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Registered Member #543
Joined: Tue Feb 20 2007, 04:26PM
Location: UK
Posts: 4992
Steve McConner wrote ...
This caused me to wander off on a freaky line of thought, which I'll offer for debate. If causality is conserved....
When we say that A is the cause of B, haven't we already burdened A with the property or qualium of meaning, a human attribute, (so far as we know) which the event as a thing in itself does not possess? When we make statements like A is the cause of B, haven't we actually falsified the phenomenon by interpreting it? And we have smuggled the'arrow of time' in through the back door.
My own GUT: The Mind is a CODEC, allowing us a limited, partial view of the whole. I am also attracted to the idea that consciousness may be an inherent property of the Universe, an extra-rational view which is perhaps an expression of my Quaker beliefs.
Registered Member #2040
Joined: Fri Mar 20 2009, 10:13PM
Location: Fairfax VA
Posts: 180
Steve McConner wrote ...
.......... If this were true, the only way to travel into the future would be to build a complete simulation of (the region of interest) of the universe, that ran faster than the usual 1 second per second. Any possible time machine would have to work in this way. We already do this with weather forecasting, but what I propose would amount to "reality forecasting": building an accurate model of the future that could be experienced through virtual reality machines.
This of course brings up the question of free will: whether the universe is emergent or just Laplacean. If it really is emergent, or non-algorithmic or whatever, then maybe the universe is the only computer big enough to "run" itself. Douglas Adams actually anticipated this when he joked in the Hitch-hiker's Guide that the Earth was a computing device built by aliens to solve the question of the meaning of life.
I don't know if he meant this seriously, but I found it a very satisfying answer. To me it means that the "meaning" of life consists of the configuration of all the matter in the universe, and can't be understood by any one person because it's too big. It also means that the future can't be accessed, simply because we haven't created it yet.
To simulate the universe would require a quantum computer the size of the universe. To simulate the universe with a conventional computer would require it to be larger than the universe. Our universe can be looked at as a quantum computer, which computes itself.
I don't have the slightest idea weather the universe is entirely computational or not. If it is then it is mind boggling to think of all of the seemingly random occurrences and realize that they are just the result of some interactions which can be modeled and predicted before they even happen (provided we have the quantum computing universe simulator). And what of free will? In the strictly computational universe free will doesn't exist, there are no such things as choices or chance. To us there appears to be these things but in actuality there isn't anything of the sort. Every event is already predestined, from the start of the universe forward through eternity. Every thought you have, every feeling, everything is completely out of your hands. What your thinking right now, what your going to do in ten minutes, it is all predetermined. It is tough to wrap your mind around.
If we could take a few of your small scale universe simulations, each one exactly the same, and set them to run we should be able to find out if there is such things as randomness or free will. Unfortunately this is impossible, there would be no way to make them all exactly the same or have them run under exactly the same conditions.
Registered Member #65
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 06:43AM
Location:
Posts: 1155
Z28Fistergod wrote ...
If we could take a few of your small scale universe simulations, each one exactly the same, and set them to run we should be able to find out if there is such things as randomness or free will. Unfortunately this is impossible, there would be no way to make them all exactly the same or have them run under exactly the same conditions.
I doubt the argument will hold given the premise of the propagation of temporal entanglement. One may still have "free" will to see what will happen in this model's future, but in doing so ensures that it must occur as the observer becomes locked in the past... Schrödinger's cat is therefore now assured to be dead or alive if the event occurs...
To stick with a theme: the simulation may therefore be aware it is simulating, but could never overlap the instances to violate causality.
btw, I often ponder if Douglas Adams calculated Wikipedia was inevitable given technology trends. =)
Registered Member #2040
Joined: Fri Mar 20 2009, 10:13PM
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Carbon_Rod wrote ...
I doubt the argument will hold given the premise of the propagation of temporal entanglement. One may still have "free" will to see what will happen in this model's future, but in doing so ensures that it must occur as the observer becomes locked in the past... Schrödinger's cat is therefore now assured to be dead or alive if the event occurs...
To stick with a theme: the simulation may therefore be aware it is simulating, but could never overlap the instances to violate causality.
btw, I often ponder if Douglas Adams calculated Wikipedia was inevitable given technology trends. =)
Also the problem of knowing the position and velocity of every particle within a simulation makes this experiment theoretically and practically impossible. First we would need to know the positions and velocities, then we would need to be able to control trillions of trillions of these particles simultaneously. A real nightmare for any project manager.
