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If I may make a shitty analogy... Most humans see reality through the lens of high-level languages. A hyper-defined DSL of Ruby. Our everyday interactions and

If I may make a shitty analogy... Most humans see reality through the lens of high-level languages. A hyper-defined DSL of Ruby. Our everyday interactions and understanding of the world are both informed by that DSL. However, as people specialize into various areas they realize that there exists something deeper, something closer to the metal. Eventually, Julie the scientist discovers that our language can be broken down into more discrete operations than our Ruby DSL would lead us to believe. After much study and experimentation she finds heaps of cryptic-looking code dedicated to memory management, CPU optimization, fault tolerance, etc. The more she studies, the more she finds. By now she's uncovered machine code and developed an instrument to compile it down to an even more fundamental entity: binary. You can take this analogy down to the hardware level -- I'll spare you. But as human beings we cannot process the world in binary and still function normally. We can certainly think about it and after much effort place our experiences in that context. But we need the aforementioned abstractions to quickly and easily process that we need to run from tigers. Although we know the Ruby DSL hides many details of reality from us by its very nature, we ignore that out of pragmatism.

djsumdog 10y ago
Computer languages are much more precise and deterministic than natural language. The machine is actually quite simple compared to our biology. People once believed the world was flat, that the Earth orbited the sun. Today some think the universe is at least 13 billion years old, others only 10,000. People on both sides think the other side is misguided, ignorant or just plain stupid. Think we're in a simulation? Put down your fucking bong hippie. Also get a job. Those are important for some reason and determine your self worth. Also self worth is a thing .. that you should have. Evolutionary fitness has led humanity to believe powerful myths. Even you, yes you the rational atheist computer scientist on hacker news, believe many many myths right now. Many which don't matter, many you will never know are myths. In a million years, we will either be able to create computer simulations powerful enough to simulate part of our universe, or we'll go extinct. Humanity will be a spec on our 13 billion year+ universe. Either that or someone will press the reset switch and start us over with some other parameters. It's not a lot of comfort to people who die in Chinese factories to give us cell phones, or to Chesley Manning sitting in prison.
- jackcosgrove 10y ago
  "Even you, yes you the rational atheist computer scientist on hacker news, believe many many myths right now. Many which don't matter, many you will never know are myths." Who actually replicates experiments to determine what they should accept and reject? Sure, you've learned not to touch a hot stove, or that ice cream is delicious, but how do you know the age of the earth, or what the employment rate is? You know what you trust when it comes to abstract things. Scientists have a track record of delivering results, so you trust what scientists say. Fair enough - time is short and we all can't be empiricists, and scientists themselves need to divide their labor and trust each other. But still there is a medium delivering the good news to you, rather than you finding it for yourself. There are better safeguards against lying than there were in the past, but I see this more as a difference of degree rather than kind.
drostie 10y ago
This needs to be the top comment in this thread; it precisely gets to the heart of what's being said here. I mean, the other criticism is good too--I was trained as a physicist; I too balk when I see quantum mechanics used this way. (I'm a big fan of Searle's third law[1].) But I mean, the only point that we're actually seeing used here is that QM is creating a huge amount of tension for people who used to comfortably believe in an objective observer-independent reality. That's not actually a hugely divisive issue here. One issue that isn't particularly quantum but is brought up here is that there seems to be a strange embeddability problem in the most basic theories of consciousness, also highlighted by Searle as part of his "Chinese room" thought-experiment: somehow the two halves of your brain merge into one consciousness, but somehow we don't think that two people dancing really do; we don't think that the two halves of your brain keep separate accounts of reality quite the same way that we do think that two dancers do: what is the boundary? Is it just, say, a matter of the volume and frequency of communication as related to the reaction speeds of the surrounding media? Or what? Similarly the issue that Donald Hoffman's raising up-front is precisely the one that you're analogizing: hey, there's no reason to think that this language that our brain uses maps directly onto the fundamentals of the reality; rather where there is a translation between these two it's complicated at best, and you're only seeing the world after layers and layers of programming have acted on it. Maybe at the most fundamental things are crazily different -- and we can't understand them easily, if at all -- and what we've got are really effective models. When this happens, and what the universe is doing "down in the plumbing" starts to get really difficult to understand, it's going to be more useful for us to regard our impressions of reality as a sort of farce -- except that pragmatically, we can't do that, so we have to regard the underlying we-can't-actually-experience-it-but-here's-what-we-think-it-is reality itself as a sort of farce. That feels like an uncomfortable "turtles all the way down" place to head, but I read Donald Hoffman as saying precisely, "Hey, it's not as scary as it sounds, just try it for a few: I'm not promising any dramatic answers, in fact I'm just promising less bluster about 'here's all the stuff we know for sure' and more honesty about how little we really know." [1] Searle's third law is a fun one, and this whole talk is fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCyKNtocdZE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCyKNtocdZE . About at 25:30 in this discussion of philosophical problems of free will, there's a great aside: "Well, think about it, is there any part of the universe that we have solid evidence to believe is not fully determined? And the answer is, of course, we know from quantum mechanics, that at the most basic level, it's not deterministic. Now -- I dread saying this, 'cause Searle's third law is: whenever philosophers talk about quantum mechanics, what comes out is hot air, at best. And I won't use an even more obscene expression. Oh, by the way, that applies to a lot of things physicists say about quantum mechanics, too: Feynman said, look, don't try to think what quantum mechanics means, just do the equations, for God's sake, don't think you understand it -- well, unfortunately, I get paid to try and understand things! So. There is a part of the world that's not deterministic." And then continues back on the thread that he was on.

