The universe may have learned its own physical laws.
We present an approach to cosmology in which the Universe learns its own physical laws. It does so by exploring a landscape of possible laws, which we express as a certain class of matrix models. We discover maps that put each of these matrix models in correspondence with both a gauge/gravity theory and a mathematical model of a learning machine, such as a deep recurrent, cyclic neural network. This establishes a correspondence between each solution of the physical theory and a run of a neural network. This correspondence is not an equivalence, partly because gauge theories emerge from N→∞ limits of the matrix models, whereas the same limits of the neural networks used here are not well-defined. We discuss in detail what it means to say that learning takes place in autodidactic systems, where there is no supervision. We propose that if the neural network model can be said to learn without supervision, the same can be said for the corresponding physical theory. We consider other protocols for autodidactic physical systems, such as optimization of graph variety, subset-replication using self-attention and look-ahead, geometrogenesis guided by reinforcement learning, structural learning using renormalization group techniques, and extensions. These protocols together provide a number of directions in which to explore the origin of physical laws based on putting machine learning architectures in correspondence with physical theories.
from The Autodidactic Universe by Stephon Alexander, William J. Cunningham, Jaron Lanier, Lee Smolin, Stefan Stanojevic, Michael W. Toomey, and Dave Wecker.
This sounds like the kind of thing that would be rife with crackpottery, but I've looked it over enough that I can't say "it's not even false". It's not talking about whether we learned the laws of physics by trial and error (we did, that's the scientific method), but whether that's how the universe itself invented them. The authors see mathematical similarity in some formulations of laws of physics with some versions of artificial-intelligence learning algorithms. They explain this in some detail.
Definitely ground for further investigation, despite the catchy title.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Mykl on Monday January 31 2022, @05:53AM (17 children)
This fits neatly with one of the theories in the Philosophical branch called Epistemology (the nature of being).
We are all very well acquainted with Dualism (there is a body and a soul which somehow interact) and Materialism (there is no soul - just the material world). But there is also a theory called Idealism - there is no physical world, just a spiritual one. Under that theory, our perception of the material world is, in essence, a 'language' that we have learned in order to communicate with the rest of existence.
This allows for all sorts of crazy stuff (Faster than Light, Ghosts, Mind-reading, Afterlife), through the theory that these phenomena are like an 'accent' to our shared 'language' of perception.
One of the arguments to support the theory is that of the dilemma of division:
- No matter how small the smallest object in the universe is, it still has a size and mass. Thus, it must be made up of something smaller
- The only piece of matter that cannot be divided would have to be infinitely small and weigh an infinitely small amount - something not actually physically possible
- We have recently been told by theoretical physicists that the smallest items actually do weigh zero, but they 'generate mass' through their energy. Sounds like hocum to me, but if true, they are basically saying that the whole mass of the universe is really just energy. Someone will no doubt correct me on this, but you get the gist of the argument.
The article's hypothesis of the universe 'learning' it's rules of physics fits perfectly with the theory of Idealism.
Food for thought!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 31 2022, @06:06AM
Pastrami on rye, hold the mayo!
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 31 2022, @06:58AM (3 children)
This is what happens when I am banned? Sorry, Mykl, epistemology is the theory of knowledge, the study of how we can claim to know anything. The philosophical area most concerned with the nature of being, simpliciter, is Metaphysics, but you do not want to use that term around scientists.
Dualism? Yes, not a bad rendering. But idealism, if you think about it, only says there is no mind-independent reality, which means perceptual reality is it, so actually a realism? We are dangerously close to getting into Kant!
Your "division" arguments are good! Same as those of Zeno of Elea, 5th BCE, if we posit infinite divisibility, then motion is impossible, and, as you point out, so is mass! But it is important to understand what he was trying to do with these arguments, since he was a student of Parmenides, a metaphysical monist.
aristarchus
P.S. The theory reminded me of how the SN admin are also finding out the rules, by trial and error. But like evolution, this means what the resulting system is in no sense inevitable, and thus not even necessary? What if our universe just settled upon some very strange set of rules that ended up being compatible?
