Slashdot Mirror
Simulations Back Up Theory That Universe Is a Hologram
ananyo writes "A team of physicists has provided some of the clearest evidence yet that our Universe could be just one big projection. In 1997, theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena proposed that an audacious model of the Universe in which gravity arises from infinitesimally thin, vibrating strings could be reinterpreted in terms of well-established physics. The mathematically intricate world of strings, which exist in nine dimensions of space plus one of time, would be merely a hologram: the real action would play out in a simpler, flatter cosmos where there is no gravity. Maldacena's idea thrilled physicists because it offered a way to put the popular but still unproven theory of strings on solid footing — and because it solved apparent inconsistencies between quantum physics and Einstein's theory of gravity. It provided physicists with a mathematical Rosetta stone, a 'duality', that allowed them to translate back and forth between the two languages, and solve problems in one model that seemed intractable in the other and vice versa. But although the validity of Maldacena's ideas has pretty much been taken for granted ever since, a rigorous proof has been elusive. In two papers posted on the arXiv repository, Yoshifumi Hyakutake of Ibaraki University in Japan and his colleagues now provide, if not an actual proof, at least compelling evidence that Maldacena's conjecture is true."
I have no idea what any of this stuff means, but I'm going to post it on my Facebook and claim that this is what I thought all along anyway.
who appear to us as mice
...is no longer not even wrong ?
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "we have a protractor"
Then they will tell you it is recursive too.
But it happened long time ago and in a galaxy far away.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It changes nothing since it's always been more probable that we're in a simulation than not. If there is only one real world and we can create a complete simulation of it, then we can run a second simulation of it. If there's two simulations and one real world, it's more likely you're in one of the simulations than in the real world.
Personally, I'd rather be living on the event horizon of a 4D black hole instead of someone's hologram. Are these two theories mutually exclusive?
I hate to tell you but not all scientists are doctors, and also cancer is not the only issue that is affecting us today. The more we understand about the universe, the more we understand about ourselves.
In other words, what are YOU doing to cure cancer since you think that "scientists" should focus on cancer instead of XX.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
why oh why are scientists wasting time on this? one step at at time, for now figure out how to cure cancer before worrying about the big picture. you must unzip your pants before worrying about how much piss comes out
Really???? If all "scientists" thought like that then we wouldn't be in a position to even KNOW what *cancer* is. We'd be stuck on a problem prior to that hundreds of years ago.
Science is all about looking far and wide for answers. Sometimes things are immediately applicable to your specific problem/condition/annoyance/life, but sometimes they aren't.
Applied science / engineering is more about solutions to your specific problem. Perhaps you can go ask the bio-medical engineers to hurry it up, but leave the scientists alone!
why are you wasting time reading Slashdot? Millions of children are dying in Africa as we speak. You must go help them before worrying about anything else.
It's turtles all the way down to turtle prime which is a comic book.
Quite a lot older.
A lot of people might find this a little hokey, especially coming from the journal Nature. The biggest thing to overcome is science fictions deception of other dimensions. A dimension is just another direction. We know about the six directions we can currently move in (3 dimensions) plus time (which we always move forward through at a constant rate; you can slow down how fast you move through time relative to everything else, but it's not noticeable unless you can afford a very very fast vehicle). Here's a great explanation of extra dimensions:
http://www.phdcomics.com/tv/#010
The other "Things explained" videos are also really good for understanding more complex physics concepts.
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/10/13/1434223/physicists-devise-test-for-whether-the-universe-is-a-simulation
http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/10/21/0326216/fermilab-to-test-holographic-universe-theory
http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/01/16/1446238/the-universe-as-hologram
Well I was wasting time reading it for fun but now I'm doing it out of gut-wrenching depression that I'm not doing anything worthwhile.
There's more about it here. This recent work basically suggests that the theory might be true. It is a doubly useful theory in that it allows certain difficult problems in string theory to be solved in the language of conformal field theories and vice versa. If nothing else, it means string theory can be used as a computational tool in certain problems of condensed matter physics even if string theory doesn't pan out as a theory for quantum gravity. But it also makes string theory more likely as a theory for quantum gravity as it makes it in some sense compatible with the holographic principle, which among other things provides a solution to the information paradox of black holes.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
I read the FTA and I didn't get any proof that we were living in a simulation at all. The article basically says some physicists ran two simulations for a black hole -- one with quantum theory (single dimension) and the other with a (more traditional) 10-dimensional model. The results matched.
