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Comment by afarah1 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting read, but even if we assume the author is correct, and the cosmos formed as a black hole in a larger universe, the question remains, how did this larger universe formed, then? Might just be impossible to know.

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Questions like what was before the big bang or what is outside of our universe seem to be quite natural. However, we still don't know if these questions are well defined and have a proper meaning. For instance, a few hundred years ago, one might have asked, what happens if I go to the edge of the (flat) earth? Or one might ask: What is north of the north pole?

> What is north of the north pole?

I really like this analogy for "what is outside of our universe", thank you

Not really. It’s not what’s outside of our universe. It’s why is there something instead of nothing.

It’d be like asking why is there a North Pole? Why is there an Earth to give meaning to a North Pole? Why is there a universe for the Earth to exist? And so on until you inevitably reach why is there something instead of nothing?

Thanks, GPT 4.1. It told me the same thing twelve hours ago when I asked it what was at the top. “what’s north of the North Pole”?

It is well possible that GPT-4.1 references Sean Carroll, either directly or by regurgitation.

> One sometimes hears the claim that the Big Bang was the beginning of both time and space; that to ask about spacetime “before the Big Bang” is like asking about land “north of the North Pole.”

Source: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/writings/dtung/

I'm a regular listener of his Mindscape podcast, and that's where I got this phrase. I can highly recommend his podcast: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/

Maybe the larger universe is identical to the contained universe, like a fractal. That would solve the question. ;)

Would be fun if we find a function f(state, time) such that for f(singularity, 14 billion years) we get our current universe. i.e.: every singularity turns into our exact universe.

Implying there’s no such thing as randomness, at any level?

No randomness when taking everything into account. I’m not an expert but I still hold out hope that if you know more about the universe than humanity does everything will be known to be deterministic.

Also implies that all singularities of the same mass are identical. I think this should be less bold of a statement. Let’s speculate that the more mass in the singularity would correspond to higher iterations in something like the Mandelbrot set. More of a resolution enhancement.

More if a scifi prompt than anything else to be fair.

That would mean that beings getting to know everything about the universe at some point and realizing it's deterministic was always pre-determined

While I doubt you’re unique in this, I think this is the first time I’ve seen someone say they hope there’s no such thing as free will.

Can you explain why you hope everything is deterministic?

Might just be a reflection of my enjoyment of life. I’ve been very lucky on most aspects. Perhaps if things were worse I’d wish for the knowledge that it could have gone differently.

But also it would be super trippy and interesting. Knowing just the mass of the universe you’d be able to peer into any time, past or present, and see exactly what happened. But then what happens around areas where people look into the local time? This happens in the show Devs. So not at all a new idea in scifi.

Not much concern for all the people less lucky than you?

Just explaining where my ideas on determinism might come from. It’s not as though I can change the laws of physics to be one way or the other.

In my way of thinking, determinism is a prerequisite for "free will". People usually speak of free will as a the idea of making their own choices. Suppose you hypothetically take a snapshot of my exact physical/mental state at the instant of decision and replay it multiple times. If I always make the same choice, that's determinism. If the outcome of the decision is sometimes different, I can't call that a "choice" or free will. It was something random that I had no control over.

Might I suggest Brouwer's theorem while we figure it out

Could you elaborate? It's been a while since I've done any real analysis/etc.

A 2D version: If you have a map of the place you're in, there must be a point on the map that's in the exact place it represents.

Then we gotta find the black hole in our universe that contains that universe, and nuke it before they come to take our fluids!

Why selfish ???

It's imperative we maintain Purity Of Essence. It will bring Peace On Earth.

Might not be the best idea, unless we just so happen to be all the way at the top of the sequence[1]...

1 - https://qntm.org/responsibility

It’s turtles all the way down

Black holes all the way up.

This theory is in the same space:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_natural_selection

I don’t think it has a hypothesis for the origin, though

See also the recent HN discussion about Blowtorch Theory, which has roots in (but doesn’t necessitate) CNS

  building on ten years of earlier research for a book on cosmological natural selection

This is awesome, thank you! I’m interested in the general space

I loved this overview on our current approaches to measure the expansion: https://youtu.be/WNyY1ZYSzoU

It may just be that the physical conditions of our universe just prior to the big bang are indistinguishable from that of the interior of black holes.

In that sense black holes are areas where our universe has reverted from it's low entropy state all the way back to the initial nearly infinite entropy state.

I feel like quantum physics is gently pointing us towards the idea "everything you can imagine is real at once". As in, all possible universes and physics systems and whatnot do exist in some sense of this word, and we happen to inhabit one. Just like Earth is a totally unremarkable planet in a totally unremarkable solar system in a totally unremarkable galaxy, except we popped up here so for a long time we thought there's something deeply special about Earth.