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 31 2022, @07:53AM (1 child)
Quick note, speaking of learning the rules: If you downmod me, posting as AC, since I am banned, it in no way affects aristarchus' karma, only that of the poor innocent IP address I happen to be using. Think of the other ACs that may have need to use the same connection! Be fair, people.
aristarchus
[ ] - Downmod goes here.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 31 2022, @05:41PM
We're all prepared to suffer if that's what it takes.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Mykl on Monday January 31 2022, @11:24PM
Hi Ari,
You are right and I am wrong - I should have said Metaphysics (got them mixed up in the post and didn't both checking myself).
It's certainly been an interesting thread. I note a few people arguing about the current state of physics theory - in particular the "lots of stuff with zero mass creates stuff that has mass" arguments at the moment. I don't profess to have much expertise on that front, so will leave those arguments to others. Hopefully I've provided a simple enough intro to Idealism (or one form of it) to provoke the idea that maybe the universe really is all in our (collective) heads?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Monday January 31 2022, @06:59AM (4 children)
According to our current physical theories, this is not true. An electron has mass, but no size in the conventional meaning. It is not made of something smaller. And the photon has not even mass (and arguably, the electron doesn't really have mass either, it only appears to have mass because of the interaction with the Higgs boson).
And even if the current theories should turn out to have to be revised, the mere existence proves that the claim is not a logical necessity, nor an observed fact, therefore it cannot be considered a truth. First argument busted.
This argument is clearly false, as contradicted by current physics. Also most of the mass of matter isn't even mass of its constituents, but binding energy of the nucleons, via E=mc². Second argument busted.
True, if a bit simplified.
Argument by incredulity fallacy.
Yes, but that does not support the dilemma of division, nor idealism in general.
If you want to find arguments for idealism in modern physics, you have to look beyond those outdated arguments. If there is anything in physics that may be a hint to idealism, it is the strange rules of quantum mechanics.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 31 2022, @12:40PM
Hmmm. Username checks out.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday January 31 2022, @02:36PM (2 children)
Well, your first argument is wrong, but so is his. It all depends on your definition of mass, and since we have defined it at a macroscopic level, there's nothing saying it can't be the interactions of a particle with a field. Or even that the particle isn't itself a field.
Also, electrons *do* have a size, depending on exactly how you define "size". They've got a interaction potential (via charge) that gets increasingly strong as you approach them closer. So does your skin. Both can be prodded. Prodding both will cause them to react. (Your skin will indent, the electron will try to move, either towards or away from the prod.) And the reaction gets a lot stronger as you approach closer to the center. In neither case is there an impenetrable distance, though if you get too close to either you'll get a very strong reaction.
IIUC, according to at least on current theory, particles don't actually exist as independent things, they are manifestation of "fields". And this applies to all subatomic particles, not just electron or quarks. If this is true, then no such particle has an exact size, they've all got a locus of existence, and the closer you approach to the center the stronger the reaction is. The strong force has a much sharper inflection to the curve of its strength of interaction than does charge, but they both have that general pattern of behavior. I.e. size as normally defined only exists if you don't look to closely. Just like being a fluid.
IIUC, this is not a statement either in favor of or against idealism in general, though it certainly denies various specific interpretations or implementations of idealism. Also of materialism. Both probably don't make sense when applied outside the areas directly perceivable by the senses. (Aren't those pictures of galaxies pretty? Much of the light in those pictures is in frequencies that you couldn't see if you were there to look.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday January 31 2022, @07:04PM (1 child)
Actually, the definition of particle mass is quite unambiguous.
Actually, particles are elementary excitations of fields.
Let me re-quote my comment, with emphasis added:
Anyway, your attempt at a definition does not work out, as I'll explain below.
