15 ms·

The Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (2007)

77 points by aerialfrog 3y ago

Tomte 3y ago
Also PBS Spacetime: https://www.pbs.org/video/what-if-the-universe-is-math-mysv4q/ https://www.pbs.org/video/what-if-the-universe-is-math-mysv4...
falcor84 3y ago
Should add (2007) for the publication date, or even (13.8 bya) if referring to when that took place.
thriftwy 3y ago
Then what is consciousness? People keep telling me that consciousness is just some illusion which happens inside brain neural network. However, in case of mathematical universe hypothesis, nothing really happens. If you have a mathematical universe with seed 42, which you spend a lot of effort actually simulating, it is not in any way different from a mathematical universe with seed 43, which you don't. Neural networks have exactly the same zero amount of consciousness in both cases. Why do we feel that we exist? Who does the feeling part?
- maxlamb 3y ago
  consciousness is just a real-time continuous representation of time/space, i.e. of the parts of the universe in front of us (and some of it already within us, i.e. memory and imagination).
  - thriftwy 3y ago
    No, it's not. I feel that I exist. I can represent time/space in a computer program. Nothing would feel that it exists there. Overall, I feel I'm trying to push against another philosophical maxim that I know: "If somebody tells you that consciousness does not exist, it's all just measurement and neuron signals - believe them"
    - antonvs 3y ago
      What is that maxim supposed to mean? My first interpretation is that it's saying that people who say that might be philosophical zombies, lacking consciousness.
    - maxlamb 3y ago
      | I can represent time/space in a computer program. Nothing would feel that it exists there. That's why I said real-time and continuous. All digital systems, at the lowest level of computations are discrete, not continuous (i.e. analog). And the changes happening in real-time, i.e. the transistors values changing in processing units are very far removed from a representation of reality. What I mean by that is that if you are watching a video of a desert on a computer screen and took a snapshot of the transistor values in a GPU/CPU happening at the same time, they is no good mapping from one to the other (Since that one screenshot may be computed by thousands of computation cycles in the GPU/CPU).
  - markburns 3y ago
    Memory is the current spacetime location's fuzzy view when looking towards the past. Imagination is the fuzzy view when looking forwards to the future or with the many-worlds view, imagination is the looking out(?) towards multiple outcomes. Consciousness is the step towards the next point in the many world multiverse. Without the ability to be blind to the future, life as we know it wouldn't exist. Nothing conscious would take risks and so complexity couldn't evolve. If you could glance to the future and see all of the laid out spacetime, there wouldn't be any interesting exploration of it. So we have to be blinkered just to exist with this level of insight into the complexities of the universe.
  - antonvs 3y ago
    As someone else observed, many computer & robotic systems have some sort of real-time continuous representation of time/space. Do you think they're conscious?
    - maxlamb 3y ago
      By continuous I also meant analog. No digital system is continuous at the lowest level of computation.
- pyinstallwoes 3y ago
  Not saying I agree with a mathematical universe hypothesis, however I have given it some thought. I'd argue that any 'operator' is consciousness in that setting. There's some quote out there by some famous mathematician or hpyscisist along the lines of "it appears the operations themselves act as if they were conscious" Even then, how we think of operations symbolically is just an emanation of a universal that we can't see in that sense; but in another sense, we are also emanations of that thing too in the sense that we (humans) are extensions of measurement and operations.
- laichzeit0 3y ago
  At high doses of psilocybin you experience the loss of ego. It's a weird feeling, where "you" are not there anymore. There is no "I". So it's definitely possible to be conscious but feel like "you" or whatever the idea you have of a self just isn't there anymore.
  - jadbox 3y ago
    Beyond the ego, what is this conscious stuff providing awareness qualia? It seems we must assert one of these options: a) consciousness is an emergent system of matter (materialism). b) matter contains elements of consciousness (panpsychism). c) matter/energy is consciousness with varying levels of complexity (monism).
    - antonvs 3y ago
      Your option (c) is idealistic monism specifically, since physical monism corresponds to materialism. And then there's: d) matter, energy, and consciousness all arise from or are different aspects of some single "substance" (neutral monism) e) consciousness and matter are "radically different kinds of things" (dualism) f) the question is unanswerable and/or incomprehensible to us (mysterianism)
      - jadbox 3y ago
        Thank you for that catch, yes, idealistic monism. Oh, I should have added E for as I already mentioned monism. D & F are also interesting positions. Neutral-monism sounds like an hegelian dialectic [the gap]: Many neutral monists hold that the terms “physical” and “mental” apply only to groups of neutral entities, not individual ones, "The stuff of which the world of our experience is composed is, in my belief, neither mind nor matter, but something more primitive than either. Both mind and matter seem to be composite, and the stuff of which they are compounded lies in a sense between the two, in a sense above them both, like a common ancestor". (Russell 1921: 10–11)
    - tsimionescu 3y ago
      Is c really a workable hypothesis? It doesn't seem it could account for most of what we observe, at least not if we don't start believing in new sun gods or something like that. Ultimately, if the world has a constant shape that looks the same to most people, it resembles what we call matter more than what we call consciousness.
- A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
  You are your brain. Your mind is a part of your brain; a part that combines a spatial-temporal sense with a future-oriented simulating function. Your brain is modelable – not only is it "a structure" in an abstract sense, it is an ordered physical structure made of molecules, and, both in whole and in part, it is reducible to a mathematical structure of highly limited complexity. "Qualia" consist of your mind's representations of external things, immediately derived from sensory input, wedded to that sense of being in space and time and the associations raised by that sense. As your brain exists within a logical system -- a structure with a mathematical model which includes an evolution function -- your brain is also a logical system which evolves through time. As for "nothing actually happens" -- the block universe hypothesis, which is strongly implied by relativity, fully accounts for this. As an aside: I think that Tegmark is basically correct, but his hypothesis is not well defined and could use further explanation.
  - mike_ivanov 3y ago
    It must feel really, really good when everything is so perfectly crystal clear and easily explainable; when there are only answers, and no questions. How it is possible, is a mystery in itself.
    - pixl97 3y ago
      Unfortunately these questions may not be answerable. For example, let's imagine a universe where all these questions are answerable,how it started and why it works can be explained. Then that universe has a vacuum meta instability and collapses into a new form. In the previous universe it was completely predictable that it would happen, but the singularity effect of the state change left a low entropy universe. Information was lost, and new physics takes over. An observer in the new universe would see a blank piece of paper and would have no idea why this paper existed and why it was blank. And could know how we got there. This universe would be a very unsatisfactory place for the inquisitive to exist.
      - mike_ivanov 3y ago
        That was irony.
- guerrilla 3y ago
  You are a body. Consciousness is your UI to the world that you generate and you use. Don't over-complicate this shit.
  - jstanley 3y ago
    That's one viewpoint, but it's not "over-complicated" to consider others. You are a consciousness. Your body is your UI to the world.
    - guerrilla 3y ago
      That reduces to solipsism or idealism, which have been explored extensively. Defenses of them are definitely over-complicated, which is why they aren't considered serious positions in philosophy anymore. Your questions are orthogonal to my answers.
      - antonvs 3y ago