djsumdog 10y ago

Computer languages are much more precise and deterministic than natural language. The machine is actually quite simple compared to our biology. People once believed the world was flat, that the Earth orbited the sun. Today some think the universe is at least 13 billion years old, others only 10,000. People on both sides think the other side is misguided, ignorant or just plain stupid. Think we're in a simulation? Put down your fucking bong hippie. Also get a job. Those are important for some reason and determine your self worth. Also self worth is a thing .. that you should have. Evolutionary fitness has led humanity to believe powerful myths. Even you, yes you the rational atheist computer scientist on hacker news, believe many many myths right now. Many which don't matter, many you will never know are myths. In a million years, we will either be able to create computer simulations powerful enough to simulate part of our universe, or we'll go extinct. Humanity will be a spec on our 13 billion year+ universe. Either that or someone will press the reset switch and start us over with some other parameters. It's not a lot of comfort to people who die in Chinese factories to give us cell phones, or to Chesley Manning sitting in prison.

jackcosgrove 10y ago
"Even you, yes you the rational atheist computer scientist on hacker news, believe many many myths right now. Many which don't matter, many you will never know are myths." Who actually replicates experiments to determine what they should accept and reject? Sure, you've learned not to touch a hot stove, or that ice cream is delicious, but how do you know the age of the earth, or what the employment rate is? You know what you trust when it comes to abstract things. Scientists have a track record of delivering results, so you trust what scientists say. Fair enough - time is short and we all can't be empiricists, and scientists themselves need to divide their labor and trust each other. But still there is a medium delivering the good news to you, rather than you finding it for yourself. There are better safeguards against lying than there were in the past, but I see this more as a difference of degree rather than kind.

drostie 10y ago

This needs to be the top comment in this thread; it precisely gets to the heart of what's being said here. I mean, the other criticism is good too--I was trained as a physicist; I too balk when I see quantum mechanics used this way. (I'm a big fan of Searle's third law[1].) But I mean, the only point that we're actually seeing used here is that QM is creating a huge amount of tension for people who used to comfortably believe in an objective observer-independent reality. That's not actually a hugely divisive issue here. One issue that isn't particularly quantum but is brought up here is that there seems to be a strange embeddability problem in the most basic theories of consciousness, also highlighted by Searle as part of his "Chinese room" thought-experiment: somehow the two halves of your brain merge into one consciousness, but somehow we don't think that two people dancing really do; we don't think that the two halves of your brain keep separate accounts of reality quite the same way that we do think that two dancers do: what is the boundary? Is it just, say, a matter of the volume and frequency of communication as related to the reaction speeds of the surrounding media? Or what? Similarly the issue that Donald Hoffman's raising up-front is precisely the one that you're analogizing: hey, there's no reason to think that this language that our brain uses maps directly onto the fundamentals of the reality; rather where there is a translation between these two it's complicated at best, and you're only seeing the world after layers and layers of programming have acted on it. Maybe at the most fundamental things are crazily different -- and we can't understand them easily, if at all -- and what we've got are really effective models. When this happens, and what the universe is doing "down in the plumbing" starts to get really difficult to understand, it's going to be more useful for us to regard our impressions of reality as a sort of farce -- except that pragmatically, we can't do that, so we have to regard the underlying we-can't-actually-experience-it-but-here's-what-we-think-it-is reality itself as a sort of farce. That feels like an uncomfortable "turtles all the way down" place to head, but I read Donald Hoffman as saying precisely, "Hey, it's not as scary as it sounds, just try it for a few: I'm not promising any dramatic answers, in fact I'm just promising less bluster about 'here's all the stuff we know for sure' and more honesty about how little we really know." [1] Searle's third law is a fun one, and this whole talk is fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCyKNtocdZE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCyKNtocdZE . About at 25:30 in this discussion of philosophical problems of free will, there's a great aside: "Well, think about it, is there any part of the universe that we have solid evidence to believe is not fully determined? And the answer is, of course, we know from quantum mechanics, that at the most basic level, it's not deterministic. Now -- I dread saying this, 'cause Searle's third law is: whenever philosophers talk about quantum mechanics, what comes out is hot air, at best. And I won't use an even more obscene expression. Oh, by the way, that applies to a lot of things physicists say about quantum mechanics, too: Feynman said, look, don't try to think what quantum mechanics means, just do the equations, for God's sake, don't think you understand it -- well, unfortunately, I get paid to try and understand things! So. There is a part of the world that's not deterministic." And then continues back on the thread that he was on.