The threat of AI is not something that keeps me awake at night as much as other things. Our species has been very good at exploiting the environment to engineer positive feedbacks for us. We are now converting the planetary biosphere into a garbage heap. We are demolishing our life support system. These things keep me far more concerned than the problem of AI.

The problem of AI taking over is worth keeping in mind though. I think we are seeing the integration of digital technology into us. Now we have wearable tech and Microsoft has its holographic view system, even though it has nothing to do with real holograms. I do see a real prospect for more direct brain computer interfaces (BCI) in the next few decades. We may see this intrude into the inner aspects of our consciousness, and we may in many ways end up in a sort of cyber mind-meld. Star Trek had the BORG, and I would not be too surprised if we end up in that state in the second half of this century.

The question of AI "taking over," assuming there is much left here worth taking over, may come if we have adaptive and learning AI systems hooked to human brains. They might adapt and learn how to become more like the brain, which could in the end supplant the brain. These might form the basis for von Neumann probes that migrate out into the solar system and after hundreds of millions of years migrate across the galaxy. I see some prospect for this sort of thing happening.

Cheers LC

``The pragmatic physicist - first name Pragmatic, last name Physicist - wants to describe observations and only bothers to think if thinking seems useful for this description.''

I didn't notice any ethical restraint in this description. Ethical restraint, social conventions, and philosophical disputation have had a tendency to inhibit knowledge advancement.

Survival is the only moral goal of life suggests ``rights'' come from the ability to survive. Those technologically advanced societies overcome lesser societies. Humanists would like to think Kant's view would win. But history has shown Hobbes' view of the leviathan is what nature allows over a long term. Kautilya's ``Arthashastra'' and Machiavelli's ``The Prince'' are good descriptions of international relations.

5 days later

Dear Mr. Fisher:

You write "There is a real Universe." Please define "real" and "universe". Without that, your statement is meaningless.

-- Sophia

Dear Ms. Magnusdottir,

I hope you are not admitting that you do not know what the words "real" and "universe" mean after admitting in your essay that your "Pragmatic Physicist did not care what the words reality and the universe meant.

Curious Joe Fisher

Hi Joe,

I don't understand your remark. I am telling you that I do not know what you mean with the words "real" and "universe", and that I cannot reply to your comment unless you explain what you mean.

-- Sophia

Hi Sophia,

I did appreciate your point in the conclusions section that there is no particular reason why models must be mathematical to be useful.

I agree with this and I think there is a great value in spending time to get the descriptive model correct. It should be obvious to everyone that having a quantum theory in which there is no agreement on interpretation is missing something.

I do however, feel that a model which has a clear top level description regarding properties that can be measured and related to a mathematical model is the most convincing and useful type of model.

Thank you for reading my essay titled Solving the Mystery and I hope I answered your question on realism to your satisfaction.

With best regards

Richard

Dear Sophia,

Those words do not bear my definitions. When I entered the inquiry "definition of real?" into the GOOGLE Search Engine programmed into my desktop computer, the first definition it provided was:

1. actually existing as a thing or occurring in fact; not imagined or supposed.

When I entered the inquiry "definition of universe?" into the GOOGLE SEARCH ENGINE programmed into my desktop computer, the first definition it provided was:

1. all existing matter and space considered as a whole; the cosmos.

There is no real need for you to respond to my comments. I am right about the real Universe. I used the words real and universe correctly. Your abstractions filled essay about an abstract Pragmatic Physicist dealing with an abstract universe was entertaining, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and I do hope that it does well in the competition.

Peacefully,

Joe Fisher

Dear Madam,

Your essay is poetry written in prose format. We wish you could have used a gender neutral format like 'it' because there is no bare charge or bare mass. Every perceivable information / object is composite with positive (male) charge in the center (central like bone) confined by negative charge (female exterior like flesh) with both protecting each other differently. Their net internal dynamics makes them male or female (if one extra y chromosome, then male; if in pairs, female. If moves out, positive; if moves in, negative). Human consciousness might have "a non-physical component", but it is revealed only through a physical body. Reality or existence is whatever has a limited structure that evolves in time and is perceivable / measurable directly or indirectly, is intelligible (perceivable or knowable as the result of measurement) and communicable universally (describable in a language as defined in our essay: Transposition of information to another system's CPU or mind by signals or sounds using energy. The transposition may relate to a fixed object/information. It can be used in different domains and different contexts or require modifications in prescribed manner depending upon the context). Thus, wittingly or otherwise, you have included reality in your discussion - "not a follower of the shut-up-and-calculate doctrine".

