10 ms·
How to Understand the Universe When You’re Stuck Inside of It
- joe_the_user 7y agoPerhaps "understanding 'intelligence' when you're stuck inside it" is even harder and yet a lot of artificial intelligence research seems very linear and not interested in unknown unknowns. If we are following the "anthropic principle" the two questions might not be entirely unrelated.
- ncmncm 7y agoIt is even less interested in the more consequential unknown knowns, better known as "what you think you know that ain't really so". If Donald Rumsfeld could have understood this concept, we might have stayed out of Iraq.
- pcj_1000x 7y ago> This relational framework captured Smolin’s imagination, as did Leibniz’s enigmatic text The Monadology, in which Leibniz suggests that the world’s fundamental ingredient is the “monad,” If this is not evidence that Haskell is the language of the Gods, I don't know what is...
- avmich 7y agoMonads were used in APL language long before Haskell came to be. Surely all those are different monads though.
- 6thaccount2 7y agoThey are different...I can understand the APL ones. I have no idea what a "monoid in the category of endofunctors" means :)
- avmich 7y agoLook at this statement enough times over long enough period, and it starts making sense. "Category" is that central thing of the science of nodes and arrows between them. "Functor" is a mapping - a function - from a category to another category, where each node is mapped and each arrow is mapped according to node mapping. Like, if 1 in number category maps to A in character category, 2 maps to B, and there is an arrow 1->2 in number category, then this arrow should map to arrow A->B in character category. "Endofunctor" adds that the resulting category should in fact be the same as original. So, 1->2 can e.g. map to 3->4 in the same number category. "Monoid" is requirement that with the category we also have defined binary operation (let's call it X), that the operation is associative and also that category has "identity" node (let's call it I) - that is, for any A both operations A X I and I X A both produce A. It's like adding with zero. Now, this is not enough to understand monads - but it provides a foundation for what those monads, mathematically speaking, are. Consequences of these definitions can lead far :) .
- criloz2 7y agoI will not say Haskell, I will say the category theory, is all right there :)
- melling 7y agoQuanta Magazine has been producing a lot of stories that have been appearing on HN lately. An interesting aside it that Quanta was started by James Simon’s Foundation. James Simons is an interesting person. He doesn’t get the publicity of a Gates, Buffett, or Bezos. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Harris_Simons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Harris_Simons https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNznD9hMEh0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNznD9hMEh0
- consumer451 7y agoThe Numberphile YT channel managed to get a rare interview with Mr. Simons. https://youtu.be/QNznD9hMEh0 https://youtu.be/QNznD9hMEh0
- olivermarks 7y agothanks for link!
- melling 7y agoThat’s the same link I posted.
- consumer451 7y agoI'm sorry, I should have checked. I would delete my comment if there was not another interesting child.
- nikofeyn 7y agothat interview is really great. i have watched it a few times. i think it makes it clear why simons has been so successful. he doesn't seem to really second guess, just does things, delegates well, and despite being obviously brilliant, he seems to have a very practical and humble mindset. the TED interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5kIdtMJGc8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5kIdtMJGc8) is also good, despite the host's frequent vapid questions. in that interview, simons elaborates on his funding of origins of life studies and efforts.
- inopinatus 7y agoAll matter is information, all information is functional, and perception is therefore the lazy evaluation of the universe.
- newsoul2019 7y agoDoes the universe require perception in order for there to be existence? If so, does the perception require consciousness? Is consciousness constrained to the universe, or orthogonal to it?
- s_kilk 7y agoGiven that perception is a material process in-and-of the universe itself, it all gets a bit circular.
- mitchty 7y agoNo, all you need is to observe things. Be it a simple detector or conscious observer, you've extracted information from the environment. The observation implies existence, what observed it is inconsequential.
- newsoul2019 7y agoSo is entropy really about energy, or information? Or is there any difference.
- CuriousSkeptic 7y agoStatistics. Imagine any given configuration of the universe. Of all possible changes to a new configuration (think Levenshtein distance) from that configuration there’s a large set of “equivalent” (in the aggregate) configurations, let’s call those the future. There is a smaller set of configurations which we would ascribe some special character too, such as being somewhat orderly let’s call those the past. the set of possible configurations encoding a broken pot are larger then the set encodings an unbroken one. But the state brokenness of the pot is entirely a subjective things, without that interpretation of the encoding they are equally random Now if you are a “process”, a kind of pattern that can be identified as the same entity in several of those configurations, it would seem necessary for that pattern to follow some rule in which most of those “future” configurations would retain its unique characteristic. So if you throw a dart into this mess of configurations and hit such an entity, selecting any direction to move from that point at random would most likely give you a configuration with higher entropy, but in which this particular pattern would be retained. Some patterns would have a higher chance than other of being traceable along those changes, perhaps they encode a kind of anticipation of likely futures yielding a rules set which a higher likelihood of existing from one configuration to the next. Let’s call this patterns “living”
- mhet 7y agoSmolin dropped out of highschool, played in a rock band, thought himself mathematics and suddenly he is in Harvard... good jump Smolin. Flawless victory!
