It's interesting we have such receptivity in the HN community here on physicist-proposed metaphysics (yay!), yet in an entirely similar light - an article covering physicist Roger Penrose's 'microtubules' on HN a couple days ago, we get the reflexive "but experts say this is bunk' treatment.
Personally I don't know from Sam on either hypothesis. I'm just wondering for all things seeming equal, when do we get receptivity from the HN community and when to anticipate the knives coming out?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41696559
It can be pure chance. Who commented first, who happened to click the article, the time of day it was posted, the style of the website the article was hosted on, etc etc. it’s easy to get sucked into the illusion that the commenting population is a stationary distribution when in fact it might be highly multimodal and each thread is not a representative sample of the overall population.
Having said that, your question still stands, I suppose I’m just thinking it ought to be phrased differently? why does one article trigger more engagement than others, and why does one article trigger more engagement with certain subsets of the HN population? (Whereas your phrasing could seem to suggest there are monolithic grand narratives that describe what “The HN community thinks”)
>chance
Yes I suppose I should find some serenity in the pure chance of things.
>monolithic
Yes it would be unfair of me to interrogate as if the comment-base was a monolithic whole. So perhaps not monolithic, but still probably manifesting more shared responses to stimuli than the wider population at large. I definitely feel there's a distinct HN 'meta-personality', as I believe another replier re. organelles was alluding to. While forum moderation probably also shapes that to a degree, the meta-personality feels more the result of shared professional technical training (and knowing that others in the community are of like training, very very broadly speaking).
I think I am more likely to accept Wheeler’s path compared to Penrose’s because, although I think they may have both made category errors, Wheeler seems to have known that consciousness wasn’t the actual thing, and he wanted to work out what the actual thing was.
I think Penrose is almost in the same bucket as the panpsychic philosophers: assuming that consciousness is the important thing and trying to construct a universe in which it is emergent in certain complex things in a more concentrated way.
Personally I don’t think we even have a definition of what consciousness is and we are using it as a place holder for some property of observation that we haven’t quite nailed yet.
Penroses theories about cognition smell like bunk and I only got a physics undergraduate degree. I’m glad he has found things to do in his old age but there are not a lot of physics departments jumping to put those theories to the test.
This isn’t a “both sides” issue, it’s two separate physicists and two separate theories about different areas of physics.
> it’s two separate physicists and two separate theories about different areas of physics.
They're both touching on consciousness. Wheeler's participatory universe (least several paras of the article) & Penrose's (& coauthor's) microtubules.
Penrose was (just days ago) on Theory of Everything talking about whether consciousness affects observation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPH-SzWF46w&t=83s (tl;dw: he doesn't think it does.) Later in the same video, he actually comes down pretty hard on the participatory universe, without naming Wheeler or using the word 'participatory' (at least post-editing): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPH-SzWF46w&t=287s
The real question - which I do not intend to answer - is, "Are the same HN users who are receptive to the metaphysics here also providing the 'experts disagree' retorts?" If we were to categorize the different mindsets of HN users and study their reactions, we might be able to treat the whole as an organism and the different groups as organelles. Then we poke it with sticks for science!
I certainly like the organism / organelles metaphor, referencing it (in response to an adjacent comment about whether the community could be treated as a monolith or not). 'meta-ganism'?
As the other comments point out... most things are dynamical systems that respond to chaos theory (small inputs, big divergence in output). Many of the possible states can be reduced down to two or so poles (e.g. skepticism vs acceptance vs outrage vs indifference in our potential responses)
Trying to determine when or why a dynamical system like this goes to a specific state is Sisyphean if I put a word to it.
Novelty and memes play a part as well. If skepticism propagates faster around an idea (say Penrose's proposal) you'll get uncritical thinkers parroting. Same thing happens for the acceptance of ideas that often have no basis in reality.
This is probably one of the better descriptions of forum interaction (mid-size and up - ie past the point where you recognize some meaningful percentage of handles in any given thread)/social media that I have ever read. Much better said than my sibling comment!
It does seem like there are often strange attractors (loosely speaking), steady-states, collapse states etc that the heterogenous commenting population display organically.
I also really like that description of forum interaction. Sisyphean it might be to get to the bottom of it all, but isn't this the sort of thing marketers spend a pretty penny to attempt to accomplish? One could prepare a battery of A|B tests around articles covering a ceratin concept, change things like time of post, quality of formatting), maybe space them out over the course of a year to avoid repetitious exposure, and see which pole the comment base gravitates to.
> It is not a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.
It’s more palatable when we consider not the observation, but the information that was collapsed out of the superimposed states at the time of the observation. The universe uses lazy evaluation, and things only happen when they have effects on other things, and what we see as past depends on what we observe now, as both need to be consistent with each other.
For speed of light, a more direct analogue (though your example still makes sense) would be what is often called the “speed of sound” in numerical methods (like the finite difference method, aka FDM), which is often closely related to both temporal and spatial discretization schemes and can lead to numerical instability (cf. CFL condition, Von Neumann stability analysis, etc). It’s also related to things like stiff problems. It essentially has to do with how fast computational information propagates through the simulated domain. Note that it is still called “the speed of sound” even when you are not simulating the wave equation! (At least by my profs)
The simulation framing tends to draw deterministic connotations. I think when people think of a simulation or perhaps physical interpretations, they imagine life as happening to them, rather than through them. I think it’s easy to perceive it one way or the other, and what you seek you will find.
But something like ‘lazy evaluation’ could provide a bridge between the two views. A choice is made AND a physically compatible path is observed as if it were always so from the past to the present.
Personally, I think of the universe is alive with choice and we do get to participate.
PS. I kept a copy of Kip Thorne’s Black Holes and Time Warps on my nightstand as a kid - it filled me with fascination. Thanks Kip!
> The simulation framing tends to draw deterministic connotations.
I bristle at this because there is obviously a massive amount of probabilistic programming methodology and stochastic simulation techniques out there, but at the end of the day in terms of connotation you are probably correct…
1. The laws of the universe require unimaginable power, knowledge, and precision to implement. Its Creator must have these traits.
2. It doesn’t fail. Everything humans build requires maintenance but still fails. That this universe runs with a 100% reliability rate shows its maintainer’s power, knowledge, and perfection. It also shows He is sustaining us every second. He’s thinking about and caring for His creation.
3. Humans appear hardwired to seek who God is. So, the Creator wants us to look for them.
4. Even as children, humans have basic notions of love, justice, and are relational. The Creator is a relational, moral being who wants them to think like that.
5. All life passes through genes that carry some appearance and behavior. The higher creations raise their offspring. The Creator designed us to bear children who we teach. We’re creators in a way, too.
6. Many claim the Creator reveals Himself to them. One had objective proof, power, and outcomes that back that up (eg GetHisWord.com). The Creator has purpose for us which He helpfully shares. Jesus also lived it, too, in the same flesh before dying for our sins.
