Check out Sean Carroll's recent books if you want an introduction to these ideas that conveys the actual mathematical content and not just a word jumble.
Sean Carroll's content really hits the spot. Technical and mathematical enough to avoid metaphors that don't hold up to careful thought, but straightforward enough to be enjoyable even after work when my brain is fried. He's incredibly prolific too, hours of content per week that's accessible to people like me go up on his Mindscape podcast and Youtube posted lectures.
Given we have atoms obviously we are made of waves, but the question really is are we ONLY made of waves and that is most if not only important.
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Just like any materialist finding our mind is affected by brain area function, and claim we are just brain matter and there is no soul. May be we do not have. But a materialist approach also may not be true.
And even if true, are all fields founded. How about G or monad or … may be there is something about dark energy and dark matter we need to think of. And are all universes like us?
Even more important even if we are materialist or wave, does it matter that much. After all whilst one can say one can do all chemistry by study physics and all biology by studying chemistry, really? Reduction and mono-theme goes as far as we can and leads no where in many area of human endeavour.
Btw should I drive on the left or right? A must. Seems not as we observe both. Can you do whatever you want, also not.
Should I do x or y? How to deal with hamas, putin invasion …
That is action in context and society. But there are also action in my mind. My action is my individual choice and responsibility …
Not saying it is wrong. In fact, I think it is right. Just as said who shave the barber, does it large enough to be self referential and …
Thanks. I actually have one piece which strongly reminded me of the wave orbitals: https://gods.art/math_videos/prism_eye_video_near_spoke4.htm.... Surprisingly, the orbital-like shapes were a surprise to me that came out of a wave interference experiment.
Waves are just a description of the behavior that’s been observed, right? It is a mathematical model.
Physicists cleverly foist the question of what is and why on philosophers (who are happy to ponder endlessly), it turns out “can we model how it works” is much more profitable to follow.
First, the dominant philosophy of physics/science is that of falsification. Which roughly says that it is impossible to know the "true" laws. All of physics is just models, nothing else, and you can't do better than that.
Second, physicists also do not foist this question onto philosophers. There is plenty of work done on this by physicists.
Particularly, on the question of whether the wavefunction is simply a calculational tool or more, there are many many papers written by physicists. Two samples [1, 2].
Listen to people describe extremely complex social systems and problems (poverty, war, etc) and how to fix them. They appear simple because people are describing their cognitive representation of them (which is derived from
simplistic, incorrect representations broadcast on the media), rather than the things themselves.
The problem exists at both the individual and the collective level. It's a big problem.
I'm unsure what you mean by three significant figures. 99.8%? 1.57% 1,240?
Physicists aren't generally in the book selling business, but authors generally want their books to be popular and presenting mathematical abstractions as physical reality certainly seems like it would make it more appealing to the general public (and of course, publishers).
It was meant to be witty more than informative, but it only has one meaning: to one significant figure would mean no more than 4.9% of physicists sell books. To three, it's 00.049%. I think less than 1 in two thousand physicists being book authors is accurate.
Mathematical models answer all sorts of 'why' questions: why is the sky blue? why do the planets move the way they do? Why does biological altruism exist in a Darwinian world?
Any toddler can ask "why" ad nauseam (at least it seems that way to adults in the vicinity) - and that is a good thing - but answering is the clever part.
Strangely, some philosophers seem to shy away from answering. Philip Goff, for example, whose forays into popularizing include "Galileo's Error", merely declares that consciousness is fundamental, without explaining the second thing about what that means, and he is not, apparently, at all interested in following through; in fact, he seems to think that is a job for scientists - the same scientists who have made the error of adopting mathematical models, apparently - who should gratefully accept his insights and do something (what?) with them.
@matthewsawczyn6592:If this man ever talks to toddlers, the conversation will be infinite.
@thisismonitor4099: He actually did. He talked to me when I was a toddler at a physics conference in Greece and i remember it well. However, at the time I thought my father (another physicist) was smarter than him:)... Well he asked me if I knew my numbers (I did) and then talked a bit about them, and I told him my father taught me and that he was the smartest man in the world - lol he agreed:)
He was a very kind man to children indeed and he certainly had no airs about him given that this guy was a 1 on the Landau scale and that probably no one else at the conference was better than a 3 so he would have been 100 times more influential than anyone else ...
Regurgitating memorized ideological theories as if they are facts is not particularly clever in my books, but opinions vary.
> who should gratefully accept his insights and do something (what?) with them.
Well...they could practice their epistemic humility and control over their conscious processes, wonder whether their ideology and models are missing anything important (to the future well-being of the existence of humans on this planet), etc.
Imagine I said "rain is made of matrices". There is a problem with that statement. Your rain model might function using matrices, but that's not what rain is.
When you keep digging deeper, you might conclude rain actually is matrices.
What is rain? Falling water.
What is water? H2O.
What is H and O? Atoms.
What are atoms? A collection of particles.
