3 ms·

Assuming that c is really the speed of causality, then no, there’s a limit to large scale structures or operations in an expanding universe.

akvadrako 9y ago
I suppose that's true based on what we know. But perhaps there is a way to demonstrate it's only a temporary split and the universe will come back together when we (as in the universe) are done considering two thoughts in parallel.
danenania 9y ago
Doesn't the inflation theory contradict this? If expansion (or contraction) of spacetime can occur faster than the speed of light, then it could theoretically enact causality faster too right? Or even more theoretically, isn't it also possible that distant regions of our universe could be adjacent in other dimensions? Perhaps in some higher (or lower?) dimension, every particle in the universe is right next to each other, having never separated after the big bang. Not that any of this is particularly likely, but since we don't understand the core mechanisms of consciousness very well, it seems possible they could be operating on levels of physics that we also don't understand yet.
- jerf 9y ago
  "If expansion (or contraction) of spacetime can occur faster than the speed of light, then it could theoretically enact causality faster too right?" Well, if you're looking to claim that the universe used to be conscious prior to inflation, at which point it was torn to pieces in every direction possible simultaneously, sure. Probably not what you were fishing for, though. "Not that any of this is particularly likely, but since we don't understand the core mechanisms of consciousness very well, it seems possible they could be operating on levels of physics that we also don't understand yet." Well, if the universe is operating in that manner, it would have to be doing so with some rather tight bounds on it to ensure that we never ever have to take those things into consideration when plotting the behavior of a system. I would tend to say this falls into the "raises more questions than it answers" bucket, myself. If consciousness is a complicated phenomenon that only manifests in some sort of very small way in certain interactions, then A: what are those interactions? and B: by what mechanism is the universe even discovering those interactions? It's not hard to imagine a universe that has physics just like ours, except that a particular combination of 10 to the 11th atoms of carbon in a very precise linked order will spontaneously emit very large quantities of blue light. But without a clue as to what that may be, how is anything in the universe ever supposed to find that pattern of atoms? That is, if this is how consciousness works and there is some sort of very ill-defined, handwavey "field" associated with it, by what mechanism did anything in the universe discover how to interact with it? These are not necessarily forever unanswerable questions, but right now, they would in many ways be bigger questions than the question they are putatively being offered as the answer to.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  Doesn't the inflation theory contradict this? If expansion (or contraction) of spacetime can occur faster than the speed of light, then it could theoretically enact causality faster too right? There is no theoretical limit to the rate of metric expansion, but unfortunately metric expansion doesn’t allow for FTL communication. Let’s put aside issues of lightspeed in an expanding universe though because we don’t even need to go there to address this basic issue of why you can’t have a brain past certain limits. At some point limited by the speed of light even in a static universe, your “thoughts“ would be incredibly slow. What would it mean to have a neuron the width of the galaxy? Would you be particularly intelligent just because you had a lot of individual parts from a certain distance? There’s probably some theoretical upper bound on the optimum size for a computing body in a universe bound by c, based on the total amount of entropy which could ever be contained in a given region and the rate of signal transmission. As to adjacent dimensions and that kind of thing, who knows? In current physics that would be like magic, and magic can be whatever you want it to be after all.