Several take aways: 1) Great work by the physicists 2) I thought the standard models had eleven dimensions and not ten 3) I still don't know what they are talking about because this stuff is way beyond me 4) There is no mention about whether this proves one way or another that our universe is a hologram or a simulation.
The FTA is throwing around the word hologram, but IMHO that is a bit a stretch. Or maybe I don't know the official scientific definition of a hologram.
You do realize that quantum mechanics were met with similar derision? Heck, Einstein never really accepted the notion, and that's as great a scientist as we've ever had. It took years to devise experiments that could validate quantum mechanics' existence.
This isn't to say that this theory is right or wrong, merely that groundbreaking theories almost invariably will look like "mathematical fancy" to most people (especially those with "get off my lawn!" syndrome) and will be met with confusion or denial by a lot of others, including respected scientists. It's crazy, but it might just work. Remember: the universe wasn't designed so that our puny minds would find it logical or straightforward. It just is.
I think it's more probable that you just have no idea what you're talking about.
The hot grits are still real to me, dammit!
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
Nobody is saying that the universe is precisely a hologram stored on a flat plane, so before you call it horseshit, you could try to read what they are actually saying. Also, the particular theory they are talking about here has actually been tested, at least somewhat: people used it to compute some stuff about gluon plasma, which they then tested against LHC data, and it matched quite well. So the theories do work, and they can be used to compute real predictions.
Is this related to the work that Arkani Hamed and Trnka are doing with Ampletuhedrons? They have discovered a geometry that simplifies calculations and that suggests space and time might not be fundamental to physics.
nonsense, it makes boobs awesome holographic porn, projected from a surface.
Someone clever was working out the maximum entropy of a black hole, and found that (unexpectedly) it was proportional to the surface area of the event horizon, not its volume. After some more thought, other clever people found that the full state of every particle that falls into a black hole remains encoded as oscillations and deformations of its surface area.
This leads to the realization that the despite the fact that a black hole's event horizon is seemingly much simpler than a full-dimensional portion of a universe, it's theoretically possible that it's just as rich a simulation. Perhaps the "real" representation of the universe is actually just a rippling membrane, and the 3D view we see around us is just an alternate interpretation. This is where the word "hologram" comes in - it's only an analogy (because flattish holograms seem to encode 3D data).
Now, the word "real" is misleading - neither representation is 'more true', it's just that the fewer-dimensional representation might be a lot simpler. A comparable situation is the way the earth goes around the sun, or the sun goes around the earth. A stationary sun makes models of the planetary orbits a heck of a lot simpler, but a stationary earth makes it a lot easier to give directions to your party.
All of this was theoretical until this recent finding. The researches created two mathematical models of the universe - one of them ten-dimensional (similar to some forms of modern theories of our universe, though the article points out their model was simpler). The other model was a one-dimensional universe filled with ideal springs. These models were identical, in the same way as the 3D universe and the event horizon - they're alternate ways of calculating the same thing.
The researchers discovered that simulations in both of these universe models have the same output - in other words, they do seem to be different ways of describing the same universe.
The way I think of the universe, is like a 11 dimensional sphere of putty, that got hit with a hammer. (aka the big bang).
So, the sphere got deformed spraying outward in 3 dimensions (space) while flying off into a 4th (time) and the other 7 dimensions got compressed.
A Particle is a bit of energy caught in a loop around some number of those 7 dimensions, each combination of possible wrapping gives a different fundamental particle, with antiparticles having the same wrap, but opposing spin.
Light/radio 'waves' are caused by the photons looping around one of the higher dimensions, not one of our 3 spatial dimensions, which is how it is travelling in a straight line space, yet still taking a wavering path; like a piece of string wrapped around an infinitesimally small cylinder.
