John Wheeler saw the tear in reality

234 pointsposted a year ago
by rbanffy
(quantamagazine.org)

202 Comments

ricksunny

a year ago

It's interesting we have such receptivity in the HN community here on physicist-proposed metaphysics (yay!), yet in an entirely similar light - an article covering physicist Roger Penrose's 'microtubules' on HN a couple days ago, we get the reflexive "but experts say this is bunk' treatment.

Personally I don't know from Sam on either hypothesis. I'm just wondering for all things seeming equal, when do we get receptivity from the HN community and when to anticipate the knives coming out? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41696559

szvsw

a year ago

It can be pure chance. Who commented first, who happened to click the article, the time of day it was posted, the style of the website the article was hosted on, etc etc. it’s easy to get sucked into the illusion that the commenting population is a stationary distribution when in fact it might be highly multimodal and each thread is not a representative sample of the overall population.

Having said that, your question still stands, I suppose I’m just thinking it ought to be phrased differently? why does one article trigger more engagement than others, and why does one article trigger more engagement with certain subsets of the HN population? (Whereas your phrasing could seem to suggest there are monolithic grand narratives that describe what “The HN community thinks”)

ricksunny

a year ago

>chance Yes I suppose I should find some serenity in the pure chance of things.

>monolithic

Yes it would be unfair of me to interrogate as if the comment-base was a monolithic whole. So perhaps not monolithic, but still probably manifesting more shared responses to stimuli than the wider population at large. I definitely feel there's a distinct HN 'meta-personality', as I believe another replier re. organelles was alluding to. While forum moderation probably also shapes that to a degree, the meta-personality feels more the result of shared professional technical training (and knowing that others in the community are of like training, very very broadly speaking).

n4r9

a year ago

I'm guessing you're referring to my HN comment here (and the resulting discussion): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41696559

Well... not all hypotheses are equal! I'm not necessarily a fan of Wheeler's "participatory universe" either, but I would note a few important differences:

- Orch-Or claims to explain the origins of consciousness and free will. This overlaps with philosophy, which is concerned with what it means to explain consciousness. And philosophers generally have responded with serious criticisms.

- Orch-Or relies on specific biological assumptions e.g. about the robustness of quantum coherence in brain matter. In fact it is not merely metaphysical but is in principle falsifiable, which is a good thing! However, physicists and neuroscientists have found a lot of these assumptions to be unreliable.

- Orch-Or appears to be based on a misunderstanding of Godel's Theorem and computationalism, as has been pointed out by mathematicians and computer scientists.

- The Participatory Universe is effectively an interpretation of quantum theory. It just guides us in understanding the ontological statuses of the object in the theory. In this it is similar to Everettian (many worlds) type hypotheses. Orch-or goes much further and I would regard it as a modification of quantum theory. In this it is similar to objective collapse type hypoetheses.

tananan

a year ago

> Orch-Or appears to be based on a misunderstanding of Godel's Theorem and computationalism, as has been pointed out by mathematicians and computer scientists.

When I was looking for this, I failed to find or agree with anything conclusive for either side. Admittedly, I am not knowledge enough to be a good judge. Do you have any pointers?

aardvark179

a year ago

I think I am more likely to accept Wheeler’s path compared to Penrose’s because, although I think they may have both made category errors, Wheeler seems to have known that consciousness wasn’t the actual thing, and he wanted to work out what the actual thing was.

I think Penrose is almost in the same bucket as the panpsychic philosophers: assuming that consciousness is the important thing and trying to construct a universe in which it is emergent in certain complex things in a more concentrated way.

Personally I don’t think we even have a definition of what consciousness is and we are using it as a place holder for some property of observation that we haven’t quite nailed yet.

PTOB

a year ago

The real question - which I do not intend to answer - is, "Are the same HN users who are receptive to the metaphysics here also providing the 'experts disagree' retorts?" If we were to categorize the different mindsets of HN users and study their reactions, we might be able to treat the whole as an organism and the different groups as organelles. Then we poke it with sticks for science!

szvsw

a year ago

Or even bodies without organs… uh oh, shhh, no Deleuze allowed on here I think!

ricksunny

a year ago

I certainly like the organism / organelles metaphor, referencing it (in response to an adjacent comment about whether the community could be treated as a monolith or not). 'meta-ganism'?

meowkit

a year ago

As the other comments point out... most things are dynamical systems that respond to chaos theory (small inputs, big divergence in output). Many of the possible states can be reduced down to two or so poles (e.g. skepticism vs acceptance vs outrage vs indifference in our potential responses)

Trying to determine when or why a dynamical system like this goes to a specific state is Sisyphean if I put a word to it.

Novelty and memes play a part as well. If skepticism propagates faster around an idea (say Penrose's proposal) you'll get uncritical thinkers parroting. Same thing happens for the acceptance of ideas that often have no basis in reality.

james_marks

a year ago

I’ve noticed in round table discussions where everyone is expected to comment, an idea will emerge early and then dominate future responses.

Sure, many of us seek acceptance from the group, but also, as an idea gets traction, I think it just gets harder to have an original idea.

It’s like trying to remember how a song goes while another one is playing, and I see it on HN threads (like this one!) often.

JPLeRouzic

a year ago

I would appreciate a HN filter that would systematically remove the first thread.

JALTU

a year ago

Group-thinkers gonna group.

szvsw

a year ago

This is probably one of the better descriptions of forum interaction (mid-size and up - ie past the point where you recognize some meaningful percentage of handles in any given thread)/social media that I have ever read. Much better said than my sibling comment!

It does seem like there are often strange attractors (loosely speaking), steady-states, collapse states etc that the heterogenous commenting population display organically.

ricksunny

a year ago

I also really like that description of forum interaction. Sisyphean it might be to get to the bottom of it all, but isn't this the sort of thing marketers spend a pretty penny to attempt to accomplish? One could prepare a battery of A|B tests around articles covering a ceratin concept, change things like time of post, quality of formatting), maybe space them out over the course of a year to avoid repetitious exposure, and see which pole the comment base gravitates to.

khafra

a year ago

This Quanta Magazine article is mostly non-bunk history and uncontroversial physics; it lets us bask in the warm glow of confirming what we thought we knew, while filling in a conformant few facts we didn't know around the edges.

And when it tackles the possibly-bunk issues, it makes no concrete claims; it presents them in an anthropological manner. There is nothing to rebut.

sameoldtune

a year ago

Penroses theories about cognition smell like bunk and I only got a physics undergraduate degree. I’m glad he has found things to do in his old age but there are not a lot of physics departments jumping to put those theories to the test.

This isn’t a “both sides” issue, it’s two separate physicists and two separate theories about different areas of physics.

ricksunny

a year ago

> it’s two separate physicists and two separate theories about different areas of physics.

They're both touching on consciousness. Wheeler's participatory universe (least several paras of the article) & Penrose's (& coauthor's) microtubules.

