
How to Understand the Universe When You’re Stuck Inside of It - theafh
https://www.quantamagazine.org/were-stuck-inside-the-universe-lee-smolin-has-an-idea-for-how-to-study-it-anyway-20190627/
======
criloz2
I have been working the past two years trying to understand how would be
possible to create a simulation of the universe and a lot of what Lee Smolin
says resonates with some of the conclusion that I have got at the moment

for example, he says that the wave function describes an ensemble of possible
states of a system, example an electron, and this is equal for all the other
electrons of the universe, I will more specific and say that there is a
Functor that describes all the possible states of the surface of any
observable system and it behaves as a wave function when that system tends to
the stability. (this can be related with holographic theory)

Lee Smolin that the universe is looking for maximum variability, which I think
is not correct, the universe is looking for maximum stability in all matter
hierarchies because it allows describing any possible surface with a Functor,
and makes the simulation more easy to carry.

this is big because it means that is not necessary to simulate every electron
on the universe to create a good simulation of itself, or every atom, or every
molecule, or even so every planet, imagine the natural numbers, we don't need
to create all the sets of the natural number in memory in order to use them
and we can peek at any moment at any region of the natural numbers, while the
memory support it, and we will be able to make any computation over them, so
why the electron can not work like that, or any kind of matter?

those functors, are passed between two systems when a system observe to
another system using what we have called photons. also when the universe can't
describe the surface of the system with a functor that can easily be
transported to the observer, this system appears as a black hole.

I am 100% sure that we live in a simulation, not necessarily made by "gods",
but it could be a fundamental way in which the universe behave

~~~
Ancalagon
I understand you have likely been looking into this for a while, but do you
have any citations for any of this material? There are quite a few claims in
here that need to be parsed out.

~~~
criloz2
not at the moment, is something that I am formalizing, it just the general
idea, Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, it will take time,
but I feel that I am in the right path

------
joe_the_user
Perhaps "understanding 'intelligence' when you're stuck inside it" is even
harder and yet a lot of artificial intelligence research seems very linear and
not interested in unknown unknowns.

If we are following the "anthropic principle" the two questions might not be
entirely unrelated.

~~~
ncmncm
It is even less interested in the more consequential unknown knowns, better
known as "what you think you know that ain't really so". If Donald Rumsfeld
could have understood this concept, we might have stayed out of Iraq.

------
melling
Quanta Magazine has been producing a lot of stories that have been appearing
on HN lately.

An interesting aside it that Quanta was started by James Simon’s Foundation.
James Simons is an interesting person. He doesn’t get the publicity of a
Gates, Buffett, or Bezos.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Harris_Simons](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Harris_Simons)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNznD9hMEh0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNznD9hMEh0)

~~~
consumer451
The Numberphile YT channel managed to get a rare interview with Mr. Simons.

[https://youtu.be/QNznD9hMEh0](https://youtu.be/QNznD9hMEh0)

~~~
melling
That’s the same link I posted.

~~~
consumer451
I'm sorry, I should have checked. I would delete my comment if there was not
another interesting child.

------
cr0sh
I'm not a physicist, nor a philosopher, and certainly not a mathematician - so
maybe what I'm going to write will seem both naive and probably wrong, but I'm
doing it anyhow.

In this Quanta interview, Amanda Gefter writes:

"Leibniz argued (against Newton) that there’s no fixed backdrop to the
universe, no “stuff” of space; space is just a handy way of describing
relationships. This relational framework captured Smolin’s imagination, as did
Leibniz’s enigmatic text The Monadology, in which Leibniz suggests that the
world’s fundamental ingredient is the “monad,” a kind of atom of reality, with
each monad representing a unique view of the whole universe. It’s a concept
that informs Smolin’s latest work as he attempts to build reality out of
viewpoints, each one a partial perspective on a dynamically evolving universe.
A universe as seen from the inside."