        > they aren't considered serious positions in philosophy anymore. Statements like this say more about your biases than about anything happening in philosophy. As recently as 2019, Chalmers published "Idealism and the Mind-Body Problem" (https://philpapers.org/archive/CHAIAT-11.pdf https://philpapers.org/archive/CHAIAT-11.pdf), a survey of some current positions in idealism.
  - antonvs 3y ago
    Are computers conscious? If not, why not, and can they be programmed to be conscious? > Don't over-complicate this shit. One big issue that makes this difficult is that we have no understanding of how it's possible for physical matter to possess consciousness. Absolutely none, just lots of conjecture with no evidence or well-developed theory to support it. If you have a non-complicated answer to all this, you will be world-famous for solving the hard problem of consciousness (https://consc.net/papers/facing.html https://consc.net/papers/facing.html).
    - guerrilla 3y ago
- jstanley 3y ago
  > People keep telling me that consciousness is just some illusion In my view, consciousness is the only thing that can not be an illusion. If it's an illusion, who is being fooled? Consciousness isn't the illusion, it's the audience. > If you have a mathematical universe with seed 42, which you spend a lot of effort actually simulating, it is not in any way different from a mathematical universe with seed 43 Yes, this is the key point of the mathematical universe (for me). No simulation has to occur. There is no way to tell, from within the mathematical universe, whether or not anyone is running the simulation. The simulation helps someone outside find out what happens in the universe, but the stuff that happens in the universe happens whether you simulate it or not. All of the possible mathematical universes "exist" and are equally valid. "Existence" and "the passage of time" are things that only make sense within the mathematical universe. There is nothing outside.
  - thriftwy 3y ago
    Why do I have this long term feeling that I exist in a specific mathematical universe and is absent from all others, or at least represent an unique path distinct from all other paths which I am not? Who does the feeling part? Who is the audience? When you run simulation there's at least some audience, but in case of math universe there is only archeology, by definition. Mathematical object has no original, only replicas.
    - benlivengood 3y ago
      I think for humans our memory is why we only feel connected to a particular causal timeline of consciousness. For myself I am conscious of the present moment and of my memories and of my imagination. For us to be conscious of our experiences in other universes or timelines we would need a way to know what those experiences are like. In our universe memory is a cheap way of recording what the causal past was like vs. needing to compute/simulate what happens in other timelines with enough accuracy to be as fully conscious of it as we are of our memories.
  - naasking 3y ago
    > In my view, consciousness is the only thing that can not be an illusion. If it's an illusion, who is being fooled? Consciousness isn't the illusion, it's the audience. I don't why people keep being taken by this silly argument. You've merely assumed that "illusion" requires a subject. Here's a definition of illusion that doesn't require a subject: a perception that entails a false conclusion if taken at face value. There, now "consciousness is an illusion" is simply, "consciousness is a perception from which we falsely infer the existence of subjective qualities".
- CalRobert 3y ago
  Who knows? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness provides some interesting reading though. Maybe we have it backwards, and consciousness is the underlying firmament of reality and the material world emerges from that (if it even exists, of course).
  - A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
    > Maybe we have it backwards, and consciousness is the underlying firmament of reality and the material world emerges from that (if it even exists, of course). This is unsupportable, even in principle, and reduces very quickly to solipsism. There's no way to account for an objective world with this (bad) philosophy.
    - thriftwy 3y ago
      Not if you can think of some predictions from that theory that would later be proven true.
    - antonvs 3y ago
      > reduces very quickly to solipsism Not necessarily. Solipsism generally is the idea that only one's own mind exists (or at least, it's the only mind whose existence one can supposedly be certain of.) But the gp description seems to encompass something like idealistic monism, where consciousness is fundamental, but it's not necessarily that of one person's mind. This is not equivalent to solipsism in general.
    - CalRobert 3y ago
      I wasn't even trying to account for an objective world so much as to consider one possible explanation for the subjective experience of being. Though it is, admittedly, a bit of a cop out ("consciousness exists because it is existence"). I don't think it reduces to solipsism, though. I don't think anything I said precludes the existence of multiple minds?
- tommiegannert 3y ago
  > Who does the feeling part? An even more intriguing question is if there are meta-consciousnesses on humans. Let's assume humans have consciousness, and we are all just a bunch of cells. Does a cell feel conscious? Maybe, maybe not. A bacteria doing gradient descent perhaps doesn't make that many decisions. But perhaps this hunt has something similar to our hormones, and they can feel happiness. An arm? A brain? The neurons of just an eye? They can't really affect their survivability on their own, so perhaps there was no evolutionary advantage in being conscious. For something with arms, feet and brain and two eyes? They can compare the world now, to what used to be, and reason about what should be. This awareness of time and the space I effect, I'd argue is a huge part of consciousness. But what about some group of people, or the species as a whole? I'm fairly sure my cells don't understand that together they are "conscious." The same way, how could I tell if some meta-organism that includes me is considering itself conscious? Surely, if I'm capable of consciousness, anything that includes me would inherit that property? If consciousness is transitive, that would be a huge result. Then the "who" is no longer of relevance, because it's all relative: a single consciousness could be a meta-part of multiple other consciousnesses at the same time. And then we go all the way up to galaxy clusters. Are they conscious? I'm part of one. The slowness of information travel alone would make it incomprehensible for me to even observe it. If they are conscious, I would die long before I could even communicate the question. I think this time scale problem will limit our understanding of consciousness for a long time. Even just looking at groups of humans, how would we recognize if they feel themselves? We can study biological systems on our scale, but anything beyond that... Well, it just sucks. Because I'd really, really, love to know the answer.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    If you were an alien and showed up on earth, then hurt a human, you'd likely think we work at least like a semi-collective consciousness. Much like a cell that is injured starts chemically communicating problems, we'd start communicating at a meta organism against the new threat. This is one thing that's always given me the 'concern of the unknown' when it comes to AI. The potential meta consciousness abilities of AI could vastly exceeded human capabilities.
    - 3y ago
- meroes 3y ago
  Another problem (which Tegmark writes about) is math will have to change. Some of the math we study will have to be part of illusion - there is no “one” math currently, and how could something exist in MUH which isn’t computable. His vision pairs down math, much to the ire of many mathematicians. But it is not unviable, we don’t need much of math for physics.
- antonvs 3y ago
  > People keep telling me that consciousness is just some illusion which happens inside brain neural network. Ask those people what is experiencing the illusion, and whether we can program a computer to have conscious experience using the same illusion generation. It's like answering the question of "what created the universe" by saying "a god did it." It just pushes the question back. If something can experience an illusion - i.e. to use the philosophical language, "there is something it is like" to have that illusion - then it has consciousness, and the illusion has nothing to do with it.
- smlckz 3y ago