But that's just my mental model, it work well enough to keep me from going mad (I think)
So, the headline is quite wrong. Nothing in this work has directly to do with our universe, nor does it show that we live in a hologram. What it does do is provide some further evidence for a string theory conjecture called AdS/CFT. This conjecture says that "string theory in d dimensions" is precisely the same as "conformal field theory in d-1 dimensions". This is cute, since it lets us calculate some things, for example, one might be interested in calculating something in some field theory, but it is very difficult to do. AdS/CFT lets us translate that thing into a string theory thing, which usually is easier to compute. So people working in condensed matter physics, particle physics and QCD are actually using this string theory conjecture as a computational tool. However, AdS/CFT tells us nothing about our universe, since we know that the type of string theories it talks about can't describe our universe. So it is "only" a useful toy model and computational tool. The article is about that some guys have run computer simulations to calculate something on both sides, so both on the string side, and in the field theory side, and what they get match, as it should if the conjecture is true. This is nice and lends further evidence to the conjecture, but there is plenty of other evidence already known, both numerical and theoretical. So I fail to see how this is important or newsworthy, it feels mostly like useless hype.
If I understand this wikipedia article correctly, it's a projection of the universe's cosmological event horizon. So think of it as being caused by turbulence the "blast wave" produced by the big bang.
Eleven vs Ten dimensions is at the heart of the "hologram" thing. The universe as a hologram (nothing at all to do with a simulation) is a metaphor for how the math worked out in a very surprising way from two different directions.
In the study of black holes, a block hole represents the maximum entropy is is possible to have in a given volume. That there is a maximum possible information needed to completely describe a volume of space. Surprisingly that limit grows with surface area, not volume. By analogy, this is like saying you could take a holographic recording of a volume at its surface, and completely reconstruct the volume from that data. But the "holographic universe" is just an analogy for the very odd result that all the information describing a volume of space "fits" in 2 dimensions. It's best not to read too much into that because the limit here is really quite high, the maximum possible information is on the order of the surface area of a sphere measured in plank-lengths - vastly more bits than is likely relevant to anything.
Inspired by this work, but in completely unrelated theory, it was found that the 11-diminsional quantum model can be completely captured in a 10-diminsional model that includes gravity. The presence of gravity in the universe "flattens" the state needed to describe it by one dimension. This was to me a much more interesting result that the black hole result (because the numbers there were so high it wasn't really a limit at all). Qualitatively all this is not that surprising in glorious hindsight, because gravity does limit the possible ways to arrange matter in the universe: black holes mean any arrangement with too much too close together collapses the information needed to describe it into just a few numbers. How that translates into needing 1 less dimension in quantum mechanics is far beyond me.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Sorry, but on this system, we don't allow self-modifying code.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I read the FTA and I didn't get any proof that we were living in a simulation at all.
Because it doesn't claim that. Hologram != Simulation.
The FTA is throwing around the word hologram, but IMHO that is a bit a stretch. Or maybe I don't know the official scientific definition of a hologram.
It just means that our universe seems to have more dimensions than it really does, for certain purposes. By analogy with a visual hologram, which looks 3d but all the depth information resides entirely in the interference patterns encoded in a 2d image.
It doesn't have anything to do with a holodeck or the universe as a simulation or even really invalidate the laws of physics as we currently know them. At best, it might mean that someday (a long, long time away) we can find a way to cheat certain of those laws that exist only as emergent behavior from the actual underlying system.
Basically, there are two major concepts.
First, is duality. This is where two models can represent the same system (they are duals of each other). The thing with duality is that in many cases, a problem that is impossible to solve in one model may be trivially done in another. You may know the duality between time-domain and frequency-domain systems - a convolution in one is a multiplication in the other (which is handy for some really difficult convolutions).
The other concept is a hologram. Take a traditional hologram you can buy as a souvenir - it's just a flat piece of transparent material (glass or plastic), yet look through it and you see a 3D image hovering in space - projected if you will, in 3D. And it is 3D, because you can look around the object. Yet the object is stored on a 2D medium. (FYI - the same concept applies to holographic sights - the dot is projected on the target in 3D space). Holograms are useful because they can cast higher dimensional spaces into lower dimensional spaces, yet retain the original resolution and details of the higher dimensional space (or how they get a 3D projection on a 2D surface).