  - danenania 9y ago
    M-theory (which posits additional dimensions) is obviously not observationally proven by any stretch, but it's based on mathematics and scientific principles and is respected by many prominent physicists, so I wouldn't call it the realm of magic. It does make falsifiable predictions--the problem is developing technology capable of falsifying them. An Alcubierre warp drive[1] would be capable of enacting causality faster than light, no? 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive
    - QAPereo 9y ago
      The Alcubierre drive might or might not work on our universe; it requires something which may not exist. If it did work, it would also be a time machine, and so far causality has been a safer bet. M-theory is engaging and fascinating, filled with great math, but there is no indication that it describes our reality. Worse, M-Theory flirts with unfalsifiability. All told, when looking at things like the original question raised by the article, we have to look to established theory backed by observation.
drdeca 9y ago
Ok, maybe that would impose a limit on "the entire universe", but what if we just are considering "this causally connected component" of the universe? (Aside: there may be a bit of difficulty/ambiguity in defining "this causally connected component of the universe". I think the basic reasoning should turn out the same in each of the reasonable ways to define it.) like, a person's brain can be split in 2 and have them live, iirc, so that it could split into parts that are no longer connected at some point, doesn't seem to by itself rule out the consciousness of a part I think? That isn't to say that I think "this connected component of the universe " is conscious. I don't think it is. (I believe in the existence of souls, though by that I do not mean that I am confident that a human-made AI couldn't be conscious. Maybe it could, I don't know. If it seemed to be, I think it would be best (in most contexts) to err on the side of assuming that it was? Point is, I think there is something humans have(/are) that "this connected component of the universe" doesn't.)
- QAPereo 9y ago
  This is the core of my thinking on the matter. How big could life forms like these become? Interesting thoughts require not only a complex brain, but also sufficient time for formulation. The speed of neural transmissions is about 300 kilometers per hour, implying that the signal crossing time in a human brain is about 1 millisecond. A human lifetime, then, comprises 2 trillion message-crossing times (and each crossing time is effectively amplified by rich, massively parallelized computational structuring). If both our brains and our neurons were 10 times bigger, and our lifespans and neural signaling speeds were unchanged, we’d have 10 times fewer thoughts during our lifetimes. If our brains grew enormously to say, the size of our solar system, and featured speed-of-light signaling, the same number of message crossings would require more than the entire current age of the universe, leaving no time for evolution to work its course. If a brain were as big as our galaxy, the problem would become even more severe. From the moment of its formation, there has been time for only 10,000 or so messages to travel from one side of our galaxy to the other. We can argue, then, that, it is difficult to imagine any life-like entities with complexity rivaling the human brain that occupy scales larger than the stellar size scale. Were they to exist, they wouldn’t yet have had sufficient time to actually do anything. http://nautil.us/issue/51/limits/can-a-living-creature-be-as-big-as-a-galaxy-rp http://nautil.us/issue/51/limits/can-a-living-creature-be-as...