  Then you arrive at questions such as "Why do we exist?", even "Why anything exists at all, what was the need for all of this?" > Why do we feel that we exist? Who does the feeling part? There’s the non-helpful answer “I think, therefore I am.” I don’t think there’s any good answer to these questions. We can think about ourselves, we can think about existence, so we feel we exist? Let us imagine a person can not receive any external stimuli, can not send any instruction to control the movement of body, [e.g. a brain with blood circulation to keep it alive, but no input/output], in awakened state, now what should they feel? [Such a horrible state!] It seems they should feel their existence only on the basis of the functioning of their brain.
- benlivengood 3y ago
  In the mathematical universe consciousness is equivalent to a proper class (the sets that feel like something from the inside) and the intersection of that class with the possible states of our physical universe yields the possible consciousnesses in our universe. How are some sets conscious? Probably some encoded self-reference or other self-similarity. E.g. there are infinitely many integers that under Gödel numbering refer to logical statements about the same integer. If anything, that should feel like some sense of self with reference to the choice of numbering and logic. Human consciousness is possibly many layers of parallel self-references that yield additional and comparative qualia. There are almost certainly other mechanisms of achieving consciousness as well.
  - thriftwy 3y ago
    But who does that achieving of consciousness? A random seed written on a piece of paper?
    - benlivengood 3y ago
      The "who" is the set that is conscious. Just like a prime number is prime without having any external force make it so or requiring anything to embody the primeness. Primality is in the nature of the natural numbers. The claim is that consciousness is in the nature of sets. The latter does not yet have experimental evidence. It seems as reasonable to me as other possibilities like electrons are conscious or quantum fields are conscious mostly because both of those are well-described by mathematics.
      - thriftwy 3y ago
        Why do I feel like I am living in time if I am actually not in a simulation, not a Boltzmann brain, but just a random seed that is not written on a piece of paper anywhere? What is the meaning of all this, then? You are reiterating cheezy stuff about "nature" and quantum fields, ignoring the random seed part.
- naasking 3y ago
  I think the view that mathematics and logic are static is incorrect. Computers are mathematical as well. I think viewing mathematics as the study of structure, and structures can be transformed into other structures via a mathematical procedure we know of as computation resolves the difficulties.
  - thriftwy 3y ago
    You cannot transform a mathematical structure. The only thing you can do is find another structure with linked properties. But both structures are immutable. It is not possible to transform a sphere so that it turns into a cube and no spheres can be reasoned about anymore.
    - naasking 3y ago
      > You cannot transform a mathematical structure. The only thing you can do is find another structure with linked properties. But both structures are immutable. I think you're conflating the structures that describes mathematical structure with the structure itself. Like I said, mathematics is the study of structure, so the syntactic elements you're used to interacting with are themselves structures that describe other structures. These syntactic descriptions have isomorphisms to the underlying structures they're describing, but they are not the structures themselves (map is not the territory, etc.). Mathematics is larger than this immutable descriptive layer IMO. Edit: as a more concrete example, consider how we model mutable data structures and stateful session protocols in programming languages. One way is to project these into an immutable trace, as an immutable description of the object's state changes, but that trace is not the underlying structure. The underlying structure itself is still mathematical, but mutable, eg. cellular automata.
      - thriftwy 3y ago
        The idea here is that deterministic computations neither exist nor don't; regardless of whether they are being simulated. A Life pattern does not xare whether you simulate it or not. It will not become conscious in any way after your decision to simulate it.
codebolt 3y ago
One thing this hypothesis has going for it, from a purely armchair metaphysics perspective, is that it gives some kind of answer to the question 'why does anything exist'. If mathematics (or the underlying 'thing' that math describes) is objectively true or real, then it could have a platonic existence by power of its own self reference. It also explains why all physical laws are mathematical and all physical properties are quantifiable ('mathematics is the language of the universe' as Galileo said). I still don't believe in it for several reasons. But I believe that it is the only logical conclusion of a purely materialist worldview.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > If mathematics (or the underlying 'thing' that math describes) is objectively true or real, then it could have a platonic existence by power of its own self reference. Indeed; I managed to independently arrive at this part of the idea, I think even before the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis was published. It's even more cognitively unstable than Boltzmann brains, but maths is also the only thing I can think of that doesn't need to be caused in order to exist. https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2018/08/26/mathematical-universe-v-boltzmann-brains/ https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2018/08/26/mathematica...
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    > maths is also the only thing I can think of that doesn't need to be caused in order to exist I never understood this line of argument. Plainly, there is something at the beginning of the universe (or an eternal existence in some other way) which doesn't need to be caused in order to exist. So then, why do we take this notion that everything needs to have a cause to exist as some kind of rule, when it is self-evidently broken?
    - ben_w 3y ago
      The argument is "only X has property Y, therefore this other thing of unknown nature with property Y must also be an X". Well, except for the bit where X is cognitively unstable, and also for the other bit where I don't seriously believe the fact that I personally can't imagine alternatives means they don't exist.
Lucent 3y ago
Mathematical universe is obviously true yet uselessly ahead of its time in the same way as Schrodinger asserting heredity was controlled by an "aperiodic crystal" a decade before DNA was discovered.
- A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
  > Ahead of its time. > First posited by Pythagoreans 2600 years ago, and by various other people in the centuries since. > Centuries older than Christianity, Islam, and Rabbinic Judaism. It's not ahead of its time. Instead, it's a very old concept that is manifestly disfavored because it doesn't work as a folk metaphysics. (i.e. as something that the common man can understand with ease, which provides him with an explanation of the world.) It also doesn't work, within reasonable bounds, as the foundation of an ethical system.
deleted 3y ago
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mellosouls 3y ago
Related discussion from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15637074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15637074
andrewstuart 3y ago
Fancy words to say there is a grand designer. I don’t buy it. Always at the edge of human understanding we say “well we don’t understand that, so there must be a man behind the curtain”.
- panda-giddiness 3y ago
  Tegmark proposes no such thing; indeed, he may as well be proposing the exact opposite of what you claimed. He is essentially suggesting that all mathematical structures are "real", which would explain why the universe exists at all -- presumably because it is also a mathematical structure.
- telmo 3y ago
  Then it would be the "grand designer" hypothesis, wouldn't it? I notice that the big unspoken resistance to metaphysics these days is the fear that it is somehow a trick to smuggle God back into our understanding of reality. This fear can become excessive, and carry the unsavory and perhaps ironic side-effect of turning physicalism into a God that cannot be questioned.
  - antonvs 3y ago
    I've noticed that as well. I do think it tends to compromise thinking on the subject of consciousness, because it basically creates a space of questions one must not ask, taboo topics.
superb-owl 3y ago
It's nice to see this treated as an hypothesis rather than an assumption. Too many smart people I talk to take it for granted that the universe is made out of math.
- pixl97 3y ago
  Of all assumptions to make, assuming the universe is made of math is likely the least harmful.
A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
