Consider the following:
For all terrestrial phenomena that we have observe so far we have a theory of everything.
In order to put matter into a state where it behaves in such a way that you can tell the difference between two competing theories that describe the world, you have to build the LHC. Anything less than that and the theories all are perfectly good at describing what we see.
I think there is a tendency to misunderstand LHC and it's high energies as somehow being "brute force". High energy really just means small structures. It's better to think of it as the worlds best microscope. LIGO is the worlds best ruler. So we're measuring the world and it's matter to an unfathomable precision and we do not see meaningful divergence between theory and experiment.
We know there is more out there, but it's not stuff we can study on earth. That's the single biggest problem.
But now we have catalysts that allow us to get more gas from the same oil, and with less heat. Less energy for a bigger gain.
Big, hot, smashy, explodey things are good for a proof of concept, but for a practical application we want to make them smaller and lower energy (per unit) then scale them up huge (more units) and keep the energy down (magnitude + per unit).
Can you make these particles in a different environment? Can you move some of the embodied energy into a material? Can you reuse that material? All of these are good questions. If we answer them then the next LHC maybe doesn’t have to be an order of magnitude bigger and power hungry in order to see over the next horizon. Maybe 2x would do it.
Something bigger than Neptune orbit.
We are ~12 orders of magnitude away from the grand unification energy.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01869-1
And you eventually run into rather fundamental problems of tearing your atoms apart with the magnetic field you create. But I am not up to speed on how close we actually are to these limits.
[0]: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/ac4921/...
If you build something in a vacuum then you don’t necessarily need a single continuous piece to create a vacuum. If you specced an accelerator a million miles in diameter, the diameter matters from a standpoint of whether we can accelerate the particle sideways fast enough to keep it in the track, but they are also saying they need 3.1 million miles of accelerator hardware. They are implying they can’t lay it out as a crazy straw, but is that because of the lateral acceleration, the interaction between the coils, or the limits of manufacturing?
What if you built a collider in a spherical arrangement, accelerating in three dimensions at once, but 1/3 the diameter? What if the accelerator were broken into sections to dodge asteroids, with a cumulative segment length that added up to the desired total? What if you laid it out like a Spirograph? What if you laid it out like a truncated Spirograph (just bits of the outer circumference)? What if you laid it out like a 3 dimensional truncated Spirograph?
If there are no individual things, as quantum field theory seems to suggest, what are numbers counting?
More specificity or higher resolution is not implied, though it can happen after the paradigm has shifted as a new set of niches are waiting to be explored and filled.
See phlogiston. If we fairly assume that measurements are multidimensional and thus techniques to observe new dimensions can be conferred to have increased resolution...
But I'd absolutely concede that I may have misread. But I do believe Kuhn was fairly explicit in detailing this process. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Today's crisis in physics (if that's what it is) seems to be that, even though our existing model seems incomplete for theoretical reasons (lack of harmonization between models, for example), it continues to fit all the empirical data we have been able to generate. Really, we are hoping to stumble upon a new paradigm, but we can't seem to make it happen.
There is, however, free will.
Information complexity is a real and measurable physical quantity, and unlike all others it doesn't obey conservation laws.
The sigularity that happens when information complexity is out of control is colloqually called "free will".
(Someday maybe we'll be able to map information complexity the same way we now map cosmic background radiation. Now that would be a sight to behold!)
Well, I've come across that idea before; in certain kinds of Buddhism, consciousness is considered fundamental, the senses are created by consciousness, and the material world is projected by consciousness through the senses.
Well, this was explained to me in the context of a particular type of tantric Buddhism; but actually the basic idea is common across most mainstream Buddhism. Most schools teach that the universe is cyclical, and is completely destroyed at the end of an era, before being recreated ex-nihilo. The creation process is started with the appearance of Brahma, who then hallucinates the rest of the universe into existence.
So in that model, it is consciousness, not matter that is fundamental, because the material world cannot come into existence without consciousness.
This is just rephrasing of the symulation hypothesis in mystical terms and is just as useless as the symulation hypothesis itself (regardless if it's "true" or not).
There's some valuable deeper stuff in hindu and buddhist philosophies, but this set of ideas isn't it (neither valuable nor actually deep, just "exotic" sounding to an extent).
That "Brahma" isn't a computer; the model doesn't suggest that the universe is a simulation. You seem to have wedged in an interpretation that is fundamentally materialist, which sort of misses the point; according to this model, consciousness is fundamental. That is what was being discussed.
I agree that it's "mystical" to postulate that consciousness is fundamental; but it's equally mystical to assume that matter is fundamental.
In the Buddhist tradition where I learned this, the Brahma story was just that - a myth. But they treated the "consciousness is fundamental" thing as a core teaching, they elaborated it, and the practices grew out of that view. The tradition was a practice tradition; they shunned metaphysical speculation, and "philosophy" was generally treated as another technique for breaking-down conceptual thought.
