9 ms·

The Autodidactic Universe

86 points by jbotz 5y ago

goldenkey 5y ago
I always kind of thought that it was peculiar that life is almost a defined "unit" on Earth. As if it were an attribute of the universe. And I do wonder if molecules, atoms, and smaller components of the universe are self-reinforcing. Life creates life. Particles do combine and decay. Is it possible that they themselves also sort of evolved, became the most populous, and also quasi-reproduce (in the nature of Feynman transition diagrams?) EDIT: To be clear, I mean, that they would interact to produce something that could in the future, reproduce them back again. Sort of like how life doesn't immediately create duplicates, it creates babies or immature stem cells, that then eventually mature.
- HPsquared 5y ago
  Humanity could be seen as a kind of super-organism, like a slime mold - each individual being a single cell.
  - goldenkey 5y ago
    Indeed. So could energy itself in some respects. By GRE, all light cones emanate from the big bang, a single point. If you draw a spacetime graph, you literally get a complex-valued radial tree in real space and complex time where the derivative is always the speed of light. Sorta looks like slime molds, a hydra...a spaghetti monster ;-) [1] Like a Poincare disk: https://fineartamerica.com/shop/posters/poincare+disk https://fineartamerica.com/shop/posters/poincare+disk
  - medstrom 5y ago
    But humans are much more independent than the cells of a slime mold. This has always been a bit of a halting analogy for me.
    - guerrilla 5y ago
      Are they? I don't think so. The behavior of both is determined entirely by their genes and their cumulative interaction with their environment.
      - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
        well if you assume that humans have many more possible genes and cumulative interactions, and many more possible interactions to take at any point in time, then yes I guess I would say they were more independent.
      - medstrom 5y ago
        For any organism to hold together and be viable, it's critical for all its cells to obey their programming perfectly. If individual cells went off and did their own thing, it would not be viable. Our bodies line up such rebel cells and shoot them by the hundreds every second, the rare ones that somehow convince us they're on our side are called "cancer tissue" and don't contribute to our fitness. You certainly could make some analogies here, and it's an interesting topic. The mass of humankind as a substrate on which memes are selected for fitness, where more viral memes outcompete the less viral ones, now there's a fun one. But a single superorganism... I find it hard to see. Yes ultimately we obey our genes ("programming") in a way determined by our environment... but so does cancer tissue. Plus there's such a great variability in how humans might respond to the same stimuli that we're not like well-behaved cells at all, plus much of the environment surrounding each human is not determined by other humans, which throws a lot of indeterminacy into the mix.
        guerrilla 5y ago
        > Our bodies line up such rebel cells and shoot them by the hundreds every second Like how we imprison criminals and fight ISIS, etc.
      - mensetmanusman 5y ago
        Some people believe humans have an amount of free will (which by definition is supernatural as you allude to). Others believe humans have as much free will as a rock rolling down the side of a mountain. It’s either an act of faith as to which you believe (if humans have free will) or a random event (if humans don’t and the laws of the universe are set up to appear to contemplate this in some clouds of atoms). Since these are axioms, it’s impossible to prove one way or the other.
- sideshowb 5y ago
  Schrodinger answered this comprehensively afaiac - by defining life as any process that consumes order to resist the attrition of increasing entropy. As such the scale doesn't matter.
  - goldenkey 5y ago
    Any atomic mass falls under that classification partly. It is storing the energy of E=MC^2 in a somewhat stable configuration, until enough energy is spent to unleash it (exothermic process.) I don't know if these particles consume other particles in the normal sense, but they certainly interact, ie. photoelectric effect and whatnot. One could see the creation of new, higher mass particles, as a form of consumption. The lines get very blurred the more you look at it.
    - sideshowb 5y ago
      Is it a form of consumption- only if heat is released I guess? It is presumably a sliding scale, though, in terms of some things more actively consuming order than others. If you want to define a proton as slightly alive, fine, though it's not very proactive in its consuming of things, it just waits around to bump into the right particle at the right speed. An amoeba is considerably more proactive about it, a fly even more so. I'm not trying to retreat to the old notion of "movement" as a criterion for life here, there is something else that defines this scale (given the known correspondence between information and entropy - computation?) I'm guessing Schrodinger had thought about the atomic mass thing, though. I'd check out his very short and readable "What is life?" if you haven't already.
      - goldenkey 5y ago
        I have glanced over Shrodinger's "What Is Life?" previously. Life is thermodynamics, information/entropy/computational like you said. Clearly the lines are blurred and the definition of life in biology textbooks is quite poor. Still, this all begs the question of whether the particles that dominate our universe are species or are inherent from the physical laws. Then when you consider that the laws themselves may be species ..well..shoot me already. My head has begun to hurt.
- monkeycantype 5y ago
  There’s an interesting idea that life began around hydrothermal vents in the ocean, and that cavities in the vent mound could have created the enclosure which contained the biological molecules, prior to the evolution of the cell membrane I like to think of this as meaning there may have been networks of biological molecules evolving metabolism networks perhaps for hundreds of millions of years before the first cell, and that perhaps both metabolism and viruses predate the cell
- medstrom 5y ago
  1. What do you mean by self-reinforcing? Self-replicating? 2. I think using the term reproduction for this is stretching the term to the point of uselessness. I mean, for example in a chemical solution you have a redox reaction where molecules on one side of the "equation" turn into the molecules on the other side and back in a cyclical loop, but I wouldn't say that they are "reproducing", as I don't know what the point of saying so would be. The redox reaction and the way organisms reproduce are two of many kinds of cyclical processes. At least that seems to me an useful distinction.
  - goldenkey 5y ago