Penrose was (just days ago) on Theory of Everything talking about whether consciousness affects observation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPH-SzWF46w&t=83s (tl;dw: he doesn't think it does.) Later in the same video, he actually comes down pretty hard on the participatory universe, without naming Wheeler or using the word 'participatory' (at least post-editing): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPH-SzWF46w&t=287s

n4r9

a year ago

In that video, Penrose explicitly claims that quantum mechanics "is wrong". He means that the equations of quantum mechanics are not sufficient to describe the universe. He thinks you need some additional mechanics to cause wave function collapse.

Wheeler, on the other hand, does not claim that quantum mechanics is wrong or incomplete, but suggests an interpretation of the equations. So in my mind they are taking very different approaches.

I watched the later part of the video you linked where Penrose describes the thought experiment with the planet without any conscious agents. He describes wave function collapse as an objective process that is "caused" by conscious measurement. Whereas my understanding of Wheeler's ideas is that wave function collapse is a subjective process.

ricksunny

a year ago

My recollection of Penrose's quoting in that video is that he said 'Physics collapses the wavefunction' implying he believes it is not a consciousness phenomenon.

n4r9

a year ago

No I agree. But in Penrose's thought experiment, he considers the consequences of theories in which consciousness causes an objective collapse.

Vegenoid

a year ago

Maybe I am missing something, but I don’t see why it’s surprising that one idea would be received with curiosity and interest, while another would be received with skepticism based on analysis from the scientific community, even though they are both ideas from prominent scientists.

ddgflorida

a year ago

It's how far either may have strayed from a materialistic viewpoint.

taylorius

a year ago

To paraphrase Dilbert's boss - "discussions go a lot more smoothly when no-one present understands any of the details."

gooseyard

a year ago

i wouldn't sweat it. if orch-or works out it won't matter who was on board early. sometimes i think that a group of people guess that some theory is correct before some clever academics figure out how to prove it in a manner that satisfies the community of science, but without that rigor we'd be buried in bullshit.

rbanffy

a year ago

> It is not a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.

It’s more palatable when we consider not the observation, but the information that was collapsed out of the superimposed states at the time of the observation. The universe uses lazy evaluation, and things only happen when they have effects on other things, and what we see as past depends on what we observe now, as both need to be consistent with each other.

bwood

a year ago

I've been compiling a list of ways in which physical reality is similar to game engines or mechanical simulation in general. Here's my list so far:

- The observer effect, quantum entanglement and wavefunction collapse --> lazy evaluation

- Speed of light --> speed of causality to resolve the object interaction problem O(n^2)

- Quanta of energy, Planck's length --> discretization of reality to limit computational precision

- Unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics --> reality is implemented with mathematics

- Parsimonious physics --> simple physical rules are less computationally expensive to evaluate

- Entropy --> stability of the simulation and a guaranteed "wind down"

szvsw

a year ago

For speed of light, a more direct analogue (though your example still makes sense) would be what is often called the “speed of sound” in numerical methods (like the finite difference method, aka FDM), which is often closely related to both temporal and spatial discretization schemes and can lead to numerical instability (cf. CFL condition, Von Neumann stability analysis, etc). It’s also related to things like stiff problems. It essentially has to do with how fast computational information propagates through the simulated domain. Note that it is still called “the speed of sound” even when you are not simulating the wave equation! (At least by my profs)

state_less

a year ago

The simulation framing tends to draw deterministic connotations. I think when people think of a simulation or perhaps physical interpretations, they imagine life as happening to them, rather than through them. I think it’s easy to perceive it one way or the other, and what you seek you will find.

But something like ‘lazy evaluation’ could provide a bridge between the two views. A choice is made AND a physically compatible path is observed as if it were always so from the past to the present.

Personally, I think of the universe is alive with choice and we do get to participate.

PS. I kept a copy of Kip Thorne’s Black Holes and Time Warps on my nightstand as a kid - it filled me with fascination. Thanks Kip!

szvsw

a year ago

> The simulation framing tends to draw deterministic connotations.

I bristle at this because there is obviously a massive amount of probabilistic programming methodology and stochastic simulation techniques out there, but at the end of the day in terms of connotation you are probably correct…

Mattasher

a year ago

I think there's a case to be made that, if the simulation hypothesis is correct, we are god's dice[1]. We exist as agents to introduce randomness in the form of free will or enough chaos to ensure non-determinism, at least from the perspective of whatever force built this place.

[1] https://mattasher.substack.com/p/btf-6-gods-dice

medstrom

a year ago

Sounds like anthropocentric bias. If you can implement a true RNG for some things, why not for all things?

nickpsecurity

a year ago

Add a few more observations:

1. The laws of the universe require unimaginable power, knowledge, and precision to implement. Its Creator must have these traits.

2. It doesn’t fail. Everything humans build requires maintenance but still fails. That this universe runs with a 100% reliability rate shows its maintainer’s power, knowledge, and perfection. It also shows He is sustaining us every second. He’s thinking about and caring for His creation.

3. Humans appear hardwired to seek who God is. So, the Creator wants us to look for them.

4. Even as children, humans have basic notions of love, justice, and are relational. The Creator is a relational, moral being who wants them to think like that.

5. All life passes through genes that carry some appearance and behavior. The higher creations raise their offspring. The Creator designed us to bear children who we teach. We’re creators in a way, too.

6. Many claim the Creator reveals Himself to them. One had objective proof, power, and outcomes that back that up (eg GetHisWord.com). The Creator has purpose for us which He helpfully shares. Jesus also lived it, too, in the same flesh before dying for our sins.

Just these six suggest that, in contrast to gaming, our world is run by God who has power, omniscience, morals, and a relationship with His people. So, that says the way to win is to be close to Him (Jesus) while playing the game by His rules. Also, to enjoy learning how it works which is endlessly deep and fun. :)

In contrast, a game engine or computer doesn’t compare mostly because of how the universe works perfectly despite billions upon billions upon billions of interactions. It can’t be overstated how unlikely that is based on all observations of reality. It’s truly astounding.

whoknw

a year ago

If you are willing to argue in good faith (no pun intended), I'd recommend for you to read Spinoza. Spinoza builds on your argument number one and argues that there can only be one substance, and this substance is God. In a nutshell: God is everything that exists, we do not exist outside of God (we are "modes" of God, if I remember correctly). Spinoza also argues that by virtue of being the only substance, God exists necessarily and does not have a choice.

The implications of this logic create problems for the Judeo-Christian stance. Absolute morality goes out of the window and a few other things with it as well.

nickpsecurity

a year ago

It might be interesting to read. It's not far from my original guess about these things.

The logic wouldn't create a problem for us due to the weight of our source, the Word of God. Whatever counters it would need perfect character, prophecies that came true, miraculous power, historical evidence, and global impact on most people groups. Then, his followers would have to experience similar things on top of transformed lives. If not, his views remain pure speculation with nothing backing them like most religions and philosophies. Not threatening at all. :)

whoknw

a year ago

That is why I prefixed my previous post with "in good faith". If you postulate that your speculations carry more weight without solid logical reasoning, that is not good faith to me.