Just these six suggest that, in contrast to gaming, our world is run by God who has power, omniscience, morals, and a relationship with His people. So, that says the way to win is to be close to Him (Jesus) while playing the game by His rules. Also, to enjoy learning how it works which is endlessly deep and fun. :)
In contrast, a game engine or computer doesn’t compare mostly because of how the universe works perfectly despite billions upon billions upon billions of interactions. It can’t be overstated how unlikely that is based on all observations of reality. It’s truly astounding.
If you are willing to argue in good faith (no pun intended), I'd recommend for you to read Spinoza. Spinoza builds on your argument number one and argues that there can only be one substance, and this substance is God. In a nutshell: God is everything that exists, we do not exist outside of God (we are "modes" of God, if I remember correctly). Spinoza also argues that by virtue of being the only substance, God exists necessarily and does not have a choice.
The implications of this logic create problems for the Judeo-Christian stance. Absolute morality goes out of the window and a few other things with it as well.
The observer being part of the universe suggests that the observer becomes entangled with the superimposed states as well by the observation, and that nothing collapses.
> The universe uses lazy evaluation […]
That’s only a sensible notion if you assume that time exists outside of the universe instead of being part of it. Wheeler’s idea of space-time being non-fundamental suggests the latter.
If I'm not mistaken some gaming physics engines work this way too, am I mistaken? Something akin to avoiding calculating the details of a voxel until it is observed by the gamer?
Not quite like voxels, because that implies some higher existence defining a grid. Avoiding that requires a more local definition of existence in terms of adjacency.
I’ve always encoded it thus:
“All matter is information, all information is functional, and perception is therefore the lazy evaluation of the universe.”
In the Greg Egan edition of this thesis, the speed of light emerges as a property of evaluative propagation through a functional universe, and new forms of consciousness are encountered living within the algebraic structure of the cosmos.
Not specifically physics engines but graphics engines use "hidden surface determination" to avoid rendering what's outside the camera view. Frustrum culling, occlusion culling, LOD optimization, space-partition based clipping, etc. This video does an amazing job explaining some of those. https://youtu.be/C8YtdC8mxTU (highly recommended channel too)
Which raises the question, if a tree falls in-game, but only non-playable characters are there. Does the falling tree make a sound when it hits the ground?
all the wavefunction collapses only needed to compute future/far away collapses, we are all just thunks, evaluated because we needed for the final compute.
That's a crazy assertion to me. Is this something proven using experiments or your conjecture? I would think a pebble floating in deep space, not interacting with anything, would still exist. If you go out there you would see it having a position and velocity. That information has to be preserved and processed continuously to ensure that an observer after 10000s of years still sees a consistent state.
Wheeler suggested to expand the observations of the "double slit apparatus" into the "delayed choice experiment" which was then itself expanded into the "delayed choice quantum eraser experiment." From the Wikipedia article:
"Wheeler pointed out that when these assumptions are applied to a device of interstellar dimensions, a last-minute decision made on Earth on how to observe a photon could alter a situation established millions or even billions of years earlier."
It is an interpretation, the Copenhagen interpretation. There are other possibilities and nobody knows the real ground truth yet. All our speculations are just that
The source of his confusion is believing that all observers must share a single reality. This is not the case: as an observer of event A=a, you only share the same reality as all other observers who also measure A=a (or anything downstream of A=a). If some observer comes along and measures A=b, they split away from your reality. Only the version of that observer that saw A=a stays with you.
There is no "remote synchronization" mechanism between observers. All observations are independent, and when an observation is made, the other outcomes are not discarded, they continue "running in parallel" until another observer comes along. That is to say, from the perspective of other observers, you and your measures are also an observation they have to make (and thereby collapse).
Everything sounds so simple until we try to explain it.
If the emulation is contained inside the universe being emulated, do you think the emulated universe includes the emulation contained within it? Does the emulation now contain another emulation? If so, now many emulations?
I don't think that's unhinged. One might think the emulation must contain a subset of the state variables of the universe. But if there are no state variables that problem goes away. I have reason to believe there are no state variables.
There are two problems -- storing the state of your emulated universe (storage space) and the operating speed.
You can undoubtably run it at less than realtime, and might even be able to find a way to scrub fwd/rev through time to the interesting bits.
The bigger issue is how to store the data. If the universe is compressible we might be able to store it and operate on it. If it's not sanely compressible then we either need to use a large chunk, or all of, the universe's matter/energy to store the state of our emulator and any inhabitants of our universe would need to file written complaints in advance at Alpha Centauri if they did not consent to being subsumed into the Giant Grey Blob(tm).
It's frankly not all that clear what this even means. When cosmologists talk about the "universe," the generally mean the observable universe, which is all events that have ever happened in the past light-cone of the observer. Since space is expanding, that is constantly changing, with the expectation being that at some point, from the perspective of anything in our current galactic supercluster, everything else will become causally disconnected when the expansion rate exceeds the speed of light and will no longer be in "our" observable universe, where even then it isn't clear what "our" means as it's also likely by then that black holes will be the only baryonic matter still in existence, and there will no longer be humans, life, planets, or even light most of the time.
As those black holes degrade via Hawking radiation over however many quadrillions of quadrillions of year, without gravitationally bound superstructures of any kind, eventually all fundamental particles will be causally disconnected from all others, permanently.
What then does it mean to "emulate the universe inside the universe itself?" How do you emulate a single fundamental particle with only a single fundamental particle? What is the distinction between the emulation and the real thing? The real thing has nothing else to interact with, so it can't compute. It's state can't be measured because there is nothing to measure with.
In short, I hesitate to speculate about what can and can't be done with the universe because what the universe even is will change quite drastically over long enough spans of time.
Well, I feel like an emulator for our universe should be able to boot off simply the initial seed value and a copy of the Total Laws of Physics(tm).
If you could emulate it then you could access and see into all the parts of our universe which are currently unobservable. Of course, if you could emulate it sufficiently you should be able to scrub the timeline into the future and visit Milliways too.
Right, but isn't it a problem that a quine also requires the information contained in the language's compiler/interpreter to be fully meaningful? This would be "outside the universe" so to speak.
A minimal quine just prints itself out as "source" code. You can choose the source language to be whatever you like, such as a minimal Turing complete combinator. So all you need is an interpreter for the base level, which could be something as simple as Rule 110[1].
It really doesn't matter what Turing-complete language you choose; they can all be implemented in terms of each other, so as soon as you have your quine one language you could as well do it any other.
Sort of. The very first compiled binary of any new language has to first be written in a language that already has a compiler, and the very first compiler of any high-level language at all had to be written in assembler.
Ultimately, if you can't write a Quine directly in logic gates, which you can't because no microprocessor can output another microprocessor, you need something external to the "universe" of the language.
But in which universe does that "map" exist? Boom, you've just created an universe containing a map out of a never-constructed-universe-containing-nothing.