This is one of the oldest concepts in Ancient Philosophy. Not only did the Pythagoreans famously believe it, they also derived a number of other concepts from it, including Eternal Return: "The Pythagoreans too used to say that numerically the same things occur again and again. It is worth setting down a passage from the third book of Eudemus' Physics in which he paraphrases their views: > ‘One might wonder-whether or not the same time recurs as some say it does. Now we call things 'the same' in different ways: things the same in kind plainly recur - e.g. summer and winter and the other seasons and periods; again, motions recur the same in kind - for the sun completes the solstices and the equinoxes and the other movements; But if we are to believe the Pythagoreans and hold that things the same in number recur - that you will be sitting here and I shall talk to you, holding this stick, and so on for everything else - then it is plausible that the same time too recurs.’" - Simplicius Commentary on the Physics 732.23-33." The notion of a mathematical universe was also quite famous with Platonists and Neoplatonists, who debated it over centuries. There was a form of Platonic revival -- which might owe something to Spinoza and Newton -- in the Early Modern period. In the 20th century, Konrad Zuse's "Digital Physics" is explicitly a Mathematical Universe Hypothesis. The way people attribute the concept to Tegmark is somewhat laughable, IMO. He just modernized small slices of it, in a rather haphazard way.
- zoogeny 3y ago
  I just happened to have the SEP article for Parmenides [1] open. It makes the claim that Plato was strongly influenced by Socrates, Pythagoras and Parmenides. It isn't easy to understand Parmenides and there are conflicting interpretations of his arguments. But he seems to be one of the first philosophers to connect that which can be thought (or understood) with that which is real through the abstract concept of "being" (ontology). [2] In some sense, mathematics is just a formalization of the attempt to capture the totality of "what may be conceived of by thought". 1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/parmenides/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/parmenides/ 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology#History (as an aside, one of the reasons we even have the thought of Parmenides is because Simplicius wrote out a large excerpt of his work in one of his own books)
- w10-1 3y ago
pcwelder 3y ago
Relevant discussion https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HBHsFCeAMSqMD7Td7/does-the-simulation-argument-even-need-simulations https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HBHsFCeAMSqMD7Td7/does-the-s... I wondered aren't the structures where there's more randomness than what we see more likely since there are a lot of different ways for it to be random. The discussion helped me realise it's a measure problem, and a measure can be constructed according to the complexity of the mathematical structure. Makes sense, but why should the measure be constructed like that?
nologic01 3y ago
Homo sapiens is the most arrogant little pile of carbon this side of the Tanhausser gate. While every scientific advance has pushed us further and further away from the center of the universe, we just cant let go of our existential angst of being utterly irrelevant and keep our megalomaniac posturing totaly infatuated with our "specialness". There is no doubt that there something extraordinary profound in the ability of our brains to create coherent representations of reality. But there is an abyss to cross before we can assert that these imperfect, evolving and malleable mental models are actually "all there is". In fact our exciting and beneficial journey of "uncovering" the mathematical fabric of the universe may have ended already. Our mental tools (causality, initial value problems, fields etc.) are powerful but they are rather like hammers looking for nails. We have now almost a century of stagnation around any really new mathematical concepts that would help us push further into "in your face" empirical manifestations, e.g. around complex phenomena. There is no obligation that the Universe is made of nails.
- goatlover 3y ago
  The success of mathematics in science suggests there is a structure to the universe that can be modeled mathematically.
  - lordnacho 3y ago
    But anything that describes structure IS mathematics, so it's somehow tautological?
- codethief 3y ago
  > We have now almost a century of stagnation around any really new mathematical concepts that would help us push further into "in your face" empirical manifestations, e.g. around complex phenomena. Could you substantiate this rather outrageous claim with some sources?
  - nologic01 3y ago
    Me thinks the burden is on you to "easily" invalidate my claim with a single example. Our core explanatory framework (underpining eg quantum or relativity) is essentially still serviced by 19th century mathematics. NB: Actually I would be thrilled if we had such a new tool to explain the universe.
PrimeMcFly 3y ago
This fits in nicely with Woflram's theories about computational irreducibility.[0] [0]https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-have-a-path-to-the-fundamental-theory-of-physics-and-its-beautiful/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-h...
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
To grasp these arguments, one has to have done enough self-reflection to perceive the workings of the mind, where thoughts arise. If a person has not done this, then many of these arguments fall on deaf ears, and they cling to their illusions.
smlckz 3y ago
I find it interesting that we can think about [simple and complex] mathematical structures. How did we get the ability to do so and why we can do so? I distinguish between mathematical structures and "reality". From my perspective, mathematical structures are being used provide succinct description of the perceptible portion of "reality", the Universe as we say. Need all mathematical structures exist? What can we say about [biological, AI, or even theoretical] systems that can deal with abstract mathematical structures: to be able to construct, modify, specialise or generalise such structures in a extra-computable manner?
- pixl97 3y ago
  >How did we get the ability to do so and why we can do so? By having to predict or own futures? When we're deciding which tree to climb for the most fruit and balancing our choice against the one that attracts the least predators we are taking a lot of complex concepts in a very fuzzy manner. The threat we imagine may not be real. The rewards we imagine may not pan out. This reality simulator we made to survive happened to also work very well when we extend it into maths, which if math is reality would make sense.
Shawnecy 3y ago
I appreciate Sabine Hossenfelder's take on MUH[1]: "...the justification that we have for calling some mathematical structures real is that they describe what we observe. This means we have no rationale for talking about the reality of mathematics that does not describe what we observe, therefore the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis isn't scientific." "...this is a belief-based statement, not supported by evidence." [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTpp0EChDbI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTpp0EChDbI
- VirusNewbie 3y ago
  Sabine is either straw manning or didn't read the actual paper, because the whole point of Max's paper is that there's no substrate or quintessence beyond just the mathematical properties. If her counter is that "No there isn't just mathematical properties", then what is there? What is a quark if not its mathematical properties?
ngcc_hk 3y ago
What is the difference between a universe partially governed by chaos and singularities, vs one not totally ruled by maths?
speak_plainly 3y ago
If anyone is interested in some further reading on Pythagorean Number, I’d recommend ‘The Theology of Arithmetic’ attributed to Iamblichus.
loicd 3y ago
In section II.D: > If one rejects the ERH, one could argue that our universe is somehow made of stuff perfectly described by a mathematical structure, but which also has other properties that are not described by it, and cannot be described in an abstract baggage-free way. This viewpoint [...] would make Karl Popper turn in his grave, since those additional bells and whistles that make the universe non-mathematical by definition have no observable effects whatsoever. I don't think that follows. It could be that the universe is asymptotically mathematical, in the sense that any mathematical structure falls short of perfectly describing the universe, but there is always a more sophisticated mathematical structure that is a closer approximation. The problem of course is that a mathematical description is made of a finite number of symbols. It could be that the external reality hypothesis holds, but the universe can only be described in a baggage-free way with an infinite number of symbols.

