> 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.
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.
> 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".
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
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).
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.
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.
I believe that GP is referring to the idea that objects are moving at a constant velocity in space-time. In that model, things that are moving rapidly (from our perspective) in the 3-space of, ummm, space, are moving slowly along the time axis of space-time (think of photons moving at the speed of light, but where the velocity along the time-axis is slowed to 'zero') and things moving slowly in space (like us!) are really booking it along the time axis of the space-time 4-space.
I agree in general with your sentiment: this is what prevents me from thinking lucidly about time as yet another dimension. But to provide some examples that counteract that, I think about instances when time seems to have been standing still, going slower or even "time flying." Then I think about how I remember those times, which is a form of time travel. People on disassociates often have experiences in which they have travelled in time. It seems, like I alluded to in my metaphor, that we _can_ travel in time; we're just not very adept yet. We don't have much control over our time traveling.
Conversely, to argue that we have control over our physical transport isn't entirely accurate either. We have a certain amount of space that we can travel in, and we were once much less adept at doing so. Additionally, we only have a certain amount of time to travel physically before we are disintegrated, which further wears down the assertion that we are masters of our physical location.
Based on the comments, there seems to be a barrier to the capabilities of our understanding timespace, which makes it extremely difficult to explain or teach, but that doesn't make it less interesting.
The existential barrier lies in understanding time as a benefit to survival. There's little benefit to most of us I can see. In fact, you could argue that an understanding of time-space may lead one to conclude "what is the point of getting up and going to work?"
On the other hand, engaging with time as understood by the frog (in the article) and using it to survive better in the future (i.e., make more money and whatnot), is a definitive advantage to birds, frogs, and physicists alike.
According to this view, the most useful application of time-space as a concept are science fiction books and movies, which may produce income. Otherwise, there's not yet a clear product to go along with the research, which we can point to and say, "See! There is time-space. $9.99 on sale."
I guess such a perspective may reveal me as an economist. News to me.
Perhaps by not studying economy (and merely staying in the same place) time-space has delivered to me an understanding of the subject of economy.
It's easier if you consider that you and the whole galaxy are moving around the universe at 10% of light speed and that it's not exactly you who moves, but the space bending around us, just like time.
On yet another point, you might imagine time as a projection of the space. We like to think of time as the domain often enough, but perhaps it's the opposite. After all, some event needs to takes place, for a time step to be noticeable.
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.
You're conflating two things. I said determinism in math, while you want to know about the universe.
Randomness only means that you can't determine the source of the determinism. Rolling a die might well be a perfectly deterministic event, and indeed, people can learn how to roll dice in a deterministic way. But done the normal way, and you get a random result, you're not going to be able to predetermine the outcome, at least not at speeds that would be useful.
>You're conflating two things. I said determinism in math, while you want to know about the universe.
Well, your phrase was "determinism is math is countered by randomness".
Since there's no randomness in math, the only logical way to interpret what you wrote would be to mean "determinism is math is countered by randomness [in the universe]".
>But done the normal way, and you get a random result, you're not going to be able to predetermine the outcome, at least not at speeds that would be useful.
Well, dice roll results are not math. We can use math to calculate their probabilities, but any randomness in dice rolls, if there is indeed any, is in the universe, not in the math we use.
You're constraining the concept of math in a way that nobody really does, is not useful to the discussion, and isn't intended by the article, which does attempt to reduce things like dice results, indeed the entire universe, to math.
>You're constraining the concept of math in a way that nobody really does
Really? I'd say that everybody, and every textbook I've ever seen uses the same definition.
The one additional distinction people disagree on is whether math is just the theorems, proofs, etc we've already described, or if math can be thought of as encompassing all possible maths (the latter being the so-called platonic view of math).
Considering dice results and their randomness (or lack thereof) as math (as opposed to something that we can use math to calculate the probabilities of) or considering the "entire universe" as math is not really a common interpretation.
I'd say that it's your view instead that few have in mind when speaking about math. People do say that mathematical principle underline physical laws and goings on inside the universe, but not that the universe is math itself.
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.
Thank you. I would never be able to express this idea so eloquently, and now I can just point people to this paragraph.