Granted, that style of reasoning also has a long tradition in philosophers like Descartes, Berkeley, etc. Descartes famously postulates that "God is not a deceiver", and that we are dealing with a benevolent God. You make the same assumption. Back then, there had to be a God, because the church would have showed people how the afterlife looks like pretty quickly. I don't understand what necessitates such a stance today.

In any case: as long as you argue from the conclusion backwards, we can spare some ink and leave this be.

nickpsecurity

a year ago

“ If you postulate that your speculations carry more weight without solid logical reasoning, that is not good faith to me.”

I thought my original comment had a link. We have a huge weight of evidence of various types to support God’s Word being from God. There’s usually more types for that than most beliefs people express on HN that are accepted. So, I start with that as a foundation much like proof assistants build on a core logic.

https://www.gethisword.com/evidence.html

To test your assertion, we can do simple comparisons that Christians often do to justify their beliefs. For instance, you equated our use of the Bible to Descartes stating an opinion. Did Descartes live a perfect life, claim to speak for God, and perform miracles to prove that? Did he come back from the dead? Do his followers experience unlikely transformations and life events in response to praying to Descartes? Do they get healings in the hospital verified by doctors by asking Descartes to heal the person? Would the people I’ve seen who were miracle healed have done better with Descartes?

When a philosopher or scientist counters Christ or His Word, we can just go down the list to find they don’t come close to refuting them. Christ wins the trustworthiness competition. Then, we trust Him based on that.

I would consider switching sides if the others met the same criteria. They’d have to claim to receive visions from God, their predictions come true precisely, work miracles, come back from the dead, have perfect character (trustworthy), and I’d have to get promised results following them. If not, “let God be true and every man a liar” when they contradict.

I find real science doesn’t contradict my faith, though, since it’s a pursuit of truth which God wants us to pursue. Most of it is OK or it doesn’t matter if it’s right or wrong. I can enjoy it all. :)

Kbelicius

a year ago

> 1. The laws of the universe require unimaginable power, knowledge, and precision to implement. Its Creator must have these traits.

Since you are adding these observation in the context of the universe being a simulation none of the above need to be true. The one who designed the universe did not necessarily have the knowledge to implement (code the universe), build the hardware that it runs on or built the power source that is powering it all.

Why did you jump to the conclusion that it is only one person/being doing everything?

> 2. It doesn’t fail. Everything humans build requires maintenance but still fails. That this universe runs with a 100% reliability rate shows its maintainer’s power, knowledge, and perfection. It also shows He is sustaining us every second. He’s thinking about and caring for His creation.

How do you know that it doesn't fail? What would failure even look like? Wouldn't something like the heat death of the universe signify its failure?

How do you know that the universe runs with 100% reliability?

Why mention that everything that humans build requires maintenance when even the universe, by your own words, requires maintenance by its creator?

> 3. Humans appear hardwired to seek who God is. So, the Creator wants us to look for them.

Humans appear hardwired to seek explanations to phenomena. So much so that when they can not logically explain a phenomena they will make up an explanation. Isn't this more logical than your statement, if not, why?

In your point 4 and 5 you are just saying because some facts of the universe thus god.

> 6. Many claim the Creator reveals Himself to them. One had objective proof, power, and outcomes that back that up (eg GetHisWord.com). The Creator has purpose for us which He helpfully shares. Jesus also lived it, too, in the same flesh before dying for our sins.

Did not share it with me. Why?

nickpsecurity

a year ago

Good observations. I’ll try to address a few of them.

Re reliability. We know what we can observe. We see the machinery doing billions of billions of things with perfect consistency. The amount of interactions required is staggering. Whereas, humans quit trying to prove code correct after many 10,000 lines.

The being is either keeping it running without failures being possible (God’s power) or is doing the equivalent of preventative maintenance. Both are logically possible.

Re hardwired. That is a good hypothesis. I’d counter along C.S. Lewis’s lines that some things we seek aren’t merely imaginative. We have a strong, unique urge for specific things we need or are critical to our species, like food or sex. Those urges are tied to objective, real things. Our urges for God, love, and justice are just as strong and global. That’s because we’re designed for it.

Re: how do I know. Well, there’s multiple forms of knowledge. They include evidentiary (eg historical), phenomenological (eg sensation of pain), logical, empirical, and revelatory. That last one is important because we can’t really know anything outside the universe unless told by those outside it. That God chose to reveal Himself to His creation solves some big problems we could never solve without that.

“ Did not share it with me. Why?”

He did. He works through people who carry His message of reconciliation, the Gospel. It was in the quote:

https://www.gethisword.com

His Word says God draws us to Him, faith is a gift, it comes by hearing His Word, and (per Jesus) His sheep hear His voice. If people are humble, and truly seeking Him, He supernaturally tells them the message is true. Convicted of their sin, they have a choice to make that determines if they face eternal punishment or receive the mercy of eternal life.

God could’ve made it hard. He could’ve required people to be geniuses, know important people, be star athletes, or live perfectly on their own. Instead, Christ paid the price for our sins. Then, gave anyone who acts on a simple message to be saved. Anyone who shares that message might pull others out the fire, too.

Believe, repent, and live for and like Him. He’s worth it. Hell’s not.

anthk

a year ago

That's a bunch of fallacies.

nickpsecurity

a year ago

You didn't say that about either the claims in the OP article or prior submissions with less proof of what they say. Your reaction might be emotional, not logical. I encourage you to consider it logically.

An easy test would be to find human machines that have 100% reliability without design or maintenance. Then, strong arguments that they'll remain that way for thousands to billions of years with no intelligent intervention. If you wouldn't believe that, why would you believe an atheist that says the universe's superior machinery was likewise undesigned, is unmaintained, and is accidentally perfect? That goes against everything we've observed.

We also have a guess on the computational requirements which are mind-boggling. Just simulating tiny molecular or quantum systems with total accuracy, if it's even happened, takes a ton of computation. Every sub-particle or force in the entire universe running at the same time is unimaginable computation. Plus, the Creator makes them all work exactly as desired with the same, observed patterns. We can't get cellular automata to work like we want but the Creator is directing a universe of simple interactions to cause specific behavior, global and local?

God is the best theory for these observations. That also makes Him the most interesting of all beings in existence. Since we know Him, we also worship Him on top of it. That's acquired through non-scientific means, though. He supernaturally imparts it to those who believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It's more phenomenological but indirectly observable.

Kbelicius

a year ago

> An easy test would be to find human machines that have 100% reliability without design or maintenance. Then, strong arguments that they'll remain that way for thousands to billions of years with no intelligent intervention. If you wouldn't believe that

This very much might be a failing, short lived universe. Why do you think that it isn't? Keep in mind that when we run simulation we do not usually run them in real time where one of our days equals one day in a simulation.

> If you wouldn't believe that, why would you believe an atheist that says the universe's superior machinery was likewise undesigned, is unmaintained, and is accidentally perfect? That goes against everything we've observed.

It doesn't go against anything we observed. We did not observe that the universe is a machine nor that it is perfect. All that we observed is that the universe is as it is.