77 points by aerialfrog 3y ago

Also PBS Spacetime: https://www.pbs.org/video/what-if-the-universe-is-math-mysv4q/ https://www.pbs.org/video/what-if-the-universe-is-math-mysv4...

falcor84 3y ago

Should add (2007) for the publication date, or even (13.8 bya) if referring to when that took place.

thriftwy 3y ago

Then what is consciousness? People keep telling me that consciousness is just some illusion which happens inside brain neural network. However, in case of mathematical universe hypothesis, nothing really happens. If you have a mathematical universe with seed 42, which you spend a lot of effort actually simulating, it is not in any way different from a mathematical universe with seed 43, which you don't. Neural networks have exactly the same zero amount of consciousness in both cases. Why do we feel that we exist? Who does the feeling part?

maxlamb 3y ago
consciousness is just a real-time continuous representation of time/space, i.e. of the parts of the universe in front of us (and some of it already within us, i.e. memory and imagination).
- thriftwy 3y ago
  No, it's not. I feel that I exist. I can represent time/space in a computer program. Nothing would feel that it exists there. Overall, I feel I'm trying to push against another philosophical maxim that I know: "If somebody tells you that consciousness does not exist, it's all just measurement and neuron signals - believe them"
  - antonvs 3y ago
    What is that maxim supposed to mean? My first interpretation is that it's saying that people who say that might be philosophical zombies, lacking consciousness.
  - maxlamb 3y ago
    | I can represent time/space in a computer program. Nothing would feel that it exists there. That's why I said real-time and continuous. All digital systems, at the lowest level of computations are discrete, not continuous (i.e. analog). And the changes happening in real-time, i.e. the transistors values changing in processing units are very far removed from a representation of reality. What I mean by that is that if you are watching a video of a desert on a computer screen and took a snapshot of the transistor values in a GPU/CPU happening at the same time, they is no good mapping from one to the other (Since that one screenshot may be computed by thousands of computation cycles in the GPU/CPU).
- markburns 3y ago
  Memory is the current spacetime location's fuzzy view when looking towards the past. Imagination is the fuzzy view when looking forwards to the future or with the many-worlds view, imagination is the looking out(?) towards multiple outcomes. Consciousness is the step towards the next point in the many world multiverse. Without the ability to be blind to the future, life as we know it wouldn't exist. Nothing conscious would take risks and so complexity couldn't evolve. If you could glance to the future and see all of the laid out spacetime, there wouldn't be any interesting exploration of it. So we have to be blinkered just to exist with this level of insight into the complexities of the universe.
- antonvs 3y ago
  As someone else observed, many computer & robotic systems have some sort of real-time continuous representation of time/space. Do you think they're conscious?
  - maxlamb 3y ago
    By continuous I also meant analog. No digital system is continuous at the lowest level of computation.
pyinstallwoes 3y ago
Not saying I agree with a mathematical universe hypothesis, however I have given it some thought. I'd argue that any 'operator' is consciousness in that setting. There's some quote out there by some famous mathematician or hpyscisist along the lines of "it appears the operations themselves act as if they were conscious" Even then, how we think of operations symbolically is just an emanation of a universal that we can't see in that sense; but in another sense, we are also emanations of that thing too in the sense that we (humans) are extensions of measurement and operations.
laichzeit0 3y ago
At high doses of psilocybin you experience the loss of ego. It's a weird feeling, where "you" are not there anymore. There is no "I". So it's definitely possible to be conscious but feel like "you" or whatever the idea you have of a self just isn't there anymore.
- jadbox 3y ago
  Beyond the ego, what is this conscious stuff providing awareness qualia? It seems we must assert one of these options: a) consciousness is an emergent system of matter (materialism). b) matter contains elements of consciousness (panpsychism). c) matter/energy is consciousness with varying levels of complexity (monism).
  - antonvs 3y ago
    Your option (c) is idealistic monism specifically, since physical monism corresponds to materialism. And then there's: d) matter, energy, and consciousness all arise from or are different aspects of some single "substance" (neutral monism) e) consciousness and matter are "radically different kinds of things" (dualism) f) the question is unanswerable and/or incomprehensible to us (mysterianism)
    - jadbox 3y ago
      Thank you for that catch, yes, idealistic monism. Oh, I should have added E for as I already mentioned monism. D & F are also interesting positions. Neutral-monism sounds like an hegelian dialectic [the gap]: Many neutral monists hold that the terms “physical” and “mental” apply only to groups of neutral entities, not individual ones, "The stuff of which the world of our experience is composed is, in my belief, neither mind nor matter, but something more primitive than either. Both mind and matter seem to be composite, and the stuff of which they are compounded lies in a sense between the two, in a sense above them both, like a common ancestor". (Russell 1921: 10–11)
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    Is c really a workable hypothesis? It doesn't seem it could account for most of what we observe, at least not if we don't start believing in new sun gods or something like that. Ultimately, if the world has a constant shape that looks the same to most people, it resembles what we call matter more than what we call consciousness.
A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
You are your brain. Your mind is a part of your brain; a part that combines a spatial-temporal sense with a future-oriented simulating function. Your brain is modelable – not only is it "a structure" in an abstract sense, it is an ordered physical structure made of molecules, and, both in whole and in part, it is reducible to a mathematical structure of highly limited complexity. "Qualia" consist of your mind's representations of external things, immediately derived from sensory input, wedded to that sense of being in space and time and the associations raised by that sense. As your brain exists within a logical system -- a structure with a mathematical model which includes an evolution function -- your brain is also a logical system which evolves through time. As for "nothing actually happens" -- the block universe hypothesis, which is strongly implied by relativity, fully accounts for this. As an aside: I think that Tegmark is basically correct, but his hypothesis is not well defined and could use further explanation.
- mike_ivanov 3y ago
  It must feel really, really good when everything is so perfectly crystal clear and easily explainable; when there are only answers, and no questions. How it is possible, is a mystery in itself.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Unfortunately these questions may not be answerable. For example, let's imagine a universe where all these questions are answerable,how it started and why it works can be explained. Then that universe has a vacuum meta instability and collapses into a new form. In the previous universe it was completely predictable that it would happen, but the singularity effect of the state change left a low entropy universe. Information was lost, and new physics takes over. An observer in the new universe would see a blank piece of paper and would have no idea why this paper existed and why it was blank. And could know how we got there. This universe would be a very unsatisfactory place for the inquisitive to exist.
    - mike_ivanov 3y ago
      That was irony.
guerrilla 3y ago
You are a body. Consciousness is your UI to the world that you generate and you use. Don't over-complicate this shit.
- jstanley 3y ago
  That's one viewpoint, but it's not "over-complicated" to consider others. You are a consciousness. Your body is your UI to the world.
  - guerrilla 3y ago
    That reduces to solipsism or idealism, which have been explored extensively. Defenses of them are definitely over-complicated, which is why they aren't considered serious positions in philosophy anymore. Your questions are orthogonal to my answers.
    - antonvs 3y ago
      > they aren't considered serious positions in philosophy anymore. Statements like this say more about your biases than about anything happening in philosophy. As recently as 2019, Chalmers published "Idealism and the Mind-Body Problem" (https://philpapers.org/archive/CHAIAT-11.pdf https://philpapers.org/archive/CHAIAT-11.pdf), a survey of some current positions in idealism.
- antonvs 3y ago
  Are computers conscious? If not, why not, and can they be programmed to be conscious? > Don't over-complicate this shit. One big issue that makes this difficult is that we have no understanding of how it's possible for physical matter to possess consciousness. Absolutely none, just lots of conjecture with no evidence or well-developed theory to support it. If you have a non-complicated answer to all this, you will be world-famous for solving the hard problem of consciousness (https://consc.net/papers/facing.html https://consc.net/papers/facing.html).
  - guerrilla 3y ago
jstanley 3y ago
> People keep telling me that consciousness is just some illusion In my view, consciousness is the only thing that can not be an illusion. If it's an illusion, who is being fooled? Consciousness isn't the illusion, it's the audience. > If you have a mathematical universe with seed 42, which you spend a lot of effort actually simulating, it is not in any way different from a mathematical universe with seed 43 Yes, this is the key point of the mathematical universe (for me). No simulation has to occur. There is no way to tell, from within the mathematical universe, whether or not anyone is running the simulation. The simulation helps someone outside find out what happens in the universe, but the stuff that happens in the universe happens whether you simulate it or not. All of the possible mathematical universes "exist" and are equally valid. "Existence" and "the passage of time" are things that only make sense within the mathematical universe. There is nothing outside.
- thriftwy 3y ago