And particles? Excitations of a quantum field.
And a quantum field? A distribution of operators.
So maybe rain is made of matrices. At least, this is my understanding of the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis.
It would not be a useful thing to say (at least on its own, without a great deal of context and further explanation) and nothing I wrote above suggests otherwise.
Would you care to articulate what's bothering you? I'm afraid I have been unable to discern anything that would be specific to science, even when taking into account the article on the difference between necessity and sufficiency that you linked to.
Oh, that's no bother at all: I try to keep an open mind, while expecting putative explanations of any sort to actually make some progress on explaining something. As far as I know, it's not a named ~ideology of any sort, just a reasonable response to incomplete knowledge.
As it would be neither informative nor fair to speculate about what's on your mind, this isn't giving me any hint as to what's bothering you, so would you now care to answer my question?
Thank you. And to be clear: your question is a fine one, and perfectly reasonable.
> I try to keep an open mind...
Not to be rude, but I consider this to be an (unrealized) "no" - to me, ~passivity cannot implement skepticism; true skepticism is extremely intellectually demanding.
It's not possible to give you an object level description of my issues that would do them any sort of justice, but I think this points in the direction quite well: consider when religion ruled the world (controlled the memetic functioning of the majority of human minds) - this, for what are now obvious reasons, had many issues, and caused substantial harm to humans.
Science was the way out of that delusion, and it has rewarded us well. But it too is yet another delusion/faith based ideology (to a lesser degree in volume, though not necessarily consequence[1]), there is another level of enlightenment available to humans, but the ideology of science/scientism is now behaving as religion did in the past, rather than adhering to its scriptures (a recurring problem with ideologies of any kind).
[1] climate change is an existential threat in my books, and it was brought to our doorstep by science
And thank you for your reply - I think we can agree to differ over where the optimal level of skepticism lies.
Global warming is indeed a serious matter involving not only the use, abuse, and unintended consequences of applied knowledge, but also the abuse (for intended consequences) of skepticism. The same could be said for the lab-leak hypothesis of the origin of covid-19, at least for those of us (such as myself) who think there's a plausible case for it.
As someone who thinks AI "doomerism" is similarly a justified concern, I suppose I should be concerned that if Philip Goff et. al. ever get around to explaining mental phenomena as being a consequence of consciousness being fundamental, then that could help bring about the doomer scenarios, but frankly, I am not so open-minded as to think there's any real prospect that they will (mainly because they don't seem at all interested in finding such explanations.)
I feel there is a real possibility of humanity suffering a serious and possibly terminal setback in the relatively near future, either as a consequence of abusing something we know or not making use of something we know, but I have no opinion as to which way it will go, if indeed it does.
> And thank you for your reply - I think we can agree to differ over where the optimal level of skepticism lies.
It depends what you mean precisely - if you mean the optimal level for going about one's life in a general sense (maximizing personal pleasure, the prime directive), sure. But when it comes to optimal with respect to achievement of the best judgment with respect to the epistemological limitations of reality itself, that is a very different thing. I predict I would be better at it, because you would not be able to try: your mind would not allow itself to be applied to that analysis (it would make up some stories to get out of it, or simply refuse to continue the conversation).
> Global warming is indeed a serious matter involving not only the use, abuse, and unintended consequences of applied knowledge, but also the abuse (for intended consequences) of skepticism.
Notice that I was talking about causality (science is the primary cause of climate change), but you have smoothly slid the conversation to involving.
> The same could be said for the lab-leak hypothesis of the origin of covid-19, at least for those of us (such as myself) who think there's a plausible case for it.
You could indeed say that lab leak involves many things...but if you constrain the scope of the discussion to causality, it also greatly constrains what can be said. I suspect this is why humans have such a strong and predictable negative reaction to precise use of language, they intuitively sense danger.
> As someone who thinks AI "doomerism" is similarly a justified concern, I suppose I should be concerned that if Philip Goff et. al. ever get around to explaining mental phenomena as being a consequence of consciousness being fundamental, then that could help bring about the doomer scenarios, but frankly, I am not so open-minded as to think there's any real prospect that they will (mainly because they don't seem at all interested in finding such explanations.)
Agree. If you're looking for someone serious and that can be taken seriously, I recommend folks from "eastern religions"....Buddhists, mystics, etc.
This is a good video that well demonstrates how incompetent and unaware of it scientists (in this case Sean Carroll) are in this domain (keep in mind that the gloves do not come off in such exhibition matches, so you never really get to see the true extent of the differential):
The Nature of Reality: A Dialogue Between a Buddhist Scholar and a Theoretical Physicist
> I feel there is a real possibility of humanity suffering a serious and possibly terminal setback in the relatively near future, either as a consequence of abusing something we know or not making use of something we know, but I have no opinion as to which way it will go, if indeed it does.
I do too, and I will make a bold prediction: two of the most important things that we will not make use of but should have are epistemology, and non-binary forms of logic.
