ZOMBIE FORUMS

It's a stinking, shambling corpse grotesquely parodying life.
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 30, 2004 12:28 am 
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Tamayo wrote:
Skjie: IcyMonkey, Wandering Idiot and Tamayo are blowhards. (Well ... yes. -- Tamayo)


I <3 you. Muchly less than three. And it makes only slightly more sense. I shall now dissapear, this sort of thing is no place for a musician.

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PostPosted: Sun Dec 05, 2004 4:10 am 
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Emy wrote:
WI wrote:
Emy: *sex0rs Tam*

Emy and Tamayo, in unison: Wait, what?! o_o

Please, I don't have the time to keep track of every female boarder you've flirted with. It's more convenient (not to mention statistically sound) to just assume it's all of them. ;)


Tamayo wrote:
The full set of real numbers (indeed, complex numbers) must be necessary to describe the universe. Some time ago, there was a Big Bang. How long ago? Each reference point will indeed have a different answer to that question, due to the aforementioned warping of space-time, but the answers are nevertheless meaningful. They are also changing, continuously. The real numbers are the smallest continuous field.

Your hypothetical thing-that-understands-the-universe-completely must certainly understand at least how long it has been for it since the Big Bang occurred, or else it cannot make the same determination for any abstract object. It must then be able to compute the real numbers. QED.

You missed a rather important part of what I said- that I was postulating a finite and completely quantized universe. The latter means that all physical values, including those involving spacetime and relativistic effects, have ultimate limits on their precision, which would mean that the full set of reals (complex, etc.) doesn't actually exist. Of course, we don't really know whether the universe is ultimately finite in extent and fully quantized or not. General Relativity treats spacetime as continuous, but it's not designed to handle the miniscule distances where quantization would become noticeable (which is part of the reason it's incompatible with quantum mechanics). And there have been other instances where giving a more detailed structure to something that had previously been considered isomorphic to a simple mathematical ideal has proven beneficial, such as going from the idea of homogeneous matter being continuous to the atomic theory, or more recently the switch from thinking about particles as mathematical points to strings, and then to higher-dimensional extended branes (including those of the hypothetical M-theory).

The Digital Physics people tend to think along these lines, although they seem a bit goofy (but then, I haven't finished reading A New Kind of Science yet, as I got tired of looking at dot patterns and decided to put it away until I'm done with some more interesting books)

Spacetime is also quantized in Loop Quantum Gravity*, and I believe some variants of string theory.

I suppose you could say that the Planck time and length denote a de facto quantization of spacetime, but since quantum physicists frequently work with theories at the sub-Planck level, it would be a bit hollow to say so.


* Ignore the largely non-technical sniping on the talk page. Both LQG and string theory are pretty much up in the air at this point, being beyond current experimental provability. Although as I understand it string theory is better at predicting actual properties of the universe at present.


Ultimately though, this is just me throwing out ideas as examples. My real point lies with what you conveniently said here:

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Tamayo: Even given immortality and time travel, an being must have Godlike intelligence to have certain knowledge of any physical quantity.

Who's to say we won't give rise to a "godlike" intelligence at some point? I hardly think such a thing is inevitable or even likely, or that I could even understand exactly what such an entity would entail (like I said, any being that could get past the self-consciousness limiting problem would be very odd indeed), but I don't feel I can disprove it. I know you think it's impossible because it might violate the current mathematical framework, but that seems a bit iffy when talking about a subject as speculative as the ultimate ends of intelligence. What if it turns out that the universe we've been experiencing is actually a simulation, and the real universe outside it has very different laws of reality which would make all computations involving reals possible? (Or simply make them irrelevant, etc.) We've gotten past things that some people thought were fundamental limitations before (the fact that "they" were obviously wrong in hindsight is irrelevant, what matter is what was thought at the time), so who knows what we'll get past in the future?


Stating that we can never understand the universe completely seems like an error of overcertainty, rather like (to use an example at random) when I stated that the cardinality of the set of reals was definitely aleph1. It might be aleph1, but we can't know for sure. Although that's a more fundamental uncertainty than what you're saying, I regard them as being somewhat similar, since the future from our point of view is ultimately uncertain. If humanity manages not to destroy itself and technological progress continues at anything resembling the current rate, the far-flung future of sentience in the universe (assuming we're the only ones) will be radically different enough from anything we're familiar with that I don't think we can make too many definitive statements about it.


I should note that I currently regard the most likely ultimate end for humanity and its descendants to be simply perishing with the rest of the universe in a heat death/big crunch. Although I don't believe I can prove that (and it would certainly be nice if we found a way out of it).


Let me rephrase my point one last time:

1. Humans stupid and ignorant of universe
2. May not always be
3. Currently too stupid to know whether (2.) is really true or not

And, with that bit of too-late-at-night-inspired caveman phrasing, I rest my case.


Tamayo wrote:
The Invisible Pink Unicorns™ problem, while very important to all of us, is not important to the TtUtUC. The unicorns are not part of the universe. (Unless, of course, they have a gravitational, electromagnetic, strong or weak field with which to interact with the rest of the universe -- in which case, they're not as invisible as all that.)

No, they can't interact with the universe in any observable way and aren't implied by anything that can. That's their whole deal :)

I specifically said that the TtUtUC (type 4) has complete knowledge of all nonexistent things, so it would know everything there is to know about the IPU's (which is an infinite amount). Type 4 is the most transcendent definition of "complete knowledge" I can think of, and indeed may be the highest one any human can conceive of, since anything postulated by a human mind would be something that can be thought of, so by definition a Type 4 entity would already know about it.

Of course I still left Type 5 open, since unlike some people, I don't like stating Ultimate Truths in anything other than a conditional sense...


Tamayo wrote:
However, let's think of another thing that the TtUtUC can do that is beyond human power: answering the halting problem. The TtUtUC can predict exactly when Windows crashes next, even though no human can .... ;)

I'm pretty sure even a Type 3 entity could solve the halting problem, having access to an infinite amount of computation. And hell, I can predict when Windows will crash, at least in a probabilistic sense...


Incidentally, I'm still curious about the properties of aleph2 sets (assuming the GCH for simplicity's sake), if you feel like engaging in any Tangential Math Ramblings™ :) I can't seem to find anywhere on the web that gives specifics for anything above the continuum.

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