I am getting more and more attracted to the idea that a significant part of what eludes us, occurs within our own multitude and diversity. We can't understand what's too close to ourselves because that proximity splits us as subjects... and turns ambiguities - subtle divergences in our understandings that are no obstacle when the object is distant and well distinguished from us - into, at once, what we'd want to better put a finger on, and what deprives us of the common language we'd need to achieve that.
Depends on what we mean by understood. If it means being able to fully reproduce it in our minds, then John D. Barrow must be right, except for the cases of a trivial universe. If it means being able to start reproducing it in our minds, knowing that with enough resources we would reproduce it fully, then John D. Barrow must be wrong, because I believe I have arrived to an answer to Leibniz question 'Why is there something rather than nothing?":
To come up with a candidate for a Universal Turing Machine from "Nothingness", let's:
1. assume "Nothingness" 2. conclude "Equidistance" (because "Nothingness" means equal absence of information regarding any aspect whatsoever) 3. see the definition of a ball 4. see the computation of Pi number with increasing precision, i.e.: number of π.
Mindey I. Why is there something rather than nothing? invites to compare something with nothing. But in the case of a radical nothing (that seems implied by the question) you can't imagine yourself there -- there's no infrastructure to achieve a comparison, no space for an observer, no time for the attention of that observer of nothing to evolve towards a comparable something, or for the nothing itself to evolve into something. My conclusion is, this is a pseudo-question that traps attention by imitating the form of similar questions that are genuine.
IOW, I would diverge from you at point 2 -- at the implication that nothing hosts anything, much less any two things having a mutual distance (whatever the latter is deemed to be).
Boris Borcic in the case of a radical nothing (that seems implied by the question) you can't imagine yourself there
Is this a joke? :) Radical nothingness would imply that there is no question that we're asking either. Even easier.
At the point 2... you ask about the existence of the concept of distance, which is the construct of our world, our language.
The reason I'm using the words like distance, is because it is going to be understood intuitively by most people, it's a language that I'm using. Try explaining how would you diverge at this point without a language... or, in the language that you think most people will understand better.
Boris Borcic interesting analogy, but we are already something (not nothing), and we just want to model nothingness. It does not mean we have to become nothingness, it just means we have to be able to have the model of it...
The only reasonable model of perceptual nothingness I have ever come to is relative emptiness, which is to say, a region where the frequency of events is so low as to be negligible ... not nothing, but almost empty.
Conceptually, the issue is relevance. In context, something is "nothing" if wholly irrelevant to current consideration and hence negligible and ignorable therein. In other words, out of focus -- which relates to the perceptual notion of nothingness, as frequency is relative.
Mindey I. Speak for yourself, I don't want to model the kind of nothingness implied by the question, which is the ultimate counterfactual. That nothingness is what's not the case whatever the case is or can be, so Why is what can't be the case, not the case? forms an appropriate rephrasing of the original question that doesn't lure into trying to answer it.
Boris Borcic Why is what can't be the case, not the case?
A great and more abstract question, but it is not equivalent to the Leibniz's question, and has an easy answer:
What can't be the case, is not the case precisely because we just negated its possibility to be the case (i.e., our phrase is equivalent to a search process for the things that can't be the case).
I think Leibniz's questions is about how the world is, not about how our logical system is.
Mindey I. I'll concede to you that I should have written "does not lure us into trying to find a non-trivial answer to it" instead of "does not lure into trying to answer it", but that's barely a reason to expound the obvious in such painful and pedantic detail. I am not really interested in this debate, but I'll just affirm that I disagree that it isn't the same question. The one property I can discern to the "nothing" in the question is that it doesn't change upon substituting another "something" from another possible world in the question, and it is none of these.
A single mind yes, but not an entire society of minds. No single human being fully understands the entirety of the Space Shuttle from metallurgy to chemistry and quantum mechanics behind the electronics to the software and aeronautics.
We break things into smaller pieces and use tools such that we can collaborate by only understanding small pieces at any given time while society as a whole is the repository for the whole.