> We also have a guess on the computational requirements which are mind-boggling. Just simulating tiny molecular or quantum systems with total accuracy, if it's even happened, takes a ton of computation. Every sub-particle or force in the entire universe running at the same time is unimaginable computation. Plus, the Creator makes them all work exactly as desired with the same, observed patterns. We can't get cellular automata to work like we want but the Creator is directing a universe of simple interactions to cause specific behavior, global and local?

Those computational requirements exists within our universe but if we are talking about a simulation or a creator what seems like an impossible computational requirements... maybe this universe is being ran on a their version of a calculator.

layer8

a year ago

The observer being part of the universe suggests that the observer becomes entangled with the superimposed states as well by the observation, and that nothing collapses.

> The universe uses lazy evaluation […]

That’s only a sensible notion if you assume that time exists outside of the universe instead of being part of it. Wheeler’s idea of space-time being non-fundamental suggests the latter.

inopinatus

a year ago

This may be reconciled by defining the speed of light in terms of the latency of evaluation.

ricksunny

a year ago

If I'm not mistaken some gaming physics engines work this way too, am I mistaken? Something akin to avoiding calculating the details of a voxel until it is observed by the gamer?

inopinatus

a year ago

Not quite like voxels, because that implies some higher existence defining a grid. Avoiding that requires a more local definition of existence in terms of adjacency.

I’ve always encoded it thus:

“All matter is information, all information is functional, and perception is therefore the lazy evaluation of the universe.”

In the Greg Egan edition of this thesis, the speed of light emerges as a property of evaluative propagation through a functional universe, and new forms of consciousness are encountered living within the algebraic structure of the cosmos.

avaldez_

a year ago

Not specifically physics engines but graphics engines use "hidden surface determination" to avoid rendering what's outside the camera view. Frustrum culling, occlusion culling, LOD optimization, space-partition based clipping, etc. This video does an amazing job explaining some of those. https://youtu.be/C8YtdC8mxTU (highly recommended channel too)

codetrotter

a year ago

Which raises the question, if a tree falls in-game, but only non-playable characters are there. Does the falling tree make a sound when it hits the ground?

mabster

a year ago

In most games I would suspect the tree doesn't fall. Philosophy bypassed!

gnz11

a year ago

Sound is only perceived, it’s not intrinsic to the event itself.

codetrotter

a year ago

Do the NPCs in the game perceive sound?

chadcmulligan

a year ago

graphics engines do, they only display the visible pixels, the others are culled out of the calculation

doodlebugging

a year ago

If a phenomenon is not a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenom and since the act of focusing on an observation yields information only about the phenomenon that we are attempting to observe, what happens to all the informations pilling out around it that becomes part of the unobserved phenomenon in the defocused region nearest the phenomenon that we are observing with highest focus?

Basically, is it true that nothing exists until we observe it with high enough focus that the information it contains builds its own reality. If this is true then does it mean that I need to wear my glasses all the time to experience reality and when I leave them on my desk I'm slipping thru an unfocused stream of information that only loosely defines a reality because I am unable to adequately focus on those things that I need to be observing, therefore they aren't quite definable phenomena.

keshet

a year ago

And if I drink alcohol then my world also becomes kind of blurry.. then reality also becomes less defined? It sure feels that way. But not to my friend sitting next to me who chose not to drink. We live in separate realities at least as far as our individual experiences are concerned.

perryizgr8

a year ago

> The universe uses lazy evaluation

That's a crazy assertion to me. Is this something proven using experiments or your conjecture? I would think a pebble floating in deep space, not interacting with anything, would still exist. If you go out there you would see it having a position and velocity. That information has to be preserved and processed continuously to ensure that an observer after 10000s of years still sees a consistent state.

jdblair

a year ago

> you would see it having a position and velocity

but not at the same time!

codesnik

a year ago

all the wavefunction collapses only needed to compute future/far away collapses, we are all just thunks, evaluated because we needed for the final compute.

dustingetz

a year ago

which experiment proves the universe uses lazy evaluation? this seems like interpretation

akira2501

a year ago

Wheeler suggested to expand the observations of the "double slit apparatus" into the "delayed choice experiment" which was then itself expanded into the "delayed choice quantum eraser experiment." From the Wikipedia article:

"Wheeler pointed out that when these assumptions are applied to a device of interstellar dimensions, a last-minute decision made on Earth on how to observe a photon could alter a situation established millions or even billions of years earlier."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed-choice_quantum_eraser

That's not to say that this is "proof" but I think this is where the notion is most directly apprehended.

SilasX

a year ago

Which, to be clear, then invalidates at least one of the assumptions, right?

wholinator2

a year ago

It is an interpretation, the Copenhagen interpretation. There are other possibilities and nobody knows the real ground truth yet. All our speculations are just that

medstrom

a year ago

Speculations done correctly can have a good chance to arrive at truth. That's also known as reasoning. There's probably no experimental confirming or disconfirming this, ever, but that doesn't mean all theories stand on equal ground.

After almost a century of discussions between smart people, the physics consensus has steadily inched away from Copenhagen.

That said, that doesn't mean lazy evaluation isn't happening. You just can't use lazy evaluation to "explain" wavefunction collapse, it's more the other way around, that collapse can be a lazy evaluation trick. It'd describe only this simulation and say nothing about outer reality (thus no longer works as evidence for or against the simulation hypothesis, it's just a consistent part of the story given that it's true).

martin-adams

a year ago

I would guess the double-slit experiment to fit this analogy.

krunck

a year ago

> The universe uses lazy evaluation

Brilliant.

rbanffy

a year ago

Thank you. I doubt I’m the first, however.

excalibur

a year ago

Seriously, this article brings to mind the classic short story about a simulated universe: https://qntm.org/responsibility

And also the wildly speculative conjecture that our universe will be retroactively created by a super intelligent AI in the precise manner necessary to facilitate its own existence, from which it follows that we exist for the express purpose of creating it. (If anybody knows the source I might have stolen this one from please let me know.)

collingreen

a year ago

There is a dark version of this (with some pascal's wager thrown in) called Roko's basilisk. Maybe that's what you're thinking of?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk

pavel_lishin

a year ago

There's also a Stephen Baxter novel, where a splinter group of humanity called "Wigner's Friends", believes something like this to be the case. I forget which one it is, but it's part of the Xeelee Sequence.

Vecr

a year ago

Roko's basilisk isn't retrocausal, maybe you're thinking of some Nick Land thing? But even there it's hard to tell how literal he is being with the Terminator analogies (if you haven't seen the movie it has time travel in it), the sanewashed version of his thesis revolves around thermodynamics, chaos theory, and strange attractors.

gom_jabbar

a year ago

For a detailed discussion of retrocausality in Nick Land's work, check out the https://retrochronic.com/ introduction. There's even a dedicated Terminator section.

Nick Land interprets Roko's Basilisk as "retrochronic AI infiltration".

Vecr

a year ago

Yes, well. At this point I'm mostly convinced by multiple high quality arguments that Roko's Basilisk is non-functional against any reasonable theory of rationality.