For some reason, my mind went to the idea of "nodes and edges" of a graph;
with the nodes being these "monads" and their relationships being the "edges",
and then later in the interview...Smolin notes:

"The event has relations with the rest of the universe, and that set of
relations constitutes its “view” of the universe. Rather than describing an
isolated system in terms of things that are measured from the outside, we’re
taking the universe as constituted of relations among events."

I don't know for sure if what I was thinking is the same thing as what he
expresses here, but I think I might be close. Regardless, I now wonder
something else:

Could the colloquial concept/idea of "6 degrees of separation" apply here? If
so, what implications might that have for Smolin's theory?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation#Math...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation#Mathematics)

I won't pretend to have any answers here (again, assuming anything I wrote
above means anything)...

~~~
danbruc
There is a very good introduction - 20 lectures of 45 minutes - to loop
quantum gravity by Carlo Rovelli [1] who worked together with Lee Smolin on
that topic. In a nutshell loop quantum gravity is about triangulating space
with tetrahedra, then representing this triangulation as a graph - one vertex
per tetrahedron, one edge between every two tetrahedra sharing a face - with
the edges labeled with SU(2) transformations describing the change in
orientation due to spacetime curvature as one moves from one tetrahedron to a
neighboring one, and of course the dynamics of this description. I hope I got
this right, I am totally not a physicist. There is also a very good talk for
the general public focusing on the nature of time by Rovelli [2] in case the
lecture series is to long or technical.

Well, I initially started writing this comment because of the quote »Leibniz
argued (against Newton) that there’s no fixed backdrop to the universe, no
“stuff” of space; space is just a handy way of describing relationships.«.
According to Rovelli - he talks about this in the lecture series mentioned
above - Newton was fully aware [3] that his notion of space and time are just
abstract notions and that space and time are fundamentally relational. But due
to the success of using abstract space and time in science and engineering
this got somewhat forgotten and those abstract notions were and are considered
much more fundamental than they are. This in lectures two (space) and ten
(time) which both provide an overview about the philosophical evolution of the
concepts and should be - at least the first part of the lectures - accessible
without [almost] any background.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mp4fpwl9loQ&list=PLwLvxaPjGH...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mp4fpwl9loQ&list=PLwLvxaPjGHxR6zr421tXXlaDGbq8S36Un)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6rWqJhDv7M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6rWqJhDv7M)

[3] I just skipped a bit through the second lecture on space and I may have
somewhat overstated Newton's awareness but I will leave this as first written.
It is more like he was aware that we only have access to relational space and
time but we can infer from that a true abstract notion of space and time. I
really recommend to just watch the lecture for a more nuanced picture, it
starts out very non-technical and this very discussion.

------
jonmc12
> _But if your goal is to discover new, deeper laws, you need to mix with
> philosophers again._

Some reading in this direction:

"How Hume and Mach Helped Einstein Find Special Relativity", Norton

"Range", Epstein. Ch 1 discusses Bool's influence on Shannon for the discovery
of information theory. Ch 5 includes anecdotes and research for "Thinking
Outside Experience", including the methods of analogy used by Keppler
regarding theories of planetary motion.

> _Then there was this pragmatic turn, where the dominant mode of physics
> became anti-foundational, anti-philosophy._

Related papers:

"Analytic and Continental Philosophy, Science, and Global Philosophy", Tieszen

"Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy", Hanna

------
motohagiography
Kind of an interesting limit question though. Like what could we know about an
instrument from a tune played on it, or from a collection of sheet music that
may or may not have been written for it?

The instrument can be thought of very loosely as representing a monad where
force, reason, intent and all these other things go in and then "phenomena of
type music" comes out. If the universe were monadic the way he describes,
there is probably some information theory-meets-ontological limit that has to
do with whether you can ever get "upstream" of these monads, of which our
universe is the effect.

Other than perhaps being able to discover and reproduce them.

------
davidivadavid
I thought the article was going to be a more scientific take on this fun talk
by George Hotz:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESXOAJRdcwQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESXOAJRdcwQ)

------
Filligree
Some of it you can _only_ understand from inside the universe. It would be
difficult at best to guess at the Born rule from a simulation.