Both P1 and P2 of Craig's argument are problematic, although I admittedly have a hard time following the transfinite gymnastics one way or the other for P2. But for P1 it's not clear to me that there is a logical problem with something coming into existence uncaused, and we unfortunately have nearly 0 experience with something coming into existence to provide enough empirical support.
Regarding P2, there is ample cosmological evidence in the form of scientific theories like the Big Bang that provide strong support for the universe having a finite beginning.
There is nothing that comes into existence without a cause. From your innermost creative thoughts to a spot of mold on bread, to a new leaf on a tree, to the seemingly random emergence of a rain storm - all have a beginning and all have a cause.
I understand that many people believe that, but I don't take it that there is broad consensus-- or any consensus-- that the Big Bang represents the beginning of anything save our the beginning of what we can reasonably infer and observe. I think most self-respecting astrophysicists would respond to the question "Was there anything prior to the Big Bang?" with an "I don't know".
Regardless, P1 is still required to make Craig's KCA work, because P2 is compatible with the universe just happening.
Editing to account for your later comments:
>There is nothing that comes into existence without a cause. From your innermost creative thoughts to a spot of mold on bread, to a new leaf on a tree, to the seemingly random emergence of a rain storm - all have a beginning and all have a cause.
That isn't quite the same scenario. The sort of causation we observe (which is actually compatible with no causation, a la Hume) is more like shuffling around of existing matter and does not translate to direct evidence for or against the hypothesis that something can come into existence uncaused.
Only if you don't think there's there's a singularity (or singularity-replacement) in the future. Maybe against Wheeler? I can't remember.
But anyway, if there's a singularity (or suitable singularity-replacement) in both the future and the past you might be able to use something like Hawking's No-Boundary Condition theory to claim P2 is false.
Not that I do, but P2 is not rock-solid from a logic standpoint.
Well, if you accept the argument it only gets you to an infinite or at least very large number of objects that meet the stated requirements. Not one object in particular.
And here "object" is quite vague, I would assume almost all of the specifications would be unrecognizable as such to a human.
But wait a minute, by that logic wouldn't the fewest assumptions be that there was no cause that created the universe and that universe is a timeless, cause-less entity. Isn't that fewer assumptions than positing another entity that has those attributes.
The logic posted was in answer to _what_ is the cause, not _if_ there is a cause. I already made the case for there being a cause in my original post. Nothing comes into existence without a cause. The cause being a singular timeless eternal entity requires fewer assumptions than the multi-modal explanation theory the other user suggested.
Maybe "alternative explanations" is better wording. If you don't think God fits into a simplicity detector, could a simplicity detector of some sort that's external to God and every other member of the set of God-like objects complete at least a stochastic (probabilistic) scan?
That would in theory give priors for the probability of the "object" that fits the criteria given.
The logical error in your question is in the "that's external to God". Going back to my first post, the "cause" must be eternal (since it was what started time in order for existence to begin). And because this eternal cause was not affected or constrained by physical space, it had to be all-encompassing. Because of this, there could be nothing external to the cause (God).
Okay, accepting these new criteria (actually somewhat reasonable, if you accept the universe has a creator), intentionality restricts the objects that are acceptable, but if you accept extended Occam's priors that have the capability to contain God [0], then every "object" that meets the requirements and is simpler than God is a better explanation.
[0]: Not the same as the previously mentioned simplicity priors, as you brought up Occam's you must think God fits into logic.
I accept the universe has a cause because of the logic I presented earlier. Humans have no reason to believe there is existence without cause (if you can find a single example of something being created without a cause, you would change the course of human history!)
You deleted the other comment I was trying to respond to, but I'm interested in a response to the idea that an "object" that meets all the requirements you've given could be simpler than God, and therefore more likely by Occam priors.
I'm more than willing to volley these ideas with you but I'm not following. I didn't once use the word "object" so I don't follow your refutation here. Could you elaborate? Are you saying that my conclusion collapses to a single "cause" (which I'm calling God and you're calling an object?)
No, by the Principle of Multiple Explanations, every "object" that satisfies your conditions is equally viable, everything being equal.
You can slap a hypercomputational simplicity prior on that if you want, but that probably militates against the object being God, because I wouldn't expect God to be "simple" under that definition.
It's possible there are multiple explanations, I give you that. No one can know for certain. The argument against it; however, is more logically coherent and parsimonious than the multiple theory. Happy to dig into why that is if you want to go deeper.
I'm not arguing against a single "actual" cause, just that you don't know what the "actual" cause is to the extent that you can exclude all but exactly one explanation. Multiple hypotheses fit the data (or in this case the criteria I accepted for the sake of the discussion).
I'm not claiming to know to an infinitesimal degree of certainty; I'm simply presenting the evidence and making my case. There are many truths that cannot be proven in the way you'd like. Prove to me that you won't commit a murder tomorrow. Prove to me that George Washington was a real person. Prove to me that you love your family.
Who said that consciousness is "private property"? What if it's actually shared between people, like a field of some sort or another dimension, but everyone somehow gets their very own part of it? We know nothing about the nature of consciousness, so let's not assume anything about it. It might arise from the physical processes in the brain and be bounded by our known physics, sure, but it might just as well be something else entirely.
What if awareness is a field instead of a process? Like a moving magnet induces electric current in a coil of wire, decoherence in microtubules could induce qualia in the awareness field. See also: Alan Watts.
Not a mathematician and it's been a number of years since I read GEB, but my rough takeaway of the incompleteness is self-referential systems are magical because they can create statements that can't be proven in that system. "This sentence is false" or "Can God create a burrito so hot He cannot eat it" and all that.
So if Wheeler is saying the universe comes out of quantum observation, then the connection seems to be a self-referential Strange Loop of consciousness/observation/participation along the lines of "we're just the universe observing itself"
Gödel's undecidability theorems and the search for a theory of everything
"I investigate the question whether Gödel's undecidability theorems play a crucial role in the search for a unified theory of physics. I conclude that unless the structure of space-time is fundamentally discrete we can never decide whether a given theory is the final one or not. This is relevant for both canonical quantum gravity and string theory."
I think it's simply that Godel's incompleteness theorem had strong, foundation-shaking implications outside the context of mathematics alone. Philosophy and science were greatly affected.
> His incompleteness theorems meant there can be no mathematical theory of everything, no unification of what’s provable and what’s true. What mathematicians can prove depends on their starting assumptions, not on any fundamental ground truth from which all answers spring[0].
On these, you can define some paradoxes in compiler (lisp specially) by redefining predicates (functions that return either true or false). On most cases, it either returns an error, or spawns a debugger.
And also the wildly speculative conjecture that our universe will be retroactively created by a super intelligent AI in the precise manner necessary to facilitate its own existence, from which it follows that we exist for the express purpose of creating it. (If anybody knows the source I might have stolen this one from please let me know.)
