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."

Comments

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Human experience is shallow and base. Lizard brains are curious; lizards will stop and observe you motionlessly for many minutes. There is no fight, there is no flight; there is curiosity and communication and love in their slow eye closings. I recognize a fellow mortal, independent of all you humans, and my shared experience with the lizard is priceless.

Attributing base human impulses to the "lizard brain" maligns lizard brains.

Good response

[Okian Warrior]

It's the same as "we're all living in a sim", isn't it?

That's a very good question.

So far as I can tell, there are testable predictions that the sim theory makes. These are predictions that are not required by the theory, but that, if we see them, would be good indications of the sim.

Consider scanning a color document, separating the color channels into R, G, and B, and then doing a histogram of each channel.

If the envelope of the red histogram is smooth and goes to zero at each end (at R=0 and R=255). then we might conclude that the scanner spans the entire range of "red".

If the envelope is smooth but has discontinuous jumps at zero and 255, it means that there are intensities of red smaller than the minimum value the scanner can distinguish, and intensities higher than the highest value. Basically, all the high intensity pixels in the image max out the A/D converter in the scanner, and all the low intensity pixels register as zero even though there is significant variation.

The discontinuities at either end of the measurement imply that there is information outside the measurement range of the scanner.

We can apply that logic to certain astrophysical measurements in the universe in certain cases. If we see measurement distributions which are smooth, but have discontinuous jumps at either end it might indicate that there is information outside the measurable universe, even though we cannot measure it.

...or so it goes. I haven't looked into the theory in detail, but I was under the impression that certain astronomical measurements would imply the existence of a sim, but are not required for us to be in a sim.

Already answered.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

The Truth is Truth. The all permeating thing that you materialists call physics and laws of physics is Brahman. What we perceive as The Cosmos, and its physical manifestations are all projections, mere projection of Brahman in our plane of perception, or our sphere of perception. This is the grand illusion, or Maya. Only when we teach ourselves not to be distracted by the physics you would perceive the Brahman, the Truth.

Bear in mind sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from trollery.

There is indeed a strong argument that physics is

[raymorris]

Indeed there is a strong argument to be made that physics is (part of) God, that whatever existed at the time of the big bang and will continue to exist is God.

I don't have time to go into detail at the moment, but new discoveries in quantum physics align amazingly well with Biblical explanations of the creation of the universe, wording in the ancient explanations that didn't really make sense until we understood quantum physics.

Language issues make it difficult to express in English since "is" has many meanings, Spanish and other languages are more precise, but basically whenever "God" was asked "what are you?" or "who are you?" the answer was "I am what has always been". (Soy que es in Spanish) To the extent that physics is timeless, physics *is* God and God is physics, according to God's word.

Re:Give me that nu tau religion

[dfenstrate]

We're all seeing that this and saying we live in a simulation, etc., is simply recasting spirituality and the idea of gods in a new form, right?

Which is fine, you can do that. But as someone used to seeing their religion in the crosshairs, it does strike me as a bit weird whenever the people instinctively scathing about religious ideas decide they really want them afterall, just co-opted under different labels.

"In ages of fervent devotion men sometimes abandon their religion, but they only shake one off in order to adopt another. Their faith changes its objects, but suffers no decline." Alexis DeTocqueville, Democracy in America.

As a Christian, I am endlessly amused by these attempts to obtain spirituality without meaningful guidelines, and to explain away the inexplicable by positing an alien whose characteristics must be awfully similar to God's.