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  • Post #41

Tommaso,

If only more 19-year olds and their friends were so well read, thoughtful and expressive when immersed in the digital world. Well, I too can dream, can I not?

All the dreaming aside, is this your message: As humanity isn't a totally free self-standing entity, we cannot steer its future in isolation from (a) humanity's "inside of things" like DNA and all the vast implications of DNA as software and (b) humanity's "outside of things" like "the atmosphere along with the malicious antipodal butterfly already testing humanity's steering strengths. We'll have the necessary knowledge someday in the Noosphere as a conscious entity, Omega, and only then will humanity be in a position to steer.

Your idea of "humans are social atoms" made your essay still more intriguing. I am now dreaming of a whole new genre of science fiction.

-- Ajay

    Sorry, spent too much time dreaming and got logged off!

    The above is from me.

    -- Ajay

    5 days later

    Tommaso,

    Time is growing short, so I am revisiting and rating. Your response to my questions and comments: "You write that you `are impressed by the images` I draw: are you referring to metaphors or the actual drawing of Tommy on the couch? This drawing was inspired by a recent novel by Michele Serra (Gli Sdraiati) - unfortunately appeared only in italian - that I would recommend to anyone who has a 19-year old son, or has been 19 very recently."

    I was referring to the verbal images but really liked the drawing as well. Having a humanities background, writing fiction, and columns, I tend to appreciate vivid writing and imagery of all kinds, and do take note of political events that affect us. Not to do so, condemns us to the failings of delusional leaders with agendas of self-interest.

    Have you had time to read my essay?

    Jim

    Dear Tommaso,

    what a beautiful essay. It took me very long time to comment on your essay. I wanted to prove you're wrong. The ultimate language of nature is not software! But I couldn't. (How would you prove you're wrong?)

    In my essay I state that the generality and unity of physics is originated from formalizing the very precondition of the possibility of scientific knowledge. Where scientific knowledge is the ability to learn from the past to predict the future. If we can predict something, we can compute it. In my essay I ask if there is a being beyond physics. I say that each human being in its uniqueness does not comply with the definition of a physical object. He cannot be predicted. I confess I find the argument myself a bit cheap.

    I had many thoughts reading your essay and I might post them in a later time. For now I just want to say that in my very short essay I talk about two topics that are also part of your essay ( in a very different although not such eloquent way): The creation of information/structure and how it is compatible with the growth of entropy and a derivation of relativistic space time from the qbit.

    I hope you find the time to read and comment on my essay.

    Best regards

    Luca

      Hi Luca,

      here`s a first quick reaction to your post.

      Your first question is, essentially: how could one disprove the computational universe conjecture? Very important question indeed, in light of the fact that any serious physical theory should be such as to be possibly disproved.

      So far, this conjecture (recently termed `Bit Bang`) rests upon the wide experimental evidence that many simple models of computation (not only cellular automata) lead to the emergence of very complex, nature-like patterns (including particle-like, self-reproducing and pseudo-random phenomena). A second crucial argument is the typing-monkeys scenario: in essence, the output of the monkey activity is in itself a random universe (of character strings) totally unlike ours, but when interpreted as a program, and run in a universal Turing machine, the distribution of the output strings (Levin`s `miracolous` distribution) is much more aligned with that mix of order and disorder that we see around us: order, in a computational universe, becomes not only possible, but even necessary. Lloyd (and, I believe, others too) suggest that this random-like input could be represented by the quantum fluctuations of the vacuum from which the Big (Bit) Bang originated. I guess these arguments nicely interplay with yours, when you deal with the puzzle of the simultaneous growth of structure and entropy in our universe.

      Ok, but how about a potential falsification? The computational universe conjecture almost by definition rests a lot on computer simulations. In particular, one tries to see whether the `particles` that might emerge from animating a Plank-scale discretized spacetime - e.g. a causal set, or directed acyclic graph - can eventually reproduce, by an upward cascade of emergent layers, some known, observable phenomena, and associated measures (e.g. mass), as detected at the scales within reach of current instrumentation. If you come up with an algorithm that sets up a spectacular architecture of emergence, with all sorts of interacting patterns, but, when reaching the scales of subatomic particles, does not reproduce the elements of the standard model, than you have disproved your `theory`, which would then turn into a nice piece of recreational mathematics, like Conway Game of Life. Admittedly, a long and winding road.

