Duality in Cosmology and the Limits to the Acquisition of Information by Lawrence B Crowell

[deleted]

Hi Lawrence,

Interesting paper! It reminded me of Dyson's Time without end: physics and biology in an open universe. It's interesting that you indicate that you'd prefer not to live in a simulation, since then you would know that physics was "objective", i.e. really about the lowest possible levels of existence rather than about the rules of a simulation; I hadn't thought about the possible value of that kind of objectivity.

I take it from your comments that you don't think much can be done to improve humanity's long-term future. Is that right?

Best of luck,

Daniel

Lawrence Crowell

The Dyson paper does not take into fact the universe is accelerated in its expansion. This means that mass-energy will race away from any observer faster than they can access it. The universe in about 10^{100} years will become a de Sitter vacuum. That is a pretty brutal ultimate termination, for I am pretty sure that nature prevents warp drives and wormholes that permit us to escape this spacetime into another one.

I think it would be a profound disappointment if the universe were a computer simulation derived by some ETI. There is I think a greater sense of objectivity to our understanding of the universe if it is really a natural system. The universe that emerges from a quantum vacuum, where the large number of degrees of freedom or quantum numbers are due to a quantum critical point or quantum phase, so the quantum information we observe in this cosmology are not qubits taken from another cosmos.

My take on the human condition is that much of what we call progress is an illusion. Science exists really to explain how nature functions in a way that is consistent with experiments and observations. It does not exist to bolster the economy, it does not exist to give better arrows in military quivers, it does not exist so the average person can have more media programming and so forth. Now clearly there are applications which have made our condition better, such as medical advances. Of course it has to be admitted that much of the communicable diseases that have afflicted us came about from our close contact with livestock --- a product of a prior "progress" called agriculture. So often even where there are improvements, these really solve problems in part created by prior advancements or "progress."

I have more humble views of our physical role in the world. If we have any function in the universe it is that we have a conscious perception of the universe. I think it is highly problematic whether we will grow to acquire ever greater power in the universe to the extent some people envision. It is quite honestly questionable whether we can manage the problems we have on Earth, let alone whether we can conquer star systems and the like. Our situation is most likely one of mortality to our species and to anything that continues from us. We might release von Neumann probes into space which migrate across star systems and evolve into a space from of life. But most likely even so that will end as well.

Lawrence Crowell

Different socio-economic systems in history have had different aspects of statecraft, tradecraft, priestcraft and warcraft. The last great principally warcraft system was Nazi Germany. The USSR was more statecraft with a strong warcraft component, but squashed tradecraft and priestcraft. The United States is primarily a tradecraft system, where in effect our political and policy making systems are bought, and we have strong statecraft and warcraft sectors with probably the strongest priestcraft system of any advanced nation. Religion is quite big in the US. Further back in time priestcraft tended quite often to be the dominant socio-economic modality. In today's world priestcraft has been in a nadir as theology has taken a big drubbing by science and advancements in technology that have removed the interest in things like faith healing. Of course religion is rallying, both with the fundamentalists in the US and Islam elsewhere in the world.

The issues with inflation, or the other bugaboo called debt conservatives love to pound on, are self made problems and there is no way out of them. In the end they all reflect our penchant for living beyond our means. They mirror the real problem with our being overdrawn on the planetary energy/entropy bank. This problem became serious about 7000 years ago when humans began to control nature with agriculture, and it probably began with Australopithecus that took themselves off the menu. The process has seen our species remove themselves further from the fitness landscape as we exploit ever more of our environment. At no point in the natural history of this planet has there been an animal our size that numbered over 7 billion at one time, and this has to be multiplied by about 50 to account for our resource and energy use. This is where the real problem lies.

Economics has never been figured out right, and it never will be. Inflation will never be solved, for if you "solve it" too much you end up with deflation that is a real nightmare. Economics can't be objectively figured out, for once you have such a model its application changes the economy in ways not predicted by the model. Finally, underneath it all the "atoms" of an economy are people that fail to obey repeatable principles.

I think in a way there is a sort of illusion that we actually make progress in solving the major problems that confront us. We are good at solving fundamental questions, and pretty good at application/control problems. We manage to solve problems, such as the problem people had 30 years ago of not having digital communications at their finger tips all the time --- which if you recall was not really a problem. We are not good at solving problems that involve the detritus of our activities, and these are the things that will come to ultimately clean our clock.

John Merryman

Lawrence,

For all our many talents, we don't possess the ability to scrub life from this planet, even if we knock it back on its heels for a few millennia.

Reality does function in cycles and life manifests this through mortality of individuals and passing source code through genes.

So if you were to put human civilization on a biotic scale, would it be simply as a predator and parasite to the planet, or are there consequences and feedback loops which might advantage life?

Would it be to seed a few other solar systems with microbes?

Maybe we are just the plants method of putting more carbon back into the atmosphere?

Personally, I think that once we get beyond this narrative arc of linear progress and do fall back to earth, we will begin to realize that we are part of the larger whole and that life on this planet is evolving into a coherent organism, aka, Gaia. We then will have to transition from top predator in a collapsed ecosystem, to central nervous system of a planetary organism.

