All matter is information, all information is functional, and perception is therefore the lazy evaluation of the universe.
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 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.