No, their charge determines their interaction with the electromagnetic field (and it does so locally, not at a distance). This interaction is perfectly local. This causes an electric field around that electron which, for an electron approximately at rest which happens to be sufficiently localized, goes with the inverse square of the distance to the area where the electron is localized.
As the way I worded it above already hints at, already the concept of the distance to the electron is not really well defined (although there are situations where you can treat it as if it were; more commonly seen with the atomic nucleus).
Anyway, even if we pretend the electron were a classical particle that sits at a well defined point in space, the inverse square law means that there is no specific distance defined by the surrounding field.
Moreover, note that the field does not depend on where the electron is but where the electron was. For example, if you are a light year away from the electron (or more exactly, a light year away from the place where the electron had been a year ago), then the electric field depends on the place and motion of the electron a year ago, not on where the electron is now or whether it even still exists (it might for example have annihilated with a positron half a year ago).
Other charges interact with the electromagnetic field, not with the electron.
My skin is not an elementary particle, and it is of course a matter of definition whether you consider the electromagnetic field of the skin's particles as part of the skin or not. However the force you feel when you get very close to the skin is notprimarily from the electromagnetic field, but from the Pauli exclusion principle. You are trying to push more electrons into the same volume, which means that they'll be forced into higher energy states (and yes, that again is a simplification of what really happens).
Depends on what exactly you mean with “prodding”. If you call any type of interaction/force as “prodding” then yes, of course you can apply a force to both. But that doesn't help you in defining a size.
Not as manifestations of fields, but as excitations of fields.
Wrong. Such a particle does not have a well-defined locus of existence, but it has a well-defined size, which governs how the different fields interact with each other. Except for string theory, in all our current theories that interaction is local; interaction is always between fields at the same point; interactions between different points always are indirect, through propagation of fields.
You can measure the size of a particle by scattering experiments. That's for example how we determine the size of the proton. Doing so with the electron shows that its size is smaller than anything we can currently measure. That doesn't prove the electron is a point (obviously no experiment can exclude a size beyond it's resolution, thus we only have an upper bound on its size), but it means that for anything we can currently measure, we can treat the electron as a point particle.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Tuesday February 01 2022, @06:38AM
This is really interesting stuff. It seems that current theories are trying to find ways around conventional problems posed by distance, mass, etc.
Going back to the topic of Idealism: whatever the current theory of matter is, it can be argued that this is simply our understanding of the 'rules of grammar' for the 'language' that is our way of interacting with the universe. Further - those rules could potentially change over time as our 'language' evolves, in line with the argument from TFA that the laws of physics have changed through trial and error.
Kind of weird to think that perhaps Nuclear Fission wasn't possible until we developed the means to express it, huh?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 31 2022, @07:47AM
it sounds to me like "idealism" and "materialism" are the same thing. except that "idealists" are so obsessed with their superiority they use different words to talk about the same underlying reality.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 31 2022, @07:57AM
So much here. The nature of being is part of ontology, which is metaphysics not epistemology. There are many kinds of dualism , not all of which allow the existence of a soul. Different forms of Idealism disagree with your idea about the perception of the world and I'm not quite sure which idealist you are trying to echo in that statement since it is a bit imprecise. And that "dilemma" of yours ignores the long history of monism in regards to a material universe, and discussions around discrete universes and actual infinitesimals, and those around Leibniz monadology. And this article's hypothesis of the universe "learning" also fits perfectly with the theories surrounding materialism. One of the major problems with going from physics to metaphysics is that everything you seem to know can go right out the window with a simple "why?" because we deal with phenomena not noumena and may never know anything about the ding an sich, if there is any at all.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by crafoo on Monday January 31 2022, @12:13PM (1 child)
Interesting post. Sure to generate comments!
