined to the position that it's an emergent property of matter, in particular taking exception to human exceptionalism. I acknowledge this is sailing damn close to the Chinese Room argument.
but I don't have his hair
Imagine that eat a banana. The contents of your stomach change. You have assumed a new identity. If you grasp/accept this, you are perceiving yourself as having mutated after eating the banana, because you are in temporal lockstep with your stomach. Most of what we consider to be "fact" and "how the world works" is a matter of perception. But I don't mean that in some hippy dippy way. I mean it in the Cartesian sense, roughly speaking, but at the mechanical level not the cognitive level, partly because I don't want to get trapped in the Cartesian circle but mostly because my idea of perception is any matter whose input function is the state of all other matter, conscious or otherwise, and thereby that the arrow of time arises from an evaluative process.
If I had a spare lifetime I'd probably want to pursue this at postgraduate level at some reputable philosophy department, if there is one. But essentially the thesis is that state is coterminous with identity, and mutation of state therefore creates a new entity, and my interest is in the fundamental processes behind that.
Hence the suggestion: we are all value objects, all matter is information, all information is functional, and perception is therefore the lazy evaluation of the universe.
Note: this is especially important when you are the banana.
First, you place a lot of emphasize on perception. What if we kill - or lets say remove - all humans and animals and aliens from the universe so that we are only left with rocks and gas clouds and other stuff we would not usually link to perceiving the universe? Do you really think removing the last entity perceiving the universe would fundamentally change what is going on with all the rocks and gas clouds? What about the moment the first entity perceiving the universe came into existence? Or do you mean perceiving in a more general sense, like in quantum mechanics, where we talk about interactions and - possibly unfortunately, again due to the association with conscious agents - measurements?
Second, you do not seem to be talking about the universe in its entirety, you seem to be talking about a universe evolving in time with time being outside of that universe. This is the very point the article argues - and I think rightly so - against, ultimately there can be nothing outside of the universe, not even time, hence the universe in its entirety must be a - for the lack of a better word - static object not evolving over some time external to it.
Yes. I'm using it to mean evaluation as the fundamental causal process. I don't believe consciousness is orthogonal to the universe, ergo it must emerge from the processes within it. Sorry, the term perception is a bit loaded in this regard. But here's the thing: I also don't want to exempt a complex emergent arrangement of functions from evaluating its neighbours. Which is to say, I don't want to be excluded from looking at things.
> Do you really think removing the last entity perceiving the universe would fundamentally change what is going on
It's a good question. To me this scenario only occurs when nothing exists.
> the universe in its entirety must be a static object
Do you mean the conclusion that the universe is a rigid block of spacetime? I used to accept that as an undergrad, eventually rejecting it for the most common reason of all: the denial of free will, justifying this to myself on the grounds it conflicts with the halting problem. Unfortunately the problem then arises, "what fucking axioms do you believe then?". Here's the thing I like: if the universe is functional, then its laws may evolve as it evaluates, including the laws by which it evaluates. That provides an irreversible causal arrow, which is incompatible with a block universe.
Not actually sure I could glean that from this article though.
In the Greg Egan edition of this theory, the speed of light then emerges as a property of evaluative propagation through a functional universe, and new forms of consciousness are encountered living within the Lisp machine of the cosmos.
Yes. You on the other hand try to place time outside of the universe and that means for me you are not talking about the entire universe. It is like talking about one frame of a movie, but one frame is of course not the entire movie. And while there is change from frame to frame the entire movie is static. Equally the universe in one moment is not the entire universe. Not to mention that the universe in one moment is - to put it mildly - a problematic idea as relativity teaches us that there are no such things as a universal time or universal simultaneity.
I used to accept that as an undergrad, eventually rejecting it for the most common reason of all: the denial of free will [...]
There are several different things that people may mean when they talk about free will but those fall into two categories. The first category contains variants of free will that do not require that the future is indeterminate, for example understanding free will as just doing what one prefers. The second category contains variants of free will that do require that the future is indeterminate but the problem is that those variants of free will are not logically consistent or not worth being labeled free will to begin with.
[...] justifying this to myself on the grounds it conflicts with the halting problem.
Would you mind elaborating this point?
[...] if the universe is functional [...]
What does this actually mean? What precisely distinguishes a functional from a non-functional universe?
[...] then its laws may evolve as it evaluates, including the laws by which it evaluates.
Give that I do not know what exactly you mean with a functional universe, this may go totally into the wrong direction, but at least naively I see no problem for the rules to simply change in any kind of universe. On closer inspection it is of course not that easy because it is pretty easy to end up with something inconsistent but those details aside, why would it be impossible for the gravitational law to become an inverse cube law tomorrow? Finally this raises all kind of new questions, for example just how many layers of laws describing change in the layer below are there? Is there a ultimate static layer that does not change? And over what time dimension do those laws change?
[...] the speed of light then emerges as a property of evaluative propagation through a functional universe [...]
Are you talking about the value of the speed of light or its existence? The value is arbitrary, the digits of c are of course just an artifact of the units we use. And even the value is inconsequential, i.e. whether c is c or 5c or 100c or 0.1c, you can just rescale it and call it one as physicists often do. The only thing that matters is whether the speed of light is finite or not.
I'm sure that I don't know exactly what I mean, but I fully intend to find out.
A functional universe may be the only way to derive a Theory of Everything that is a) self-describing (and therefore recursively encodes all the "layers" simultaneously), and b) whose existence isn't rejected by the undecidability of the halting problem.
As to whether rules change; that might suggest that what we currently believe to be universal constants may not be constant, and that would be controversial besides.
> Would you mind elaborating this point?
I'm thinking directly of the arguments at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything#Arguments... (with the proviso that I believe Gödel's incompleteness theorem emerges as a corollary of Turing's proof of the undecidability of the halting problem).
> why would it be impossible for the gravitational law to become an inverse cube law tomorrow
Hard to rule out, isn't it? But in the circumstances I posit that we would not be around to perceive it. Hard not to consider one of the anthropic principles as a result. The proponents of the strong one might love the idea that a complex assembly of self-describing, self-evaluating functions is lazily evaluating the universe (but they'd be putting the cart before the horse)
> The only thing that matters is whether the speed of light is finite or not
To me the defining characteristic of c is that it is the fastest speed of propagation of evaluation, whether that is electromagnetic, or gravity waves, or any other of what we currently term the fundamental interactions. Agree, the term "speed of light" is misleading. But I went to school in a building named after James Clerk Maxwell and it's hard to give up.
If this is not evidence that Haskell is the language of the Gods, I don't know what is...
Surely all those are different monads though.
"Category" is that central thing of the science of nodes and arrows between them.
"Functor" is a mapping - a function - from a category to another category, where each node is mapped and each arrow is mapped according to node mapping. Like, if 1 in number category maps to A in character category, 2 maps to B, and there is an arrow 1->2 in number category, then this arrow should map to arrow A->B in character category.
"Endofunctor" adds that the resulting category should in fact be the same as original. So, 1->2 can e.g. map to 3->4 in the same number category.
"Monoid" is requirement that with the category we also have defined binary operation (let's call it X), that the operation is associative and also that category has "identity" node (let's call it I) - that is, for any A both operations A X I and I X A both produce A. It's like adding with zero.
Now, this is not enough to understand monads - but it provides a foundation for what those monads, mathematically speaking, are. Consequences of these definitions can lead far :) .
Perhaps we should just enjoy what we have.