foundry27
12 hours ago
I think it’s really interesting to see the similarities between what Wolfram is saying and the work of Julian Barbour on time being an emergent property. Both suggest a similar underlying ontology for the universe: a timeless, all-encompassing realm containing all possible states / configurations of everything. But what’s really fascinating is that they reach this conclusion through different implementations of that same interface. Barbour talks about a static geometric landscape where time emerges objectively from the relational (I won’t say causal) structures between configurations, independent of any observer. On the other hand, Wolfram’s idea of the Ruliad is that there’s a timeless computational structure, but time emerges due to our computational limitations as observers navigating this space.
They’ve both converged on a timeless “foundation” for reality, but they’re completely opposite in how they explain the emergence of time: objective geometry, vs. subjective computational experience
pizza
11 hours ago
I was literally thinking of the same similarities. Barbour's exposition of the principle of least action as being time is interesting. There's a section in The Janus Point where he goes into detail about the fact that there are parts of the cosmos that (due to cosmic inflation) are farther apart in terms of light-years than the universe is old, and growing in separation faster than c, meaning that they are forever causally separated. There will never be future changes in state from one that result in effects in the other. In a way, this also relates to computation, maybe akin to some kind of undecidability.
Another thing that came to mind when reading the part about how "black holes have too high a density of events inside of them to do any more computation" is Chaitin's incompleteness theorem: if I understand it correctly, that basically says that for any formal axiomatic system there is a constant c beyond which it's impossible to prove in the formal system that the Kolmogorov complexity of a string is greater than c. I get the same kind of vibe with that and the thought of the ruliad not being able to progressively simulate further states in a black hole.
psychoslave
5 hours ago
>There's a section in The Janus Point where he goes into detail about the fact that there are parts of the cosmos that (due to cosmic inflation) are farther apart in terms of light-years than the universe is old, and growing in separation faster than c, meaning that they are forever causally separated. There will never be future changes in state from one that result in effects in the other. In a way, this also relates to computation, maybe akin to some kind of undecidability.
Ho, I love this hint. However even taking for granted that no faster than light travel is indeed an absolute rule of the universe, that doesn't exclude wormhole, or entangled particles.
https://scitechdaily.com/faster-than-the-speed-of-light-info...
csomar
8 hours ago
> There will never be future changes in state from one that result in effects in the other.
You are assuming that the Principle of locality is true and proven. This is far from being the case from my understanding.
adrianN
2 hours ago
You can’t really prove things in physics, but to my knowledge we don’t have observations that contradict locality.
ziofill
8 hours ago
Actually, the parts of the universe receding from us faster than the speed of light can still be causally connected to us. It’s a known “paradox” that has the following analogy: an ant walks on an elastic band toward us at speed c, and we stretch the band away from us by pulling on the far end at a speed s > c. Initially the ant despite walking in our direction gets farther, but eventually it does reach us (in exponential time). The same is true for light coming from objects that were receding from us at a speed greater than c when they emitted it. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_on_a_rubber_rope
tempaway456456
2 hours ago
I don't think they are saying anything similar at all. Julian Barbour finds a way to get rid of Time completely (by saying every possible state exists and there must be some law that favours states that _seem_ to be related to _apparently_ previous states). Wolfram is more focused on making sense of 'time is change' through the lens of computation.
pyinstallwoes
10 hours ago
Without time you’d be everything all at once, which isn’t capable of having an experience, that is to also say: a location.
To have experience, requires position relative to the all, the traversal of the all is time.
More like a play head on a tape, you’re the play head traversing and animating your own projection.
hackinthebochs
10 hours ago
The universe doesn't need to evolve for us to have experience. We would experience evolution through the state space because its structure is oriented such as to experience evolution through time. Each point in experience-time (the relative time evolution experienced by the structure) is oriented towards the next point in experience-time. Even if all such points happen all at once, the experience of being a point in this structure oriented towards the next point is experienced subjectively as sequential. In other words, a block universe would contain sequences of Boltzman brains who all subjectively experience time as sequential.
The real question is why would such a universe appear to evolve from a low entropy past following a small set of laws.
pyinstallwoes
2 hours ago
Well, it doesn’t evolve. You just render it as evolving to perceive yourself / itself. The only way to have the state of being of observation and perception is to not be everything which gives rise to directionality.
lukasb
8 hours ago
This makes a good argument that the block universe can't exist: https://aeon.co/essays/who-really-won-when-bergson-and-einst...
(search "block")
jstanley
7 hours ago
That's not saying it can't exist, it's just saying you can't go outside the universe to look at it.
raattgift
2 hours ago
Boltzmann brains are extremely ephemeral.