EDIT: "apologies" (not really) for my excessively, "unnecessarily" antagonistic tone. I am simultaneously enjoying this conversation, you seem unusual.
Any physical theory is "just a description of the behavior that’s been observed, right? It is a mathematical model."
(Saying that 'cat' is just a word describing what's been observed completely misses the point of what science actually is. Philosophy of thought and science has gone much farther than that.)
Then the voices of the Ainur, like unto harps and lutes, and pipes and trumpets, and viols and organs, and like unto countless choirs singing with words, began to fashion the theme of Iluvatar to a great music; and a sound arose of endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing into the depths and into the heights, and the places of the dwelling of Iluvatar were filled to overflowing, and the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void.
i’ve always been struck by the aptness of that framing of the state of things.
We have also sound-houses, where we practise and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have harmony which you have not, of quarter-sounds and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have; with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep, likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp; we make divers tremblings and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds. We have certain helps which, set to the ear, do further the hearing greatly; we have also divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and, as it were, tossing it; and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and some deeper; yea, some rendering the voice, differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have all means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances.
Walter Russel's periodic table, is very intriguing.
Observing the fact that many elements decay to other elements, with time being the only variable changing, is a very strong indication that the classic periodic table might not show the whole picture.
I don't know in particular if matter is frozen light, but i think that matter has some properties we overlook.
We are made of potential, potential acts and distributes as waves (when not acting like and distributing as a state particulate.) Something tells me we already know this and are continually amazed by new narratives re-explaining these counter intuitive topics.
This announcement is like saying "buildings (large architectural structures) are actually moments of force, the cement or stone or wood or steel only exists to keep everything from collapsing in on itself.
> buildings are actually moments of force, the cement or stone or wood or steel only exists to keep everything from collapsing in on itself.
This is actually kind of a beautiful sentence, especially the first half. I’m sharing it with some of my colleagues who research computational structural design/architecture/analysis as well as historical structural/civil engineering. I think some of them might agree with it, in a weird way. I will also be trying to get the main structures prof to squeeze this line in as a debate opener to one of his lectures for a class that is mixed between architecture and engineering students. FWIW the textbook used for that class is called “form and forces” so you can see how a sentence like that would fit well into the dialogue.
I've been self studying architectural engineering. I hope to some day build my own home. It may well be a tribute to brutalism, we'll see.
This observation is genuine enough, the moment of force is kind of like the quantum super-amplitude of forces, playing out very slowly on the classical scale. The experienced architect (or engineer) can "see" how a structure may future collapse by the intuition of reading moments of force and how they influence forms.
> I've been self studying architectural engineering.
Get the form and forces textbook. It’s fantastic.
> I hope to some day build my own home. It may well be a tribute to brutalism, we'll see.
Don’t tell any architecture students this, they will rip you apart (just re-visiting their trauma upon you from when they were inevitably criticized for thinking “brutalism is cool” when they first got to arch school).
> The experienced architect (or engineer) can "see" how a structure may future collapse by the intuition of reading moments of force and how they influence forms.
Absolutely, any structures professor/lecturer worth their salt IMO should always be encouraging students to develop this ability. One excellent way to develop it is through the method of graphic statics (covered extensively in the aforementioned textbook) which was out of vogue for quite a while but has since started to gain some traction again as a pedagogical and design tool. The catenary is the oft-cited (and boring) example of a form-found structure.
Membrane and tension structures/the force density method would be another thing to check out in this realm.
if your frame of reference is centered on teh building then it could be claimed that the entire universe fundamentally depends on the exact properties of that building on some level
I mean lots of the comments in this thread exemplify the need for this book assuming it is well written enough to achieve its purpose [0]
Take for example the dismissal that "waves are just a concept/model/way of describing the universe that is useful and pretty accurate for many purposes".
Yes, this is true, but the wonder is to be found in the universe, not in the model, and the model provides a path to that wonder to be found approaching true understanding. Understanding with one may practically profit, and idk motivational salience to see connections where they are present.
Like, if you stop and think about it, isn't it like totally nuts that light, "heat", "electricity", etc. just smear out into one another at the right frequency, and that you can predict it? That you can ring all the nuclei in a human's body just like ringing a bell, listen to the tone, and turn that into a like a 3d image of tumors and crap? [1] And, this beauty / intricacy / whatever collides into the need to eat and clean up poop and so forth [2] -- And we end up with microwave ovens used thrice daily until broken and trashed, and relegate the concepts themselves into "just"s, because they are ordinary.
And if this sense of holistic appreciation for the universe is more cultivated in more people we'd see more cool stuff or live in a better world or something.
[0] idk, helping the reader develop a sense of ... awe, better intuitive understanding (because people have it no matter how wrong), connection, higher order consequences, all embedded in a practical context or something.
[1] NMR/MRI more or less
[2] which are also emergent consequences of all these heady abstract concepts btw, like what is is that we need to eat, why do we need to eat to begin with, etc.