Vermeulen

a year ago

There is zero chance this is what you meant, but I wrote a short story with that concept in 2013: https://www.3delement.com/?p=309

Did you end up finding what you were referring to? None of the other comments actually match that

andraz

a year ago

Stanislaw Lem, The Star Diaries, where Tichy at the same time apologizes and brags about how he retroactively tried to create/fix the world and how he failed.

jrussino

a year ago

Funny, one of my first thoughts upon seeing this article was that the protagonist of the story "There Is No Antimimetics Division" (by the same author) is named "Marion Wheeler" and I wondered if there was an intentional connection.

https://qntm.org/scp

hcarnot

a year ago

The source of his confusion is believing that all observers must share a single reality. This is not the case: as an observer of event A=a, you only share the same reality as all other observers who also measure A=a (or anything downstream of A=a). If some observer comes along and measures A=b, they split away from your reality. Only the version of that observer that saw A=a stays with you.

There is no "remote synchronization" mechanism between observers. All observations are independent, and when an observation is made, the other outcomes are not discarded, they continue "running in parallel" until another observer comes along. That is to say, from the perspective of other observers, you and your measures are also an observation they have to make (and thereby collapse).

IAmGraydon

a year ago

I'm glad you were able to explain why one of the most preeminent theoretical physicists of all time was "confused". Thank you for your clearly well-founded and extremely confident explanation.

bmitc

a year ago

> The source of his confusion

That's a fairly strong claim when referring to one of the greatest physicists and deepest yet wide ranging thinkers of the 20th century.

Filligree

a year ago

Yet this is essentially the consensus interpretation of MWI.

user

a year ago

[deleted]

kstenerud

a year ago

He didn't believe that all observers must share a single reality. He was confused because it was neither "one reality per observer", nor "one reality for all". The question he wanted to answer was: "What is it, then?"

saulpw

a year ago

Does this make the Law of Attraction valid, then? That what we focus on determines the reality that we traverse.

hcarnot

a year ago

No, reality is not related to what we "focus" on. I don't subscribe to quantum observer anthropocentrism (which is also something that Wheeler fell prey to): an "observer" doesn't have to be conscious and doesn't have to be human. An observer is simply something in the universe whose state causally depends on some quantum phenomenon. For that thing to resolve its state, it needs to "measure" the outcome of the quantum phenomenon. That is all.

Mattasher

a year ago

In this definition an "observer" is anything whose path depends on some perceived outcome (as in state of the universe), correct? So that could be human or a rock tumbling down a hill.

Vecr

a year ago

No. Or, maybe, but go demonstrate a merely gas-based Laplace demon first.

hypertexthero

a year ago

“Hope produces space and time?”

The longer I live the more I appreciate Kurt Gödel’s proof that we can never know everything about the universe.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-godels-proof-works-202007...

rbanffy

a year ago

You’d need something bigger than the universe to represent everything in the universe.

wslh

a year ago

We don't know if the Universe is finite or infinite, and also if it works in a completely logical way.

bumbledraven

a year ago

Not if compression is involved.

rbanffy

a year ago

Why would you think it’s not already? What we see is the observable state, not it’s underlying representation.

qingcharles

a year ago

This is why I have a totally unhinged belief that it might be possible to emulate the universe inside the universe itself.

joseph_b

a year ago

Everything sounds so simple until we try to explain it.

If the emulation is contained inside the universe being emulated, do you think the emulated universe includes the emulation contained within it? Does the emulation now contain another emulation? If so, now many emulations?

ridgeguy

a year ago

Pretty sure it's emulations all the way down.

TuringTourist

a year ago

And if that is the case, the odds are basically 0 that we happen to be the first of an infinite number of universes emulating themselves

airstrike

a year ago

But that really has no bearing on our emulated selves. For us, this is the one reality that matters

nonameiguess

a year ago

It's frankly not all that clear what this even means. When cosmologists talk about the "universe," the generally mean the observable universe, which is all events that have ever happened in the past light-cone of the observer. Since space is expanding, that is constantly changing, with the expectation being that at some point, from the perspective of anything in our current galactic supercluster, everything else will become causally disconnected when the expansion rate exceeds the speed of light and will no longer be in "our" observable universe, where even then it isn't clear what "our" means as it's also likely by then that black holes will be the only baryonic matter still in existence, and there will no longer be humans, life, planets, or even light most of the time.

As those black holes degrade via Hawking radiation over however many quadrillions of quadrillions of year, without gravitationally bound superstructures of any kind, eventually all fundamental particles will be causally disconnected from all others, permanently.

What then does it mean to "emulate the universe inside the universe itself?" How do you emulate a single fundamental particle with only a single fundamental particle? What is the distinction between the emulation and the real thing? The real thing has nothing else to interact with, so it can't compute. It's state can't be measured because there is nothing to measure with.

In short, I hesitate to speculate about what can and can't be done with the universe because what the universe even is will change quite drastically over long enough spans of time.

qingcharles

a year ago

Well, I feel like an emulator for our universe should be able to boot off simply the initial seed value and a copy of the Total Laws of Physics(tm).

If you could emulate it then you could access and see into all the parts of our universe which are currently unobservable. Of course, if you could emulate it sufficiently you should be able to scrub the timeline into the future and visit Milliways too.

joquarky

a year ago

There's no point simulating a universe that lacks agents. When the last agent dies, the simulation should halt.

phkahler

a year ago

I don't think that's unhinged. One might think the emulation must contain a subset of the state variables of the universe. But if there are no state variables that problem goes away. I have reason to believe there are no state variables.

bongodongobob

a year ago

I don't think there's any reason you couldn't but the simulation might move so slowly that it's not useful.

qingcharles

a year ago

There are two problems -- storing the state of your emulated universe (storage space) and the operating speed.

You can undoubtably run it at less than realtime, and might even be able to find a way to scrub fwd/rev through time to the interesting bits.

The bigger issue is how to store the data. If the universe is compressible we might be able to store it and operate on it. If it's not sanely compressible then we either need to use a large chunk, or all of, the universe's matter/energy to store the state of our emulator and any inhabitants of our universe would need to file written complaints in advance at Alpha Centauri if they did not consent to being subsumed into the Giant Grey Blob(tm).

mr_toad

a year ago

As far as I understand it, the pigeonhole principle would mean that you can’t losslessly compress the entire universe.

0xdeadbeefbabe

a year ago

It would be funny to find this out empirically. Like in the tower of Babel?

rbanffy

a year ago

According to the legend, they didn’t find it amusing.

titzer

a year ago

Well, Quine is a thing.

minism

a year ago

Right, but isn't it a problem that a quine also requires the information contained in the language's compiler/interpreter to be fully meaningful? This would be "outside the universe" so to speak.

titzer

a year ago

A minimal quine just prints itself out as "source" code. You can choose the source language to be whatever you like, such as a minimal Turing complete combinator. So all you need is an interpreter for the base level, which could be something as simple as Rule 110[1].

It really doesn't matter what Turing-complete language you choose; they can all be implemented in terms of each other, so as soon as you have your quine one language you could as well do it any other.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110

akira2501

a year ago

Compilers are just translators. Which is why it's not too hard to write a compiler in the language that the compiler itself implements.