An analogy is that of stirring a vat of alphabet soup and noticing that there is a fair number of single-letter words popping into view ("A", "I"), a smaller number of two-letter words, an even smaller number of three-letter words ... a very very small chance of a twenty-letter word ... and a vanishingly small chance of the 189819-letter monster <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Protologisms/Long_wo...> popping into view. The stirring doesn't stop just because a multiletter word appears, so multiletter words are quickly broken up and even valid single-letter words get hidden behind the "B"s and "Q"s and other letters in the soup.
Boltzmann brains will fluctuate out of existence on the order of a small multiple of the light-crossing time of the brain-matter that fluctuated into existence. As the brains are human, they won't even have a chance to react. Although their false memories are encoded however true memories exist in our own brains, they'll have no time to have a reminiscence or notice their lack of sensory organs. (Which is probably good, since they would quickly suffer and die from lack of pressure and oxygen).
A Boltzmann-brain with a full encoding of a life worth of false memories (from never-existing sensory input) is a much larger number of letters. Also, in a cold universe, the stirring is slower, and the letters sparser. Boltzmann brains are tremendously unlikely except in a verrrrrrrrry big volume of spacetime. But with a sufficiently big volume of spacetime, or one with an energetic false vacuum, one should expect a lot of Boltzmann brains. This view puts some limits on our own cosmos's vacuum, since we don't see lots of Boltzmann brains (or even much less complicated but RADAR-detectable and/or eclipsing strucures) fluctuating into brief existence in our solar system.
Boltzmann brains are low-entropy. A persisting Boltzmann brain (fluctuating into existence and staying in existence for a long time) is much lower entropy still. This poses problems for hypotheses that the entire early universe fluctuated into existence and then evolved into the structures we see now. Here there are human brains attached to sensory apparatus, whose memories correlate fairly well with their history of input (and recordings by ancestors, and fossil records, and so on): a system with much much lower entropy than Boltzmann brains, so what suppresses relatively high-entropy structures (including Boltzmann brains) from dominating (by count) our neighbourhood?
Also, if the universe supports large low-entropy fluctuations, galaxies that briefly (~ hundred thousand years) fluctuated in and out of existence should be much more common than galaxies with a history consistent with billions of years of galactic evolution, and you'd expect random variations in morphology, chemistry, and so forth; that's not what we see.
This is a bit annoying, as it would be handy to point to Boltzmannian fluctuation theory as the source of the tremendously low entropy in the very early universe, i.e., it could have arisen spontaneously in a less precisely ordered space. Oh well.
> why would ... a universe appear to evolve from a low entropy past following a small set of laws
Thermodynamics.
The issue is: where did the low entropy past come from? Once you have that, evolving into a higher entropy structure-filled present is not too hard -- that's essentially what we have with the standard cosmology from about the electroweak epoch onwards.
So in summary:
> sequences of Boltzman brains who all subjectively experience time as sequential
whatever these might be, they aren't Boltzmann brains, since the latter don't subjectively experience anything as objectively they fluctuate out of existence in something like a nanosecond.
Very briefly, the short existence is driven by interacting fields and the need to keep entropy (relatively) high: if your starting point just before the appearance of the brain is a region that is high quality vacuum, you have to come up with protons, calcium nuclei, ... and all that requires very careful aim to have one split-second "movie frame" of brain. You need much better "aim" which really drives down the entropy (which corresponds a much larger fluctuation) to go from vacuum to a Boltzmann brain that doesn't disintegrate starting in the very next frame thanks to overshoots of momentum.
The higher the entropy of the Boltzmann brain, the clearer the stat mech argument. (If one gets stuck thinking about human brains, C. elegans apparently develop memories and store them in their nerve ring. Why isn't the outer space of our solar system full of those Boltzmann-C.-elegans brains fluctuating in and out of existence with each possessing false memories of sensory stimuli? Smaller fluctuations, so there should be many more of those than human Boltzmann brains).
marcus_holmes
6 hours ago
Maybe we do experience everything at once, but then have to process it in a time-like manner to make any sense of it.
Like everything else that we "experience", maybe the perception that reaches our consciousness has nothing to do with what's actually out there.
There are no purple photons.
pyinstallwoes
2 hours ago
Yeah, god is everything, which can’t have experience, as it’s experiencing everything at once - thus the monad splits itself, allowing perception as a fraction of the whole which is experienced as time and direction.
JumpCrisscross
10 hours ago
> have experience, requires position relative to the all, the traversal of the all is time
You’re describing timelike experience. Photons “experience” events as in they are part of causality. But they do so in a non-timelike manner.
pyinstallwoes
2 hours ago
Said a human.
If it’s not time-like, then it’s everything, thus it can’t have experiences thus god. God splits (monad becomes many) to experience being (shards in multiplicity of the one through division: oooh spooky golden mystery).
yarg
9 hours ago
I think that time isn't what we think it is - but I don't think it's all already set; rather I think that the past can be constrained by the future just as the future is constrained by the past.
I don't think that there's spooky action at a distance (it's fundamentally equivalent to retrocausality, and the consequences of the distant foreign event cannot outpace its light cone anyway).