  Why do I have this long term feeling that I exist in a specific mathematical universe and is absent from all others, or at least represent an unique path distinct from all other paths which I am not? Who does the feeling part? Who is the audience? When you run simulation there's at least some audience, but in case of math universe there is only archeology, by definition. Mathematical object has no original, only replicas.
  - benlivengood 3y ago
    I think for humans our memory is why we only feel connected to a particular causal timeline of consciousness. For myself I am conscious of the present moment and of my memories and of my imagination. For us to be conscious of our experiences in other universes or timelines we would need a way to know what those experiences are like. In our universe memory is a cheap way of recording what the causal past was like vs. needing to compute/simulate what happens in other timelines with enough accuracy to be as fully conscious of it as we are of our memories.
- naasking 3y ago
  > In my view, consciousness is the only thing that can not be an illusion. If it's an illusion, who is being fooled? Consciousness isn't the illusion, it's the audience. I don't why people keep being taken by this silly argument. You've merely assumed that "illusion" requires a subject. Here's a definition of illusion that doesn't require a subject: a perception that entails a false conclusion if taken at face value. There, now "consciousness is an illusion" is simply, "consciousness is a perception from which we falsely infer the existence of subjective qualities".
CalRobert 3y ago
Who knows? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness provides some interesting reading though. Maybe we have it backwards, and consciousness is the underlying firmament of reality and the material world emerges from that (if it even exists, of course).
- A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
  > Maybe we have it backwards, and consciousness is the underlying firmament of reality and the material world emerges from that (if it even exists, of course). This is unsupportable, even in principle, and reduces very quickly to solipsism. There's no way to account for an objective world with this (bad) philosophy.
  - thriftwy 3y ago
    Not if you can think of some predictions from that theory that would later be proven true.
  - antonvs 3y ago
    > reduces very quickly to solipsism Not necessarily. Solipsism generally is the idea that only one's own mind exists (or at least, it's the only mind whose existence one can supposedly be certain of.) But the gp description seems to encompass something like idealistic monism, where consciousness is fundamental, but it's not necessarily that of one person's mind. This is not equivalent to solipsism in general.
  - CalRobert 3y ago
    I wasn't even trying to account for an objective world so much as to consider one possible explanation for the subjective experience of being. Though it is, admittedly, a bit of a cop out ("consciousness exists because it is existence"). I don't think it reduces to solipsism, though. I don't think anything I said precludes the existence of multiple minds?
tommiegannert 3y ago
> Who does the feeling part? An even more intriguing question is if there are meta-consciousnesses on humans. Let's assume humans have consciousness, and we are all just a bunch of cells. Does a cell feel conscious? Maybe, maybe not. A bacteria doing gradient descent perhaps doesn't make that many decisions. But perhaps this hunt has something similar to our hormones, and they can feel happiness. An arm? A brain? The neurons of just an eye? They can't really affect their survivability on their own, so perhaps there was no evolutionary advantage in being conscious. For something with arms, feet and brain and two eyes? They can compare the world now, to what used to be, and reason about what should be. This awareness of time and the space I effect, I'd argue is a huge part of consciousness. But what about some group of people, or the species as a whole? I'm fairly sure my cells don't understand that together they are "conscious." The same way, how could I tell if some meta-organism that includes me is considering itself conscious? Surely, if I'm capable of consciousness, anything that includes me would inherit that property? If consciousness is transitive, that would be a huge result. Then the "who" is no longer of relevance, because it's all relative: a single consciousness could be a meta-part of multiple other consciousnesses at the same time. And then we go all the way up to galaxy clusters. Are they conscious? I'm part of one. The slowness of information travel alone would make it incomprehensible for me to even observe it. If they are conscious, I would die long before I could even communicate the question. I think this time scale problem will limit our understanding of consciousness for a long time. Even just looking at groups of humans, how would we recognize if they feel themselves? We can study biological systems on our scale, but anything beyond that... Well, it just sucks. Because I'd really, really, love to know the answer.
- pixl97 3y ago
  If you were an alien and showed up on earth, then hurt a human, you'd likely think we work at least like a semi-collective consciousness. Much like a cell that is injured starts chemically communicating problems, we'd start communicating at a meta organism against the new threat. This is one thing that's always given me the 'concern of the unknown' when it comes to AI. The potential meta consciousness abilities of AI could vastly exceeded human capabilities.
  - 3y ago
meroes 3y ago
Another problem (which Tegmark writes about) is math will have to change. Some of the math we study will have to be part of illusion - there is no “one” math currently, and how could something exist in MUH which isn’t computable. His vision pairs down math, much to the ire of many mathematicians. But it is not unviable, we don’t need much of math for physics.
antonvs 3y ago
> People keep telling me that consciousness is just some illusion which happens inside brain neural network. Ask those people what is experiencing the illusion, and whether we can program a computer to have conscious experience using the same illusion generation. It's like answering the question of "what created the universe" by saying "a god did it." It just pushes the question back. If something can experience an illusion - i.e. to use the philosophical language, "there is something it is like" to have that illusion - then it has consciousness, and the illusion has nothing to do with it.
smlckz 3y ago
Then you arrive at questions such as "Why do we exist?", even "Why anything exists at all, what was the need for all of this?" > Why do we feel that we exist? Who does the feeling part? There’s the non-helpful answer “I think, therefore I am.” I don’t think there’s any good answer to these questions. We can think about ourselves, we can think about existence, so we feel we exist? Let us imagine a person can not receive any external stimuli, can not send any instruction to control the movement of body, [e.g. a brain with blood circulation to keep it alive, but no input/output], in awakened state, now what should they feel? [Such a horrible state!] It seems they should feel their existence only on the basis of the functioning of their brain.
benlivengood 3y ago
In the mathematical universe consciousness is equivalent to a proper class (the sets that feel like something from the inside) and the intersection of that class with the possible states of our physical universe yields the possible consciousnesses in our universe. How are some sets conscious? Probably some encoded self-reference or other self-similarity. E.g. there are infinitely many integers that under Gödel numbering refer to logical statements about the same integer. If anything, that should feel like some sense of self with reference to the choice of numbering and logic. Human consciousness is possibly many layers of parallel self-references that yield additional and comparative qualia. There are almost certainly other mechanisms of achieving consciousness as well.
- thriftwy 3y ago
  But who does that achieving of consciousness? A random seed written on a piece of paper?
  - benlivengood 3y ago
    The "who" is the set that is conscious. Just like a prime number is prime without having any external force make it so or requiring anything to embody the primeness. Primality is in the nature of the natural numbers. The claim is that consciousness is in the nature of sets. The latter does not yet have experimental evidence. It seems as reasonable to me as other possibilities like electrons are conscious or quantum fields are conscious mostly because both of those are well-described by mathematics.
    - thriftwy 3y ago
      Why do I feel like I am living in time if I am actually not in a simulation, not a Boltzmann brain, but just a random seed that is not written on a piece of paper anywhere? What is the meaning of all this, then? You are reiterating cheezy stuff about "nature" and quantum fields, ignoring the random seed part.
naasking 3y ago
I think the view that mathematics and logic are static is incorrect. Computers are mathematical as well. I think viewing mathematics as the study of structure, and structures can be transformed into other structures via a mathematical procedure we know of as computation resolves the difficulties.
- thriftwy 3y ago
  You cannot transform a mathematical structure. The only thing you can do is find another structure with linked properties. But both structures are immutable. It is not possible to transform a sphere so that it turns into a cube and no spheres can be reasoned about anymore.
  - naasking 3y ago
    > You cannot transform a mathematical structure. The only thing you can do is find another structure with linked properties. But both structures are immutable. I think you're conflating the structures that describes mathematical structure with the structure itself. Like I said, mathematics is the study of structure, so the syntactic elements you're used to interacting with are themselves structures that describe other structures. These syntactic descriptions have isomorphisms to the underlying structures they're describing, but they are not the structures themselves (map is not the territory, etc.). Mathematics is larger than this immutable descriptive layer IMO. Edit: as a more concrete example, consider how we model mutable data structures and stateful session protocols in programming languages. One way is to project these into an immutable trace, as an immutable description of the object's state changes, but that trace is not the underlying structure. The underlying structure itself is still mathematical, but mutable, eg. cellular automata.
    - thriftwy 3y ago
      The idea here is that deterministic computations neither exist nor don't; regardless of whether they are being simulated. A Life pattern does not xare whether you simulate it or not. It will not become conscious in any way after your decision to simulate it.