Roko's basilisk isn't retrocausal, maybe you're thinking of some Nick Land thing? But even there it's hard to tell how literal he is being with the Terminator analogies (if you haven't seen the movie it has time travel in it), the sanewashed version of his thesis revolves around thermodynamics, chaos theory, and strange attractors.
There's also a Stephen Baxter novel, where a splinter group of humanity called "Wigner's Friends", believes something like this to be the case. I forget which one it is, but it's part of the Xeelee Sequence.
Stanislaw Lem, The Star Diaries, where Tichy at the same time apologizes and brags about how he retroactively tried to create/fix the world and how he failed.
Funny, one of my first thoughts upon seeing this article was that the protagonist of the story "There Is No Antimimetics Division" (by the same author) is named "Marion Wheeler" and I wondered if there was an intentional connection.
Having every ‘observer’ also ‘participate’ seems to just make it even more intractably complex? Since presumably ‘participators’ can influence each other simultaneously.
So I just don’t see how any of these theories are attractive prospects, the infinite regress seems even more severe than superdeterminism theories.
It’s quite a shame this man got stuck on something that may be literally impossible to prove.
It's not like we are any closer to resolving the measurement problem today. I wouldn't be quick to dismiss Wheeler, all alternative theories for this problem are radical or "unattractive".
Observe is bad language. It implies a conscious act. "Incident" or "Interact" seem like better roots but the conjugations are even more overloaded in terms of human meaning.
The really tough problems require minds that are wired differently and John Wheeler's mind was definitely a thing apart. Its the sort of unique mental fingerprint or aesthetic that characterizes great talents in this space (Feynman and Penrose are other examples of this trait, imho).
Compare Gravitation (the bible) and its boldness, inventiveness and playfulness with the sterile presentation of most theoretical physics textbooks before and after.
Anyway, he failed to bring on a new paradigm for "deep" physics. The intersection of geometry and quantum mechanics seems to be as elusive and mysterious as ever. But hope produced all our mental breakthroughs and, who knows, it may do so again.
> The existence of such solutions conflicts with the holographic interpretation, and their effects in a quantum theory of gravity including the holographic principle are not yet fully understood.
Going from pregeometry to spacetime as information with observer participation might in ways relate to the law of increasing functional complexity. What if observers start as other particles but join together to iterate in increasingly large combinations in order to generate increasing complexity in spacetime phenomena? Exotic particles in space might be kind of like interesting minerals forming in comets and so on.
Quanta is such a great resource! High value spend from Jim Simons vast pool of dollars.
I came across MTW’s “Gravitation” as a student in the 70’s and it inspired a positively unreasonable desire to own a copy just because it looked so beautiful. Couldn’t afford the doorstop of a book at that time but happily it is still in print 50 years later.
They are good at framing advanced science as intuitive and engaging stories, context is always appreciated.
Although, frankly, whenever I see the Quanta URL I tend to skip straight to the comments. It's too verbose to my taste, I just want to understand what the discovery is about, get an understanding of the substantive details without too much prerequisite knowledge, and understand the impact on other research and possibly on applications. But I start reading the article, and it always reads like a biography. The writing is excellent, but I'm afraid I don't always have the time for the literary angle. I am willing to spend a while understanding it but focusing on the meat of the science, the peripheral story comes after if I'm curious.
I tend to save Quanta's articles for my "slow reading" part of the day.
Exactly because of the more literary prose that I know I will enjoy but need the time to appreciate. Also, I don't think I've ever had to spend more than 10 minutes to read one of their articles, it's time well spent, or maybe I'm just nostalgic for longer-form magazines that I miss from my younger years.
It's interesting we have such receptivity in the HN community here on physicist-proposed metaphysics (yay!), yet in an entirely similar light - an article covering physicist Roger Penrose's 'microtubules' on HN a couple days ago, we get the reflexive "but experts say this is bunk' treatment.
Personally I don't know from Sam on either hypothesis. I'm just wondering for all things seeming equal, when do we get receptivity from the HN community and when to anticipate the knives coming out? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41696559
It can be pure chance. Who commented first, who happened to click the article, the time of day it was posted, the style of the website the article was hosted on, etc etc. it’s easy to get sucked into the illusion that the commenting population is a stationary distribution when in fact it might be highly multimodal and each thread is not a representative sample of the overall population.
Having said that, your question still stands, I suppose I’m just thinking it ought to be phrased differently? why does one article trigger more engagement than others, and why does one article trigger more engagement with certain subsets of the HN population? (Whereas your phrasing could seem to suggest there are monolithic grand narratives that describe what “The HN community thinks”)
>chance Yes I suppose I should find some serenity in the pure chance of things.
>monolithic
Yes it would be unfair of me to interrogate as if the comment-base was a monolithic whole. So perhaps not monolithic, but still probably manifesting more shared responses to stimuli than the wider population at large. I definitely feel there's a distinct HN 'meta-personality', as I believe another replier re. organelles was alluding to. While forum moderation probably also shapes that to a degree, the meta-personality feels more the result of shared professional technical training (and knowing that others in the community are of like training, very very broadly speaking).
I think I am more likely to accept Wheeler’s path compared to Penrose’s because, although I think they may have both made category errors, Wheeler seems to have known that consciousness wasn’t the actual thing, and he wanted to work out what the actual thing was.
I think Penrose is almost in the same bucket as the panpsychic philosophers: assuming that consciousness is the important thing and trying to construct a universe in which it is emergent in certain complex things in a more concentrated way.
Personally I don’t think we even have a definition of what consciousness is and we are using it as a place holder for some property of observation that we haven’t quite nailed yet.
Penroses theories about cognition smell like bunk and I only got a physics undergraduate degree. I’m glad he has found things to do in his old age but there are not a lot of physics departments jumping to put those theories to the test.
This isn’t a “both sides” issue, it’s two separate physicists and two separate theories about different areas of physics.
> it’s two separate physicists and two separate theories about different areas of physics.
They're both touching on consciousness. Wheeler's participatory universe (least several paras of the article) & Penrose's (& coauthor's) microtubules.
Penrose was (just days ago) on Theory of Everything talking about whether consciousness affects observation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPH-SzWF46w&t=83s (tl;dw: he doesn't think it does.) Later in the same video, he actually comes down pretty hard on the participatory universe, without naming Wheeler or using the word 'participatory' (at least post-editing): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPH-SzWF46w&t=287s
The real question - which I do not intend to answer - is, "Are the same HN users who are receptive to the metaphysics here also providing the 'experts disagree' retorts?" If we were to categorize the different mindsets of HN users and study their reactions, we might be able to treat the whole as an organism and the different groups as organelles. Then we poke it with sticks for science!
I certainly like the organism / organelles metaphor, referencing it (in response to an adjacent comment about whether the community could be treated as a monolith or not). 'meta-ganism'?
Or even bodies without organs… uh oh, shhh, no Deleuze allowed on here I think!