A model can explain reality, but can we be sure that it fully explains it, particularly when manipulations of its theory-laden characters are influenced by the thinking of the scientist, which in turn are influenced by the social factors - spirit of the age! Reductionism has its own limitations. There is a story about six blind men, who went to see an elephant. Each touched only one part of the creature - leg, trunk, ear, belly, tooth, tail - and described the elephant by that experience only. Though all their descriptions are valid, one who has not seen an elephant cannot make any sense out of their combined statements. The Universe does not duplicate itself. Though all quarks look same and cannot be distinguished from each other, they are different. When you stretch a quark too much, it gives rise to another quark by drawing material from the environment. It does not 'become two'. Thus, you have rightly pointed out that "it also must contain a prescription to identify the mathematical structure with observation".

While science without technology is lame, technology without science is blind. With over-emphasis on the effectiveness of technology, its 'blindness' is increasing, which is manifest in various social and environmental problems. A very large number of people enjoy a cozy life in pursuing and teaching nothingness or self-destruction. We may enjoy temporarily, but ultimately everyone is going to suffer. We have discussed these subjects elaborately in our essay. You are welcome to read it because of many similarities.

Dear Sophia,

I find the quality of many of the essays in this competition below expectation. Yours is a refreshing exception, although I would have wanted to challenge Mr Pragmatic Physicist with some questions about what is real and what is not. I also find refreshing the subtle mix of humour in a serious discussion. I think the essay is destined to do well in my opinion at least.

Since in matters of physics and mathematics, you seem to have a pragmatic and practical mind all rolled into one, I might want to ask you a few questions on what is real, if it is pragmatically correct to ask it here or will do so at my thread, whichever is your preference.

Regards,

Akinbo

    Dear Akinbo,

    I agree on what the quality of the essays is concerned... :/ what bothers me even more though is this weird rating procedure in which participants rate each other's essays. To make matters worse, they can even see the average rating from other's ratings. I certainly wish that the responsible FQXi folks would read Surowiecki's "Wisdom of Crowds", esp the part about information cascades, then they'd see that nothing sensible can come out of this.

    In any case, it seems rather futile to complain about this. It must be difficult for FQXi, one the one hand to be open-minded, on the other hand to not be overrun by low quality entries, and then find a fast way to sort out the trash.

    I don't know what is real, or let me say Pragmatist doesn't know, just so we can get over somebody's personal (your or mine) experience. The only way Pragmatist can make sense of it is as a relative measure. You could say then that something "is as real as" something else. The question then is whether mathematics is "as real as", say, you. This is a question which seems well-defined. I don't know what to make of an an absolute "reality", I cannot find any basis for it. I myself have an unfortunate tendency towards solipsism, based on some personal experience, but Pragmatist would discard this as useless. I will check out your thread.

    -- Sophia

    Dear Joe:

    Proof by Google! Oh-oh. What do we get? Explaining "real" as "actually existing" is recursive. You now have to explain what it means to "exist". Will you explain that existing means it's real? (What does Google say?) As to the universe, this is certainly the origin of the word, but as I explain in my essay it is as a matter of fact not how physicists use the word today.

    -- Sophia

    Dear Pragmatic,

    very pleasant read indeed. A message that builds up during reading but also, it seems, during writing! Nice narrative idea and style.

    Perhaps my favourite passage is the one in which you admit to ignore why the All displays recurrent, reproducible, often self-similar subsystems, but identify in these features the key for an effective coupling with the mathematical language, which delivers simplified universal models that are reproducible and reusable. So, the marriage between a world with much regularity and a language with much 'universality' (absence of human baggage) and reproducibility appears, at least at first sight, very possible, although your treatment, being necessarily concise, cannot dig into the details, where the devil is often hidden (in marriages in particular...).

    With respect to the question of why features such as regularity and self-similarity, interspersed with chaotic ones, are so frequently observed in the subsystems of this world, let me just point out that the assumption of a fundamentally algorithmic nature of the universe appears to some physicists, e.g. S. Lloyd, as a very attractive explanation (the last figure in my essay illustrates the idea).