Quantum mechanics doesn't imply at all that everything possible is actual. That is a misconception.

I do agree that it makes sense, but not because of what quantum mechanics says.

Yes, it doesn't imply, but parallel universes is one of possible interpretations.

If you are referring to the many-worlds interpretation, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. There is no implication in many-worlds that every conceivable world exists as a branch of the actual wave function.

I fail to see how this doesn't lead to "every possible world". Maybe some edge cases are ruled out, but it seems to imply every possible world as far as what that means to the imagination.

It is constrained by whatever you take as the initial conditions. The quantum state of the universe is a specific and precise thing, as well as how it evolves over time. It can be taken as a vector in Hilbert space that evolves according to the Schrödinger equation. There is no implication that the resulting path will have it visit every point in Hilbert space, or that the slices of the wave function that represent individual “worlds” somehow cover all worlds present in the unvisited points.

This sounds like "technically no but in practice yes". Like a TV screen cannot display all visible colors, but it's close enough that we consider the job done.

The math does imply infinite universes. There are many physicists who believe that all these worlds do exist.

And a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzKWfw68M5U&list=PLsPUh22kYm...

Infinite universes doesn’t imply every possible universe. I don’t disagree about them existing.

Not only does the sun not rotate around us, the rest of the galaxy doesn't even care to think that we exist. An interesting evolution in thought nonetheless.

I find it more useful to anchor the concept of "real" in what one has direct access to. Beyond that there are many ways to describe our shared reality and the space of possible realities, including the past and future, some of which are more real than others, and go far beyond what we can imagine. Quantum physics gives us a language to expand what we can describe and imagine.

That's a very 3D way to think of a universe.

If we wait until we understand everything perfectly before publishing, we’d never publish anything. That question may remain, but so do many others, this paper can’t address them all.

It's just recursion in the simulator.

My theory: There's no such thing as before and after “it”. It is it.

Block Universe. The more you think about it, the more probable it seems. Why should a universe pass time like a movie, if all moments could exist simultaneously? If there is no time, and it’s just a simulation formed in our brain, there doesn’t have to be a beginning nor end.

However, a complete lack of time doesn't fit with our observations and we can measure relativistic effects where time gets distorted (e.g. fast moving particles that last much longer than you'd expect due to relativity)

GR is compatible with a block universe. If anything, the relativity of simultaneity strongly suggests that we live in a block universe!

What about "bit"? Doesn't that come before "it", Mr Wheeler? :)

Just casually adding the biggest question its possible to ask

A larger black hole

if we assume the author is correct, it would cease to be a scientific endeavor.

I'd put it a bit differently, that it remains a scientific endeavor, but leaves us in the same predicament as we're in now, which is the difficult work of forming a scientific theory that can only be tested indirectly.

But who would be as cruel to put us here without giving us those answers? Who? And where did that entity come from?

Maybe there was no cruelty, and we were just plain matter that fell into our encapsulating black hole. Like what happenswith our own universes black holes.

There is no other entity. We're nothing. An algebra of nothing. Combine nothing with nothing in various ways (like S-terms) and it gives you physics, among many other things. From the inside we see a universe, from the outside you would see nothing.

As an agnostic I agree, but none the less it is a whole, absurd joke to be here without any answers and I demand someone to answer me.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

This needs to be escalated. Who is your manager?

You are Number 6.

Be seeing you

That's almost a HHGG reference.

If you agree with the above comment, doesn't that make you an atheist, not agnostic?

I used to think that I was an atheist, but I realized nothing can be proven presently in any way even if I have opinions, so I decided I have to be agnostic.

So e.g. I have hunches that there's no way there is a God that's in any way as religions might think it is, and I do have a hunch that we somehow happened from probably deterministic chain reactions, but it's a hunch, it's hard to call it a belief, or it's hard to think that I believe there is no God. It's more like a hunch or a thought. Because for all I know we could be some Alien's schoolwork project, but I don't think we are.

In any case as a human I feel like I have evolutionary drive to hold someone responsible, so again I demand whoever is behind all of that to give us those answers. But that is my evolutionary drive, not that I think there's actually someone like that. It's the conflict of evolutionary brain vs the logical thoughts brain.

These different parts in the brain can also agree to many different things, which can ultimately make me much more agreeable person, if I decide to pick one of those opinions.

But I can be very disagreeable too, because I think Big Five said it can lead to success?

> I used to think that I was an atheist, but I realized nothing can be proven presently in any way even if I have opinions, so I decided I have to be agnostic.