As the other comments point out... most things are dynamical systems that respond to chaos theory (small inputs, big divergence in output). Many of the possible states can be reduced down to two or so poles (e.g. skepticism vs acceptance vs outrage vs indifference in our potential responses)
Trying to determine when or why a dynamical system like this goes to a specific state is Sisyphean if I put a word to it.
Novelty and memes play a part as well. If skepticism propagates faster around an idea (say Penrose's proposal) you'll get uncritical thinkers parroting. Same thing happens for the acceptance of ideas that often have no basis in reality.
I’ve noticed in round table discussions where everyone is expected to comment, an idea will emerge early and then dominate future responses.
Sure, many of us seek acceptance from the group, but also, as an idea gets traction, I think it just gets harder to have an original idea.
It’s like trying to remember how a song goes while another one is playing, and I see it on HN threads (like this one!) often.
[delayed]
This is probably one of the better descriptions of forum interaction (mid-size and up - ie past the point where you recognize some meaningful percentage of handles in any given thread)/social media that I have ever read. Much better said than my sibling comment!
It does seem like there are often strange attractors (loosely speaking), steady-states, collapse states etc that the heterogenous commenting population display organically.
I also really like that description of forum interaction. Sisyphean it might be to get to the bottom of it all, but isn't this the sort of thing marketers spend a pretty penny to attempt to accomplish? One could prepare a battery of A|B tests around articles covering a ceratin concept, change things like time of post, quality of formatting), maybe space them out over the course of a year to avoid repetitious exposure, and see which pole the comment base gravitates to.
> It is not a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.
It’s more palatable when we consider not the observation, but the information that was collapsed out of the superimposed states at the time of the observation. The universe uses lazy evaluation, and things only happen when they have effects on other things, and what we see as past depends on what we observe now, as both need to be consistent with each other.
I've been compiling a list of ways in which physical reality is similar to game engines or mechanical simulation in general. Here's my list so far:
- The observer effect, quantum entanglement and wavefunction collapse --> lazy evaluation
- Speed of light --> speed of causality to resolve the object interaction problem O(n^2)
- Quanta of energy, Planck's length --> discretization of reality to limit computational precision
- Unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics --> reality is implemented with mathematics
- Parsimonious physics --> simple physical rules are less computationally expensive to evaluate
- Entropy --> stability of the simulation and a guaranteed "wind down"
For speed of light, a more direct analogue (though your example still makes sense) would be what is often called the “speed of sound” in numerical methods (like the finite difference method, aka FDM), which is often closely related to both temporal and spatial discretization schemes and can lead to numerical instability (cf. CFL condition, Von Neumann stability analysis, etc). It’s also related to things like stiff problems. It essentially has to do with how fast computational information propagates through the simulated domain. Note that it is still called “the speed of sound” even when you are not simulating the wave equation! (At least by my profs)
The simulation framing tends to draw deterministic connotations. I think when people think of a simulation or perhaps physical interpretations, they imagine life as happening to them, rather than through them. I think it’s easy to perceive it one way or the other, and what you seek you will find.
But something like ‘lazy evaluation’ could provide a bridge between the two views. A choice is made AND a physically compatible path is observed as if it were always so from the past to the present.
Personally, I think of the universe is alive with choice and we do get to participate.
PS. I kept a copy of Kip Thorne’s Black Holes and Time Warps on my nightstand as a kid - it filled me with fascination. Thanks Kip!
> The simulation framing tends to draw deterministic connotations.
I bristle at this because there is obviously a massive amount of probabilistic programming methodology and stochastic simulation techniques out there, but at the end of the day in terms of connotation you are probably correct…
Add a few more observations:
1. The laws of the universe require unimaginable power, knowledge, and precision to implement. Its Creator must have these traits.
2. It doesn’t fail. Everything humans build requires maintenance but still fails. That this universe runs with a 100% reliability rate shows its maintainer’s power, knowledge, and perfection. It also shows He is sustaining us every second. He’s thinking about and caring for His creation.
3. Humans appear hardwired to seek who God is. So, the Creator wants us to look for them.
4. Even as children, humans have basic notions of love, justice, and are relational. The Creator is a relational, moral being who wants them to think like that.
5. All life passes through genes that carry some appearance and behavior. The higher creations raise their offspring. The Creator designed us to bear children who we teach. We’re creators in a way, too.
6. Many claim the Creator reveals Himself to them. One had objective proof, power, and outcomes that back that up (eg GetHisWord.com). The Creator has purpose for us which He helpfully shares. Jesus also lived it, too, in the same flesh before dying for our sins.
Just these six suggest that, in contrast to gaming, our world is run by God who has power, omniscience, morals, and a relationship with His people. So, that says the way to win is to be close to Him (Jesus) while playing the game by His rules. Also, to enjoy learning how it works which is endlessly deep and fun. :)
In contrast, a game engine or computer doesn’t compare mostly because of how the universe works perfectly despite billions upon billions upon billions of interactions. It can’t be overstated how unlikely that is based on all observations of reality. It’s truly astounding.
If you are willing to argue in good faith (no pun intended), I'd recommend for you to read Spinoza. Spinoza builds on your argument number one and argues that there can only be one substance, and this substance is God. In a nutshell: God is everything that exists, we do not exist outside of God (we are "modes" of God, if I remember correctly). Spinoza also argues that by virtue of being the only substance, God exists necessarily and does not have a choice.
The implications of this logic create problems for the Judeo-Christian stance. Absolute morality goes out of the window and a few other things with it as well.
That's a bunch of fallacies.
The observer being part of the universe suggests that the observer becomes entangled with the superimposed states as well by the observation, and that nothing collapses.
> The universe uses lazy evaluation […]
That’s only a sensible notion if you assume that time exists outside of the universe instead of being part of it. Wheeler’s idea of space-time being non-fundamental suggests the latter.
This may be reconciled by defining the speed of light in terms of the latency of evaluation.
If I'm not mistaken some gaming physics engines work this way too, am I mistaken? Something akin to avoiding calculating the details of a voxel until it is observed by the gamer?
Not quite like voxels, because that implies some higher existence defining a grid. Avoiding that requires a more local definition of existence in terms of adjacency.
I’ve always encoded it thus:
“All matter is information, all information is functional, and perception is therefore the lazy evaluation of the universe.”
In the Greg Egan edition of this thesis, the speed of light emerges as a property of evaluative propagation through a functional universe, and new forms of consciousness are encountered living within the algebraic structure of the cosmos.
Not specifically physics engines but graphics engines use "hidden surface determination" to avoid rendering what's outside the camera view. Frustrum culling, occlusion culling, LOD optimization, space-partition based clipping, etc. This video does an amazing job explaining some of those. https://youtu.be/C8YtdC8mxTU (highly recommended channel too)
Which raises the question, if a tree falls in-game, but only non-playable characters are there. Does the falling tree make a sound when it hits the ground?