    I mean that just like life is a specific case of an optimization problem, perhaps the particle types are too. They survived, were the fittest, and then became populous through mechanisms of self-reinforcement.
    - cmeacham98 5y ago
      Unlikely for two reasons: 1. Life looks like an optimization problem because living things die often and have to compete for limited resources. Electrons however stick around much longer and don't need oxygen to survive. 2. If this was true, we'd expect to see varying properties for the same type of elementary particle (especially those created in ex. the LHC), but we don't - all electrons act the same, even newly created ones.
      - goldenkey 5y ago
        The identical nature of classes of particles is, as far as string theory posits, due to different possible integer valued vibrational modes / harmonic frequencies. As far as regular physics is concerned, these forms are the stable ones. I don't see why that rules out self-reinforcement. Particles do compete - for energy. Energy bound to one particle is energy that isn't free or bound to a different one.
        cmeacham98 5y ago
- slver 5y ago
  I've thought long and hard about this, and I've concluded there's no difference in the nature of quarks, particles, atoms, molecules, complex molecules (like protein and DNA), cells, multicell organisms, ecosystems and societies, and so on. It's the same set of phenomena repeating at higher and higher scale. The particles we see are in constant flux of a number of their parameters, and we can see how environmental changes disturb this balance. Aggregate states of matter represent this very neatly. Just like flocks of birds fly together to protect themselves form harsh phenomena, gas condenses into liquids when temperature drops enough that standalone gas molecules become unstable. It's a long topic, and I'm kind of brushing over it superficially. Particles may reproduce themselves in even more literal sense than you describe, because we've some evidence to believe no particle truly "exists" in time, it's a phenomena that keeps recreating itself through interaction of lower level parts and forces, much like we're in constant air/food/water exchange with our environment. Our cells change, but seemingly we stay. Is an electron really the "same electron" from one moment to the next, or is it more like a swirl in a constantly moving river water?
- CuriouslyC 5y ago
  If you want to take that to the next level, consider instead of inanimate atoms and molecules moving randomly, there are only things making conscious choices.
  - goldenkey 5y ago
    Is all wave function collapse will being exercised? Is will/consciousness the RNG of nature? Synchronicity begins to make sense when this view is considered.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity
sideshowb 5y ago
Sounds like Sheldrake's ideas on morphic resonance (which they don't cite) but this time with a more complex mechanism. Wouldn't occam's razor direct us to prefer the original form? Though people have been trying to test that for years and rarely convinced anyone that it happens.
danbruc 5y ago
Reaction before actually reading the paper - no, it doesn't, at least not its fundamental laws. If the universe is not static, then its state must evolve from S[n] to S[n + 1] = evolve(S[n]). evolve() may not be deterministic, it may be discrete or continuous, but it must be fixed. If it was not fixed, then there would be a more fundamental level that governs how evolve() itself evolves. Non-fundamental laws on the other hand could very well appear to undergo a learning or adaptive process. EDIT: After skimming through the paper, the paper more or less agrees. They focus on a specific layer in a hierarchy of laws and are not concerned with the bottom of the hierarchy. More generally, we adopt the useful idea that the world can be analyzed in terms of a hierarchy of levels; the degrees of freedom and the regularities described at each level appear to observers there to be stable and unchanging or slowly changing. At the same time, when expressed in terms of the degrees of freedom and laws of a lower level, they may seem emergent and variable. We can then be agnostics as to whether there are fundamental, timeless laws down at the smallest scale.
- TuringTest 5y ago
  > but it must be fixed. If it was not fixed, then there would be a more fundamental level that governs how evolve() itself evolves. Nice hypotheses. How would you go testing it to check its validity?
  - danbruc 5y ago
    Does it actually need checking, isn't it a tautology? Either the value of a variable is fixed or there must be some function [1] that describes the evolution of the value of the variable? And this either has to end at some level with a fixed value or you have to have some infinite decent where there is always another level below, something I glossed over as an option in the original comment. [1] This makes no assumptions whether you can know or compute or whatever this function, just that there exists some function from one state to the next.
    - Tistron 5y ago
      In my mind, the fact that you could find functions describing all past states doesn't necessarily imply that there's a function, in some ontic sense, that produces or predicts future states. Saying that implies a preexisting belief in determinism, and this perspective seems to rather imply learning and/or exploring.
thesz 5y ago
Stanislaw Lem, "New Cosmogony", presented as an ArXiV paper. I think that piece is more than 30 years old. And it is not cited in literature list.
- forgotpwd16 5y ago
  Checking referred chapter in Stanislaw's book[0], Stanislaw (well, to be accurate his stand-in, Acheropoulos) says that the current universe was the result of a "game" between protocivilizations each having their own space with its physical laws. Actually L. Smolin has been a proponent an even more similar idea, referred to as cosmological natural selection[1], first presented in Smolin's book "The life of the cosmos"[2] published in 1992, with the argument that the universe evolved analogous to biology natural selection driven (rather civilizations) by black hole collapses. [0]: https://archive.org/details/perfectvacuum00lems/ https://archive.org/details/perfectvacuum00lems/ [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_natural_selection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_natural_selection [2]: https://archive.org/details/lifeofcosmos00smol/ https://archive.org/details/lifeofcosmos00smol/ Edit: fix link order
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
nmeofthestate 5y ago
How does "the universe" "learn" anything?
- andrekandre 5y ago
  ostensibly... through us...?
mannykannot 5y ago
I have a philosophical (or merely definitional) question: if this is so, would it not be the case that the real theory of everything would be that which sets out the possible laws and the constraints on how they are explored?
SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
Betteridge's' law of headlines.