This wasn't something you were supposed to believe, or reason about; it was presented as a way of seeing the world (a "view") that was useful in Buddhist practice. In the same tradition, we were taught that all views are provisional.
I was just answering the OP's question about what "fundamental" means in this context. I am not advocating for the view that consciousness is fundamental. I happen to take the view that consciousness exists, and is not an emergent phenomenon; but I don't have a philosophical system built around that idea. It's just that I can't see how the subjective experience of consciousness can emerge from what amounts to a system of levers and gears.
Sure using "matter" like this without defining it is equally mystical. That's why we'd take 'computation' to be "fundamental" or 'the wave function'. "Matter" is just a higher level emergent property of what we perceive.
> I happen to take the view that consciousness exists, and is not an emergent phenomenon
OK, now I see why my viewpoint would sound so "off" to you, we're probably on different extremes of the thinking spectrum :) I don't discard you're viewpoint, it's just so so so so far from mine:
I take most of what we label "reality" to be emergent properties from some kind of fundamental computation (and by "computation" I don't imply a "computer" like we know, just "math that `can run`") whose math is probably too complicated and strange for us to intuitively understand (we can just hope to get to calculate better approximations of it). I don't just see consciousness as an emergent phenomenon. I see matter as an emergent phenomenon. And also space-time itself as an emergent phenomena inside our emergent consciusnesses. The "fundamental" could just very well be something like the simplest celular automaton with non-periodict behavior or maybe something too strange for our ape-minds to ever be able to comprehend (or too simple to understand how it could be the basis - there could be enough complexity/structure in just 'the distribution of all the prime numbers' or 'the digits of pi' to contain our entire universe with its infinite past and future "inside of it").
And to clarify, "simulation" is also quite generalizable - a simulation is just something that runs as an informational phenomenon on top of some physical substrate, but is fully independent of that susbstrate to the extent that it could be "ported" from that substrate to another completely different substrate that just happens to also preserve the subset of mathematical laws required for the computation. Eg. "software" that can be "ported" so it's independent of the actual nature of the hardware. Digital/discrete (as opposed to analogical) computation gives you this magical "divorce" of computation from substrate. It doesn't have to be something like our current day software running on something like our computers - any kind of "portable discrete/digital computation" is "a simulation".
A simulation is a simulation of something; it's by definition not the reality being simulated. If you want to say you can have a simulation without simulating something, that "reality" is itself a simulation, then we're into turtle territory; this simulation models that simulation, which models another simulation, all the way down.
That path leads to solipsism, which I think is a stultifying view. It's a view that I once entertained, but eventually rejected.
(Many kinds of Buddhism known to the west are actually repackaged European philosophy; this was intentionally done in Asia so it’d be easier to sell back to us.)
Schopenhauer was interested in eastern philosophy. There is certainly a thread of Buddhist thought in some European philosophy.
I don't think it's at all reasonable to suggest that Asian Buddhists (in Asia) deliberately produced a formulation of Buddhism to appeal to Western tastes. Rather, Buddhist teachers in the West tried to find a way of presenting Buddhism without the cultural baggage.
The kind of Buddhism that I learned was largely mediaeval or earlier in its origins. Even 19thC developments in (e.g.) Tibetan Buddhism had little impact at the time on European philosophy; those developments were largely concerned with points of doctrine that flew over the heads of European thinkers.
So I'm not sure what kinds of Buddhism "known to the West" are actually repackaged European philosophy. Nichiren? "Soft" vipassana? I don't really agree that there has been much pollination of Eastern Buddhist thought from European philosophy.
See "The Making of Buddhist Modernism", review here: https://vividness.live/the-making-of-buddhist-modernism
That didn't happen in Tibet, although it modernized later with a marketing campaign resulting in everyone vaguely associating the Dalai Lama with "compassion" and "ethics".
My training was entirely in a Tibetan tradition. In 19thC Tibet, there were significant changes happening; but they were largely to do with ecumenicalism and the endless sectarian conflicts over minute points of doctrine.
"Rockstar" Tibetan lamas were certainly a thing. I was told once that, if you ask your teacher whether it would be good to attend a talk by visiting lama X, the least-favourable response would be along the lines of "He has many followers".
(slight nitpick, the idea(consciousness is fundamental, creation is cyclical) goes back much earlier than buddhism and is part of advaita vedanta.)
I'm aware that the cyclical universe is from the vedas; a lot of what passes for Buddhist metaphysics is pre-Buddhist. The Buddha didn't care much for metaphysical pronouncements; he was more a meditation teacher than a cosmologist.
So I didn't mean to claim that these ideas were Buddhist in origin; I just learned of them from Buddhists.