I think many people struggle with understanding physics once the topic moves away from what you experience in your everyday life, and to physics of things you will never experience, can never experience: very small things, very large things, very energetic things. Humans have no learned experience with these environments, yet they are 100% part of our natural world. That the laws governing these conditions is not familiar to you, that they do not conform to your lived-experiences does not indicate that there is a problem with physics, _at all_.
Physics tells us that the universe is the interactions of waves. There are no particles. There is really no such thing as mass, or mass that is independent of energy at least.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Monday January 31 2022, @12:18PM
Really even calling it waves is just a metaphor to make us more comfortable. Just look at the math. It's consistent. it works. It predicts valid future events. It describes.... something. It doesn't matter if it makes sense to us or not, metaphorically. Our modern physics isn't even the best description of the universe, or the most accurate. We know it has issues.
As far as the body-soul question: let's invent a general AI and see what happens. I think we will actually be able to answer this question in philosophy relatively soon.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 01 2022, @12:45AM (2 children)
> Someone will no doubt correct me on this, but you get the gist of the argument.
Indeed. So why bother posting, dumbass? E=mc^2 look it up.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Mykl on Tuesday February 01 2022, @05:13AM (1 child)
The point, dumbass, is that that equation doesn't work if m equals zero.
Besides, the main reason for the post was to introduce the idea of Idealism, not argue the minutia of the current state of theoretical physics. I don't profess to be an expert on either of these, but fortunately you don't need to be an expert to post to SoylentNews. Apparently you don't even need reading comprehension - something you've proven admirably for us.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 01 2022, @08:46AM
Funny you should mention that because both of you are wrong in different ways. The real equation is E2=(mc2)2+(pc)2. A result of that is mass-energy equivalence still holds if mass is zero because that means E=pc in that case.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 31 2022, @07:29AM (7 children)
no, the universe did not learn its own laws of physics.
if they're changing the definition of "learn" in order to state this sentence, that means the sentence is meaningless to the rest of us.
in order to learn, there must be a physical structure where information can be embedded.
saying "the universe learns its own laws of physics" only makes sense if you can make a direct correspondence between the laws of physics and the state of the universe.
which breaks any logical description of the whole, since you're going straight into Goedel's theorem.
and before anyone points out that the biosphere does embed the laws of biology in itself, please keep in mind that in the case of life there IS an underlying physical substrate where information can be encoded, which is subject to meta-laws (physics), so the self-reference can be removed (and technically it is removed for most modern biochemistry codes which rely on quantum electrodynamics rather than "atoms and molecules").
if you say "well there can be *this particular meta-system to the universe* where information is embedded" then all you're doing is shifting the un-learned laws of physics to the next turtle.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 31 2022, @07:36AM (1 child)
oh, and I forgot to mention why the "most likely".
it is possible that something useful will come out of this, by providing some new way of approaching real problems, but it seems unlikely.
and I assume the math involved is fairly fascinating.
I would just prefer that public funding bodies focus on the science of clean energy production and the preservation of ecosystems (strongly related but anyway).
and asteroid defense.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 31 2022, @05:47PM
Just a nit: ecosystem *preservation* is harmful. We should strive for non-interference or protection from exploitation rather than a limited and myopic preservation of what we currently have.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 31 2022, @10:42AM (1 child)
They compare it to a neural network. If "learn" is incorrect here, then neural networks don't "learn" either. (Go ahead, say they don't. A great many people will dismiss you as nit-picking.)
The problem is really that English is an imprecise language and sometimes we cut corners, and sometimes there is just no real way to express a concept. (Mathematics too -- how long before we had "zero"? Now he have "imaginary numbers" for which I feel there must be a better representation. We don't even use slide-rules any longer.)
Don't pick at the imprecise terminology, consider the meaning behind the ideas. Not saying that the meaning behind the idea is better or worse, I'm still reading, but anyway..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 31 2022, @03:03PM
One important point though is that neural networks have a place to store information. Where is this self-learning system storing its information? How is it storing it?
(Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 31 2022, @01:39PM (1 child)
Oh, look, the internet expert has spoken.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 01 2022, @11:23AM
I never said my expertise had anything to do with the internet.
come to think of it, I never said I had any expertise at all.
can we focus on the argument, rather than my existing and non-existing credentials?
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday February 01 2022, @01:15PM
If each turtle is simpler than the one that rests above it, doesn't that help? FWIW I don't think it's logically possible for reality to have any kind of ultimate and complete explanation, so it might just as well be infinite "turtles".
error count exceeds 100; stopping compilation
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Monday January 31 2022, @07:47AM (6 children)
This is all well and good, but it sounds unprovable. At best you have an interesting hypothesis.
If you were an agent in a sufficiently complex video game (where the number of total states is effectively innumerable) with no access to any knowledge beyond what was in the game, you would have no way of proving anything about the game.
The universe could have "learned its laws", or it could have been programmed to look like it "learned its laws", and the two possibilities cannot be distinguished.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mhajicek on Monday January 31 2022, @08:00AM (4 children)
There can be clues, which may indicate, but not prove, that you're in a simulation. A smallest increment of distance, or of time, for example, both of which appear to exist in our universe.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 31 2022, @08:50AM (3 children)
There was some experiment or paper I read that posited the idea that the Universe operates in almost a floating point manner. Something about how large objects had situations where things seemed rounded similar to a loss of precision. Or at least that is how I understood it. I could be totally off but I do remember people discussing the implications on the hypothesis that the universe is a simulation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 31 2022, @09:34AM (2 children)
You’re not wrong. There’s 2 different ways of looking at the natural units. By natural units I mean Planck units.
The Planck distance for instance is exactly equal to 1 Planck unit of distance and it is the smallest small.
Any distance smaller than this, for instance a fraction of a Planck unit, is too small and the universe just puts it in the most adjacent slot.
Time is like this as well. It cannot be infinitely divided. A Planck unit of time is exactly equal to 1 and it is the smallest unit of time for which one may say that time has elapsed. Any two moments occurring less than a Planck unit of time apart are in the exact same moment. Planck time is basically the frame rate of the universe.
So that’s the bottom up approach, but what caused me to finally wrap my mind around it is exactly like you said. It’s a fixed precision that the universe appears to operate with. Anything smaller than a natural unit is rounded or possibly truncated.
Without that insight I don’t think I would have passed Quantum Mechanics in college.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday January 31 2022, @02:47PM (1 child)
IIUC, that hasn't been demonstrated for time, though it's a popular theory. Actually, it hasn't been demonstrated for distance either, and probably can't be with any tools we have any possibility of building. There are some interpretations of results of observations of cosmological phenomena that suggest that there's a smallest unit of distance...but it's just suggest, and controlled experiments require about the energy of a galaxy to run.
OTOH, it's consistent with everything that we know. So nobody's denying it either.
(I have a strong suspicion that if we had tools that were strong enough to demonstrate the effect, the results would be hidden by the mass of virtual particles given real existence by siphoning off that energy.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Monday January 31 2022, @07:19PM
I've once heard a talk (unfortunately I've forgotten by whom) where the speaker noted that back before quantum mechanics, people expected new physics at the classical electron radius, as that was the length where the existing theories got in trouble. But we now know that new physics, namely quantum mechanics, already gets relevant on much larger distances, like the size of an atom, and the classical electron radius is irrelevant for quantum mechanics. The Planck length could well be the new “classical electron radius”: Something new might happen at much larger sizes, making the Planck length irrelevant.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 31 2022, @04:03PM
Hollywood has been playing this game for a long time now... it's all hypothetical until you actually "travel to" the alternate universe and bring back some observations.
This theory that the universe is the way it is because if it weren't then we wouldn't be here to observe it has been kicking around for decades. If "In the Beginning" there were an infinite (or, more popular lately, really really big) number of possible universes with an infinite (or really big) number of combinations of physical constants, then those which have constants that don't support the chaotic oscillations that lead to self-aware life would have no self-aware life in them to contemplate their existence (does this mean they then fail to exist? I think not, but others might argue the opposite.)