86 points by jbotz 5y ago

I always kind of thought that it was peculiar that life is almost a defined "unit" on Earth. As if it were an attribute of the universe. And I do wonder if molecules, atoms, and smaller components of the universe are self-reinforcing. Life creates life. Particles do combine and decay. Is it possible that they themselves also sort of evolved, became the most populous, and also quasi-reproduce (in the nature of Feynman transition diagrams?) EDIT: To be clear, I mean, that they would interact to produce something that could in the future, reproduce them back again. Sort of like how life doesn't immediately create duplicates, it creates babies or immature stem cells, that then eventually mature.

HPsquared 5y ago
Humanity could be seen as a kind of super-organism, like a slime mold - each individual being a single cell.
- goldenkey 5y ago
  Indeed. So could energy itself in some respects. By GRE, all light cones emanate from the big bang, a single point. If you draw a spacetime graph, you literally get a complex-valued radial tree in real space and complex time where the derivative is always the speed of light. Sorta looks like slime molds, a hydra...a spaghetti monster ;-) [1] Like a Poincare disk: https://fineartamerica.com/shop/posters/poincare+disk https://fineartamerica.com/shop/posters/poincare+disk
- medstrom 5y ago
  But humans are much more independent than the cells of a slime mold. This has always been a bit of a halting analogy for me.
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    Are they? I don't think so. The behavior of both is determined entirely by their genes and their cumulative interaction with their environment.
    - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      well if you assume that humans have many more possible genes and cumulative interactions, and many more possible interactions to take at any point in time, then yes I guess I would say they were more independent.
    - medstrom 5y ago
      For any organism to hold together and be viable, it's critical for all its cells to obey their programming perfectly. If individual cells went off and did their own thing, it would not be viable. Our bodies line up such rebel cells and shoot them by the hundreds every second, the rare ones that somehow convince us they're on our side are called "cancer tissue" and don't contribute to our fitness. You certainly could make some analogies here, and it's an interesting topic. The mass of humankind as a substrate on which memes are selected for fitness, where more viral memes outcompete the less viral ones, now there's a fun one. But a single superorganism... I find it hard to see. Yes ultimately we obey our genes ("programming") in a way determined by our environment... but so does cancer tissue. Plus there's such a great variability in how humans might respond to the same stimuli that we're not like well-behaved cells at all, plus much of the environment surrounding each human is not determined by other humans, which throws a lot of indeterminacy into the mix.
      - guerrilla 5y ago
        > Our bodies line up such rebel cells and shoot them by the hundreds every second Like how we imprison criminals and fight ISIS, etc.
    - mensetmanusman 5y ago
      Some people believe humans have an amount of free will (which by definition is supernatural as you allude to). Others believe humans have as much free will as a rock rolling down the side of a mountain. It’s either an act of faith as to which you believe (if humans have free will) or a random event (if humans don’t and the laws of the universe are set up to appear to contemplate this in some clouds of atoms). Since these are axioms, it’s impossible to prove one way or the other.
sideshowb 5y ago
Schrodinger answered this comprehensively afaiac - by defining life as any process that consumes order to resist the attrition of increasing entropy. As such the scale doesn't matter.
- goldenkey 5y ago
  Any atomic mass falls under that classification partly. It is storing the energy of E=MC^2 in a somewhat stable configuration, until enough energy is spent to unleash it (exothermic process.) I don't know if these particles consume other particles in the normal sense, but they certainly interact, ie. photoelectric effect and whatnot. One could see the creation of new, higher mass particles, as a form of consumption. The lines get very blurred the more you look at it.
  - sideshowb 5y ago