Sound is only perceived, it’s not intrinsic to the event itself.
In most games I would suspect the tree doesn't fall. Philosophy bypassed!
graphics engines do, they only display the visible pixels, the others are culled out of the calculation
all the wavefunction collapses only needed to compute future/far away collapses, we are all just thunks, evaluated because we needed for the final compute.
> The universe uses lazy evaluation
That's a crazy assertion to me. Is this something proven using experiments or your conjecture? I would think a pebble floating in deep space, not interacting with anything, would still exist. If you go out there you would see it having a position and velocity. That information has to be preserved and processed continuously to ensure that an observer after 10000s of years still sees a consistent state.
which experiment proves the universe uses lazy evaluation? this seems like interpretation
Wheeler suggested to expand the observations of the "double slit apparatus" into the "delayed choice experiment" which was then itself expanded into the "delayed choice quantum eraser experiment." From the Wikipedia article:
"Wheeler pointed out that when these assumptions are applied to a device of interstellar dimensions, a last-minute decision made on Earth on how to observe a photon could alter a situation established millions or even billions of years earlier."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed-choice_quantum_eraser
That's not to say that this is "proof" but I think this is where the notion is most directly apprehended.
Which, to be clear, then invalidates at least one of the assumptions, right?
It is an interpretation, the Copenhagen interpretation. There are other possibilities and nobody knows the real ground truth yet. All our speculations are just that
I would guess the double-slit experiment to fit this analogy.
> The universe uses lazy evaluation
Brilliant.
Thank you. I doubt I’m the first, however.
The source of his confusion is believing that all observers must share a single reality. This is not the case: as an observer of event A=a, you only share the same reality as all other observers who also measure A=a (or anything downstream of A=a). If some observer comes along and measures A=b, they split away from your reality. Only the version of that observer that saw A=a stays with you.
There is no "remote synchronization" mechanism between observers. All observations are independent, and when an observation is made, the other outcomes are not discarded, they continue "running in parallel" until another observer comes along. That is to say, from the perspective of other observers, you and your measures are also an observation they have to make (and thereby collapse).
Does this make the Law of Attraction valid, then? That what we focus on determines the reality that we traverse.
> The source of his confusion
That's a fairly strong claim when referring to one of the greatest physicists and deepest yet wide ranging thinkers of the 20th century.
Yet this is essentially the consensus interpretation of MWI.
“Hope produces space and time?”
The longer I live the more I appreciate Kurt Gödel’s proof that we can never know everything about the universe.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-godels-proof-works-202007...
You’d need something bigger than the universe to represent everything in the universe.
Not if compression is involved.
Why would you think it’s not already? What we see is the observable state, not it’s underlying representation.
This is why I have a totally unhinged belief that it might be possible to emulate the universe inside the universe itself.
Everything sounds so simple until we try to explain it.
If the emulation is contained inside the universe being emulated, do you think the emulated universe includes the emulation contained within it? Does the emulation now contain another emulation? If so, now many emulations?
Pretty sure it's emulations all the way down.
And if that is the case, the odds are basically 0 that we happen to be the first of an infinite number of universes emulating themselves
But that really has no bearing on our emulated selves. For us, this is the one reality that matters
I don't think that's unhinged. One might think the emulation must contain a subset of the state variables of the universe. But if there are no state variables that problem goes away. I have reason to believe there are no state variables.
I don't think there's any reason you couldn't but the simulation might move so slowly that it's not useful.
There are two problems -- storing the state of your emulated universe (storage space) and the operating speed.
You can undoubtably run it at less than realtime, and might even be able to find a way to scrub fwd/rev through time to the interesting bits.
The bigger issue is how to store the data. If the universe is compressible we might be able to store it and operate on it. If it's not sanely compressible then we either need to use a large chunk, or all of, the universe's matter/energy to store the state of our emulator and any inhabitants of our universe would need to file written complaints in advance at Alpha Centauri if they did not consent to being subsumed into the Giant Grey Blob(tm).
It's frankly not all that clear what this even means. When cosmologists talk about the "universe," the generally mean the observable universe, which is all events that have ever happened in the past light-cone of the observer. Since space is expanding, that is constantly changing, with the expectation being that at some point, from the perspective of anything in our current galactic supercluster, everything else will become causally disconnected when the expansion rate exceeds the speed of light and will no longer be in "our" observable universe, where even then it isn't clear what "our" means as it's also likely by then that black holes will be the only baryonic matter still in existence, and there will no longer be humans, life, planets, or even light most of the time.
As those black holes degrade via Hawking radiation over however many quadrillions of quadrillions of year, without gravitationally bound superstructures of any kind, eventually all fundamental particles will be causally disconnected from all others, permanently.
What then does it mean to "emulate the universe inside the universe itself?" How do you emulate a single fundamental particle with only a single fundamental particle? What is the distinction between the emulation and the real thing? The real thing has nothing else to interact with, so it can't compute. It's state can't be measured because there is nothing to measure with.
In short, I hesitate to speculate about what can and can't be done with the universe because what the universe even is will change quite drastically over long enough spans of time.
Well, I feel like an emulator for our universe should be able to boot off simply the initial seed value and a copy of the Total Laws of Physics(tm).
If you could emulate it then you could access and see into all the parts of our universe which are currently unobservable. Of course, if you could emulate it sufficiently you should be able to scrub the timeline into the future and visit Milliways too.
There's no point simulating a universe that lacks agents. When the last agent dies, the simulation should halt.
Well, Quine is a thing.
Right, but isn't it a problem that a quine also requires the information contained in the language's compiler/interpreter to be fully meaningful? This would be "outside the universe" so to speak.
A minimal quine just prints itself out as "source" code. You can choose the source language to be whatever you like, such as a minimal Turing complete combinator. So all you need is an interpreter for the base level, which could be something as simple as Rule 110[1].
It really doesn't matter what Turing-complete language you choose; they can all be implemented in terms of each other, so as soon as you have your quine one language you could as well do it any other.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110
Compilers are just translators. Which is why it's not too hard to write a compiler in the language that the compiler itself implements.
An assembly quine is an odd thing to even ponder.
Sort of. The very first compiled binary of any new language has to first be written in a language that already has a compiler, and the very first compiler of any high-level language at all had to be written in assembler.
Ultimately, if you can't write a Quine directly in logic gates, which you can't because no microprocessor can output another microprocessor, you need something external to the "universe" of the language.
> has to first be written in a language that already has a compiler
You only need an interpreter for that language.
Is that necessarily true for all universes?
I suppose an empty universe represents itself. Or you could have a universe with matter distributed in the shape of https://xkcd.com/688/
Can there be an empty universe? I suppose there is no "self" to represent then.
An empty universe would not have any information, or state change, and wouldn’t trigger any computation, therefore, it wouldn’t exist.