As an atheist myself, I find your type of agnosticism to be overly generous to the religious theories. Do you also think that Russell's Teapot might exist or do you have a limit of unlikeliness that you draw the line at?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot

Why didn't anyone tell Musk to put a teapot in space instead of a Tesla?

>So e.g. I have hunches that there's no way there is a God that's in any way as religions might think it is, and I do have a hunch that we somehow happened from probably deterministic chain reactions, but it's a hunch, it's hard to call it a belief, or it's hard to think that I believe there is no God.

Saying that you know for certain that there is no god(s) is exactly the same as saying you know for sure that there is a god(s). Being agnostic is the realization that you can't be sure one way or the other. We are not omniscient and our reasoning abilities are not flawless. You might have your strong suspicions one way or the other about whether there is a god, but if you aren't certain (as many people are) I consider that as agnostic.

Atheists are people that don't bleieve there is a God. Agnostics are people who don't know they are atheists. -- Aron Ra

I can't 100% prove that I'm an atheist, so I'm definitely agnostic. The brain structure is constantly evolving and it's unclear how that exactly works. What is a "belief" any way, and what does it matter for?

That just seems to me a terribly flawed statement. I'm agnostic. Maybe there is a god, maybe there isn't, who am I to know? It always seems like incredible hubris to me when someone claims not only to know for certain one way or the other, but project their baseless beliefs onto others.

In practice, atheists are people who think they know there is no god. Agnostics are people who realize they don’t know much at all about anything related to the origins of things and realize they don’t want to hold unprovable dogmatic beliefs like the religious people do.

I considered myself an atheist for most of my life. As I got older and learned more, this shifted. These days I consider myself agnostic.

If atheism was defined as believing a specific kind of god (e.g. the “father god in the sky that created all things in 6 days”) does not exist, I’d still consider myself an atheist.

But my agnosticism comes from an acknowledgment of our fundamentally limited understanding of certain aspects of existence, and the implications of that specific lack of understanding.

It’s not as if I believe “well maybe the god of Abraham could be real after all but I don’t know” (it seems far more likely that if there’s a god, he/she/it/they are closer to being the stuff of existence than some standalone entity). It’s more that I withhold belief entirely and don’t make absolute claims that are philosophically untenable.

If we figure out how consciousness works or achieve breakthroughs in physics, I could imagine calling myself an atheist again. Until then, agnosticism seems like the most intellectually honest position.

You’re mixing theism/atheism with gnosticism/agnosticism. They’re two separate axes.

> In practice, atheists are people who think they know there is no god.

This is generally labeled “gnostic atheism” or “strong atheism”, and only a teeny tiny fraction of people who identify as atheists take this view.

The way the vast majority of atheists use the term is as the complement set to theism. Theists believe in god(s). Atheists lack belief in gods. We don’t claim to know for certain, we just haven’t seen evidence that leads us to believe. (As you say, certainty level regarding any particular god varies depending on which one is in question.)

https://www.atheists.org/activism/resources/about-atheism/

“Gnostic atheism” is a confusing choice of words because in the context of Christianity, "gnostic" already means something quite different:

>Gnosticism is a collection of religious ideas and systems that coalesced in the late 1st century AD among early Christian sects. These diverse groups emphasized personal spiritual knowledge above the teachings, traditions, and authority of religious institutions.

I shouldn’t have written that so it sounded like both terms were equal. “Strong atheism” became the established term. My understanding is that Huxley’s coining of the term “agnosticism” was based on Christian Gnosticism’s assertion of knowledge (and it’s in the Greek root). So due to the history it’s difficult to use lower-case gnostic in a more general sense. I guess I feel like it makes it easier to understand that agnosticism is orthogonal to theism/atheism. But I should have clarified that.

In the context of Christianity, and other works of fiction, many words mean something quite different than their non-fictional use.

> In practice, atheists are people who think they know there is no god.

Many atheists find a verdict of "not guilty" on the charge "that god exists". It's the equivalent of saying "I don't believe you." That's about it.

Saying "god does not exist" is a claim that itself has a burden of proof. Most people agree there is no need to provide proof that fairies and unicorns don't exist. If you think they do: show your evidence. The default position is to think they don't exist.

Oh that was me - I figured if I let you guys work it out for yourselves, it’d be more meaningful or whatever.

As for where I came from, I gotta admit I feel curious about that too, but mostly I’m just happy to be here. Real excited to see what you do next.

I believe you, could you please give me 1000 upvotes? If you do I promise to spread the good news everywhere.

This is why the "but the universe couldn't spawn out of nothing!" style arguments are so annoying. They completely accept that an all powerful all knowing entity could exist for all of time and not need a creator without any supporting evidence. But the origin of the universe specifically needs to be explained in detail or science is a sham.

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