    Is it a form of consumption- only if heat is released I guess? It is presumably a sliding scale, though, in terms of some things more actively consuming order than others. If you want to define a proton as slightly alive, fine, though it's not very proactive in its consuming of things, it just waits around to bump into the right particle at the right speed. An amoeba is considerably more proactive about it, a fly even more so. I'm not trying to retreat to the old notion of "movement" as a criterion for life here, there is something else that defines this scale (given the known correspondence between information and entropy - computation?) I'm guessing Schrodinger had thought about the atomic mass thing, though. I'd check out his very short and readable "What is life?" if you haven't already.
    - goldenkey 5y ago
      I have glanced over Shrodinger's "What Is Life?" previously. Life is thermodynamics, information/entropy/computational like you said. Clearly the lines are blurred and the definition of life in biology textbooks is quite poor. Still, this all begs the question of whether the particles that dominate our universe are species or are inherent from the physical laws. Then when you consider that the laws themselves may be species ..well..shoot me already. My head has begun to hurt.
monkeycantype 5y ago
There’s an interesting idea that life began around hydrothermal vents in the ocean, and that cavities in the vent mound could have created the enclosure which contained the biological molecules, prior to the evolution of the cell membrane I like to think of this as meaning there may have been networks of biological molecules evolving metabolism networks perhaps for hundreds of millions of years before the first cell, and that perhaps both metabolism and viruses predate the cell
medstrom 5y ago
1. What do you mean by self-reinforcing? Self-replicating? 2. I think using the term reproduction for this is stretching the term to the point of uselessness. I mean, for example in a chemical solution you have a redox reaction where molecules on one side of the "equation" turn into the molecules on the other side and back in a cyclical loop, but I wouldn't say that they are "reproducing", as I don't know what the point of saying so would be. The redox reaction and the way organisms reproduce are two of many kinds of cyclical processes. At least that seems to me an useful distinction.
- goldenkey 5y ago
  I mean that just like life is a specific case of an optimization problem, perhaps the particle types are too. They survived, were the fittest, and then became populous through mechanisms of self-reinforcement.
  - cmeacham98 5y ago
    Unlikely for two reasons: 1. Life looks like an optimization problem because living things die often and have to compete for limited resources. Electrons however stick around much longer and don't need oxygen to survive. 2. If this was true, we'd expect to see varying properties for the same type of elementary particle (especially those created in ex. the LHC), but we don't - all electrons act the same, even newly created ones.
    - goldenkey 5y ago
      The identical nature of classes of particles is, as far as string theory posits, due to different possible integer valued vibrational modes / harmonic frequencies. As far as regular physics is concerned, these forms are the stable ones. I don't see why that rules out self-reinforcement. Particles do compete - for energy. Energy bound to one particle is energy that isn't free or bound to a different one.
      - cmeacham98 5y ago
slver 5y ago
I've thought long and hard about this, and I've concluded there's no difference in the nature of quarks, particles, atoms, molecules, complex molecules (like protein and DNA), cells, multicell organisms, ecosystems and societies, and so on. It's the same set of phenomena repeating at higher and higher scale. The particles we see are in constant flux of a number of their parameters, and we can see how environmental changes disturb this balance. Aggregate states of matter represent this very neatly. Just like flocks of birds fly together to protect themselves form harsh phenomena, gas condenses into liquids when temperature drops enough that standalone gas molecules become unstable. It's a long topic, and I'm kind of brushing over it superficially. Particles may reproduce themselves in even more literal sense than you describe, because we've some evidence to believe no particle truly "exists" in time, it's a phenomena that keeps recreating itself through interaction of lower level parts and forces, much like we're in constant air/food/water exchange with our environment. Our cells change, but seemingly we stay. Is an electron really the "same electron" from one moment to the next, or is it more like a swirl in a constantly moving river water?
CuriouslyC 5y ago
If you want to take that to the next level, consider instead of inanimate atoms and molecules moving randomly, there are only things making conscious choices.
- goldenkey 5y ago
  Is all wave function collapse will being exercised? Is will/consciousness the RNG of nature? Synchronicity begins to make sense when this view is considered.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity

sideshowb 5y ago

Sounds like Sheldrake's ideas on morphic resonance (which they don't cite) but this time with a more complex mechanism. Wouldn't occam's razor direct us to prefer the original form? Though people have been trying to test that for years and rarely convinced anyone that it happens.

danbruc 5y ago

Reaction before actually reading the paper - no, it doesn't, at least not its fundamental laws. If the universe is not static, then its state must evolve from S[n] to S[n + 1] = evolve(S[n]). evolve() may not be deterministic, it may be discrete or continuous, but it must be fixed. If it was not fixed, then there would be a more fundamental level that governs how evolve() itself evolves. Non-fundamental laws on the other hand could very well appear to undergo a learning or adaptive process. EDIT: After skimming through the paper, the paper more or less agrees. They focus on a specific layer in a hierarchy of laws and are not concerned with the bottom of the hierarchy. More generally, we adopt the useful idea that the world can be analyzed in terms of a hierarchy of levels; the degrees of freedom and the regularities described at each level appear to observers there to be stable and unchanging or slowly changing. At the same time, when expressed in terms of the degrees of freedom and laws of a lower level, they may seem emergent and variable. We can then be agnostics as to whether there are fundamental, timeless laws down at the smallest scale.

TuringTest 5y ago
> but it must be fixed. If it was not fixed, then there would be a more fundamental level that governs how evolve() itself evolves. Nice hypotheses. How would you go testing it to check its validity?
- danbruc 5y ago
  Does it actually need checking, isn't it a tautology? Either the value of a variable is fixed or there must be some function [1] that describes the evolution of the value of the variable? And this either has to end at some level with a fixed value or you have to have some infinite decent where there is always another level below, something I glossed over as an option in the original comment. [1] This makes no assumptions whether you can know or compute or whatever this function, just that there exists some function from one state to the next.
  - Tistron 5y ago
    In my mind, the fact that you could find functions describing all past states doesn't necessarily imply that there's a function, in some ontic sense, that produces or predicts future states. Saying that implies a preexisting belief in determinism, and this perspective seems to rather imply learning and/or exploring.

thesz 5y ago

Stanislaw Lem, "New Cosmogony", presented as an ArXiV paper. I think that piece is more than 30 years old. And it is not cited in literature list.

forgotpwd16 5y ago
Checking referred chapter in Stanislaw's book[0], Stanislaw (well, to be accurate his stand-in, Acheropoulos) says that the current universe was the result of a "game" between protocivilizations each having their own space with its physical laws. Actually L. Smolin has been a proponent an even more similar idea, referred to as cosmological natural selection[1], first presented in Smolin's book "The life of the cosmos"[2] published in 1992, with the argument that the universe evolved analogous to biology natural selection driven (rather civilizations) by black hole collapses. [0]: https://archive.org/details/perfectvacuum00lems/ https://archive.org/details/perfectvacuum00lems/ [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_natural_selection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_natural_selection [2]: https://archive.org/details/lifeofcosmos00smol/ https://archive.org/details/lifeofcosmos00smol/ Edit: fix link order

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

nmeofthestate 5y ago

How does "the universe" "learn" anything?

andrekandre 5y ago
ostensibly... through us...?

mannykannot 5y ago

I have a philosophical (or merely definitional) question: if this is so, would it not be the case that the real theory of everything would be that which sets out the possible laws and the constraints on how they are explored?

SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago

Betteridge's' law of headlines.