But if I include it as a variant in my Universe enum, then doesn't it exist anyway, at least as a concept, even if it's never constructed?
Then it's not a real universe but a mere symbol, I'd say. "Map vs. territory"
And in order for that symbol to exist (be expressed / thought of / conceived), it must be a part of some other existing universe that allows that...
But in which universe does that "map" exist? Boom, you've just created an universe containing a map out of a never-constructed-universe-containing-nothing.
We don't know if the Universe is finite or infinite, and also if it works in a completely logical way.
It would be funny to find this out empirically. Like in the tower of Babel?
According to the legend, they didn’t find it amusing.
I laughed at the inscription on the blackboard (the photo in the article) "Gödel's proof -- too important to be left to mathematicians".
Obligatory: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/real-3
1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.
4. This cause is uncaused, timeless, spaceless, and immaterial.
5. To create the universe, this cause must possess intentionality and decision-making capabilities.
6. Therefore, the cause of the universe is a personal, immaterial being: God.
Both P1 and P2 of Craig's argument are problematic, although I admittedly have a hard time following the transfinite gymnastics one way or the other for P2. But for P1 it's not clear to me that there is a logical problem with something coming into existence uncaused, and we unfortunately have nearly 0 experience with something coming into existence to provide enough empirical support.
Regarding P2, there is ample cosmological evidence in the form of scientific theories like the Big Bang that provide strong support for the universe having a finite beginning.
There is nothing that comes into existence without a cause. From your innermost creative thoughts to a spot of mold on bread, to a new leaf on a tree, to the seemingly random emergence of a rain storm - all have a beginning and all have a cause.
Have you experienced something different?
I understand that many people believe that, but I don't take it that there is broad consensus-- or any consensus-- that the Big Bang represents the beginning of anything save our the beginning of what we can reasonably infer and observe. I think most self-respecting astrophysicists would respond to the question "Was there anything prior to the Big Bang?" with an "I don't know".
Regardless, P1 is still required to make Craig's KCA work, because P2 is compatible with the universe just happening.
Editing to account for your later comments:
>There is nothing that comes into existence without a cause. From your innermost creative thoughts to a spot of mold on bread, to a new leaf on a tree, to the seemingly random emergence of a rain storm - all have a beginning and all have a cause.
That isn't quite the same scenario. The sort of causation we observe (which is actually compatible with no causation, a la Hume) is more like shuffling around of existing matter and does not translate to direct evidence for or against the hypothesis that something can come into existence uncaused.
Only if you don't think there's there's a singularity (or singularity-replacement) in the future. Maybe against Wheeler? I can't remember.
But anyway, if there's a singularity (or suitable singularity-replacement) in both the future and the past you might be able to use something like Hawking's No-Boundary Condition theory to claim P2 is false.
Not that I do, but P2 is not rock-solid from a logic standpoint.
If you start with the conclusion (therefore God exists), you'll always be able to find a logical chain that seems to prove it true.
Well, if you accept the argument it only gets you to an infinite or at least very large number of objects that meet the stated requirements. Not one object in particular.
And here "object" is quite vague, I would assume almost all of the specifications would be unrecognizable as such to a human.
Here is the argument for a singular cause vs a plurality of causes:
1. Occam's Razor favors explanations with the fewest entities.
2. A single cause requires fewer assumptions than multiple causes.
3. Therefore, a singular cause is more parsimonious than a plural cause.
4. A singular cause ensures consistent intentionality and unified purpose.
5. Multiple causes would necessitate coordination and could result in conflicting intentions.
6. Therefore, the cause of the universe must be singular.
But wait a minute, by that logic wouldn't the fewest assumptions be that there was no cause that created the universe and that universe is a timeless, cause-less entity. Isn't that fewer assumptions than positing another entity that has those attributes.
The logic posted was in answer to _what_ is the cause, not _if_ there is a cause. I already made the case for there being a cause in my original post. Nothing comes into existence without a cause. The cause being a singular timeless eternal entity requires fewer assumptions than the multi-modal explanation theory the other user suggested.
Maybe "alternative explanations" is better wording. If you don't think God fits into a simplicity detector, could a simplicity detector of some sort that's external to God and every other member of the set of God-like objects complete at least a stochastic (probabilistic) scan?
That would in theory give priors for the probability of the "object" that fits the criteria given.
The logical error in your question is in the "that's external to God". Going back to my first post, the "cause" must be eternal (since it was what started time in order for existence to begin). And because this eternal cause was not affected or constrained by physical space, it had to be all-encompassing. Because of this, there could be nothing external to the cause (God).
Okay, accepting these new criteria (actually somewhat reasonable, if you accept the universe has a creator), intentionality restricts the objects that are acceptable, but if you accept extended Occam's priors that have the capability to contain God [0], then every "object" that meets the requirements and is simpler than God is a better explanation.
[0]: Not the same as the previously mentioned simplicity priors, as you brought up Occam's you must think God fits into logic.
I accept the universe has a cause because of the logic I presented earlier. Humans have no reason to believe there is existence without cause (if you can find a single example of something being created without a cause, you would change the course of human history!)
You deleted the other comment I was trying to respond to, but I'm interested in a response to the idea that an "object" that meets all the requirements you've given could be simpler than God, and therefore more likely by Occam priors.
I'm more than willing to volley these ideas with you but I'm not following. I didn't once use the word "object" so I don't follow your refutation here. Could you elaborate? Are you saying that my conclusion collapses to a single "cause" (which I'm calling God and you're calling an object?)
No, by the Principle of Multiple Explanations, every "object" that satisfies your conditions is equally viable, everything being equal.
You can slap a hypercomputational simplicity prior on that if you want, but that probably militates against the object being God, because I wouldn't expect God to be "simple" under that definition.
It's possible there are multiple explanations, I give you that. No one can know for certain. The argument against it; however, is more logically coherent and parsimonious than the multiple theory. Happy to dig into why that is if you want to go deeper.
I'm not arguing against a single "actual" cause, just that you don't know what the "actual" cause is to the extent that you can exclude all but exactly one explanation. Multiple hypotheses fit the data (or in this case the criteria I accepted for the sake of the discussion).
I'm not claiming to know to an infinitesimal degree of certainty; I'm simply presenting the evidence and making my case. There are many truths that cannot be proven in the way you'd like. Prove to me that you won't commit a murder tomorrow. Prove to me that George Washington was a real person. Prove to me that you love your family.
Who said that consciousness is "private property"? What if it's actually shared between people, like a field of some sort or another dimension, but everyone somehow gets their very own part of it? We know nothing about the nature of consciousness, so let's not assume anything about it. It might arise from the physical processes in the brain and be bounded by our known physics, sure, but it might just as well be something else entirely.
What if awareness is a field instead of a process? Like a moving magnet induces electric current in a coil of wire, decoherence in microtubules could induce qualia in the awareness field. See also: Alan Watts.