Holographic theory is one where our 3D world is actually on a 2D surface. Like a hologram.
Now, what the results are is that they found a set of dual systems that represent reality - between string theory and quantum mechanics using holographic theory. In other words, they could do a calculation using string theory and have the results line up with quantum mechanics (and holograms). By proving this, a difficult problem in quantum mechanics can be translated to string theory and be easily solved there, then the results translated back, which gives the same answer as if you did it the hard way.
That would explain why nobody around here gets the girl.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
...2) I thought the standard models had eleven dimensions and not ten ...
Look, the standard model has these eleven- *CRASH* - Oy! I mean ten - TEN dimensions!
Dark Reflection
The search for equations to more accurately describe the observable universe is often first formed as a hypothesis, then once the hypothesis is formalized and can be tested it may become a Theory or Law. One can come to such equations through direct observation, such as thermodynamics or Newtonian Gravity, or be theoretical until proven, like Einstein's curved space-time. In other words one can observe something strange then attempt to explain it, or formulate explanations that cover known observations and look for other oddities it may predict later.
String theory of today is not the same as it was 30 years ago. "Crock of Bullshit" isn't remotely descriptive. Once worked out the equations may predict counter-intuitive results, such as when Einstein's equations indicated Black Holes existed... Doubters were rebuffed when we discovered them. All of the equations of physics are wrong -- or, more correctly: they are inaccurate estimations of reality, some are more accurate than others. Newtonian Gravity was verified through observation, and the gravitational constant was calculated -- We later discovered this was wrong. However, it's still a damn good approximation.
Was it a waste for Newton to study gravitation? It had no immediate practical application for every day life, except to explain oddities of celestial motion... We continue to search for a set of equations that are more accurate than what we have now. The history of physics is rife with explosions of disparate equations, and then collapsing of them into more overarching elegant systems of understanding. Equations that provide more accurate results are testable via more accurate observations, even if the equations are not founded on direct physical observation themselves.
When some suggest that "The Universe is like unto a Hologram" due to examination of String Theory, and you call the very equations untestable predictions you only provide direct evidence that that low UID numbers do not necessarily correlate with intelligence, knowledge, or wisdom.
QED.
nonsense, it makes boobs awesome holographic porn, projected from a surface.
RT or Pro?
I can see your point, but as long as it makes predictions I'm willing to keep it in a separate category.
for now figure out how to cure cancer before worrying about the big picture.
Boy will you have egg on your face when their research leads to the development of a machine that allows us to isolate and neutralize all the cancer cells in a body in one quick pass. Yes, as a side effect it will actually cause an egg to materialize, go to your house, knock on your door, and hit you. Right in the face. That's the wonder of quantum mechanics.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I think you missed a bit there.
Any simulation of the world will be as complex as the original. So if you build a full simulation of the real world, you'd double the information complexity of the world. So that wouldn't work.
One thing that might work is if you simulate regions of the "world" just in time -ie the things you see are being simulated as you look for them. That ties that simulation to a Matrix like world - each person effectively has his own world and they can be independent of each other.
Another possibility is that we are in a limited simulation - some have said that quantum theory shows the graininess of the simulation and that relativistic speed limits limit the size of the canvas on which the world is being painted (ie you only have to simulate as far as the edge of the canvas, nothing outside it affects whatever is inside).
In either of these cases, you cannot (be guaranteed to be able to) run a simulation within a simulation.
http://slashdot.org/submission/1062723/Cheap-mobile-data-plan?art_pos=2
A very crude analogy would be a Fourier transform. If you take a simple wave it is very complicated to describe it in time domain (lots of terms mathematically), but it has a simple mathematical expression in frequency domain with just a single term.
The physicists have figured out how to simplify the maths. This transformation also has a physical interpretation which is best explained as a hologram. A hologram has information from 3 dimensions scrunched into 2 dimensions, ie when you look at a hologram, it appears to have depth. In a common hologram sticker, that information is encoded in polarization. In the same manner, they seem to say information in a 11 Dimensional world can be scrunched into lesser number of dimensions. Hence the analogy.
http://slashdot.org/submission/1062723/Cheap-mobile-data-plan?art_pos=2
Why do you automatically assume that the game is someone else's? They've made some huge advances in context-suppression in the latest generation holosims - you almost totally believe that the simulation is the whole of your existence and can, among other things, truly experience the wonder and horror of being a corporeal human in the early 21st century (one of the most popular scenarios, just look at the in-game population!)