Ray Cromwell yes, today, each of us individuals are so specialized into very narrow fields, that one barely does know something about things remote from one's own field. With increase of world's complexity, a single individual has less and less relative ability to understand how the modern world works as a whole, and that's one of the things that I am trying to change by building a map for all knowledge like that (i.e., enabling everyone to understand how anything was made). However, understanding the universe is much more than just understanding the our own products.
Without a precise definition of what "understand" means, it is not a very convincing statement. With a very simple definition of understand as "replicate", there are a lot of cases where a system can "understand" itself.
In later years I've started to reason from the postulation by fiat that omniscience is impossible; what makes the existence of horizons necessary (in contrast to their location and exact nature)... and the horizons themselves a much more natural object of attention to the curious mind.
Neither do I believe that human knowledge has a well defined sum - that knowledge distributed in many heads is equivalent to the same knowledge aggregated in a single head. To pin down a problem with distributed knowledge, a consideration I like to raise is a similarity possible to characterize to respective ironies of Einstein's E=mc^2 and Archimedes' principle.
In the case of E=mc^2 the irony is with Einstein establishing an equivalence between what were arguably the most familiar and basic distinct quantities of the physicist's trade -- Einstein telling an experts community that two things most familiar and contrasting to them, were secretly the same.
Archimedes' principle can be viewed in a similar light, with the traders-shipmasters of his native merchant port of Syracuse, forming the experts community that substitutes for that of the physicists in Einstein's case -- since Archimedes' principle can be viewed as stating an homology between the two most contrasting times in the trading cycle : between the goods weighted on a scale at the moment of trading them, and the goods floating with ships content during transport.
The point is that both Einstein and Archimedes were provided with what is arguably a necessary resource: that be one and the same the expert community for both terms they asserted equivalent. I'd tend to believe that if the expert communities are disjoint, the equivalence becomes impossible to evidence, for lack of competent/legitimate judges to convince.
If you can simplify something so it can be explained to a layman, I think that shows real understanding of a subject. Which is probably why you can't when it comes to the universe, only parts of it, since an individual mind is too limited. If the Earth were one big brain (controlled by mice?), I think that would still be true since the universe is so mind-boggling immense
Human beings understand the physical world by breaking it into smaller pieces that they build models on. Understanding is inherently reductionism, we reduce things to smaller and smaller models until we reach irreducible concepts that we either implicitly trust on their face by authority, or because we have learned ingrained versions of them just by experience in the world.
Every model has a divergence from the real world to some degree, and when we attempt to understand things more holistically or at a higher level, we replace our lower level detailed models with higher level abstractions. So quantum physics gives way to chemistry, which gives way to molecular biology, which gives way to anatomy, ecology and sociology. There's no one who understands why a heart beats by starting with quantum mechanics and running reasoning on the whole system at that level.
There's a field of information theory called Algorithmic Information Theory. In AIT, one can measure the complexity or amount of information in a theoretic system, or a corpus of data, by considering the smallest possible program which reproduces the output. This yields a simpler representation of the theorem or data by a more compact set of concepts that can be applied over a series of steps. So in essence, building models or scientific theories is a form of data compression.
That's what you do when you drop lots of objects off a building, measure velocity, and then fit a parabola to the trajectory. You've reduced a near infinite set of data from observations down to a single equation that can be run in simulation at any needed resolution.
As human beings, when we are able to mentally step through a model, generate a prediction, that agrees with the real world, we then claim to say we "understand" how it works, because we now have a recipe -- a series of steps -- to follow in our model.
But there is no reason we should be able to compress data from the real world into theorems. AIT says that when there's no shorter program than the input, than the input is random. There are real world instances of this, for example, nuclear decay is random. We can't produce a model which can deterministically reproduce decay events.
Thus, Einstein's famous quote "the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible." It didn't have to be this way, or rather, we don't know if it had to be this way to support life. But contrary to the Barrow quote, it may in fact be that any universe that could support intelligence life may in fact, or may unavoidably, allow it's inhabitants to understand it. It may be a fallout from the principle of Universality in computation.
