Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

I have not heard a convincing explanation of how the universe could produce the Monorail episode of The Simpsons merely by a certain configuration of energies in the first moment of the big bang, and the consequences of thereof. The most obvious argument is that the Monorail episode of The Simpsons is not only possible in at least one of the infinitude of quantum, deterministic universes, but inevitable, and that the seeming absurdity is merely my inability to acknowledge my anthropic bias. Nonetheless, I laugh every time I think about the motion of particles leading unavoidably to the invention of everything required for someone to type "I call the big one Bitey!", and for me to appreciate it, or believe—as I must—that I appreciate it. The mind reels!

The three body problem is impossible to solve analytically. The state space is clearly all connected but in a way that cannot be short-cut. You have to walk it deterministically one state at a time. Once you reach some interesting state, you know that you will always reach it from your initial state. It is inevitable but in general impossible to predict. There is no simple story to tell as to why you'd end up there, you just do as a culmination of the state-path up to that state. We've reached a state where that Simpsons episode was created. It's very interesting and was impossible to predict from all the way back during the bing bang. Maybe it was inevitable?

It was inevitable, there is nothing else it could have been. How could it have been something else? What would have had to make it something else and if there was randomness why would it matter?

The cosmic ballet goes on.

I have a similar problem as you, I just can't understand how determinism makes the lion's atoms move exactly in the direction of the gazelle's atoms.

At the same time, I also can't ignore the large number of very famous and accomplished physicists which take determinism very seriously.

Computers already have arbitrarily complex behavior, is it absurd too?

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