Obviously this is a long way from the current mindset. Take this contest, for example. Usually I discuss and debate these sorts of issues on economic and social forums, where the participants are engaged and informed. So it has been a real eye opener to see how uninterested the mostly academic and science oriented participants are to the observation that abstract wealth extraction effectively turbocharges environmental and social destruction. I was expecting more people to have focused on it in their essays and more arguments over it, not that it would be largely brushed off. No wonder the bankers could essentially rob the country of over a trillion dollars, after the debt blowup in 2008. People really are just so absorbed in the details of their particular interests, that they really don't see what is going on.

On a personal level, various people have assumed this is some sort of social or moral crusade on my part, but I'm not much of a socialist. There are layers and levels in society, much as there are layers in nature. Our brains and our feet perform different functions and they are not interchangeable, so I'm not looking for some communist utopia of equality. It is just that when you get to the point there is no feedback between the brain and the feet and they are actively opposed to one another, there is trouble ahead, for both, That is when the society is breaking apart and those at the top will also find themselves much diminished.

Looking at all the various charts and news, they are going to have trouble kicking that can much further. This fall should be even more interesting than usual.

I do realize this system will have to crash, before any real change is possible and so it might even be advantageous for there to be little resistance to this process. Then it might happen all that much quicker.

The dichotomy of religion and government is that of vision and management. There are many powerful visions, such as wealth, power, immortality, ego, etc, which effectively serve as informal religions, as the formal ones have become somewhat threadbare. The politicians then try to serve these visions and manage how to acquire them. As I pointed out in my essay, we mistake these ideals for absolutes. The absolute would necessarily be the essence from which we rise and whatever form it manifests, serves that primordial impulse. It is our job, our vision, to learn to tame that essential element, much as our mind learns to control our multitude of organic and hormonal impulses. Then the real destiny is not a goal, but the journey.

Regards,

John

Jonathan Dickau

Hello Lawrence,

This is an excellent paper, and while it does mainly explore a tangent; the central thesis relates back to the question posed by FQXi in a way nobody else thought of. The only close brush I've seen is the reference in Dewey's paper about the 'Cosmological Forecast..' paper by Circovic, relating various cosmologies to the way they might shape humanity's future history. You are dealing with questions that apply to all sentient races, though, assuming there are others in the universe, and this is to be admired. I think it is indeed relevant to the question that we know the fundamental limits to the acquisition of information. To some extent; this is the flip-side of my essay subject or its associated line of research, which focuses on how knowledge is best accumulated. And on some level; how we can best learn about the universe is determined by the limits nature imposes on us.

On balance; I have questions as to whether the expanded Kardashev scale accommodates all possibilities for civilizations arising from a collective of living beings. To be fair; you do state that type IV and V civilizations would likely require FTL in order to exist. But I think having larger and larger amounts of energy could be supplanted by more efficient and subtle usage instead, and this might be a hallmark of a civilizations advanced enough to progress to the next stage. Progressively; control of energy is superseded by control of space, which is superseded by control of time. A suitably advanced race, or one operating from a higher dimension, could fashion the loops of spacetime suggested as a model of quantum gravity into circuits of various shapes - and thus to create a simulation perhaps more advanced or more difficult to detect than what you suggest a type IV or V IGUS might be capable of. But again; you do already suggest they can actually create universes.

So I am left with saying that the majority of people remain asleep, or are not sufficiently mindful to be aware of glitches in the system. There are only a limited number of humans who are completely unplugged from the Matrix of today's illusions. USA Today just declared Steve Ballmer's 'brand' Bor-ing, on its Money page, and one has to wonder if people are really so shallow and stupid that image is more important than substance - for someone who wants to buy a sports team franchise. If there was a simulation; maybe the trick would be to focus most of the computing power on critical places, like the smaller number of people who practice mindfulness or total awareness, and the scientists who are running experiments - because those people are harder to fool. High marks from me, for this effort.

All the Best,

Jonathan

Lawrence Crowell

Jonathan,

Thanks for the positive judgment. I think some people are not happy with this, for I am not making some great anthem of ever greater technological power, but rather proposing ultimate limits on such. Of course there is plenty of high-tech and space based growth possible within my scenario. We might become a type I civilization and colonize the solar system extensively. We might move into the asteroid belt and convert them into inverted mini-planets of the sort envisioned by Oberth and later O'Neil. This could be extended further into the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud. We might then move to other star systems.

I suspect that what might follow from us could be self-replicating systems we release into space. These could in time form an interstellar ecosystem of a diverse array of neo-bio-bots. These could over the coming billions of years come to move through this galaxy, and may others in the Virgo cluster.