~~~
gcbw2
And why would you need a way to calculate the bias on observing a system from
the inside out if your observations lack that bias?

~~~
Filligree
Perhaps you're interested in what it would be like to live inside that system?

------
dnprock
The most interesting and mind blowing insight: "When most physicists said that
the laws of physics are immutable, he said they evolve according to a kind of
cosmic Darwinism."

------
maxerbubba
Typo: The linked paper [1] refers to Monodology and Monadology

[1]
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.04799.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.04799.pdf)

------
mhet
Smolin dropped out of highschool, played in a rock band, thought himself
mathematics and suddenly he is in Harvard... good jump Smolin. Flawless
victory!

------
inopinatus
All matter is information, all information is functional, and perception is
therefore the lazy evaluation of the universe.

~~~
newsoul2019
Does the universe require perception in order for there to be existence?

If so, does the perception require consciousness?

Is consciousness constrained to the universe, or orthogonal to it?

~~~
mitchty
No, all you need is to observe things. Be it a simple detector or conscious
observer, you've extracted information from the environment. The observation
implies existence, what observed it is inconsequential.

~~~
newsoul2019
So is entropy really about energy, or information? Or is there any difference.

~~~
CuriousSkeptic
Statistics.

Imagine any given configuration of the universe. Of all possible changes to a
new configuration (think Levenshtein distance) from that configuration there’s
a large set of “equivalent” (in the aggregate) configurations, let’s call
those the future. There is a smaller set of configurations which we would
ascribe some special character too, such as being somewhat orderly let’s call
those the past. the set of possible configurations encoding a broken pot are
larger then the set encodings an unbroken one. But the state brokenness of the
pot is entirely a subjective things, without that interpretation of the
encoding they are equally random

Now if you are a “process”, a kind of pattern that can be identified as the
same entity in several of those configurations, it would seem necessary for
that pattern to follow some rule in which most of those “future”
configurations would retain its unique characteristic.

So if you throw a dart into this mess of configurations and hit such an
entity, selecting any direction to move from that point at random would most
likely give you a configuration with higher entropy, but in which this
particular pattern would be retained.

Some patterns would have a higher chance than other of being traceable along
those changes, perhaps they encode a kind of anticipation of likely futures
yielding a rules set which a higher likelihood of existing from one
configuration to the next. Let’s call this patterns “living”

------
plutonorm
Perhaps those morphic resonance guys are onto something.

------
pcj_1000x
> _This relational framework captured Smolin’s imagination, as did Leibniz’s
> enigmatic text The Monadology, in which Leibniz suggests that the world’s
> fundamental ingredient is the “monad,”_

If this is not evidence that Haskell is the language of the Gods, I don't know
what is...

~~~
avmich
Monads were used in APL language long before Haskell came to be.

Surely all those are different monads though.

~~~
6thaccount2
They are different...I can understand the APL ones. I have no idea what a
"monoid in the category of endofunctors" means :)

~~~
avmich
Look at this statement enough times over long enough period, and it starts
making sense.

"Category" is that central thing of the science of nodes and arrows between
them.

"Functor" is a mapping - a function - from a category to another category,
where each node is mapped and each arrow is mapped according to node mapping.
Like, if 1 in number category maps to A in character category, 2 maps to B,
and there is an arrow 1->2 in number category, then this arrow should map to
arrow A->B in character category.

"Endofunctor" adds that the resulting category should in fact be the same as
original. So, 1->2 can e.g. map to 3->4 in the same number category.

"Monoid" is requirement that with the category we also have defined binary
operation (let's call it X), that the operation is associative and also that
category has "identity" node (let's call it I) - that is, for any A both
operations A X I and I X A both produce A. It's like adding with zero.

Now, this is not enough to understand monads - but it provides a foundation
for what those monads, mathematically speaking, are. Consequences of these
definitions can lead far :) .

------
jaequery
Maybe one of the laws of the universe is that, one should never understand
“it”.

Perhaps we should just enjoy what we have.