But as long as we're talking about impossible experiments, if the simulation is made exact then there would be no way to differentiate it from the original, and the simulation would be no more aware than the original. But what good would there be in a experiment that we can't observe the result for, as soon as we do we have spoiled it. The simulation also could not run any faster than the original so it would be pretty much useless.
Registered Member #30
Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706
Z28Fistergod wrote ...
To simulate the universe would require a quantum computer the size of the universe...
And what of free will? In the strictly computational universe free will doesn't exist, there are no such things as choices or chance. To us there appears to be these things but in actuality there isn't anything of the sort. Every event is already predestined, from the start of the universe forward through eternity.
Well, this is kind of my point. If it's all deterministic, but determined by algorithms (or non-algorithmic emergent behaviours or whatever) so complex that they can't be simulated because the device needed to do it would require more matter than exists in the universe, then it's impossible for anyone to determine what it's going to do. And that's what deterministic means, so it can't be deterministic after all.
So it amounts to either free will (to a Penrose worshipper type like me) or randomness (to a bag-of-waterist like Dr. Slack)
I liked Harry's suggestion that causation is not a law of the universe as such, but just an artifact of human perception. That would make sense, because you can imagine how it would be adaptive for animals, apes, early humans or whatever, to start seeing events in terms of causation. It would help them to predict what their enemies or prey were going to do next. And likewise a memory of the past would be adaptive too. And once you had a past, a present and a future, the illusion of "travelling through time" would be hard to resist. I can't help thinking of the last two verses of Burns' "To A Mouse":
Registered Member #2040
Joined: Fri Mar 20 2009, 10:13PM
Location: Fairfax VA
Posts: 180
Steve McConner wrote ...
..... This caused me to wander off on a freaky line of thought, which I'll offer for debate. If causality is conserved, then surely time travel into the future is impossible, because it means seeing events that haven't happened yet. This amounts to the same thing as information (next week's lottery results and so on) flowing backwards in time, allowing effects (the numbers you write on the lottery ticket after returning from your trip) to precede their causes. .....
I don't see a problem with going forward in time, as soon as you arrive in the "future" it becomes the present. You aren't seeing things that haven't happened yet, you are seeing things that are happening now. The only information you posses is information of events that have already happened. Going back in time would mean you have quite a bit of information about events that haven't happened yet. If you believe in the multiverse theory then it doesn't really matter because you have created a new branch which will have different events.
... not Russel! Registered Member #1
Joined: Thu Jan 26 2006, 12:18AM
Location: Tempe, Arizona
Posts: 1052
Z28Fistergod wrote ...
I don't see a problem with going forward in time, as soon as you arrive in the "future" it becomes the present. You aren't seeing things that haven't happened yet, you are seeing things that are happening now. The only information you posses is information of events that have already happened. Going back in time would mean you have quite a bit of information about events that haven't happened yet. If you believe in the multiverse theory then it doesn't really matter because you have created a new branch which will have different events.
I get very nervous when I see people of science using words like "believe." Belief is for matters of faith, not matters of science. While the multiverse notion sounds nice, it doesn't even meet the most basic requirements of a scientific theory -- it doesn't make any predictions about the way our universe works that can be tested. It's more of a concept that has yet to be expressed as a valid, falsifiable theory.
As far as time travel to the future, I don't see the problem, but it depends on how you define it. It's certainly theoretically possible (though not technologically, yet) to jump into a ship, loop around the center of the milky way, and be back home within your lifetime, while thousands of years pass by on earth. That seems to meet my definition of time travel into the future: you arrive at some arbitrary date in the future in much less time than everyone else experiences. If, however, your requirement for time travel into the future is that you cease to exist, then exist again at some arbitrary date in the future, then that's quite different.
Registered Member #30
Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706
Chris Russell wrote ...
I get very nervous when I see people of science using words like "believe." Belief is for matters of faith, not matters of science.
This is what I used to "believe" too, but Penrose and Polanyi proved to my satisfaction that science itself is a belief system that I adopt like any other. They famously used Godel's incompleteness theorem to show that, while science can test existing hypotheses, you need to resort to quite unscientific ways of thinking in order to think up the hypotheses in the first place.
Commandments of science would be things like the second law of thermodynamics: "Thou shalt not break even, because nobody has ever made an engine that does" and the principle of induction: "The sun rose this morning, therefore go forth without fear for it riseth tomorrow too", as well as Popper's condition of falsifiability that Chris mentions above. And we all know what happens to anyone on 4hv who breaks these commandments, they get cast into the wilderness with wailing and gnashing of teeth. In this sense we are a cult like any other.
