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Is Physical Law an Alien Intelligence? (nautil.us)
What if alien life were so advanced that its powers were indistinguishable from physics? It's the one-year anniversary of a startling article which appeared in Nautilus magazine. Long-time Slashdot reader wjcofkc writes: Caleb Scharf, astronomer and the director of the multidisciplinary Columbia Astrobiology Center at Columbia University presents an intriguing thought experiment.
"Perhaps Arthur C. Clarke was being uncharacteristically unambitious. He once pointed out that any sufficiently advanced technology is going to be indistinguishable from magic. If you dropped in on a bunch of Paleolithic farmers with your iPhone and a pair of sneakers, you'd undoubtedly seem pretty magical. But the contrast is only middling: The farmers would still recognize you as basically like them, and before long they'd be taking selfies. But what if life has moved so far on that it doesn't just appear magical, but appears like physics?"
The original submitter included their own counterarguments against the idea, but the astronomer follows his proposal to its ultimate conclusion.
"Perhaps hyper-advanced life isn't just external. Perhaps it's already all around. It is embedded in what we perceive to be physics itself, from the root behavior of particles and fields to the phenomena of complexity and emergence."
"Perhaps Arthur C. Clarke was being uncharacteristically unambitious. He once pointed out that any sufficiently advanced technology is going to be indistinguishable from magic. If you dropped in on a bunch of Paleolithic farmers with your iPhone and a pair of sneakers, you'd undoubtedly seem pretty magical. But the contrast is only middling: The farmers would still recognize you as basically like them, and before long they'd be taking selfies. But what if life has moved so far on that it doesn't just appear magical, but appears like physics?"
The original submitter included their own counterarguments against the idea, but the astronomer follows his proposal to its ultimate conclusion.
"Perhaps hyper-advanced life isn't just external. Perhaps it's already all around. It is embedded in what we perceive to be physics itself, from the root behavior of particles and fields to the phenomena of complexity and emergence."
It's not. It's not even intelligent.
We already have a name for their possible existence: god.
Some quick questions:
1) Does this hypothesis have testable predictions,
2) Does the theory imply observations that we could make that would invalidate the theory?
I'm a fan of "Hey, Martha!" stories, they're entertaining and thought provoking, but I don't know how much serious consideration such a proposal warrants. (Compared to, say, the survivability of "The Martian" or whether aspects of the "Star Trek" universe are physically realizable.)
And what if the physicis of the physics-alien of our physics-alien was an alien intelligence also?
The alien intelligences will converge to being turtles, all the way down.
Maybe people are so affraid to imagine a world without gods that they find a way to create another one!
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
I'm fine with calling it science fiction, or more broadly, art.
Art often presents the vanguard of human ideas, before they make their way into other fields.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Science too suffers the problem of infinite regress. Scientific assumptions are conclusions without proof. Stop being so smug.
I read the book. It does not explain anything about physics. If you cannot elaborate, then the only thing I can do is believe or do not believe. Therefore, this is not physics, but religion. BTW: Have you ever read a physics book? Including those in high school. I doubt that.
As is said here, physics requires not only an idea that matches the data, but an idea the results in tangible novel predictions that can be tested. Physics is open to new ideas, such as the idea that energy is quantized, but requires those ideas to be formalized and used to create new verifiable knowledge, like the tunneling electron.
In short, physics focuses on practical results while natural philosophy focuses on fanciful conjectures. Physics is does not necessarily lead to a more absolute 'truth' but does provide a reasonably objective method to determine if a particular truth is personal or universal.
In this case, there may be an intelligence behind the physics. My question would be, how does this change the laws and assumptions and results we already have? One this I would suggest is that intelligence can change it's mind, so we would see evidence in the universe of differing laws. In fact we might see this, for instance the lack of antimatter. The second question is does assuming an intelligence help us develop a formal result to explain the discrepancy.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
The book doesn't say anything about it directly. But there are a segment of Christians that honestly believe what he is saying - that physics itself is a manifestation of God. It's a progression from the watchmaker idea, where God creates physics and sets the world in motion, but isn't actually part of the watch himself. The honest/self-consistent Christians (there are very few) who believe this have had to forsake Biblical literalism as well, since a literal interpretation of the Bible contradicts with physics.
So can an infant or a rock...unbelief is a state of mind, not a claim to truth. Set aside your smugness and start thinking again.
So for me God exists and my existence is the proof
Maybe you're right.. who am I to say? But that's not "proof." I could just as easily claim that "my God is a carton of milk and my ability to eat soggy cereal is the proof."
I don't mean to mock your faith.. just arguing that what you call "proof" is indeed still just taken on faith.
Then again if you want to get really philosophical, even your own existence that you're premising your "proof" on is up for debate ;).. There's actually no way to prove that you (and the rest of the universe) aren't just some figment of my fever dream and I may wake up at any moment and you all just poof into nothingness.
Given that we're talking about the Big Bang, most likely Genesis. And really, if you're willing to play a little fast and loose with interpretation:
1) Light created. Check.
4) Heavenly bodies (in particular, the sun) "controlling" day and night. Check.
2) Firmament created. Check.
5) Creatures come to exist. Check.
3) Water recedes to leave dry land. Check.
6) People come to exist. Check.
7) God rests. Given the above time scales, maybe that's why we haven't heard from him in 6000 years? It could be another hundred million before he gets back to work for all we know. So lets call that a Check too.
Note that the ordering is a bit out, and of course breaking up all of the universe' evolution into a couple dozen paragraphs leaves just a tiny bit out to say the least, but it can be loosely interpreted to follow the universe and Earth's actual history if you're you're not a literalist.