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> laws of nature "must" be shorter Coming at this from philosophy of science rather than as a physicist, I feel those quotes around "must". I think you also r

> laws of nature "must" be shorter Coming at this from philosophy of science rather than as a physicist, I feel those quotes around "must". I think you also recognise how that might be a sort of "fundamentally wrong assumption". Imagine your words replayed 50 years in the future, not on physics but applied tp the problem of general AI/sentience. "The equations that we already have are sufficient to describe human thought to 99.9999999% but they are a hodge podge of several different theories...." Whereupon a psychologist/neuroscientist in any epoch would say: "Why on Earth are you looking for a *singular*, unified explanation of human experience?" What you can have is a set of "best they can be", internally self-consistent and well evidenced theories, none of which can ever fully explain the system - and that is the nature/feature of the system. Isn't that what Godel and Russell showed us?

TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
It may be - probably is - a feature of the limits of our mental processes so far. But there's no good reason to assume the system itself just happens to mirror those limits. It would be very strange if the entire universe worked in inconsistent ways that matched the naive reasoning of some not very interesting animals on an ordinary star in the middle of nowhere.
- nonrandomstring 1y ago
  We agree on human incompleteness. One limitation of recent tree-dwellers on utterly unremarkable small blue-green planets on the western spiral arm of the galaxy might be how we think about things like "consistent"? Or "knowable"? What if those things weren't a component of intelligence at all, but features a singularity which looks different depending on which side you approach it from? In maths, that's not even weird? [0] [0] https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/yip-2025/ https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/yip-2025/

TheOtherHobbes 1y ago

It may be - probably is - a feature of the limits of our mental processes so far. But there's no good reason to assume the system itself just happens to mirror those limits. It would be very strange if the entire universe worked in inconsistent ways that matched the naive reasoning of some not very interesting animals on an ordinary star in the middle of nowhere.

nonrandomstring 1y ago
We agree on human incompleteness. One limitation of recent tree-dwellers on utterly unremarkable small blue-green planets on the western spiral arm of the galaxy might be how we think about things like "consistent"? Or "knowable"? What if those things weren't a component of intelligence at all, but features a singularity which looks different depending on which side you approach it from? In maths, that's not even weird? [0] [0] https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/yip-2025/ https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/yip-2025/