I have played with polynomial chaotic oscillators quite a bit. For a given equation of the form X(t) = A*X(t-1)^N + B*X(t-2)^M ... for various randomly selected values of A, B, N, M, X(t-1), X(t-2), etc. in a "reasonable range" of say +/- 10.0ish, about 99% of random choices will either collapse to a point, or runaway to infinity fairly quickly - discard those as uninteresting and look harder at the oscillators. Among the oscillators, there are various forms which have been characterized by "leading thinkers" in the field over the last 30 or so years as: chaotic, quasi-periodic, highly periodic, etc. If you plot X(t) vs X(t-k) on a 2D surface, you get pretty pictures that are tempting to categorize according to their shapes. http://mangocats.com [mangocats.com] is a small sampling of these kinds of pictures which have been colorized by picking up color information from a photograph at X(t-q), X(t-r). The old https://electricsheep.org/ [electricsheep.org] project created animations by varying the A,B,N,M, etc. constants and having people vote on their "cool factor" to search the space for interesting animations.
Somewhere in the 9th dimension, "the Gods" may get around to rating our Universe as interesting, or not, one of these eons. Would be a shame if we're too dull by their standards and they collapse us early.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bradley13 on Monday January 31 2022, @09:34AM (15 children)
There is also the theory that many universes were created at the big bang, nearly all of which promptly collapsed and self-destructed, because their laws of physics didn't allow for expansion.
Whichever way you view it, we are left with a universe-level anthropic principle: Our universe has the laws it has, because otherwise we wouldn't be here to see it.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 31 2022, @09:44AM (11 children)
The Anthropic principal is provably false. The laws we have did produce us, but there is enough wiggle room in the laws of physics to still produce sentient beings with all manner of different “turns of knobs” as it were. Fine tuning is just a popsci myth or possibly a popsci religion.
Better is to realize that our laws of physics emerge because the conserved quantities emerge via the principal of least action and the various forces in our universe dictate that the principal of least action flows down and through the particular valleys it does because of the interactions between conserved energies and the strengths of the fields those conserved energies pass through on their way to their most stable state.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 31 2022, @09:58AM (3 children)
We are supposed to take the word of an AC that cannot differentiate "Principle" from "Principal"? Sorry, but do you have any ID?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 31 2022, @11:31AM
You are applying the anecdote (spelling/grammar) to dis-prove the statistic (in this case a theory).
Try again!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 31 2022, @03:33PM (1 child)
Remember, the way to tell the difference is that the principal is your pal!
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 31 2022, @09:05PM
Did you know the Greek for "principal" is ἀρχή, the source or origin. And the "best" in Greek is ἄριστος, so when you put them together, you get " ἀρίσταρχος", or aristarchus. Just saying, using the right words is a sign of education and intelligence, while using the wrong words could mean you are a Florida man on the internets.
"Principle" in Greek would be λόγος, which was in the beginning, but that is not important now. Confero Heraclitus [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 31 2022, @10:47AM
That's why we have the current arrangement of matter that we have. The laws themselves would determine that arrangement, and so far as we know wouldn't be subject to the influence of other aspects (the fundamental constants could be whatever-whatever, not impacted by the speed of light, or the size of an electron, or the fine-structure constant, or the ...)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Monday January 31 2022, @02:54PM
I don't know why you think that disproves the anthropic principle.
We will only exist in one that allows us to exist, so the universe we observe will be a universe in which we can exist. That there may be other universes doesn't change this at all. In fact, there could be several such universes in which a creature indistinguishable from you exists, but since you can't communicate with them, you don't know of their existence.
(FWIW, there are interpretations of physics in which multiple copies of you exist within this same universe, just not within your light cone. This is an expected result if the universe is infinite in size.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 31 2022, @02:56PM (3 children)
You going to come up with that proof?
