The
KEO satellite project is launching a time capsule into space:
In 2009/2010, all of this [user-submitted] material will be transferred on board the satellite KEO and launched. KEO should return to Earth after circling our planet for several thousands of years, providing the world of tomorrow with an authentic image of what human beings are like today.
Today is the last day for anyone to
submit text that will be stored in the digital time capsule. Here is my submission:
On December 31, 2009, the following obviously correct ideas are considered to be on the cutting edge of philosophy:
- There is no such thing as an afterlife.
- Many Worlds is the most clear-headed and productive way to interpret quantum mechanics.
- Reductionism: The belief that the universe isn't fundamentally made out of love or consciousness or life or cells, but rather, that it has some fixed mathematical structure which admits to being modeled using various layers of abstraction on which those concepts can be defined.
- Nothing -- not the big bang, not consciousness, not life -- is an inherently mysterious phenomenon. The universe is all representable mathematical relationships, and mystery is just a feeling in the mind of an observer.
- The structure of consciousness and intelligence is cleanly separated from the quantum level by a level of abstraction. The only relevant details about low-level physics that those phenomena exploit are the implementation details of some Turing-equivalent model of computation.
6 comments:
You say some odd things about mathematics and reality.
For example, your definition of reductionism. Most reductionists would say it means believing that the universe is made out of atoms / superstrings / some basic physical thing. Instead you say the universe "has some fixed mathematical structure". You then make your reductionist point by talking about "layers of abstraction" - but why are you so vague about the foundation? The Kabbalistic tree of life has a "fixed mathematical structure", does that make Kabbalists (who try to map everything in the universe onto the tree) reductionists?
You also say "The universe is all representable mathematical relationships". I can't tell if this is a *definition* of the universe, or a quasi-empirical discovery, or what. Let's take as a first definition, "The universe is everything that exists". You might then be saying that "To exist is to be a representable mathematical relationship" - that might be your *definition* of existence. Or, you might be saying, hey guys, it turns out that everything that exists is a "representable mathematical relationship" - rather than being an atom, or a soul, or a nonmathematical relationship, or an unrepresentable mathematical relationship.
I believe there is some sort of half-thought-through metaphysics behind these statements of yours, and that you ought to try to bring it into the open.
"Most reductionists would say it means believing that the universe is made out of atoms / superstrings / some basic physical thing. Instead you say the universe 'has some fixed mathematical structure.'"
Dude, a "basic physical thing" is a mathematical structure in the memory of the computer on which our universe is running. I don't think I'm half-baked on this one; I know what reductionism is.
Do you know what idealism is? "The philosophical theory that ... the ultimate nature of reality is based on mind or ideas." You are espousing something which sounds more like idealism than realism: an object is a "mathematical structure in the memory of the computer on which our universe is running".
Now I assume you're not just stating the simulation hypothesis. You're not just saying "we're inside a big computer in the real world, and to know reality we'd have to get out". Your statement is supposed to be true, to make sense, even if we are talking about zero-level reality. Correct me if I'm wrong, of course, but I assume you want to say that reality itself "is a computer", and the universe is a program on that computer.
Now I think at a minimum these are quasi-metaphorical expressions when used in this context, and you should try to express this idea some other way, if you are really serious about it. "Computer" in the mundane world carries all the conceptual baggage of being a manufactured artefact, made by conscious beings for a specific purpose. So if none of that is what you mean by "computer", I have to ask myself, what part of the concept *do* you want to use? I'm thinking "state machine": something which has states and undergoes transitions between them. And there's some notion of causality too.
OK, so reality has states, and when they change it's because they are caused to change. Next problem: what do you mean by a "program"? Again, I know the mundane meaning well enough, but that's not what you mean here, so what *do* you mean? Again I grope for an abstraction from theoretical computer science: Turing's tape. It's a type of state machine, and it has an aspect which we call a program - its initial conditions. But is that all you mean by "program" - cosmic initial conditions? I doubt it. But I'm not sure what you mean - feel free to enlighten me.
Do you see, not only that I have to do all this guessing in order to figure out what you mean, but this guessing is unavoidable, because you are using a language which can only be metaphorical in this context? The same thing goes for "memory" and "mathematical structure". You're like an Egyptian scribe who says everything is made of hieroglyphs. It's impossible to tell what your literal point is, because you're speaking in metaphors, almost without realizing it.
Mitchell, if you want to avoid all this common philosopher-confusion, you have to do a Yudkowsky/Drescher and start judging epistemological beliefs by whether you'd program them into an AI.
For example: The mathematical structure that is the Theory of Computation is extremely useful to making predictions and motivating progress in science. In particular, I would program an AI to arrive at correct beliefs using a form of Occam's razor whose simplicity measure is program complexity on a Turing machine. This is possible because the universe's mathematical structure "factors" into states that are related in such a way that a TM can compute from one to the other.
My original post about reductionism contained insights that cause your brain to be a better true-hypothesis-generator, even though I didn't rehash enough material from lesswrong.com to educate a layman enough to appreciate it. I'm not interested in arguing with a philosophical student of perfect emptiness. To me, optimizing for philosophy prowess means having the most powerful belief-generator (and belief-generator-generator) algorithm.
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I have neither a science nor philosophy background (I'll explain what I DO have later), so imagine me reading the ping-pong match between Liron and Mitchell and then seeing it interrupted by a retarded R2D2 drone selling get-rich-quick schemes. I know it wasn't your intended punchline, but - damn! - that was funny!
So yeah, what brought me here was, in a way, a mathematical reduction of its own: a common username. I've been using "Lshap" for almost 15 years, and decided (instead of working) to investigate my acronym-cousins. And there you were.
I could've left it there, of course, but I thought your ideas were cutting-edge and your attempt to wrap your brain around the thin fabrics of the universe noble. And yes, of course your concepts are metaphorical, but what choice is there when you're attempting to light the limitless geography of the universe with a tiny mental penlight? Poetic license granted.
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