Oh, wait, I'm not supposed to discuss such things on the in-game forums. Forget I said anything.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It changes nothing since it's always been more probable that we're in a simulation than not.
Not in the least.
If there is only one real world and we can create a complete simulation of it
That's why. Parlor thoughts only. You cannot fit a complete description of reality in said reality. Recursion.
One can manipulate math to to describe or answer pretty much anything you want. Just because the equations match what's happening does not mean they describe what's going on.
Who cares? As long as the equations match what's happening (and what's going to happen), does it matter what's "really" going on? We've been doing quantum mechanics for almost a century now, and still no one actually knows what it all means - but we're perfectly happy to take advantage of QM in our technology.
How do I know? Logic, study, rational thought.
Oh, that's me convinced then.
Any evidence?
Why can't these scientists "prove" their theory either?
I expect they're trying, which is better than simply declaring something to be true.
These thoughts are interesting study for Philosophy, and I have studied and written Philosophy for 35+ years.
Or so you believe. Perhaps you and the rest of what we call reality were brought into existence as of last Thursday at the behest of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Certainly, you can describe anything with equations, and you can come up with multiple mathematical descriptions that match what you know. But they'll make different predictions, which can be tested, and that's where the value of generating a mathematical description is. If you're not looking for predictions you can just say "that's the way it is," skip the math, and move on to something else.
Can anyone explain why this result doesn't contradict this one?
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/07/06/137634397/physicists-almost-certain-the-universe-is-not-a-hologram
Are we talking about different things here?
Hey, maybe _your_ universe only has ten dimensions, but _my_ universe goes to eleven!
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
"So you should major in subjects like English, philosophy, psychology, and sociology -- subjects in which nobody really understands what anybody else is talking about, and which involve virtually no actual facts. I attended classes in all these subjects, so I'll give you a quick overview of each:"
"PHILOSOPHY: Basically, this involves sitting in a room and deciding there is no such thing as reality and then going to lunch. You should major in philosophy if you plan to take a lot of drugs...."
http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~martine/light/barrycollege.html
Unfortunately, some aspects of physics are starting to sound like Dave Barry's take on Philosophy..
One can manipulate math to to describe or answer pretty much anything you want. Just because the equations match what's happening does not mean they describe what's going on.
Who cares? As long as the equations match what's happening (and what's going to happen), does it matter what's "really" going on? We've been doing quantum mechanics for almost a century now, and still no one actually knows what it all means - but we're perfectly happy to take advantage of QM in our technology.
Yes, it really matters. In the middle ages, there were mathematical formulas which described the planets and sun revolving around the earth. The math worked very well even though the theory was proven to be very wrong.
Math, particularly when used as a language, can be used to describe all sorts of things. As with the spoken language, one can create a sentence that is technically and grammatically correct, but still is nonsense. The whole purpose of langauge, any language, even mathematics is to convey ideas. So, yes, it really does matter what's going on. That's the whole point of using a precision language, like math, in the first place.
I got into this discussion too late to be noticed, but I feel the need to help people understand that this theory is *NOT* stating the universe is a simulation. Projections are not simulations.
What the theory suggests is that of all the dimensions we know about (the article mentions 6, which is how many dimensions you get with one flavor of string theory), some of them are illusion. Like a hologram -- a 2D plastic or glass toy that displays a 3D image. The universe does not contain 6 dimensions; it contains a smaller number, and the rest of the dimensions only appear to be there.
It's likely that the universe contains at least three dimensions, because we would have noticed non-isomorphic behavior in space. But the jury is still out on whether the fourth dimension -- Time -- is an illusion. The same goes for the fifth and sixth dimensions.
None of this says anything about the universe being simulated. That's a philosophical question that physics will probably never be able to answer.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
>That there is a maximum possible information needed to completely describe a volume of space. Surprisingly that limit grows with surface area, not volume.