I think its a superposition of states of a closed time-like curve thing being fleshed out as its contradictions are resolved and interactions are permitted between its colocated non-contradictory aspects.
But I'm not a physicist, so that's probably all just bullshit anyway.
andoando
7 hours ago
I suspect there are many different mental conceptions that amount to the same facts of nature.
bmitc
7 hours ago
I generally like the idea of most everything being emergent, but where does it stop? Is it emergence all the way down?
bbor
7 hours ago
Idk, just looking at it now Barbour seems much, much more rigorous. The linked article is more “using scientific terms to muse about philosophy” than physics, IMHO. For example;
In essence, therefore, we experience time because of the interplay between our computational boundedness as observers, and the computational irreducibility of underlying processes in the universe.
His big insight is literally the starting point of Hegel’s The Science of Logic, namely that we are finite. That in no ways justifies all the other stuff (especially multiverse theory), and it’s not enough to build a meaningfully useful conception of time, at all. All it gets you is that “if you were infinite you wouldn’t experience time”, which is a blockbuster-sci-fi-movie level insight, IMO.I can’t help but think of Kant as I write this; he wrote convincingly of the difference between mathematical intuition and philosophical conception, a binary Wolfram would presumably—and mistakenly-identify with solid logic vs meaningless buffoonery. But refusing to acknowledge our limits makes you more vulnerable to mistakes stemming from them, not less.
…the metaphysic of nature is completely different from mathematics, nor is it so rich in results, although it is of great importance as a critical test of the application of pure understanding—cognition to nature. For want of its guidance, even mathematicians, adopting certain common notions—which are, in fact, metaphysical—have unconsciously crowded their theories of nature with hypotheses, the fallacy of which becomes evident upon the application of the principles of this metaphysic, without detriment, however, to the employment of mathematics in this sphere of cognition.
Worth remembering at this point that Aristotle coined “physics” for the mathematical study of physis (nature), which was then followed up by a qualitatively different set of arguments interpreting and building upon that basis in a work simply titled metaphysics (after physics). We’ve learned infinitely more mathematical facts, but IMO “what is time, really?” will forever remain beyond their reach, a fact determined not by the universe but by the question itself.TL;DR: if you’re gonna try to talk cognition you should at least admit that you’re writing philosophy, and ideally cite some philosophers. We’ve been working on this for a hot minute! Barbour seems to be doing something much less ambitious: inventing the most useful/fundamental mathematical framework he can.
m3kw9
11 hours ago
So you are saying there is a version of me that is king of the universe in some timeline?
grugagag
9 hours ago
In a skin enclosed universe you are already King Meatbag, ruler over your mind and body.
biofox
4 hours ago
My body disagrees.
pixl97
11 hours ago
If the universe is infinite then there is a possibility that you are a king of an observable universe somewhere.
xandrius
10 hours ago
Infinite does not mean that all the permutations are possible.
You being you and you becoming a king might simply not be a combination which is compatible.
kridsdale3
7 hours ago
Great way to let someone down who asks you out.
There are no branches in the Ruliad in which you and I end up together. I have foreseen it.
mensetmanusman
8 hours ago
You vastly misunderestimate infinity if you don’t recognize that anything feasible will happen.
jbotz
4 hours ago
Depends on how you define feasible.
Take Wolfram's 1-dimensional cellular automata... some of them have infinite complexity, and of course you can "run" them for infinite time, and the "current" state is constantly expanding (like the Universe). So let's define "something feasible" as some specific finite bit pattern on the 1-dimensional line of an arbitrary current state. Is that "feasible" bit pattern guaranteed to appear anywhere in the automaton's present or future? I believe, and if I understand correctly, so does Wolfram, that for any reasonably complex "feasible pattern" the answer is no; even though the automaton produces infinitely many states, it is not guaranteed to explore all conceivable states.
In other words, in a given Universe (which has a specific set of rules that govern its evolution in time) even though there are infinitely many possible states, not all conceivable states are a possible result of that evolution.
pantulis
4 hours ago
There are infinite numbers between 3 and 4, yet none of them is number 7.
adastra22
8 hours ago
It is simpler than that. Wolfram has a long history of plagiarizing ideas and passing them off as his own.
mensetmanusman
8 hours ago
That’s the history of 99.9999% of ideas based on the average token generation rate of humanity.
PaulDavisThe1st
8 hours ago
The mother of someone who was a friend in the 90s used to always pepper her speech with attributions for almost everything she was saying (in any "serious" conversation). "I think it was Popper who said ..." "Schenk developed this idea that ...")
It was * so * annoying to listen to.
adastra22
7 hours ago
We should hold dinner-table conversations and scientific letters to different standards.
adastra22
7 hours ago
Real scientists tend to try to be careful about attribution and especially don't just blatantly regurgitate the last thing they read and pass it off as their own. That is highly frowned upon in polite academic society.