An assembly quine is an odd thing to even ponder.

nonameiguess

a year ago

Sort of. The very first compiled binary of any new language has to first be written in a language that already has a compiler, and the very first compiler of any high-level language at all had to be written in assembler.

Ultimately, if you can't write a Quine directly in logic gates, which you can't because no microprocessor can output another microprocessor, you need something external to the "universe" of the language.

titzer

a year ago

> has to first be written in a language that already has a compiler

You only need an interpreter for that language.

yreg

a year ago

Is that necessarily true for all universes?

I suppose an empty universe represents itself. Or you could have a universe with matter distributed in the shape of https://xkcd.com/688/

xpl

a year ago

Can there be an empty universe? I suppose there is no "self" to represent then.

rbanffy

a year ago

An empty universe would not have any information, or state change, and wouldn’t trigger any computation, therefore, it wouldn’t exist.

airstrike

a year ago

But if I include it as a variant in my Universe enum, then doesn't it exist anyway, at least as a concept, even if it's never constructed?

xpl

a year ago

Then it's not a real universe but a mere symbol, I'd say. "Map vs. territory"

And in order for that symbol to exist (be expressed / thought of / conceived), it must be a part of some other existing universe that allows that...

airstrike

a year ago

But in which universe does that "map" exist? Boom, you've just created an universe containing a map out of a never-constructed-universe-containing-nothing.

ordu

a year ago

I laughed at the inscription on the blackboard (the photo in the article) "Gödel's proof -- too important to be left to mathematicians".

MichaelZuo

a year ago

Having every ‘observer’ also ‘participate’ seems to just make it even more intractably complex? Since presumably ‘participators’ can influence each other simultaneously.

So I just don’t see how any of these theories are attractive prospects, the infinite regress seems even more severe than superdeterminism theories.

It’s quite a shame this man got stuck on something that may be literally impossible to prove.

ko27

a year ago

It's not like we are any closer to resolving the measurement problem today. I wouldn't be quick to dismiss Wheeler, all alternative theories for this problem are radical or "unattractive".

svachalek

a year ago

It's not like being radical or unattractive has anything to do with validity though.

kstenerud

a year ago

Except that Wheeler got a LOT of things right, and this was in his wheelhouse. And he wasn't making a statement of fact on this, merely expressing his confusion that it wasn't making sense (yet).

And then he died before he could figure it out. All we have left are little strands of his thoughts.

mistermann

a year ago

Understandability to era-bound humans is not a prerequisite for existence luckily.

kps

a year ago

There is no other kind of observation. You observe a photon when it and your retina (or device) participate in a physical interaction.

Finnucane

a year ago

It also seems a little narcissistic to assume that humans are the only 'observers' or 'participants' who are determinative.

akira2501

a year ago

Observe is bad language. It implies a conscious act. "Incident" or "Interact" seem like better roots but the conjugations are even more overloaded in terms of human meaning.

grishka

a year ago

Who said that consciousness is "private property"? What if it's actually shared between people, like a field of some sort or another dimension, but everyone somehow gets their very own part of it? We know nothing about the nature of consciousness, so let's not assume anything about it. It might arise from the physical processes in the brain and be bounded by our known physics, sure, but it might just as well be something else entirely.

saulpw

a year ago

What if awareness is a field instead of a process? Like a moving magnet induces electric current in a coil of wire, decoherence in microtubules could induce qualia in the awareness field. See also: Alan Watts.

grishka

a year ago

Process is something that happens over time. We don't know what time is because it might as well be an artifact of consciousness itself, so this particular distinction between a process and a field feels pointless. Time might arise from us moving in that field for example.

openrisk

a year ago

The really tough problems require minds that are wired differently and John Wheeler's mind was definitely a thing apart. Its the sort of unique mental fingerprint or aesthetic that characterizes great talents in this space (Feynman and Penrose are other examples of this trait, imho).

Compare Gravitation (the bible) and its boldness, inventiveness and playfulness with the sterile presentation of most theoretical physics textbooks before and after.

Anyway, he failed to bring on a new paradigm for "deep" physics. The intersection of geometry and quantum mechanics seems to be as elusive and mysterious as ever. But hope produced all our mental breakthroughs and, who knows, it may do so again.

pvg

a year ago

Compare Gravity

Total pedantipoint but the book's title is Gravitation of which he was one of three authors.

Thrymr

a year ago

> he was one of three authors

Indeed, but the other two (Charles Misner and Kip Thorne) were Wheeler's former students.

pvg

a year ago

Sure, but Thorne once bought me pizza so he's the most important co-author.

user

a year ago

[deleted]

its_bbq

a year ago

On the blackboard he and his students wrote "Godel's Proof -- too important to be left to the mathematicians."

As a mathematician, I'd love if anyone here knew the context

floatrock

a year ago

Not a mathematician and it's been a number of years since I read GEB, but my rough takeaway of the incompleteness is self-referential systems are magical because they can create statements that can't be proven in that system. "This sentence is false" or "Can God create a burrito so hot He cannot eat it" and all that.

So if Wheeler is saying the universe comes out of quantum observation, then the connection seems to be a self-referential Strange Loop of consciousness/observation/participation along the lines of "we're just the universe observing itself"

cosmic_dust9

a year ago

Wouldn't that be a limitation of language rather than the ability to form concepts?

floatrock

a year ago

Again, not a mathematician so I'm likely butchering all this, but my layperson's understanding is Godel showed there's a kind of equivalence mapping between english language and mathematical symbolic language. It's all just information juggling (and you can use the equivalence to translate things you can prove with mathematics into the other trickier languages).

So if sub-matter quantum-woo is just information juggling, then it's the ability to have self-referentiality that makes for some interesting properties.

defgeneric

a year ago

I don't know the context, but Claus Kiefer was on the Physics Frontiers podcast recently talking about this paper:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.07331

Gödel's undecidability theorems and the search for a theory of everything

"I investigate the question whether Gödel's undecidability theorems play a crucial role in the search for a unified theory of physics. I conclude that unless the structure of space-time is fundamentally discrete we can never decide whether a given theory is the final one or not. This is relevant for both canonical quantum gravity and string theory."

swifthesitation

a year ago

> His incompleteness theorems meant there can be no mathematical theory of everything, no unification of what’s provable and what’s true. What mathematicians can prove depends on their starting assumptions, not on any fundamental ground truth from which all answers spring[0].

So why leave it solely to the mathematicians.

[0] https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-godels-proof-works-202007...

anthk

a year ago

On these, you can define some paradoxes in compiler (lisp specially) by redefining predicates (functions that return either true or false). On most cases, it either returns an error, or spawns a debugger.

artimaeis

a year ago

I think it's simply that Godel's incompleteness theorem had strong, foundation-shaking implications outside the context of mathematics alone. Philosophy and science were greatly affected.

unparagoned

a year ago

>Why don’t they create 10,000 separate space-times?