codebolt 3y ago

One thing this hypothesis has going for it, from a purely armchair metaphysics perspective, is that it gives some kind of answer to the question 'why does anything exist'. If mathematics (or the underlying 'thing' that math describes) is objectively true or real, then it could have a platonic existence by power of its own self reference. It also explains why all physical laws are mathematical and all physical properties are quantifiable ('mathematics is the language of the universe' as Galileo said). I still don't believe in it for several reasons. But I believe that it is the only logical conclusion of a purely materialist worldview.

ben_w 3y ago
> If mathematics (or the underlying 'thing' that math describes) is objectively true or real, then it could have a platonic existence by power of its own self reference. Indeed; I managed to independently arrive at this part of the idea, I think even before the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis was published. It's even more cognitively unstable than Boltzmann brains, but maths is also the only thing I can think of that doesn't need to be caused in order to exist. https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2018/08/26/mathematical-universe-v-boltzmann-brains/ https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2018/08/26/mathematica...
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  > maths is also the only thing I can think of that doesn't need to be caused in order to exist I never understood this line of argument. Plainly, there is something at the beginning of the universe (or an eternal existence in some other way) which doesn't need to be caused in order to exist. So then, why do we take this notion that everything needs to have a cause to exist as some kind of rule, when it is self-evidently broken?
  - ben_w 3y ago
    The argument is "only X has property Y, therefore this other thing of unknown nature with property Y must also be an X". Well, except for the bit where X is cognitively unstable, and also for the other bit where I don't seriously believe the fact that I personally can't imagine alternatives means they don't exist.

Lucent 3y ago

Mathematical universe is obviously true yet uselessly ahead of its time in the same way as Schrodinger asserting heredity was controlled by an "aperiodic crystal" a decade before DNA was discovered.

A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
> Ahead of its time. > First posited by Pythagoreans 2600 years ago, and by various other people in the centuries since. > Centuries older than Christianity, Islam, and Rabbinic Judaism. It's not ahead of its time. Instead, it's a very old concept that is manifestly disfavored because it doesn't work as a folk metaphysics. (i.e. as something that the common man can understand with ease, which provides him with an explanation of the world.) It also doesn't work, within reasonable bounds, as the foundation of an ethical system.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

mellosouls 3y ago

Related discussion from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15637074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15637074

andrewstuart 3y ago

Fancy words to say there is a grand designer. I don’t buy it. Always at the edge of human understanding we say “well we don’t understand that, so there must be a man behind the curtain”.

panda-giddiness 3y ago
Tegmark proposes no such thing; indeed, he may as well be proposing the exact opposite of what you claimed. He is essentially suggesting that all mathematical structures are "real", which would explain why the universe exists at all -- presumably because it is also a mathematical structure.
telmo 3y ago
Then it would be the "grand designer" hypothesis, wouldn't it? I notice that the big unspoken resistance to metaphysics these days is the fear that it is somehow a trick to smuggle God back into our understanding of reality. This fear can become excessive, and carry the unsavory and perhaps ironic side-effect of turning physicalism into a God that cannot be questioned.
- antonvs 3y ago
  I've noticed that as well. I do think it tends to compromise thinking on the subject of consciousness, because it basically creates a space of questions one must not ask, taboo topics.

superb-owl 3y ago

It's nice to see this treated as an hypothesis rather than an assumption. Too many smart people I talk to take it for granted that the universe is made out of math.

pixl97 3y ago
Of all assumptions to make, assuming the universe is made of math is likely the least harmful.