      I completely agree with you that the uniqueness of each human being, and its ability to act spontaneously, makes her unsuitable for treatment as a physical object - and puts her out of the reach of traditional physics (this is a key point in de Chardin`s `The Human Phenomenon`). There is a nice quote (from Schroedinger, I think, but I could not find it back) where living things are described as ones that keep moving also when, according to physical law, they should come to rest. One of the crucial and fascinating questions related, in particular, to computational theories of the evolving cosmos based on emergence, is to spot the moment, the emergent level when this (apparent?) ability to act spontaneously appears. Following de Chardin, I believe that this agency skill should appear very soon, much before the appearance of life as traditionally conceived.

      I do have the time for reading and commenting your essay, and I`ll do it very soon.

      Best regards

      Tommaso

      Tommaso,

      I had a very good time with your fine essay. I liked being reminded how important it was for me back in the 70's to discover Teilhard de Chardin, with his wonderfully grand view of the stages of being, the physical and biological and human. Though a lot of important ideas have emerged since he wrote, it's still a tremendous challenge to envision a perspective that includes these very different realms and make sense of them together.

      And I'm sympathetic to your software metaphor. This is one of the many ways in which the emergence of electronic media has opened us up to new ways of thinking -- which is the theme of my own essay here.

      For me though, the key thing about "software" is not the computational aspect per se. In general, software does something, it has a function beyond itself, that makes certain algorithms more useful than others. In biology, of course, the basic functionality is that of reproduction, since only if organisms replicate themselves can the DNA software they carry get itself passed on. The reproductive process involves all sorts of difficulties in coordinating internal processes and adapting to the external environment, so it ramifies into a host of subsidiary functions that the software needs to handle.

      Likewise in physics -- in a previous essay in last year's contest I suggested that the many diverse laws and principles of physics have evolved as a kind of DNA that relates to the underlying functionality of measurement. I mentioned at the end of that piece that while simple algorithms can certainly give rise to very complex structures, the peculiar kinds of dynamic order we find in physics don't seem at all amenable to deterministic computation. So again, the software that runs our universe may be doing something more than computation for its own sake. At the quantum level it seems to be engaged in setting up interaction-contexts where certain choices get made at random, which are then passed on as a basis for setting up new measurement-contexts to determine further information.

      As to the software that makes us humans so different from other animals, I think that's essentially the language-technology that gets installed in our brains when we first learn to talk. Like the software that runs physics, human language serves to define the world we live in by communicating about it. We learn to perceive and think about our world by talking about it, both with ourselves and with others.

      It's fairly easy to understand how biological evolution works. I think that's because the process is so objective -- we can see organisms making physical copies of themselves, out there in the world. We have some distance on biology, even when it concerns our own bodies. On the other hand, the kinds of interpersonal connection by which language and thought reproduce themselves from one human brain to another aren't so easy for us to see or think about clearly. Likewise the many different ways in which things can be physically observed and measured -- whether by our sense-organs or by our lab equipment -- are all quite complex and difficult to define. We know how to do these things very well, but it's not easy to be clear about what's going on.

      Of course the great attraction of the computational approach is the old idea of deriving all the complexities of our world from certain simple, basic mathematical principles or processes. And we've been able to learn a lot by following that lead. But I don't think it can take us all the way to the foundations, even in physics.

      Thanks again for your very friendly and intelligent piece of work -- Conrad

      Hi Tommaso,

      I'm still reading your fascinating article, I will come back and comment on it soon. However, I wanted to inform you today that I've responded to your excellent questions and observations on my page, and I would very much like to receive your feedback which I know will be of the highest quality. If you do wish to comment further there, please make sure to attach your post underneath my misplaced post (i.e., place it underneath part one of my two part reply). This will ensure that part one and part two do not get separated from one another.

      Also, you might enjoy my reply to George Gantz. It offers a series of very important points that I would have put in my paper if I had had more room.

