Comment by hliyan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hliyan | Hacker News Reader

Tried reading the paper [1]. I understand the authors are academics, which is why I'm surprised the paper reads like a layman's attempt at a contributing to a "theory of everything", or at best, an inquiry written by a 18th century European philosopher of science.

- "identification of conceptual equivalencies among disparate phenomena were foundational to developing previous laws of nature" - what exactly is a "conceptual equivalence"? You mean models? Unifying disparate observations into models is basic science. Not sure why it is highlighted here as some important insight.

- "The laws of classical physics emerged as efforts to provide comprehensive, predictive explanations of phenomena in the macroscopic world" - followed by a laymen's listing of physical laws, then goes on to claim "conspicuously absent is a law of increasing “complexity.”"

- then a jumble of examples including gravitation, stellar evolution, mineral evolution and biological evolution

- this just feels like a slight generalization of evolution: "Systems of many interacting agents display an increase in diversity, distribution, and/or patterned behavior when numerous configurations of the system are subject to selective pressure."

At this point, I gave up.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2310223120

I think speculative science always starts out as philosophy. This is as true now as it was in the 18th century. If you look at any thinker on the edge of human understanding you'll find something similar (e.g. I was reading Michael Levin's stuff on bioelectricity recently and it also has a heavy dose of philosophy).

I don't really have an issue with any of the points you raised - why do they bother you?

The interesting stuff is the discussion about "functional information" later in the paper, which is their proposed quantitative measure for understanding the evolution of complexity (although it seems like early stages for the theory).

It's "just" a slight generalisation of the ideas of evolution but it applies to nonbiological systems and they can make quantitative predictions. If it turns out to be true then (for me) that is a pretty radical discovery.

I'm looking forward to seeing what can be demonstrated experimentally (the quanta article suggests there is some evidence now, but I haven't yet dug into it).

> I think speculative science always starts out as philosophy. This is as true now as it was in the 18th century.

Indeed, and Natural Philosophy was the precursor to what we now call Science.

I still think the old name better fit what we’re doing because it admits that the work is still a philosophical endeavor.

This is not to question the validity of what we now call science, but it’s common these days to believe in the ultimate supremacy of science as the answer to questions that are best explored both philosophically and scientifically, and because pure science still can’t answer important philosophical questions that that the entire scientific discipline rests upon.

Tell me about the supremacy of science after the government restores the NIH, NOAA, etc. In fact most people in the world believe in the supremacy of their religious faiths.

My religious faith is science

now what?

I'm open minded about religion. It can be whatever you want.

You're describing anti-science sentiment, which is problematic and dangerous. But this is also whataboutism.

I'm describing unfounded beliefs many people hold about science based mostly on a lack of philosophical understanding, which is orthogonal to anti-science sentiment and still important to examine.

I don't see a reason for there to be tension between the two.

I may have overreacted. I'm a scientist, and I'm surrounded by scientists. When I hear about "supremacy of science" it's usually being presented as a straw man. I don't know any scientists who believe it, beyond the temporary phase in everybody's education where they get caught up in the "master of the universe" feeling.

That’s understandable, especially in the current climate. I’ve definitely encountered the straw men from the anti-science types too, and it’s incredibly frustrating.

As a layperson, I often come in contact with people who believe in science but fall into what is essentially scientific absolutism and see philosophy as irrelevant. I was one of those people in my 20s before I went down some rabbit holes that set me straight. Many of the people around me did not.

The scientists I know are not the absolutist types. I sometimes forget there are more scientists here than the average internet community.

> I think speculative science always starts out as philosophy

or in my words: "the first approximation is poetic. the last one is mathematical"

from philosophy to hard-science and engineered tooling and other products (andor services)

similarly to

from poetry as dubious, cloudy, and vague ideas all the way to crystal clear, fixed and unmoving (dead) formalizations

> I don't really have an issue with any of the points you raised - why do they bother you?

Idk about GP, but bad science writing ("identification of conceptual equivalencies ...") does bother me. It's sloppy, and tends to hide possibly invalid shortcuts taken by the authors by being an impenetrable fog of words. That sort of thing is a very good indicator of bunk, and it tends to peg my BS meter. Which isn't to say that there is no place for that sort of language in a scientific paper, but that one should preface the use of it with an admission of hand-waving for some purpose.

I think you should try to get the intent instead of stumbling on surface level. The core idea is that recursion explains emergence.

A distributed system can still achieve centralized outcomes as a result of centralizing constraints acting on it. For example, matter under gravity forces leads to celestial bodies, particles under EM forces lead to stable chemical molecules, genes and species under the constraint of replication lead to evolution, language under constraint of usage leads to the evolution of culture, and brains under the constraint of serial action lead to centralized semantics and behavior. In neural nets we have the loss function as a centralizing constraint, moving weights towards achieving a certain functional outcome.

Ok, so what is the relation between centralizing constraints and recursion? Recursion is how distributed activity generates constraints. Every action becomes a future constraint. I think this approach shows great promise. We can link recursive incompressibility and undecidability to explanatory gaps. You can't know a recursive process unless you walk the full path of recursion, you have to be it to know it. There is no shorter description of a recursive process than its full history.

So what looks like constraints when seen top-down, looks like search seen bottom-up. Particles search for minimal energy, genes for survival, markets search for profit, and our actions for goal maximization. Search acts on all levels, but since constraints are emergent, search is also open-ended.

Your comment reminded me of this article. It suggested that we experience time because the underlying processes of the universe are recursive. And since our computational capacity is limited, we as observers can only perceive the future by progressively unfolding it. If recursion explains emergence, could it follow that everything tends to grow more complex over time?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41782534

I believe model and concept can be equivalent, not sure about the required formal terminology in English.

Complexity is probably most formally modeled in entroy in thermodynamics, although it behaves in the opposite direction that these ideas and oberservations suggest it should.

It still asks questions about the reason for this complexity and there is no scientific answer aside from "propably accidental complexity".

Science is curious so it probably shouldn't be dismissed by unmet formal requirements that aren't specified. "Layman" is unspecific, so what would your requirements be exactly?

>- "identification of conceptual equivalencies among disparate phenomena were foundational to developing previous laws of nature" - what exactly is a "conceptual equivalence"? You mean models?

No, a model is not an "identification of conceptual equivalencies among disparate phenomena". It's a simplified representation of a system.

"identification of conceptual equivalencies among disparate phenomena were foundational to developing previous laws of nature" could be called an analogy, an isomorphism, a unifying framework, etc.

>Unifying disparate observations into models is basic science. Not sure why it is highlighted here as some important insight.

Perhaps because the most important insights are the most basic ones - it's upon those eveything else sits upon.

>At this point, I gave up

If you can't bother beyond the abstract or 1st paragraph, or are perplexed that the abstract has a 10,000ft simplistic introduction into the basics, then it's better that you did :)

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