This is equivalent to the Bekenstein bound, where the maximum entropy/information density is proportional to the radius and mass/energy. In the extreme case, for the latter substitute the Schwarszchild radius for that mass/energy, giving a formula proportional to the square of the radius--i.e. surface area, as you wrote.
> It's best not to read too much into that because the limit here is really quite high....[11D to 10D reduction] much more interesting result that the black hole result
I suggest otherwise. A finite maximum number of quantum states in any finitely bounded region of space implies that any physical system with a finite extent can always be simulated by a nondeterministic linearly bounded automaton, an abstract model of computation that is strictly less powerful than a Turing machine. So no super-Turing machines, no noncomputable information processing/thinking, no arbitraty precision real numbers--all of these things are unphysical. Unless you're a dualist and don't believe that mind is what the brain does, this physical constraint means that our minds are ultimately computational, because their physical implementation is computational, and that any finite brain can ultimately have only a finite number of different thoughts. It also means that halting problems and Godelian limits exist for our minds just as they exist for our electronic computers.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
What do you mean it was proven wrong? It never was, and it hasn't been yet. It probably can't be. (Well, except in the sense that Newtonian Mechanics was wrong.)
What was proven was that the heliocentric theory was a lot easier to calculate. And you didn't need to keep adding on as many special correction factors each time the instruments improved. So now we're doing relativity and quantum mechanics, and they are just means of calculation. Relativity doesn't really define an interpretation, and Quantum Mechanics is consistent with multiple different interpretations. The different interpretations seem quite different when described in English, but the math is exactly the same. You can't chose between the multi-world interpretation and Solipsism on the basis of evidence, you need to choose on the basis of philosophical biases.
Just consider, Relativity talks about bent spaces, but in what direction is space bent? Well, that's not clear. Perhaps saying bent is just something to enable you to understand that what we're really talking about is lengths being longer in one direction than in another, but that's just gibberish. You CAN'T translate Relativity into English and have it really make sense, any more than quantum mechanics. The last one you could "pretty much" do that with was Newtonian Mechanics, and if you really think carefully about that, you also find places where you must follow the math rather than reason. Just try to think carefully about what an infinitesimal means, or an imaginary number. You can't. You're just used to them, so you slide over the places where they are incomprehensible.
FWIW, I don't understand pre-Newtonian mechanics well enough, but I'm rather certain that they had equally incomprehensible places. Think of Cantor's proofs, and then try to imagine what it means to paint one copy of the interval of real number red and another blue. Or Zeno's paradoxes.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
At some point, science has to put forth something that's not only consistent but testable. Religion appears to be exempt from that troublesome requirement.
And a scientific theory can be falsified by new evidence. Religion, not so much.
As for science having a "belief system", I strongly suggest you not attempt to "disbelieve" in gravity while near the edge of a high building or in electromagnetism while sticking an uninsulated conductor into a live socket.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
The fixation on "best" accepted theory is more about hubris than insight.
The Kolmogorov/Chaitin view is that you should believe every statement about the universe that you can't formally disprove—all at the same time— using an exponentially weighted average based on the minimum description length of each viable description (baroque theories with billions of epicycles are down-weighted by k^-1e9, where k is the mean entropy of your typical epicycle). I don't really know the math, so take that with a grain of salt, but it's at least the general idea.
The standard model is extremely cogent and concise. It will exponentially outweigh practically everything else.
The only reason this isn't used is that we pretty much never know the minimum description length for anything (there's a result where something akin to minimum description is length is formally proven to be the hardest computation definable), and we can't take the exponentially-weighted integral of all as-yet undisproven theories by any convenient method.
Any undisproven theory that comes along with the potential to be formulated as cogently (or nearly so) as the standard model should be regarded as valid until proven otherwise (either false, or irredeemably baroque).
There's no sane reason to impose incumbency politics on theory. Theory is not a vote.
Naa. A much easier answer is that the simulation of the mind has only a limited amount of introspection capability.