How do we know it doesn’t? The whole wavefunction collapse and single world is an untestable and unprovable assumption.

m0llusk

a year ago

Going from pregeometry to spacetime as information with observer participation might in ways relate to the law of increasing functional complexity. What if observers start as other particles but join together to iterate in increasingly large combinations in order to generate increasing complexity in spacetime phenomena? Exotic particles in space might be kind of like interesting minerals forming in comets and so on.

joshuamcginnis

a year ago

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.

2. The universe began to exist.

3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

4. This cause is uncaused, timeless, spaceless, and immaterial.

5. To create the universe, this cause must possess intentionality and decision-making capabilities.

6. Therefore, the cause of the universe is a personal, immaterial being: God.

jhickok

a year ago

Both P1 and P2 of Craig's argument are problematic, although I admittedly have a hard time following the transfinite gymnastics one way or the other for P2. But for P1 it's not clear to me that there is a logical problem with something coming into existence uncaused, and we unfortunately have nearly 0 experience with something coming into existence to provide enough empirical support.

joshuamcginnis

a year ago

Regarding P2, there is ample cosmological evidence in the form of scientific theories like the Big Bang that provide strong support for the universe having a finite beginning.

There is nothing that comes into existence without a cause. From your innermost creative thoughts to a spot of mold on bread, to a new leaf on a tree, to the seemingly random emergence of a rain storm - all have a beginning and all have a cause.

Have you experienced something different?

jhickok

a year ago

I understand that many people believe that, but I don't take it that there is broad consensus-- or any consensus-- that the Big Bang represents the beginning of anything save our the beginning of what we can reasonably infer and observe. I think most self-respecting astrophysicists would respond to the question "Was there anything prior to the Big Bang?" with an "I don't know".

Regardless, P1 is still required to make Craig's KCA work, because P2 is compatible with the universe just happening.

Editing to account for your later comments:

>There is nothing that comes into existence without a cause. From your innermost creative thoughts to a spot of mold on bread, to a new leaf on a tree, to the seemingly random emergence of a rain storm - all have a beginning and all have a cause.

That isn't quite the same scenario. The sort of causation we observe (which is actually compatible with no causation, a la Hume) is more like shuffling around of existing matter and does not translate to direct evidence for or against the hypothesis that something can come into existence uncaused.

joshuamcginnis

a year ago

No one is claiming to know what happened prior to the Big Bang. Whatever existed before time had to be infinite. If you read my logic carefully, I believe I make a perfectly reasonable case for 1. the universe existing (which I think most people would agree, we are living in an existence) and 2. that existence having a start (e.g. the universe is expanding, light gets redder the longer it travels, etc) 3. Anything that comes into existence has a cause.

I think when you combine the scientific evidence with the logic and continue down that line, you can make a good faith argument for an intelligent creator.

vjerancrnjak

a year ago

If you take general relativity and evidence for it then you’d have to accept there is no beginning or end, there’s spacetime. No time is passing and all events are embedded in timeless spacetime.

If you take quantum field theory, all reality spawns somehow out of immaterial fields without any cause.

Others from Advaita stream of thought have arrived at a place where the absolute is not God at all and don’t need physics to reason about that. In their terms we are all God with a problem of mistaken identity. Reality is already timeless, deathless.

Vecr

a year ago

Only if you don't think there's there's a singularity (or singularity-replacement) in the future. Maybe against Wheeler? I can't remember.

But anyway, if there's a singularity (or suitable singularity-replacement) in both the future and the past you might be able to use something like Hawking's No-Boundary Condition theory to claim P2 is false.

Not that I do, but P2 is not rock-solid from a logic standpoint.

joshuamcginnis

a year ago

In layman terms, what are the current cohesive and logical arguments for existence having no beginning?

Vecr

a year ago

1) We exist (or at least you do, Cogito, ergo sum, "I think, therefore I am")

2) Since we exist, something had to have lead to us

3) The thing that lead to us was either lead to in turn, or "just existed"

4) If you don't accept that something can "just exist", that leads to infinite regress (before A there was B, before B there was C... on to infinity)

5) It's not too presumptuous to prevent infinite regress by saying "the universe" is what "just existed".

Since the possibility of the universe "just existing" was established by the previous reasoning, you can think if that's a reasonable stopping place when it comes to predictive power.

Hawking suggested it was though the "projection" he used for making the argument was complex and and don't fully understand it.

As far as I can tell, his argument was that the universe appearing to have a beginning was "merely" thermodynamic, and in the final quantum theory the beginning and the end would be closed, making the universe fully self contained. (Something about gravitational entropy fully canceling out all other entropy, making the universe sum to zero, with both the "beginning" and the "end" summing to the exact same value as each other (zero)).

esperent

a year ago

If you start with the conclusion (therefore God exists), you'll always be able to find a logical chain that seems to prove it true.

user

a year ago

[deleted]

joshuamcginnis

a year ago

Why don't you provide your own logic chain for why God doesn't exist and I'll read and respond to your arguments.

Vecr

a year ago

Obviously that can't be done absolutely, but

1) theoretically there are a huge number of explanations that fit the evidence, possibly an infinite number

2) almost none of them will contain your God

Done.

You can argue about what system should should be used to assign credibility to those explanations, but I'm not sure if you're read up on various Bayesian and non-Bayesian prior systems.

gigatree

a year ago

Do you mean that for like a specific person’s made up god, or would you replace “your God” with “a God, an entity, or a mind of some kind”. Because in that case I assume those two points wouldn’t apply, right?

joshuamcginnis

a year ago

Simply pointing out that there are alternative possibility is not an argument against a creator. It's possible the creator is a pink unicorn, but it's not likely.

Vecr

a year ago

Absolutely it's an argument against God that almost none of those explanations contain God.

If you want to enter more evidence or argue priors you can, but in the argument's current state it's highly effective.

kstenerud

a year ago

No one has proven P1 to be true in all frames. We're not even sure that time began.

We don't know if P2 is actually true (in fact, there is growing suspicion that the big bang was merely the beginning of the current phase of our universe).

Also, your P4 contradicts your P1, and the rest is speculation.

mr_toad

a year ago

1 is begging the question, 1 and 4 are contradictory, and 5 and 6 are non-sequiturs.

Vecr

a year ago

Well, if you accept the argument it only gets you to an infinite or at least very large number of objects that meet the stated requirements. Not one object in particular.

And here "object" is quite vague, I would assume almost all of the specifications would be unrecognizable as such to a human.

joshuamcginnis

a year ago

Here is the argument for a singular cause vs a plurality of causes:

1. Occam's Razor favors explanations with the fewest entities.

2. A single cause requires fewer assumptions than multiple causes.

3. Therefore, a singular cause is more parsimonious than a plural cause.

4. A singular cause ensures consistent intentionality and unified purpose.

5. Multiple causes would necessitate coordination and could result in conflicting intentions.

6. Therefore, the cause of the universe must be singular.

Vecr

a year ago

Okay, accepting these new criteria (actually somewhat reasonable, if you accept the universe has a creator), intentionality restricts the objects that are acceptable, but if you accept extended Occam's priors that have the capability to contain God [0], then every "object" that meets the requirements and is simpler than God is a better explanation.