akvadrako 9y ago

I suppose that's true based on what we know. But perhaps there is a way to demonstrate it's only a temporary split and the universe will come back together when we (as in the universe) are done considering two thoughts in parallel.

danenania 9y ago

Doesn't the inflation theory contradict this? If expansion (or contraction) of spacetime can occur faster than the speed of light, then it could theoretically enact causality faster too right? Or even more theoretically, isn't it also possible that distant regions of our universe could be adjacent in other dimensions? Perhaps in some higher (or lower?) dimension, every particle in the universe is right next to each other, having never separated after the big bang. Not that any of this is particularly likely, but since we don't understand the core mechanisms of consciousness very well, it seems possible they could be operating on levels of physics that we also don't understand yet.

jerf 9y ago
"If expansion (or contraction) of spacetime can occur faster than the speed of light, then it could theoretically enact causality faster too right?" Well, if you're looking to claim that the universe used to be conscious prior to inflation, at which point it was torn to pieces in every direction possible simultaneously, sure. Probably not what you were fishing for, though. "Not that any of this is particularly likely, but since we don't understand the core mechanisms of consciousness very well, it seems possible they could be operating on levels of physics that we also don't understand yet." Well, if the universe is operating in that manner, it would have to be doing so with some rather tight bounds on it to ensure that we never ever have to take those things into consideration when plotting the behavior of a system. I would tend to say this falls into the "raises more questions than it answers" bucket, myself. If consciousness is a complicated phenomenon that only manifests in some sort of very small way in certain interactions, then A: what are those interactions? and B: by what mechanism is the universe even discovering those interactions? It's not hard to imagine a universe that has physics just like ours, except that a particular combination of 10 to the 11th atoms of carbon in a very precise linked order will spontaneously emit very large quantities of blue light. But without a clue as to what that may be, how is anything in the universe ever supposed to find that pattern of atoms? That is, if this is how consciousness works and there is some sort of very ill-defined, handwavey "field" associated with it, by what mechanism did anything in the universe discover how to interact with it? These are not necessarily forever unanswerable questions, but right now, they would in many ways be bigger questions than the question they are putatively being offered as the answer to.
QAPereo 9y ago
Doesn't the inflation theory contradict this? If expansion (or contraction) of spacetime can occur faster than the speed of light, then it could theoretically enact causality faster too right? There is no theoretical limit to the rate of metric expansion, but unfortunately metric expansion doesn’t allow for FTL communication. Let’s put aside issues of lightspeed in an expanding universe though because we don’t even need to go there to address this basic issue of why you can’t have a brain past certain limits. At some point limited by the speed of light even in a static universe, your “thoughts“ would be incredibly slow. What would it mean to have a neuron the width of the galaxy? Would you be particularly intelligent just because you had a lot of individual parts from a certain distance? There’s probably some theoretical upper bound on the optimum size for a computing body in a universe bound by c, based on the total amount of entropy which could ever be contained in a given region and the rate of signal transmission. As to adjacent dimensions and that kind of thing, who knows? In current physics that would be like magic, and magic can be whatever you want it to be after all.
- danenania 9y ago
  M-theory (which posits additional dimensions) is obviously not observationally proven by any stretch, but it's based on mathematics and scientific principles and is respected by many prominent physicists, so I wouldn't call it the realm of magic. It does make falsifiable predictions--the problem is developing technology capable of falsifying them. An Alcubierre warp drive[1] would be capable of enacting causality faster than light, no? 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    The Alcubierre drive might or might not work on our universe; it requires something which may not exist. If it did work, it would also be a time machine, and so far causality has been a safer bet. M-theory is engaging and fascinating, filled with great math, but there is no indication that it describes our reality. Worse, M-Theory flirts with unfalsifiability. All told, when looking at things like the original question raised by the article, we have to look to established theory backed by observation.

drdeca 9y ago

Ok, maybe that would impose a limit on "the entire universe", but what if we just are considering "this causally connected component" of the universe? (Aside: there may be a bit of difficulty/ambiguity in defining "this causally connected component of the universe". I think the basic reasoning should turn out the same in each of the reasonable ways to define it.) like, a person's brain can be split in 2 and have them live, iirc, so that it could split into parts that are no longer connected at some point, doesn't seem to by itself rule out the consciousness of a part I think? That isn't to say that I think "this connected component of the universe " is conscious. I don't think it is. (I believe in the existence of souls, though by that I do not mean that I am confident that a human-made AI couldn't be conscious. Maybe it could, I don't know. If it seemed to be, I think it would be best (in most contexts) to err on the side of assuming that it was? Point is, I think there is something humans have(/are) that "this connected component of the universe" doesn't.)

QAPereo 9y ago
This is the core of my thinking on the matter. How big could life forms like these become? Interesting thoughts require not only a complex brain, but also sufficient time for formulation. The speed of neural transmissions is about 300 kilometers per hour, implying that the signal crossing time in a human brain is about 1 millisecond. A human lifetime, then, comprises 2 trillion message-crossing times (and each crossing time is effectively amplified by rich, massively parallelized computational structuring). If both our brains and our neurons were 10 times bigger, and our lifespans and neural signaling speeds were unchanged, we’d have 10 times fewer thoughts during our lifetimes. If our brains grew enormously to say, the size of our solar system, and featured speed-of-light signaling, the same number of message crossings would require more than the entire current age of the universe, leaving no time for evolution to work its course. If a brain were as big as our galaxy, the problem would become even more severe. From the moment of its formation, there has been time for only 10,000 or so messages to travel from one side of our galaxy to the other. We can argue, then, that, it is difficult to imagine any life-like entities with complexity rivaling the human brain that occupy scales larger than the stellar size scale. Were they to exist, they wouldn’t yet have had sufficient time to actually do anything. http://nautil.us/issue/51/limits/can-a-living-creature-be-as-big-as-a-galaxy-rp http://nautil.us/issue/51/limits/can-a-living-creature-be-as...