Actually, that's true irrespective of whether the apparent physical universe has "grounded" existence. You decide whether to move your fingers, and how, before you are aware of the action. My theory is that consciousness evolved out of a need to serialize experiences in order to index them for storage and retrieval. The actual physical universe (whether or not it's a simulation) is massively parallel WRT consciousness. What we CAN be aware of is only a fraction of what we physically experience. So the universe that we experience is guaranteed to be a simulation, irrespective of whether the containing physical universe is itself a simulation.
The other alternative is Solipsism, which strikes me as a rather useless belief, even if it *IS* consistent with all available evidence.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Then again, all that really has to be simulated is each person's sensory perception.
Who is to say that the water in the oceans is actually made of H2O and NaCL and all kinds of microbes and other chemicals? One just needs to be convinced that any personal measurement is consistent within their universe (such as "seeing" light through a microscope, or "seeing" data on a screen connected to a spectrometer or other analysis device).
Playing Halo doesn't require that every tree leaf on the map is rendered always, but when at least one player zooms in through their scope they should see those leaves.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Penrose is one of the most prominent respected scientists to propose noncomputable physics (see his "The Emperor's New Mind" and "Shadows of the Mind"), but his arguments were refuted by various experts, from physicists to logicians (see, for example, "A Refutation of Penrose's Godelian Case Against Artificial Intelligence"). He seemed to do it without any evidence, really, and claimed that quantum mechanics must be wrong since it's computable (as is, by the way, quantum field theory).
There were other related arguments around the same time bearing upon this. One had to do with things such as a proposal that artificial neural networks can be super-turing if the weights at nodes could be arbitrary precision real numbers--something clearly excluded by the Bekenstein bound. Yet another one was the observation that a turing machine modified to have continued interaction with its environment, rather than just starting with input and ending with output, can be super-turing. However, this argument is akin to a slight of hand, because it's based on a misleading definition of what the information processing system is, by excluding part of it--the interacting environment in question. If that environment is finite (and it is limited by the system's light cone, unless you believe superluminal communication speed is possible), then the combined system is still sub-turing: a non-deterministic LBA.
So are human minds subject to the same theoretical limits that apply to finite computers? It certainly appears that way, according to our current understanding of physics. Of course, it may be that this will be upturned in the future by the discovery of new, noncomputational physics, and, of course, not all philosophical worldviews align with physicalism.
As for your comment on how powerful quantum computer algorithms can be, we already have a pretty good idea that they're not all that powerful--they're just more efficient (and, specifically, polynomially more efficient); see the computational complexity classes defined for them, like BQP etc. http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.3401
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
As for science having a "belief system", I strongly suggest you not attempt to "disbelieve" in gravity while near the edge of a high building or in electromagnetism while sticking an uninsulated conductor into a live socket.
That's an absolutly miserable analogy. Gravity and Electricity in themselves aren't the same as the Scientific Laws describing Gravity or Electricity. People still died from falling off cliffs before Newton ever put some math to Gravity. Disbelieving that Newton has correctly described Gravity with the inverse square equations may mean you will screw up your Moon-shot, but it never made anybody jump off a cliff and hope to fly, and a lot of people built heavier than air craft that failed to fly before anyone got it right, even though they did believe in Newton's laws.
Scientific axioms are ideas such as Naturalism (meaning simply "the rejection of the Supernatural as a possible explanation for a given phenomenon", not the whole, complex philosophy we would properly call Naturalism). The principle that a theory must make testable predictions to be a part of Science is one of those Axioms of Science, as you yourself point out. You just cited a big part of Science's belief system as proof it doesn't have a belief system. A given theorem, i.e. Alfred Wegener's continental drift hypothesis, Darwin and Wallace's Natural Selection, or even Einstein's General Relativity is NOT part of the belief systems of Science - such things are the results of applying the Scientific Method, and it's the things that make up the method itself that count as belief systems. Again, the results of the method are not, and can NEVER be, themselves part of the method, in just the way Korzibski said "The map is not the territory".
