Reply To: T-shirt designers unite and take over

[dash]

dash wrote: The truth is you don’t need space to be infinitely divisible in order to make it impossible to run the simulation into the future. Space could be quantized, it could take a finite amount of information to describe a particle’s position. Yet because we’re in the universe and every particle of the universe is interacting with every other particle, we can never be able to model the universe perfectly.

Anyway I wanted to make a point about humanity’s approach to understanding the physics of the universe.

Einstein was always trying to fathom “The Mind of God”. Or “The Old One”. He felt that at the bottom level the principles of the universe must be elegant. Einstein — smart guy, right? Yet did he really believe in A Divine Creator? Can any scientist really believe there is a God and truly be scientifically open minded? I’m convinced Einstein failed because whether or not he did believe in Intelligent Design, his approach essentially was no different than if there was a designer.

Specifically if Einstein intentionally ruled out “inelegant” theories in favor of “elegant” ones, that conscious choice itself presupposes that the universe was designed by an intelligence that itself deliberately chose elegance over inelegance. The expectation of elegance inherently is thinking within the box. As such, einstein failed in his attempts to understand the universe. He was doomed to failure. Understanding can only come by abandoning all preconceptions, including the requirement for elegance, simplicity, an intentional design, purpose, and indeed meaning itself.

I would like to share a link to my own theory of why we exist, or why this universe we live in exists. Here it is:

http://www.xdr.com/dash/essays/TheUniverse.html

Basically even if you start from the premise that “God created the universe” you have to ask, “Why does god exist? Where did He come from?” Eventually there is a requirement for spontaneous reality to come into existence. I believe that the infinity of all possible universes, with all possible physical laws, with all possible initial conditions, all exist and are real — each to itself. We’re just in one of the myriad possible universes out of all of those. All the others are imaginary. The mere potential for a universe to exist gives rise to it. It is real to itself. There is no Big Machine computing any universe. There is no creator. If anything universes are a spontaneous outcome of Information itself.

From that point of view the only thing special about our universe is that it is suitable for the evolution of life intelligent enough to wonder why it exists. There is no requirement that the physical principles of our universe are computable, elegant or even especially simple. They DO appear to be pretty simple, however. That’s also a bit of a surprise, when you think about it.

Let me give one more example of the Thinking Inside The Box. Newton realized gravity fell off in an inverse square manner. We know that any function can be exactly reduced to a Taylor Series expansion, as in
f(x) = a + b/x + c/x^2 + d/x^3 + e/x^4 …

Newton noted that gravity appeared to fall off as the square of distance. As such there is only a term for (c) in the Taylor Series. a, b, d, e and all the rest are zero. Why must they be exactly zero? Why must c’s coefficient be exactly 1? Here is the subconscious expectation of simplicity. Of elegance.

Might there be non-zero terms for the other members? Are we (as a species) even looking for such things? “Gravity falls off as the square of distance. Therefore our equation is f=Gm1m2/r^2.QED”. That is really ridiculous, when you really stop and think about it. Who said the physical laws operating in this universe must have integer coefficients? Might the coefficients be, instead, irrational numbers? Might it take an infinite amount of information just to represent the equations themselves?

-Dave