Ray Cromwell While "been there, done that" isn't exact, i't's accurate enough. Years before Chaitin published, I'd been transformed by the experience of an extreme episode of optimizing code size. Not theory, practice. And the couple years before that I was a physics undergrad.
Ray Cromwell AIT focusses on minimal equivalent algorithmic code length, but the vicinity of absolute minimality can involve weird and surprising re-factorings away from eg local minima... further if the object is nature, short of achieving the fabled unification of physics, there's no definitive, secure bound to what you'd pack together... meanwhile future added data has potential to reveal common information (with what's already counted in) in very divergent ways... there is conflict between an attitude optimally opened to such divergent potentialities and... what I'd call cognitive greed, taking it all as if we were on the road to omniscience with most of it already in our possession.
I don't have means/energy for that, but I'd call for declaring duality in projective geometry the canon of what Ockham in the end prefers (over axioms). I'd describe the current state of science as deadlocked about dualities in general, just in need to drop the dream of omniscience, tbd by pedestaling dualities instead of axioms, in logical systems. I'd then try to show dualities flying under the radar in evolutionary ecology and theoretical population genetics, and hopefully in the end display string theories in the role of God's genuine blueprint of sexual reproduction, via the equation of strings to life histories:)
Even our own planet has a lot left to teach us, as long as we don't destroy it in the process
ReplyDeleteI am getting more and more attracted to the idea that a significant part of what eludes us, occurs within our own multitude and diversity. We can't understand what's too close to ourselves because that proximity splits us as subjects... and turns ambiguities - subtle divergences in our understandings that are no obstacle when the object is distant and well distinguished from us - into, at once, what we'd want to better put a finger on, and what deprives us of the common language we'd need to achieve that.
ReplyDeleteDepends on what we mean by understood. If it means being able to fully reproduce it in our minds, then John D. Barrow must be right, except for the cases of a trivial universe. If it means being able to start reproducing it in our minds, knowing that with enough resources we would reproduce it fully, then John D. Barrow must be wrong, because I believe I have arrived to an answer to Leibniz question 'Why is there something rather than nothing?":
ReplyDeleteTo come up with a candidate for a Universal Turing Machine from "Nothingness", let's:
1. assume "Nothingness"
2. conclude "Equidistance"
(because "Nothingness" means equal absence of information regarding
any aspect whatsoever)
3. see the definition of a ball
4. see the computation of Pi number with increasing precision, i.e.: number of π.
...
Mindey I. Why is there something rather than nothing? invites to compare something with nothing. But in the case of a radical nothing (that seems implied by the question) you can't imagine yourself there -- there's no infrastructure to achieve a comparison, no space for an observer, no time for the attention of that observer of nothing to evolve towards a comparable something, or for the nothing itself to evolve into something. My conclusion is, this is a pseudo-question that traps attention by imitating the form of similar questions that are genuine.
ReplyDeleteIOW, I would diverge from you at point 2 -- at the implication that nothing hosts anything, much less any two things having a mutual distance (whatever the latter is deemed to be).
Boris Borcic
ReplyDeletein the case of a radical nothing (that seems implied by the question) you can't imagine yourself there
Is this a joke? :) Radical nothingness would imply that there is no question that we're asking either. Even easier.
At the point 2... you ask about the existence of the concept of distance, which is the construct of our world, our language.
The reason I'm using the words like distance, is because it is going to be understood intuitively by most people, it's a language that I'm using. Try explaining how would you diverge at this point without a language... or, in the language that you think most people will understand better.
Nothing is a contradiction. Let that sink in.
ReplyDeleteProgram crashes are most typically a consequence of null pointer dereference, which is a computer version of mistaking nothing for something.
ReplyDeleteBoris Borcic interesting analogy, but we are already something (not nothing), and we just want to model nothingness. It does not mean we have to become nothingness, it just means we have to be able to have the model of it...
