
Life Is a Braid in Spacetime (2015) - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/29/scaling/life-is-a-braid-in-spacetime-rp
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airstrike
> Some people find it emotionally displeasing to think of themselves as a
> collection of particles. I got a good laugh back in my 20s when my friend
> Emil addressed my friend Mats as an “atomhög,” Swedish for “atom heap,” in
> an attempt to insult him. However, if someone says “I can’t believe I’m just
> a heap of atoms!’’ I object to the use of the word “just”: the elaborate
> spacetime braid that corresponds to their mind is hands down the most
> beautifully complex type of pattern we’ve ever encountered in our universe.
> The world’s fastest computer, the Grand Canyon or even the Sun—their
> spacetime patterns are all simple in comparison.

Thank you. I would never be able to express this idea so eloquently, and now I
can just point people to this paragraph.

~~~
chaoticmass
This concept is from where I conceived my online alias 'Chaoticmass.' I
thought it was really deep when I was 13.

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sctb
Discussed at the location in time of publishing:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10323222](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10323222).

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ianai
I’ve always had a fundamental problem with the identification of human
knowledge with reality. I see this idea as identifying the function with its
graph, in a sense. But that requires us to have a logical framework that will
asymptotically approach reality. I don’t think that may exist.

For one, the uncertainty principle suggests there is no exact, fully
determined reality.

Second, Goedel showed us that logical systems are either incomplete or
inconsistent.

Third, there is more certainty in the past than the future - in so far as
credible measurements may exist of the past and not the future. The present
may then be the collapse of all those possible futures into a knowable past.
There is a way to discriminate the past, present, and future from one another.

While we certainly have some helpful wisdom built up, I think the true nature
of reality may not be known. There will always be a layer below or additional
properties unknown, unknowable, or undecidable portion to the universe.

~~~
08-15
> For one, the uncertainty principle suggests there is no exact, fully
> determined reality.

Absolutely not! The uncertainty principle suggests that position and momentum
are inappropriate descriptions of reality. The quantum mechanical wave
function would be a complete description, if quantum mechanics was all there
is to reality.

> Second, Goedel showed us that logical systems are either incomplete or
> inconsistent.

He didn't. He showed us that finite theories in sufficiently powerful logical
systems, specifically number theory expressed in first order logic, admit
multiple models. Turning this into "any theory of the universe will be
incomplete" is playing fast and lose with the meaning of the word
"incomplete".

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childintime
By the end of the article the author seems to have forgotten about the
postulate in the beginning. Much better article by the same author:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14677846](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14677846)

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dandare
For me, the problem with thinking about time as just another dimension is that
while we can move through the spatial dimensions, with time we are either
locked in one place or flowing at an absolutely constant rate* (depending on
the bird/frog perspective).

*extrapolating from general relativity.

~~~
csomar
> flowing at an absolutely constant rate

Not really. We are moving at an instantaneous speed. Wanna try it? Go to bed,
you'll wake up almost instantly but 8 hours later.

The perception of time happens in your brain. The speed is just your brain
processing information. Not necessarily all human perceive time the same way
(you can never know, heh?) but we can be pretty certain about the order of the
spacetime flow.

~~~
3pt14159
I have an eerily accurate internal clock. In high school I repeatedly awoke
around two or three second before my alarm clock went off in my washroom.
Enough time to get there and turn it off just as the first beep was starting.

Unless I'm sick (or otherwise mentally altered) I know how much time has
passed.

~~~
ianai
It’s not like our brains actually turn off while we sleep. Being that aware of
time seems like a good trait though. Congrats!

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vinceguidry
Determinism in math is countered with randomness. You can abstract over the
randomness to get absolutes but within the realm defined by randomness, you
can still obtain meaning by hacking away at it.

Many things we think are random aren't _entirely_ so. So you can have fun
using your brain to tease out the factors and then eventually master your
approach to the randomness.

Math allows us to not have to endlessly solve the same problem over and over
and over again.

~~~
coldtea
> _Determinism in math is countered with randomness_

What randomness? Where would the source of randomness be in the universe?

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nategri
one pretty obvious source starts with a q

~~~
csomar
There is speculations (interpretations) that quantum processes are random. But
we can never be sure since we still don't know the true nature of reality.