What ever IGUS might evolve in the universe, whether it is us or some continuation from us (neobiobots), or elsewhere in the universe, the limitations of physics likely prevent the sort of simulation capability necessary to create a complete virtual universe. The Bolshoi Cosmic Simulation a few years ago and this year there was the release of data from another such computer simulation puts data on a fine scale about that of a star. That is a far cry from an individual particle or quantum system. These are far from being the "Matrix" which covers the entire universe to fine grained detail everywhere. Physics prevents any IGUS from acquiring ever more energy due to the limitation of light speed and because the universe is exponentially accelerating its expansion.

There is another reason why I think there are limits. Black holes interiors and regions within trapping surfaces can have quantum computing that is infinite. The existence of Cauchy horizons and singularities means that in a finite time an infinite number of qubit transitions can occur. This means the quantum computation of the universe may be beyond the λ-computation of Turing machines, but is of a second order nature. This means that standard computational methods may never be able to work. This is even if the vast number of degrees of freedom in our observable universe are emergent from a quantum critical point or phase transition. One may never be able to simulate this to a perfect degree. These ideas though involve stuff I am researching.

Cheers LC

[deleted]

Hi Lawrence,

I briefly skimmed your whole essay but read some parts in more details (I'm running out of time). The introduction is a nice set-up for the rest of the article especially in regard to the limits placed on information access. This is an important and current issue. The "recent" (well since 2012) firewall paradox, while maybe not exactly so relevant to your arguments is another example of the central role information plays in the thinking of many people/researchers these days. [As an side let me say that I recently saw a talk on this which pin-pointed the energy source as a breaking of the entanglement between the radiated particle and the particle that falls down the BH. The reason for this break is that the outgoing particle needs to be entangled with the previously outgoing particles to resolve the information loss paradox in this picture. The breaking of the entanglement is likened to the breaking of a chemical bond which releases energy. This is the part I did not get since I do think or did not know that entanglement breaking was so closely analogous to breaking of a chemical/nuclear bond. But back to your essay]

The middle/technical part of your essay was the one I only scanned since this would require more time to read in detail, but it looks solid so I have just taken the conclusions there as given [I did the same with Aaron Feeney's essay which also had a long technical part in the middle. BTW if you have not already taken a look at his essay it is quite good]. On think I did note: after equation (2) you list various exponential scale factors e.g. a(t) ~ e^{t/2} or a(t) ~ e^{2t/3}, but these don't seem to solve equation (2). These kind of exponential scale factors are generally what one finds for dS space-time with a CC, but equation (2) is just FRW with k=0 and with the CC=0 thus one should have a(t) ~ t^n which you do mention. The "n" will depend on whether one has radiation or dust for ones "fluid". This maybe a typo but in fact it does not really matter for the rest of your arguments.

Finally I like your analysis of the Kardashev scale -- I talk about this in my essay but in much less detail. I did do some research for my essay on the history of this scale and found that there is an alternative version which measures how advanced a civilization is based on how much information it can access [I'm not sure who this is named after].

Anyway I liked your essay very much (despite the fact I was lazy to fully go through the middle part). It made many good points. Best of luck in the contest.

Doug

Douglas Singleton

The above was me.

Best,

Doug

Lawrence Crowell

The solution a ~ t^{1/2} is the matter dominated result and t^{2/3} is the radiation dominated result. If you have

da/dt = a*const*sqrt(ρ)

then for a ~ t^n, then for ρ ~ a^{-3} matter density you have

t^{n-1} ~ t^n t^{-3n/2}

this means that n -1 = -3n/2 + n === > n = 2/3, and for ρ ~ a^4 for radiation, this gives n - 1 = -2n, so n = 1/2. This is a fairly standard result. I did write e^{3t/2} and I really meant t^{2/3} and t^{1/2}. This is a rather curious mistake, and I am not sure why I wrote this. This appears to be a rather embarrassing brain fart.

Your comments about interactions and entanglements are interesting. It is a bit late for me to go into this, so I will do so tomorrow. There is something odd occurring with entanglement is that the gravity field is not local in the way other fields are. The nonlocality of gravity, or really quantum gravity, changes the nature of entanglement. Most QFTs are local, such as the Wightman canonical quantization condition and causality one gets in basic QFT texts. Gravitation is different, and I think entanglement monogamy and such may no longer apply.

Cheers LC

Petio Hristov

Hello Lawrence,

As an appeal for correspondence and exchange of ideas between FQXi members I have send you my books on your email address.

Their content is not only a new approach in the understanding of the Universe, but a new sort of physics, because in my study of the physical laws I had to give a new definition of time and space regarding the sequence and nature of their creation.

For some myths Egyptologists use the phrase: "divine mystery" the reading of which helps me to understand the cosmic mysteries. This understanding I gain by running the myth "through the prism" created by the physical laws and I decipher the formed image.

I hope that this will help you in your own field and in your studies.

Best wishes,

Petio

Lawrence Crowell

Thank you, I will try to give this a reading in the near future.

Cheers LC

Lawrence Crowell

I attach a corrected version of my paper here. There were a couple of misquoted equations here. These have been corrected, even though they do not effect the outcome or conclusion of the paper.

LCAttachment #1: FQXi_2014.pdf

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