ReplyDeleteThe only reasonable model of perceptual nothingness I have ever come to is relative emptiness, which is to say, a region where the frequency of events is so low as to be negligible ... not nothing, but almost empty.
ReplyDeleteConceptually, the issue is relevance. In context, something is "nothing" if wholly irrelevant to current consideration and hence negligible and ignorable therein. In other words, out of focus -- which relates to the perceptual notion of nothingness, as frequency is relative.
Mindey I. Speak for yourself, I don't want to model the kind of nothingness implied by the question, which is the ultimate counterfactual. That nothingness is what's not the case whatever the case is or can be, so Why is what can't be the case, not the case? forms an appropriate rephrasing of the original question that doesn't lure into trying to answer it.
ReplyDeleteBoris Borcic
ReplyDeleteWhy is what can't be the case, not the case?
A great and more abstract question, but it is not equivalent to the Leibniz's question, and has an easy answer:
What can't be the case, is not the case precisely because we just negated its possibility to be the case (i.e., our phrase is equivalent to a search process for the things that can't be the case).
I think Leibniz's questions is about how the world is, not about how our logical system is.
Mindey I. I'll concede to you that I should have written "does not lure us into trying to find a non-trivial answer to it" instead of "does not lure into trying to answer it", but that's barely a reason to expound the obvious in such painful and pedantic detail. I am not really interested in this debate, but I'll just affirm that I disagree that it isn't the same question. The one property I can discern to the "nothing" in the question is that it doesn't change upon substituting another "something" from another possible world in the question, and it is none of these.
ReplyDeleteTo even begin to ask a question presupposes the existence of the questioner. Which is something.
ReplyDeleteA single mind yes, but not an entire society of minds. No single human being fully understands the entirety of the Space Shuttle from metallurgy to chemistry and quantum mechanics behind the electronics to the software and aeronautics.
ReplyDeleteWe break things into smaller pieces and use tools such that we can collaborate by only understanding small pieces at any given time while society as a whole is the repository for the whole.
This is in a way a restatement of Kurt Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. I like it.
ReplyDeleteRay Cromwell yes, today, each of us individuals are so specialized into very narrow fields, that one barely does know something about things remote from one's own field. With increase of world's complexity, a single individual has less and less relative ability to understand how the modern world works as a whole, and that's one of the things that I am trying to change by building a map for all knowledge like that (i.e., enabling everyone to understand how anything was made). However, understanding the universe is much more than just understanding the our own products.
ReplyDeleteWithout a precise definition of what "understand" means, it is not a very convincing statement. With a very simple definition of understand as "replicate", there are a lot of cases where a system can "understand" itself.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.nyx.net/~gthompso/quine.htm
In later years I've started to reason from the postulation by fiat that omniscience is impossible; what makes the existence of horizons necessary (in contrast to their location and exact nature)... and the horizons themselves a much more natural object of attention to the curious mind.
ReplyDeleteNeither do I believe that human knowledge has a well defined sum - that knowledge distributed in many heads is equivalent to the same knowledge aggregated in a single head. To pin down a problem with distributed knowledge, a consideration I like to raise is a similarity possible to characterize to respective ironies of Einstein's E=mc^2 and Archimedes' principle.
In the case of E=mc^2 the irony is with Einstein establishing an equivalence between what were arguably the most familiar and basic distinct quantities of the physicist's trade -- Einstein telling an experts community that two things most familiar and contrasting to them, were secretly the same.
Archimedes' principle can be viewed in a similar light, with the traders-shipmasters of his native merchant port of Syracuse, forming the experts community that substitutes for that of the physicists in Einstein's case -- since Archimedes' principle can be viewed as stating an homology between the two most contrasting times in the trading cycle : between the goods weighted on a scale at the moment of trading them, and the goods floating with ships content during transport.