On the blackboard he and his students wrote "Godel's Proof -- too important to be left to the mathematicians."
As a mathematician, I'd love if anyone here knew the context
Not a mathematician and it's been a number of years since I read GEB, but my rough takeaway of the incompleteness is self-referential systems are magical because they can create statements that can't be proven in that system. "This sentence is false" or "Can God create a burrito so hot He cannot eat it" and all that.
So if Wheeler is saying the universe comes out of quantum observation, then the connection seems to be a self-referential Strange Loop of consciousness/observation/participation along the lines of "we're just the universe observing itself"
I don't know the context, but Claus Kiefer was on the Physics Frontiers podcast recently talking about this paper:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.07331
Gödel's undecidability theorems and the search for a theory of everything
"I investigate the question whether Gödel's undecidability theorems play a crucial role in the search for a unified theory of physics. I conclude that unless the structure of space-time is fundamentally discrete we can never decide whether a given theory is the final one or not. This is relevant for both canonical quantum gravity and string theory."
I think it's simply that Godel's incompleteness theorem had strong, foundation-shaking implications outside the context of mathematics alone. Philosophy and science were greatly affected.
> His incompleteness theorems meant there can be no mathematical theory of everything, no unification of what’s provable and what’s true. What mathematicians can prove depends on their starting assumptions, not on any fundamental ground truth from which all answers spring[0].
So why leave it solely to the mathematicians.
[0] https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-godels-proof-works-202007...
On these, you can define some paradoxes in compiler (lisp specially) by redefining predicates (functions that return either true or false). On most cases, it either returns an error, or spawns a debugger.
Seriously, this article brings to mind the classic short story about a simulated universe: https://qntm.org/responsibility
And also the wildly speculative conjecture that our universe will be retroactively created by a super intelligent AI in the precise manner necessary to facilitate its own existence, from which it follows that we exist for the express purpose of creating it. (If anybody knows the source I might have stolen this one from please let me know.)
There is a dark version of this (with some pascal's wager thrown in) called Roko's basilisk. Maybe that's what you're thinking of?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk
Roko's basilisk isn't retrocausal, maybe you're thinking of some Nick Land thing? But even there it's hard to tell how literal he is being with the Terminator analogies (if you haven't seen the movie it has time travel in it), the sanewashed version of his thesis revolves around thermodynamics, chaos theory, and strange attractors.
There's also a Stephen Baxter novel, where a splinter group of humanity called "Wigner's Friends", believes something like this to be the case. I forget which one it is, but it's part of the Xeelee Sequence.
Stanislaw Lem, The Star Diaries, where Tichy at the same time apologizes and brags about how he retroactively tried to create/fix the world and how he failed.
Maybe you're thinking of some strange version of the Omega Point idea?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Point
Maybe "the last question"? https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
Funny, one of my first thoughts upon seeing this article was that the protagonist of the story "There Is No Antimimetics Division" (by the same author) is named "Marion Wheeler" and I wondered if there was an intentional connection.
https://qntm.org/scp
Having every ‘observer’ also ‘participate’ seems to just make it even more intractably complex? Since presumably ‘participators’ can influence each other simultaneously.
So I just don’t see how any of these theories are attractive prospects, the infinite regress seems even more severe than superdeterminism theories.
It’s quite a shame this man got stuck on something that may be literally impossible to prove.
It's not like we are any closer to resolving the measurement problem today. I wouldn't be quick to dismiss Wheeler, all alternative theories for this problem are radical or "unattractive".
It's not like being radical or unattractive has anything to do with validity though.
There is no other kind of observation. You observe a photon when it and your retina (or device) participate in a physical interaction.
Define "you."
Understandability to era-bound humans is not a prerequisite for existence luckily.
It also seems a little narcissistic to assume that humans are the only 'observers' or 'participants' who are determinative.
Observe is bad language. It implies a conscious act. "Incident" or "Interact" seem like better roots but the conjugations are even more overloaded in terms of human meaning.
Wonder if the movie Interstellar was inspired by Wheeler.
Not exactly, but they had Kip Thorne as their science advisor and Wheeler was his Phd supervisor!
The really tough problems require minds that are wired differently and John Wheeler's mind was definitely a thing apart. Its the sort of unique mental fingerprint or aesthetic that characterizes great talents in this space (Feynman and Penrose are other examples of this trait, imho).
Compare Gravitation (the bible) and its boldness, inventiveness and playfulness with the sterile presentation of most theoretical physics textbooks before and after.
Anyway, he failed to bring on a new paradigm for "deep" physics. The intersection of geometry and quantum mechanics seems to be as elusive and mysterious as ever. But hope produced all our mental breakthroughs and, who knows, it may do so again.
Compare Gravity
Total pedantipoint but the book's title is Gravitation of which he was one of three authors.
> he was one of three authors
Indeed, but the other two (Charles Misner and Kip Thorne) were Wheeler's former students.
Sure, but Thorne once bought me pizza so he's the most important co-author.
How can there be a tear in reality, surely, what's behind the tear is more...reality?
It's PhD philosophy dissertations all the way down.
God gives hope
/? "Wheeler's bags of gold" https://www.google.com/search?q=wheelers+bags+of+gold
Holographic principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle :
> The existence of such solutions conflicts with the holographic interpretation, and their effects in a quantum theory of gravity including the holographic principle are not yet fully understood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler
Going from pregeometry to spacetime as information with observer participation might in ways relate to the law of increasing functional complexity. What if observers start as other particles but join together to iterate in increasingly large combinations in order to generate increasing complexity in spacetime phenomena? Exotic particles in space might be kind of like interesting minerals forming in comets and so on.
Quanta is such a great resource! High value spend from Jim Simons vast pool of dollars.
I came across MTW’s “Gravitation” as a student in the 70’s and it inspired a positively unreasonable desire to own a copy just because it looked so beautiful. Couldn’t afford the doorstop of a book at that time but happily it is still in print 50 years later.
They are good at framing advanced science as intuitive and engaging stories, context is always appreciated.
Although, frankly, whenever I see the Quanta URL I tend to skip straight to the comments. It's too verbose to my taste, I just want to understand what the discovery is about, get an understanding of the substantive details without too much prerequisite knowledge, and understand the impact on other research and possibly on applications. But I start reading the article, and it always reads like a biography. The writing is excellent, but I'm afraid I don't always have the time for the literary angle. I am willing to spend a while understanding it but focusing on the meat of the science, the peripheral story comes after if I'm curious.
Similar. But I recently read this parody all the way through and lolled https://mathenchant.wordpress.com/2024/09/17/our-fractional-...
I tend to save Quanta's articles for my "slow reading" part of the day.
Exactly because of the more literary prose that I know I will enjoy but need the time to appreciate. Also, I don't think I've ever had to spend more than 10 minutes to read one of their articles, it's time well spent, or maybe I'm just nostalgic for longer-form magazines that I miss from my younger years.
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