      You have given me a lot to think about, and I am grateful.

      Warmly,

      Aaron

      Tommaso,

      Thank you for a very well written and fascinating essay. I agree with you that the idea that our universe could have emerged from a computer program is quite intriguing: it resonates with Max Tegmark's thesis that the universe is nothing more than an abstract (mathematical) structure, that when "seen" from the inside acquires the emergent property of physicality. Have you ever looked at the work of Bruno Marchal of Université Libre de Bruxelles, and of other like-minded thinkers that hang around the Google Group "Everything List"? You might find it interesting.

      Good luck in the contest!

      Marc

      P.S. Thank you for the comments you left on my essay's forum: I have answered you there.

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        • Post #50

        Hi Tommaso,

        Excellent thought provoking essay.

        I like: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) The appearance of the human phenomenon marks the point at which the fabric of the universe achieves the ability to reflect itself.

        I question: DNA as software. I personally think DNA crosses the threshold between quantum phenomena and the classical world. Wolfram has done good work... but more insight is needed and perhaps a breakthrough is needed on his cellular life theories.

        I like very much Tommy's conclusion: The next stop for humanity, to answer your question, is Superlife.

        Sounds good to me.

        Wishing you the best,

        Don Limuti

        Hi Tommaso,

        You have a very original style! And I'm glad to see Chaitin's book mentioned; I've just read the shortened paper version of his metabiology, but I think they're very interesting ideas. Your connection to cellular automata is also interesting. It would be great if it were possible to make substantive predictions or decisions based on this kind of model.

        Best wishes,

        Daniel

          Hi Tommaso,

          I just did a very quick read through of your essay (the dead line approaches :-( ) and like it very much. Part of the reason is there are *some* points of connection with things in my essay (your discussion of complex systems which has some connection with the unknown unknowns or "black swan events" of Taleb I talked about in my essay, but as you noticed not in as much detail as was maybe "promised" in the introduction). You go into much more depth on the issue of complexity as well as connecting to computation [As a side note my main area of work is field theory so I tend to view things in terms of scattering amplitudes, Feynman diagrams, path integral etc. You as a computational expert frame things in terms of computability, or the automata of S. Wolfram. If a football player -- either US football or the football played by everyone else -- were to write an essay about steering the future it would probably involve lessons learned from playing sports. In fact my HS physics teachers was also the HS football coach (this is often the case especially in small schools in the US) and most of his examples involved football].

          Oh I also liked the literary device of presenting these ideas as a discussion between you and your nephew (and Alice via Skype). And also the idea of the ant-hill (and to a greater degree human societies being more than just the simple sum of their parts -- i.e. some emergent complexity. In fact if one looks at individual humans with their hosts of bacteria, viruses, fungi, parasites, symbiotic organism(useful and malicious) any individual is more than a sum of their parts. Anyway sorry I had to rush through the reading of your excellent essay, but I hope to give it a more through read later.

          Best,

          Doug

          Oh yes, I had an interaction with Marchal when organising a workshop here in Pisa, back in 2009, and with Jurgen Schmidhuber who also was in the 'Everything List' Google Group if I well remember. However, I tend to prefer concrete simulation activity over discussions of more philosophical nature.

          Thanks for pointing out. Cheers.

          Yes, Chaitin's metabiology is quite interesting, but certainly still at a preliminary stage. Yet, it proved quite useful for providing some balance in my essay, representing the missing software oriented treatment of the second of the three stages discussed by de Chardin in his book: Prelife (Wolfram), Life (Chaitin), Thought (Tononi).

          Tommaso

          PS

          i think we have cross rated our essays. In any case, I did.