However, science still has a lot to commend it on the grounds that worshipping at its altar brings forth cool stuff like jet fighters, atomic weapons and the IPhone 3G, which are more miraculous than anything any other religion has brought forth so far. "By their fruits shall ye know them" and so on. I certainly make a better living as an engineer than I would as a preacher, so I'm not about to renounce my beliefs.
Wandering even further off topic (but hopefully productively!) Penrose believed that mathematical objects like the Platonic solids and the Mandelbrot set have an existence of their own. What if these objects "existed" in the sense that they are the primitives of our brains' vision system? They could actually be coded into our DNA. Or, if you believe in nurture over nature, maybe they exist as memes.
... not Russel! Registered Member #1
Joined: Thu Jan 26 2006, 12:18AM
Location: Tempe, Arizona
Posts: 1052
Steve McConner wrote ...
This is what I used to "believe" too, but Penrose and Polanyi proved to my satisfaction that science itself is a belief system that I adopt like any other. They famously used Godel's incompleteness theorem to show that, while science can test existing hypotheses, you need to resort to quite unscientific ways of thinking in order to think up the hypotheses in the first place.
Commandments of science would be things like the second law of thermodynamics: "Thou shalt not break even, because nobody has ever made an engine that does" and the principle of induction: "The sun rose this morning, therefore go forth without fear for it riseth tomorrow too", as well as Popper's condition of falsifiability that Chris mentions above. And we all know what happens to anyone on 4hv who breaks these commandments, they get cast into the wilderness with wailing and gnashing of teeth. In this sense we are a cult like any other.
That's a reasonably fair assessment, but it does not make science a religion, or cult. The only thing that science asks you to take on faith is that adherence to the scientific method is a good idea, and I daresay science has quite a bit of evidence in its corner to support that notion. Everything else builds on that foundation, and invites examination and scrutiny. You can certainly draw parallels between the scientific community and many other types of communities and social structures: consensus compares well to democratic societies, the widespread sharing of new discoveries could be compared to socialism, the tendency to scoff at the unscientific could be called elitism. "Belief system" is a fair title, but incomplete; it fails to convey what makes science different from (and thus not equal to) other belief systems, such as Flying Spaghetti Monsterism.
In any case, we certainly do not take theories on faith, which was the thrust of my point above. You don't believe or fail to believe a theory; you examine the evidence and come to a conclusion as to whether the theory passes muster. In the case of the concept of parallel universes, there is no evidence to examine, nor any proposed experiments or observations that would provide any conclusive evidence. In that regard, it is not worthy of the title of theory. If someone wants to put faith in the idea, that's a personal matter, not a matter of science.
Registered Member #30
Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706
Chris Russell wrote ...
In any case, we certainly do not take theories on faith, which was the thrust of my point above. You don't believe or fail to believe a theory; you examine the evidence and come to a conclusion as to whether the theory passes muster. In the case of the concept of parallel universes, there is no evidence to examine, nor any proposed experiments or observations that would provide any conclusive evidence.
Well, I'm asking you to consider a newborn theory before anyone has figured out how to test it. For instance, Maxwell's displacement current, or the theory of relativity, or Tesla's non-Hertzian waves. All of these were proposed and debated for at least 10 years before anyone figured out how to make experiments precise enough to actually test them. Therefore in the meantime, they had to be taken on faith. It seems obvious now that all three are testable, the first two being true and the third false, but there was no such hindsight at the time.
It follows (to me at least) that if you want to make a scientific discovery right now, the last thing you want to do is start with known experimental results. You'll be like the proverbial man who kept a diary of everything that happened to him, and left it to the Royal Society in his will, with instructions that they should examine it for any signs of scientific discoveries. You need to use an (illogical) process of creativity to stumble on a new hypothesis, the test for which will be an experiment that nobody has even thought of doing yet. And faith is the only thing that drives you through the process of thinking up this test. In this sense, the LHC is built on faith: we believe that it'll produce a Higgs boson or whatever, but have no way of knowing for sure until it's fired up. I like to think of it as a sort of modern-day cathedral or temple.
As regards the parallel universes thing: here we're debating several hypotheses that all fit the same experimental evidence, which is a classic case for Ockham's Razor. Or more like Ockham's Weed Whacker to prune away all those unnecessary alternate realities.
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