- davidivadavid 7y agoI thought the article was going to be a more scientific take on this fun talk by George Hotz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESXOAJRdcwQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESXOAJRdcwQ
- cr0sh 7y agoI'm not a physicist, nor a philosopher, and certainly not a mathematician - so maybe what I'm going to write will seem both naive and probably wrong, but I'm doing it anyhow. In this Quanta interview, Amanda Gefter writes: "Leibniz argued (against Newton) that there’s no fixed backdrop to the universe, no “stuff” of space; space is just a handy way of describing relationships. This relational framework captured Smolin’s imagination, as did Leibniz’s enigmatic text The Monadology, in which Leibniz suggests that the world’s fundamental ingredient is the “monad,” a kind of atom of reality, with each monad representing a unique view of the whole universe. It’s a concept that informs Smolin’s latest work as he attempts to build reality out of viewpoints, each one a partial perspective on a dynamically evolving universe. A universe as seen from the inside." For some reason, my mind went to the idea of "nodes and edges" of a graph; with the nodes being these "monads" and their relationships being the "edges", and then later in the interview...Smolin notes: "The event has relations with the rest of the universe, and that set of relations constitutes its “view” of the universe. Rather than describing an isolated system in terms of things that are measured from the outside, we’re taking the universe as constituted of relations among events." I don't know for sure if what I was thinking is the same thing as what he expresses here, but I think I might be close. Regardless, I now wonder something else: Could the colloquial concept/idea of "6 degrees of separation" apply here? If so, what implications might that have for Smolin's theory? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation#Mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation#Math... I won't pretend to have any answers here (again, assuming anything I wrote above means anything)...
- jerf 7y agoThe "six degrees of separation" arises because the graph has a particular shape that gives it that property, such as the mostly-power-lawish shape that human relationships have. It is not a general characteristic of graphs. While we know this model is too stupid-simple to be the whole story, if you imagine the universe as a naive 3d grid graph with nodes at evenly-space intervals where everything takes place, there is no "six degrees of separation" effect; distances between one node and another would be the Manhattan distance, with no N-node shortcut to another point available on average. (Already we see why this graph can't be our universe; our universe does not use the Manhattan distance metric for distance.)
- Filligree 7y agoSome of it you can only understand from inside the universe. It would be difficult at best to guess at the Born rule from a simulation.
- jonmc12 7y ago> But if your goal is to discover new, deeper laws, you need to mix with philosophers again. Some reading in this direction: "How Hume and Mach Helped Einstein Find Special Relativity", Norton "Range", Epstein. Ch 1 discusses Bool's influence on Shannon for the discovery of information theory. Ch 5 includes anecdotes and research for "Thinking Outside Experience", including the methods of analogy used by Keppler regarding theories of planetary motion. > Then there was this pragmatic turn, where the dominant mode of physics became anti-foundational, anti-philosophy. Related papers: "Analytic and Continental Philosophy, Science, and Global Philosophy", Tieszen "Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy", Hanna
- criloz2 7y agoI have been working the past two years trying to understand how would be possible to create a simulation of the universe and a lot of what Lee Smolin says resonates with some of the conclusion that I have got at the moment for example, he says that the wave function describes an ensemble of possible states of a system, example an electron, and this is equal for all the other electrons of the universe, I will more specific and say that there is a Functor that describes all the possible states of the surface of any observable system and it behaves as a wave function when that system tends to the stability. (this can be related with holographic theory) Lee Smolin that the universe is looking for maximum variability, which I think is not correct, the universe is looking for maximum stability in all matter hierarchies because it allows describing any possible surface with a Functor, and makes the simulation more easy to carry. this is big because it means that is not necessary to simulate every electron on the universe to create a good simulation of itself, or every atom, or every molecule, or even so every planet, imagine the natural numbers, we don't need to create all the sets of the natural number in memory in order to use them and we can peek at any moment at any region of the natural numbers, while the memory support it, and we will be able to make any computation over them, so why the electron can not work like that, or any kind of matter? those functors, are passed between two systems when a system observe to another system using what we have called photons. also when the universe can't describe the surface of the system with a functor that can easily be transported to the observer, this system appears as a black hole. I am 100% sure that we live in a simulation, not necessarily made by "gods", but it could be a fundamental way in which the universe behave
- criloz2 7y agoI will extend me a little and say that this is also important for AI, a good AI should be able to detect those "systems" and automatically transform then in wave functions example when we walk, we tend to transform our walk patterns to a wave function, till some unexpected change in the ambient appears, this frees our brain and allow us to think in another thing. try to walk with a pattern that does not tend to stability, while that you will never be able to use your brain to do another task, just like you brain wants stability the universe also want it. this phenomenon not only happens when we walk, we do this all the time at multiples level in the hierarchy of the mental models that we use for describing the world or our actions, which some times result in bad predictions but allow us to the think in other complex problems on a higher level of abstractions.
- motohagiography 7y agoKind of an interesting limit question though. Like what could we know about an instrument from a tune played on it, or from a collection of sheet music that may or may not have been written for it? The instrument can be thought of very loosely as representing a monad where force, reason, intent and all these other things go in and then "phenomena of type music" comes out. If the universe were monadic the way he describes, there is probably some information theory-meets-ontological limit that has to do with whether you can ever get "upstream" of these monads, of which our universe is the effect. Other than perhaps being able to discover and reproduce them.
- binnyrog 7y agohttps://pcfielders.com/fix-wifi-authentication-problem-android/ https://pcfielders.com/fix-wifi-authentication-problem-andro...
- maxerbubba 7y agoTypo: The linked paper [1] refers to Monodology and Monadology [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.04799.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.04799.pdf
- jaequery 7y agoMaybe one of the laws of the universe is that, one should never understand “it”. Perhaps we should just enjoy what we have.
- plutonorm 7y agoPerhaps those morphic resonance guys are onto something.
- dnprock 7y agoThe most interesting and mind blowing insight: "When most physicists said that the laws of physics are immutable, he said they evolve according to a kind of cosmic Darwinism."