The point is that both Einstein and Archimedes were provided with what is arguably a necessary resource: that be one and the same the expert community for both terms they asserted equivalent. I'd tend to believe that if the expert communities are disjoint, the equivalence becomes impossible to evidence, for lack of competent/legitimate judges to convince.
Not sure what caused this debate...sort of interesting, however, everything should be as simple as it can be but not simpler!
ReplyDeleteIf you can simplify something so it can be explained to a layman, I think that shows real understanding of a subject. Which is probably why you can't when it comes to the universe, only parts of it, since an individual mind is too limited. If the Earth were one big brain (controlled by mice?), I think that would still be true since the universe is so mind-boggling immense
ReplyDeleteSince Universe includes multiple individuals each with different vantage points, it is impossible to understand it in the context of any single mind.
ReplyDeleteHuman beings understand the physical world by breaking it into smaller pieces that they build models on. Understanding is inherently reductionism, we reduce things to smaller and smaller models until we reach irreducible concepts that we either implicitly trust on their face by authority, or because we have learned ingrained versions of them just by experience in the world.
ReplyDeleteEvery model has a divergence from the real world to some degree, and when we attempt to understand things more holistically or at a higher level, we replace our lower level detailed models with higher level abstractions. So quantum physics gives way to chemistry, which gives way to molecular biology, which gives way to anatomy, ecology and sociology. There's no one who understands why a heart beats by starting with quantum mechanics and running reasoning on the whole system at that level.
There's a field of information theory called Algorithmic Information Theory. In AIT, one can measure the complexity or amount of information in a theoretic system, or a corpus of data, by considering the smallest possible program which reproduces the output. This yields a simpler representation of the theorem or data by a more compact set of concepts that can be applied over a series of steps. So in essence, building models or scientific theories is a form of data compression.
That's what you do when you drop lots of objects off a building, measure velocity, and then fit a parabola to the trajectory. You've reduced a near infinite set of data from observations down to a single equation that can be run in simulation at any needed resolution.
As human beings, when we are able to mentally step through a model, generate a prediction, that agrees with the real world, we then claim to say we "understand" how it works, because we now have a recipe -- a series of steps -- to follow in our model.
But there is no reason we should be able to compress data from the real world into theorems. AIT says that when there's no shorter program than the input, than the input is random. There are real world instances of this, for example, nuclear decay is random. We can't produce a model which can deterministically reproduce decay events.
Thus, Einstein's famous quote "the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible." It didn't have to be this way, or rather, we don't know if it had to be this way to support life. But contrary to the Barrow quote, it may in fact be that any universe that could support intelligence life may in fact, or may unavoidably, allow it's inhabitants to understand it. It may be a fallout from the principle of Universality in computation.
I agree with Ray Cromwell .
ReplyDeleteRay Cromwell While "been there, done that" isn't exact, i't's accurate enough. Years before Chaitin published, I'd been transformed by the experience of an extreme episode of optimizing code size. Not theory, practice.
ReplyDeleteAnd the couple years before that I was a physics undergrad.
Ray Cromwell AIT focusses on minimal equivalent algorithmic code length, but the vicinity of absolute minimality can involve weird and surprising re-factorings away from eg local minima... further if the object is nature, short of achieving the fabled unification of physics, there's no definitive, secure bound to what you'd pack together... meanwhile future added data has potential to reveal common information (with what's already counted in) in very divergent ways... there is conflict between an attitude optimally opened to such divergent potentialities and... what I'd call cognitive greed, taking it all as if we were on the road to omniscience with most of it already in our possession.
ReplyDeleteI don't have means/energy for that, but I'd call for declaring duality in projective geometry the canon of what Ockham in the end prefers (over axioms). I'd describe the current state of science as deadlocked about dualities in general, just in need to drop the dream of omniscience, tbd by pedestaling dualities instead of axioms, in logical systems. I'd then try to show dualities flying under the radar in evolutionary ecology and theoretical population genetics, and hopefully in the end display string theories in the role of God's genuine blueprint of sexual reproduction, via the equation of strings to life histories:)