A_D_E_P_T 3y ago

This is one of the oldest concepts in Ancient Philosophy. Not only did the Pythagoreans famously believe it, they also derived a number of other concepts from it, including Eternal Return: "The Pythagoreans too used to say that numerically the same things occur again and again. It is worth setting down a passage from the third book of Eudemus' Physics in which he paraphrases their views: > ‘One might wonder-whether or not the same time recurs as some say it does. Now we call things 'the same' in different ways: things the same in kind plainly recur - e.g. summer and winter and the other seasons and periods; again, motions recur the same in kind - for the sun completes the solstices and the equinoxes and the other movements; But if we are to believe the Pythagoreans and hold that things the same in number recur - that you will be sitting here and I shall talk to you, holding this stick, and so on for everything else - then it is plausible that the same time too recurs.’" - Simplicius Commentary on the Physics 732.23-33." The notion of a mathematical universe was also quite famous with Platonists and Neoplatonists, who debated it over centuries. There was a form of Platonic revival -- which might owe something to Spinoza and Newton -- in the Early Modern period. In the 20th century, Konrad Zuse's "Digital Physics" is explicitly a Mathematical Universe Hypothesis. The way people attribute the concept to Tegmark is somewhat laughable, IMO. He just modernized small slices of it, in a rather haphazard way.

zoogeny 3y ago
I just happened to have the SEP article for Parmenides [1] open. It makes the claim that Plato was strongly influenced by Socrates, Pythagoras and Parmenides. It isn't easy to understand Parmenides and there are conflicting interpretations of his arguments. But he seems to be one of the first philosophers to connect that which can be thought (or understood) with that which is real through the abstract concept of "being" (ontology). [2] In some sense, mathematics is just a formalization of the attempt to capture the totality of "what may be conceived of by thought". 1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/parmenides/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/parmenides/ 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology#History (as an aside, one of the reasons we even have the thought of Parmenides is because Simplicius wrote out a large excerpt of his work in one of his own books)
w10-1 3y ago

pcwelder 3y ago

Relevant discussion https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HBHsFCeAMSqMD7Td7/does-the-simulation-argument-even-need-simulations https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HBHsFCeAMSqMD7Td7/does-the-s... I wondered aren't the structures where there's more randomness than what we see more likely since there are a lot of different ways for it to be random. The discussion helped me realise it's a measure problem, and a measure can be constructed according to the complexity of the mathematical structure. Makes sense, but why should the measure be constructed like that?

nologic01 3y ago

Homo sapiens is the most arrogant little pile of carbon this side of the Tanhausser gate. While every scientific advance has pushed us further and further away from the center of the universe, we just cant let go of our existential angst of being utterly irrelevant and keep our megalomaniac posturing totaly infatuated with our "specialness". There is no doubt that there something extraordinary profound in the ability of our brains to create coherent representations of reality. But there is an abyss to cross before we can assert that these imperfect, evolving and malleable mental models are actually "all there is". In fact our exciting and beneficial journey of "uncovering" the mathematical fabric of the universe may have ended already. Our mental tools (causality, initial value problems, fields etc.) are powerful but they are rather like hammers looking for nails. We have now almost a century of stagnation around any really new mathematical concepts that would help us push further into "in your face" empirical manifestations, e.g. around complex phenomena. There is no obligation that the Universe is made of nails.

goatlover 3y ago
The success of mathematics in science suggests there is a structure to the universe that can be modeled mathematically.
- lordnacho 3y ago
  But anything that describes structure IS mathematics, so it's somehow tautological?
codethief 3y ago
> We have now almost a century of stagnation around any really new mathematical concepts that would help us push further into "in your face" empirical manifestations, e.g. around complex phenomena. Could you substantiate this rather outrageous claim with some sources?
- nologic01 3y ago
  Me thinks the burden is on you to "easily" invalidate my claim with a single example. Our core explanatory framework (underpining eg quantum or relativity) is essentially still serviced by 19th century mathematics. NB: Actually I would be thrilled if we had such a new tool to explain the universe.

PrimeMcFly 3y ago

This fits in nicely with Woflram's theories about computational irreducibility.[0] [0]https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-have-a-path-to-the-fundamental-theory-of-physics-and-its-beautiful/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-h...

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

To grasp these arguments, one has to have done enough self-reflection to perceive the workings of the mind, where thoughts arise. If a person has not done this, then many of these arguments fall on deaf ears, and they cling to their illusions.

smlckz 3y ago

I find it interesting that we can think about [simple and complex] mathematical structures. How did we get the ability to do so and why we can do so? I distinguish between mathematical structures and "reality". From my perspective, mathematical structures are being used provide succinct description of the perceptible portion of "reality", the Universe as we say. Need all mathematical structures exist? What can we say about [biological, AI, or even theoretical] systems that can deal with abstract mathematical structures: to be able to construct, modify, specialise or generalise such structures in a extra-computable manner?

pixl97 3y ago
>How did we get the ability to do so and why we can do so? By having to predict or own futures? When we're deciding which tree to climb for the most fruit and balancing our choice against the one that attracts the least predators we are taking a lot of complex concepts in a very fuzzy manner. The threat we imagine may not be real. The rewards we imagine may not pan out. This reality simulator we made to survive happened to also work very well when we extend it into maths, which if math is reality would make sense.

Shawnecy 3y ago

I appreciate Sabine Hossenfelder's take on MUH[1]: "...the justification that we have for calling some mathematical structures real is that they describe what we observe. This means we have no rationale for talking about the reality of mathematics that does not describe what we observe, therefore the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis isn't scientific." "...this is a belief-based statement, not supported by evidence." [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTpp0EChDbI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTpp0EChDbI

VirusNewbie 3y ago
Sabine is either straw manning or didn't read the actual paper, because the whole point of Max's paper is that there's no substrate or quintessence beyond just the mathematical properties. If her counter is that "No there isn't just mathematical properties", then what is there? What is a quark if not its mathematical properties?

ngcc_hk 3y ago

What is the difference between a universe partially governed by chaos and singularities, vs one not totally ruled by maths?

speak_plainly 3y ago

If anyone is interested in some further reading on Pythagorean Number, I’d recommend ‘The Theology of Arithmetic’ attributed to Iamblichus.

loicd 3y ago

In section II.D: > If one rejects the ERH, one could argue that our universe is somehow made of stuff perfectly described by a mathematical structure, but which also has other properties that are not described by it, and cannot be described in an abstract baggage-free way. This viewpoint [...] would make Karl Popper turn in his grave, since those additional bells and whistles that make the universe non-mathematical by definition have no observable effects whatsoever. I don't think that follows. It could be that the universe is asymptotically mathematical, in the sense that any mathematical structure falls short of perfectly describing the universe, but there is always a more sophisticated mathematical structure that is a closer approximation. The problem of course is that a mathematical description is made of a finite number of symbols. It could be that the external reality hypothesis holds, but the universe can only be described in a baggage-free way with an infinite number of symbols.