[0]: Not the same as the previously mentioned simplicity priors, as you brought up Occam's you must think God fits into logic.

joshuamcginnis

a year ago

I accept the universe has a cause because of the logic I presented earlier. Humans have no reason to believe there is existence without cause (if you can find a single example of something being created without a cause, you would change the course of human history!)

Vecr

a year ago

You deleted the other comment I was trying to respond to, but I'm interested in a response to the idea that an "object" that meets all the requirements you've given could be simpler than God, and therefore more likely by Occam priors.

joshuamcginnis

a year ago

Maybe the name is what you're hung up on? Whatever this simpler thing is would still need to be timeless, spaceless, immaterial, possess intentionality, and decision-making capabilities.

Vecr

a year ago

Yes? But I assume you aren't arguing for God-as-in-any-object-or-idea-that-meets-a-list-of-criteria, I assume you're arguing for God. God that's described in any book I've read appears to have a lot of complexity, and I don't think it's likely that nothing else that would meet the criteria would be simpler.

joshuamcginnis

a year ago

Ah, great question. OK, if there is a "God" explanation for creation and its a logically sound argument, then how do we know who or what this God is? Many religions claim to know, but how we can differentiate them and use logic, reason, science, etc to find this one true God. Is that the question you're after?

Vecr

a year ago

Not exactly, my argument there was that there would be a huge number of individually more likely (due to being simpler) candidate objects for your criteria, that in combination entirely swamp every conception of God that has ever been written down in any book anywhere.

copypasterepeat

a year ago

But wait a minute, by that logic wouldn't the fewest assumptions be that there was no cause that created the universe and that universe is a timeless, cause-less entity. Isn't that fewer assumptions than positing another entity that has those attributes.

joshuamcginnis

a year ago

The logic posted was in answer to _what_ is the cause, not _if_ there is a cause. I already made the case for there being a cause in my original post. Nothing comes into existence without a cause. The cause being a singular timeless eternal entity requires fewer assumptions than the multi-modal explanation theory the other user suggested.

Vecr

a year ago

Maybe "alternative explanations" is better wording. If you don't think God fits into a simplicity detector, could a simplicity detector of some sort that's external to God and every other member of the set of God-like objects complete at least a stochastic (probabilistic) scan?

That would in theory give priors for the probability of the "object" that fits the criteria given.

joshuamcginnis

a year ago

The logical error in your question is in the "that's external to God". Going back to my first post, the "cause" must be eternal (since it was what started time in order for existence to begin). And because this eternal cause was not affected or constrained by physical space, it had to be all-encompassing. Because of this, there could be nothing external to the cause (God).

Vecr

a year ago

I don't think your argument follows. Assume there's an uncreated universe that is very suited to running simulations. Assume someone in that universe creates our universe, fully contained inside theirs. Yes, that person is outside our time, and started our time, but in their universe, they are 1) constrained by physical space 2) not all-encompassing at all 3) have a whole lot of stuff in there with them that is external to them.

Sure, you can go into infinite regress arguments, but they hit both of our arguments just as hard.

joshuamcginnis

a year ago

One cannot just "assume there's an uncreated universe". There's no evidence for that. I'm not saying it's impossible, but if we're going to use it to make conclusions, there's has to be some logical or observable basis for it. My arguments are based on logic and observation. It would be impossible to find the truth if we just dream up any possible scenario without actually drawing conclusions from the evidence in front of us.

Vecr

a year ago

Assuming it only as part of that hypothesis, not assuming it for all reality. If it's not impossible, since we can't observe the evidence, its only detriment is complexity by either hypercomputational Simplicity priors (if we don't think we can fit it into logic) or extended Occam's priors (if we think we can).

As well as all the other hypotheses we can't meaningfully differentiate from it, almost none of them recognizable as your "God".

joshuamcginnis

a year ago

I'm more than willing to volley these ideas with you but I'm not following. I didn't once use the word "object" so I don't follow your refutation here. Could you elaborate? Are you saying that my conclusion collapses to a single "cause" (which I'm calling God and you're calling an object?)

Vecr

a year ago

No, by the Principle of Multiple Explanations, every "object" that satisfies your conditions is equally viable, everything being equal.

You can slap a hypercomputational simplicity prior on that if you want, but that probably militates against the object being God, because I wouldn't expect God to be "simple" under that definition.

joshuamcginnis

a year ago

It's possible there are multiple explanations, I give you that. No one can know for certain. The argument against it; however, is more logically coherent and parsimonious than the multiple theory. Happy to dig into why that is if you want to go deeper.

Vecr

a year ago

I'm not arguing against a single "actual" cause, just that you don't know what the "actual" cause is to the extent that you can exclude all but exactly one explanation. Multiple hypotheses fit the data (or in this case the criteria I accepted for the sake of the discussion).

joshuamcginnis

a year ago

I'm not claiming to know to an infinitesimal degree of certainty; I'm simply presenting the evidence and making my case. There are many truths that cannot be proven in the way you'd like. Prove to me that you won't commit a murder tomorrow. Prove to me that George Washington was a real person. Prove to me that you love your family.

user

a year ago

[deleted]

bamboozled

a year ago

How can there be a tear in reality, surely, what's behind the tear is more...reality?

PTOB

a year ago

It's PhD philosophy dissertations all the way down.

dmvdoug

a year ago

Until they get Buridan’s-assed.

renox

a year ago

> By choosing what to measure in the present, we participate in the creation of the past.

Not everybody accept this interpretation of this experiment!!

actionfromafar

a year ago

Wonder if the movie Interstellar was inspired by Wheeler.

dcminter

a year ago

Not exactly, but they had Kip Thorne as their science advisor and Wheeler was his Phd supervisor!

user

a year ago

[deleted]

nzzn

a year ago

Quanta is such a great resource! High value spend from Jim Simons vast pool of dollars.

I came across MTW’s “Gravitation” as a student in the 70’s and it inspired a positively unreasonable desire to own a copy just because it looked so beautiful. Couldn’t afford the doorstop of a book at that time but happily it is still in print 50 years later.

oersted

a year ago

They are good at framing advanced science as intuitive and engaging stories, context is always appreciated.

Although, frankly, whenever I see the Quanta URL I tend to skip straight to the comments. It's too verbose to my taste, I just want to understand what the discovery is about, get an understanding of the substantive details without too much prerequisite knowledge, and understand the impact on other research and possibly on applications. But I start reading the article, and it always reads like a biography. The writing is excellent, but I'm afraid I don't always have the time for the literary angle. I am willing to spend a while understanding it but focusing on the meat of the science, the peripheral story comes after if I'm curious.

piva00

a year ago

I tend to save Quanta's articles for my "slow reading" part of the day.

Exactly because of the more literary prose that I know I will enjoy but need the time to appreciate. Also, I don't think I've ever had to spend more than 10 minutes to read one of their articles, it's time well spent, or maybe I'm just nostalgic for longer-form magazines that I miss from my younger years.