Hacker News Reader

Comment by n4r9 | Hacker News Reader

This is probably a reference to Hume's problem of induction, i.e. that observing a regularity in the past cannot justify assuming that it will hold in the future. It's vaguely related to the article, but talking about "time windows" and "Mathers" muddles the point.

View on HN

Is it vaguely related? He wondered why measuring anything even works. Why wouldn’t the measurement disappear, thus making all this measuring pointless? Because, apparently the measurement(s) are true each time-step, and it will be true for that time, until it’s not true. Why it reasonably works well for us? Well, God , I guess. Same way the Sun doesn’t burn our skin off (God, I guess, but some have issues with that).

Sorry, I had to critique that immediately because I could already see that other second paragraph I quoted coming, as in, this author probably worships Math, Science, and those that do it, certainly not God, because he was unable to characterize the phenomena of it as related to God.

Yes, vaguely related. Dirac is not wondering why measurement itself works, but why mathematical reasoning applies so effectively to the measurement results.

I think it's valid to be surprised that all observations of a physical phenomena up until this point have obeyed a beautiful and (relatively) simple mathematical relationship, without even thinking about predicting the future.

Measurement works because universe moves in a simple way. As Hume indicates, you need very complex motion for irregularity, maybe even sentient, but sentient universe is fairy tale.

> but sentient universe is fairy tale.

Ehhhhh.... this is actually a much bigger claim than you realize and to immediately dismiss it leads to some problematic issues in the continuum of reality.

Without a rigorous falsifiable definition of sentient at all scales it can apply at best the problem is undefined. Are brains sentient? Are neurons sentient? Are the actual algorithms these structures run sentient? Without those answers we can really only say "The universe is probably not sentient".

Also, you are the universe experiencing itself.

For a regularity to be broken, the phenomenon causing this regularity should be sentient to break the regularity in an intelligently chosen way. It doesn't matter how sentient are neurons, they don't affect anything and might as well be absent. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_Neptune - what neurons did there?

Could you cite your reference to Hume here please? I'm not aware of him linking complexity to regularity.

Chicken and farmer.

That's Russell rather than Hume, and I don't see how it links to complexity.

The chicken has a problem with prediction of future because of intelligent behavior of the farmer, i.e. the farm is a conspiracy of sorts.

I wonder if you're reading too far into one example. Hume's original example was of the sun rising every day - nothing to do with sentience or arguably even complexity. The chicken/farmer example is one that Russell came up with to make it easier to imagine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com