Hacker News Reader

Comment by fake-name | Hacker News Reader

I find it fascinating that there seems to be this assumption that the universe has to be trivially comprehensible to us.

Our brains are an emergent properly of the large scale behaviour of the universe. There is no reason we should even assume we're capable of comprehending the small-scale universe's properties, let alone that they should "make sense" to us.

View on HN

There's a very good reason we should assume that we're capable of comprehending the universe's properties: we might be right, and there's only one way to find out.

Right, but if we find substantial evidence that the universe is behaving in a way that we can describe mathematically, make accurate predictions based on, but seems intuitively "weird"... maybe that last isn't a reason to dismiss it?

I don't think anyone is dismissing quantum mechanics just because it's intuitively weird. They're continuing to work on it, which is an optimistic strategy.

I think people do dismiss the many-worlds interpretation because it's intuitively weirder than the Copenhagen one, even though it makes a lot more mathematical sense. (It still fails to explain the Born rule, but that's a much smaller lacuna than the collapse mechanism required by the Copenhagen interpretation).

'a lot more mathematical sense'? No, it'll only make more sense if/when it is able to make testable predictions different from the usual QM predictions.

All interpretations yield the same testable predictions, so the only way to choose between them is to say one is more or less simple/elegant than the other. Just like it's possible to construct Newton's laws of motion in a rotating reference frame, with multiple corrective terms, and end up with exactly the same testable predictions - but that theory is nevertheless in some sense "less true" than Newton's original theory.

What does "make sense" mean?

I don't think we can have an argument about whether we can generate a description of the universe that agrees with reality until we agree on what "making sense" means in the first place.

Not OP, but I would think it that things make sense when they can be intuited. It's amazing how much we can intuit–people figure out orbital mechanics with enough time playing KSP.

Then there are things which we cannot imagine intuitively, like 5-Dimensional hypercubes, but we can describe them in math quite easily.

> Not OP, but I would think it that things make sense when they can be intuited.

Most people can't even intuit basic statistics properly. "Intuition" is no substitute for "theory, experiment and disproof".

What fundamental limitation of human information storage/processing technology would prevent us from "making sense" of the universe at a general level? By "making sense", I mean coming up with a complete and consistent physical model.

Based on previous experiences, I suspect that the universe is governed by relatively simple rules that lead to complex emergent behavior, which would certainly be conducive to our understanding it.

> What fundamental limitation of human information storage/processing technology would prevent us from "making sense" of the universe at a general level? By "making sense", I mean coming up with a complete and consistent physical model.

The nature of that fundamental limitation may escape our grasp by definition. The article at least presents the idea that the strange observations of the quantum mechanical universe may sit outside the range of science. I think there's some merit to the idea that humans, not as "willful" entities, but as groups of particles swept up in a cosmic chain reaction, may face fundamental limitations to the "scope" of what we can grasp about the nature of the universe.

Of course, that could be totally wrong as well.

The person you're replying to meant "is intuitive to us" when they said "making sense".

As for systems where it's hard to come up with a complete and consistent model...

- If coin flips were decided by a cryptographic random number generator, it would be intractable for us to extract the seed or even to distinguish the output from true randomness or go-both-ways indexical uncertainty.

- Probably-approximate-correct learning is not possible for all models [1].

- If we're unable to eliminate Boltzmann brains [2] from cosmological predictions, that would seem to imply agents should constantly assign near-certainty to being surrounded by heat death and ignoring that is more of an optimization-for-the-cases-where-you're-not-and-things-matter.

- If the number of rules is larger than the number of atoms in the universe, we're never going to be able to remember them all or write them all down.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probably_approximately_correct_...

2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain

our brains evolved to make sense of our surroundings, and these surroundings are part of the universe; we are just struggling to expand the domain.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com