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          • Post #55

          Hi Douglas,

          we had already an exchange in your thread (it is hard to keep track of everything here!). Thanks for reading my essay, and for your comments. I just react to one of them, appearing in square brackets [...]. Often is has been observed that descriptions of the universe, across history, have been influenced by the current technology - from the clockwork universe of Pascal, Newton, Leibnitz, to the computing universe of our times, and this of course invites some skepticism about such technology-biased views. However, while computers are certainly the representative technology of the last few decades, the notions of algorithm and computation are much older (by millenia). The computational universe conjecture (Zuse, Fredkin, Wolfram, Lloyd and others), in its boldest form, claims that the universe is discrete (spacetime being a giant causal set - as also suggested by the Causal Set Programme physicists - Bombelli, Sorkin, Rideout, Henson, etc.) that is animated algorithmically. When mentioning `software` as the engine that fuels everything by algorithmic steps, the idea is not to provide a metaphor based on one`s area of expertise (like a football coach would do), but to provide the actual, infinitely accurate description of everything (if, ontologically, the universe is discrete and finite, albeit possibly growing unboundedly, infinite accuracy is conceivable). God created only Natural numbers; men invented the Reals.

          In the dialogue among Tomas, Tommy and Alice (no Bob around), I`ve illustrated how the views by Wolfram, Chaitin and Tononi (to pick three representative scientists) can fit under a rather unifying picture of three diverse components of our universe: Prelife, Life, and Thought (using Teilhard`s terminology). The unifying factors are: discreteness and algorithmic evolution.

          Differential equations, fields, path integrals, and all the tools of continuous mathematics, are extremely powerful for providing approximated descriptions of physical reality, and any computation-oriented account of the world must eventually be able to replicate the results obtained by them (as the Causal Set people are well aware of).

          A crucial argument here (to make a long story short) is the typing monkeys: their output is a messy universe of characters, too messy to look like ours. But if you feed this digital mess to a universal Turing machine (i.e., you take it as a program), then the output you get is a mix of order and disorder (Levin`s distribution) that resembles what we see around us.

          Best regards

          Tommaso

          PS - I know that the deadline is approaching. I did rate your essay, a few days ago, after commenting. You write that you hope to find more time to give a more thorough reading to my work. If this means that you have not yet rated it, please do. Rating here is definitely a complex system. I`ve been for a long time in the top 15, but a couple of days ago, probably due to a malicious antipodal butterfly, I jumped to around rank 30 in one shot, which looks strange to me under both a continuous and a discrete mathematical viewpoint.

          Hi Tommaso,

          No I already did rate you essay, I just apologize that I did not have a chance to read in more detail since there are many different themes at play. But in any case I did read enough it understand this was a very good essay and so I rated it accordingly. My statement was just to say that I might not have completely gotten all the deep details from your essay which has several levels.

          Again good luck with the contest.

          Best,

          Doug

            Hi Tommaso,

            I liked the concept of the benefits that may be derived by modelling different groups and institutions as cellular automata, but I wonder how this would be accomplished. Nevertheless, it is certainly an important idea to explore, and it, along with many of the other ideas you discuss in your essay have added to the richness of this forum.

            I have rated your essay with these points in mind.

            Warmly,

            Aaron

            Ok, great! In fact, I myself might not have completely gotten all the details from my essay! :-) What I mean by this is that, when attempting to put under the same umbrella such diverse things as spacetime, darwinian evolution and thought/consciousness, you easily run the risk of not being a professional expert in all three areas. But the effort is in part justified by a Schroedinger quote, that goes roughly like this (I only have the italian translation):

            `We clearly perceive that only now we begin to collect reliable material for combining in a single complex the sum of all areas of our knowledge; but, on the other hand, it has become almost impossible for a single mind to dominate more than one small specialized area. I do not see a way out from this dilemma, other than having someone trying to formulate a synthesis of facts and theories, albeit using second-hand and incomplete knowledge of some of them, running the risk of having people laugh at him/her`.

            5 days later

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            • Post #60

            One of the most interesting and enjoyable essays in the contest, Tommaso. It was fascinating to consider this question through the lens of Chardin, Chaitin, Wolfram, and Tononi.

            I agree that the operations of physics can probably be thought of as a form of information processing. The idea of developing into a broader collective form of consciousness is very appealing.

            I do think we may be in more control of our collective destiny that you seem to suggest. Complex adaptive systems like society, as you say, do exhibit order at some levels. Just as we may be able to predict and alter the climate without being able to control the weather, we may be able to shape our social evolution without being able to determine the specific fate of each individual.

            Well done, in any case. Good luck in the contest!

            Best,

            Robert de Neufville