    Your essay is one of the few I've read so far that offers - starting from the title - a generous attempt to address the very hard question about possible alternatives to mathematics for modelling the observable world. The requirement for such an alternative model to support predictions beyond the 'wait and see' barrier, and to describe many subsystems, not just one, is also very well stated in several passages.

    The answer you provide to this hard question is appealing, at least at first sight: use subsystems for modelling subsystems - establish a reproducible link between them. It's also a very economic solution, in that it does not bring on stage new actors. The example of Analogue Gravity explains well the idea.

    But your proposal triggers a question.

    The marriage between mathematical model and physical subsystem is asymmetric, in the sense that the model abstracts away the details of the modelled object: it represents an equivalence class of phenomena (subsystems), each happening at different places and times. In the subsystem-subsystem marriage, this is lost: both subsystems have fuzziness, so to speak. One might suspect that mathematics is still necessary, for extracting the universality behind BOTH of them.

    Thanks and best regards

    Tommaso

    P.S. Is there not any Pragmatic Computationalist in your wider family tree?

      Dear Ms. Magnusdottir,

      I enjoyed your story of Pragmatic Physicist.

      I am a pragmatic physicist with a vivid pictorial imagination. In my mind's eye, I see real waves and particles propagating through space and interacting with each other. I believe that this physical intuition provides a better insight into physical theory than mathematical formalism. Indeed, humans have a natural propensity for visual image processing; mathematics is more difficult. However, theoretical physicists are taught to reject physical intuition since it is unreliable, relying only on mathematical formalism. I believe that this is a mistake.

      In my essay, "Remove the Blinders: How Mathematics Distorted the Development of Quantum Theory", I argue that premature adoption of an abstract mathematical framework prevented consideration of a simple, consistent, realistic model of quantum mechanics, avoiding paradoxes of indeterminacy, entanglement, and non-locality. What's more, this realistic model is directly testable using little more than Stern-Gerlach magnets.

      Alan Kadin

        Physics without math appears impossible because we need numbers when we make measurements. Numbers are part of math. I do see see how we can do physics without math. Probably someone who knows no math can conceive a physical theory but physics goes beyond conception and requires measurements. Measurements are impossible without math. Can you offer a compelling argument about the possibility of measurements without any math? That would be really interesting.

        There is also another alternative: Math progresses so much that humans are no longer necessary, they can described mathematically and saved on a chip along with their world.

          Dear Tommaso,

          You have picked out a very important point indeed, one that I had to gloss over due to lack of space. The real mystery is, in fact, why do we find ourselves in an environment that has so many self-similarities - both over space and over time?

          I don't think that mathematics is really necessary to extract them, but it is definitely useful, and I think that this is essentially the reason why we find mathematics useful, 'unreasonably useful' even.

          One may suspect - and I apologize in advance for the anthropic smell ;) - that these self-similarities are necessary somehow for the evolution of life, or for that life to be able to start recognizing any regularities at all, which is essential for evolution. See, if nature wasn't so reproducible and, in a sense, reliable, life would never adapt and could never evolve.

          Somewhere in the multiverse there is a Computationalist in Pragmatic's family tree...

          -- Sophia

          Dear Alan,

          I agree with you that humans have a natural propensity for visual image processing. In fact, the human eye-brain team is still vastly better at analyzing visual information than any computer. I think that the relevance of data vizualisation for human understanding and, ultimately, scientific modeling, is often underestimated. Alas, I see no reason why not this should eventually be possible to do by a computer.

          I am vary of the idea though that intuition is better than mathematical formalism. Human intuition did not develop to explain phenomena that we have no physical perception of. I will look at your essay and read it with interest.

          -- Sophia

          Numbers are an intermediary. They are handy, but you don't need them. You can determine for example whether the height of a quicksilver column is as high as the height of a sandpile without ever writing down the height of either. What you need to make predictions is not the number, you need to know what to do in reaction - you need a model system, but that system doesn't have to be numerical in any sense.

          Besides, the point isn't that we should do science entirely without math, but that math might not be sufficient, and that's no reason to give up on doing science all together. Ie, use numbers where useful, but what do you do when they're not useful? That's the point I addressed in my essay.