Keep in mind that the most important of those interactions, from your point of view, are the interactions of those conserved energies (which really are just the whole of the universe's fields subject to gauge symmetries which generate the conserved quantities) with the aggregated fields (yes, still talking QFT fields not some other sort of fields) of your body, particularly the brain. Maybe the mind/spirit/soul/whatever too, if that somehow happens to be separate. I'm not picky. The point is that if you look at the usual QM equations, no matter what context, they are perfectly reversible. So what puts the time direction in? I think you need look no further than your brain for answers - namely, memory (and a few other irreversible processes).
How could we not see a time direction, when that's how our brains work? So I guess contrary to your assertion, not only is your above assertion not provable, I've actually proven the anthropic principle. Another weighty problem dealt with by the internet mob gestalt!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 31 2022, @04:04PM
Don't forget to include me as coauthor on your paper. You should never discount the intellectual gravitas that is the Anonymous Coward [youtube.com].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 01 2022, @12:56AM (1 child)
> So what puts the time direction in? I think you need look no further than your brain for answers - namely, memory (and a few other irreversible processes).
Are you an idiot? All the individual processes are reversible, that's the conundrum.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday February 01 2022, @02:04AM
Tell that to the stuff sliding out at the speed of light beyond the event horizon at edge of the observable universe. Which stuff was your past again?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 01 2022, @06:22PM
> but there is enough wiggle room in the laws of physics to still produce sentient beings with all manner of different “turns of knobs” as it were.
For one, we don't know that yet. Second, even if true, probably only a small subset would. Most combo's would be too bland.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Monday January 31 2022, @01:44PM (2 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 01 2022, @01:04AM (1 child)
That would be interesting if the properties of the black hole relate to the (internal) values of the constants.
The truth is, we're due a period of social reinvention. The sciences have run into a dead end meanwhile we still treat eachother as if we're in military school. Classes, bosses, competing against eachother. For who? Who's rules? Those rules, by the way - we make them up - see e.g. history.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday February 02 2022, @09:56AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 31 2022, @12:27PM
the lawless universe has one law: to learn its laws ... or sumething.
other lawless universes just say "f#ck it" and go on a holiday?
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Monday January 31 2022, @12:28PM
Learning is a process characteristic by systematic changes in subject itself.
If Universe learns, it means it is changeable, and, since by definition the Universe is topologically an existential closure of all existence, it also means it is self-changeable.
That also means the Universe is programmable, since the systematic change in part of Universe, like this one computer for example, can be induced by another subjective part of Universe, this one me for example, and this is programming.
And that means, the Universe is also hackable.
The future is not for everyone. The AIPs will have no use for human cults.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 31 2022, @12:36PM
Hey man, I'm so stoned I can see all the dark matter.
Groovy man, but I can see the universe inventing the laws of physics by trial and error.
Oh wow, let's publish... but first pass me that cigar-sized joint again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 31 2022, @01:06PM
https://www.sciencealert.com/images/2020-11/neuron-galaxy.jpg [sciencealert.com]
The ghost is in the shell?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 31 2022, @01:24PM
That also means it may not have!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 31 2022, @02:10PM
"Prevalence of nonsensical algorithmically generated papers in the scientific literature"
Guillaume Cabanac, Cyril Labbé
JASIST, 25 May 2021
https://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.24495 [wiley.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 31 2022, @02:40PM (1 child)
I think this is particularly flawed since it assumes that there is a self-learning system that would end up with our universe as some sort of preference. That's much like assuming the Earth is at the center of the universe.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by khallow on Monday January 31 2022, @03:12PM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sonamchauhan on Monday January 31 2022, @11:56PM
If.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 01 2022, @03:15AM
Like, what if everything that could happen did happen, man, and one of those things is cosmos with its locality and temporality.
But my question is whether their approach or string theory is less falsifiable.