I, you, or anyone else can certainly build theories that are not scientific, in that they can't be tested. Does that mean they have negative value, (in a way analogous to your "falling off a high building" analogy)?. Not at all. I can devise an idea that can't currently be tested but might be testable later (Ideas can become scientific with time, as new technologies make it possible to test things we once couldn't, but there is no Axiom of Science that explains, for all hypothesi, how to judge in advance whether a hypothesis can ever become scientific or not), I can speculate about subjects that don't fall under Strict Naturalism at all, such as what another person was thinking when they did the action I observed. I can judge various matters by a different standard than in Science (such as applying a legalstandard instead of a scientific one in determining whether someone is guilty of a crime.
None of that deserves to analogized to various forms of painful death inflicted on people for not 'believing'. Acknowledging that Science has a belief system may not count as making it into a religion, but when you conflate specific theories with the method, and then use that to threaten non-believers with painful consequences for their non-belief, you've definitely started treating Science as a religion.
Read some Kurt Gödel, Thomas S. Kuhn, and Karl Popper, please.
Who is John Cabal?
Just because the equations match what's happening does not mean they describe what's going on.
Yes and physics has operated very well for the last hundred years based on that method. All that counts is that it can predict what will happen, ie: can it be tested. The more phenomena it can be applied to the better.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The interpretation put on the ancient greek math and accepted as "gospel" by medieval scholars was shown to be deficient in the 1600's, the Greek math itself gave more accurate results for at least a century after Copernicus went to his grave. This was the beginning of the enlightenment which told us there's no way to prove any particular interpretation is correct, all you can really do is compare the scope and accuracy of the predictions between competing theories, (including the theory that "god done it").
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Too bad that our universe is neither AdS (the cosmological constant is positive) nor ten-dimensional as in the papers.
OS Reviews: Free and Open Source Software
Yes, it does.
You seem to stick to the idea that the corpus of knowledge gathered through the scientific method is the same thing as the scientific method itself. The difference has already been explained by another poster rather more eloquently than I could. Religious people accept religious truths on faith, whereas those of a more scientific frame of mind accept scientific hypotheses on the basis that they rest upon evidence. They may accept that the evidence exists by trusting those in the scientific community to not pull the wool over their eyes, but this is not the same thing as accepting the hypotheses itself on faith.
Actually since the 1960s science and philosophy have been divorced from each other, to the detriment of science. I am not equating science and religion, by the way. I am merely pointing out that since most people no longer have a solid understanding of philosophy, they fail to understand that what they propose to know scientifically, they don't actually know, but instead believe. That is because to know something, one must have first experienced it (that's philosophy), without that, we can only accept on faith (not religious faith) what has been told to us. Of course the more credible sources that tell us about it, the more we can rely on it, but without first hand experience, it will always be acceptance on faith not true knowledge (although the probability may be extremely high).
Like it or not, that is the same mechanism involved with religious faith. An idea is passed done by those deemed to be knowledgeable or learned. The more credible the sources and the more voluminous the sources, the greater the reliance on it. However, without first hand experience, it is still acceptance on faith and not true knowledge.
Think back to geometry class and doing proofs. Probably you were told various things, and then had to do the proofs yourself. Once you did them yourself, you had first hand knowledge and actually knew, for instance, that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line (in Euclidean geometry). But up until that point, you accepted that the statement was true, based on the testimony of the teacher. That is belief or faith.
Or, take cold fusion, periodically, we hear of accounts of it occurring in a lab. That is testimony. Somebody repeats the experiment for them self and finds that it does not. That negates the first person's testimony. If they repeated it, then they had knowledge that the process worked and the rest of us would accept that the testimony was a little more credible. By the time it is repeated many times, we would accept it as highly credible, but it would still be acceptance and belief, not first hand knowledge.
Belief does not lessen science, it is only a problem because we chose to ignore philosophy. If we emphasized philosophy as part of STEM in education, things would be much more balanced and it would be much more difficult for pseudo-science to exist. Why? Because people would understand what science is and is not and what they know and what they accept (or think they know).
Put differently, faith is much broader than religious faith. If I write you a personal check at a garage sale, you are accepting on faith that the funds are available so that when you deposit the check you will be paid. That is the true meaning of faith - acceptance on the word of another. Without faith, we could not have science, because every scientist would have to repeat every experiment for themself to prove what they were currently wanting to prove. Faith is as essential to science as it is to religion and that is why it doesn't lessen science.