Categories
Uncategorized

Endless Creation Out of Nothing

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/endless-creation-out-of-nothing/

The subhead gives away a lot: “Could our universe have been an experiment by an ancient civilization?”. That’s not creation “out of nothing”… that’s just kicking the creation can down the road.

What the author seems to be saying is that it’s potentially possible to create universes “artificially”. Okay.

Also, there is no such thing as “nothing”, at least not in space because seemingly empty space always has “something” in it. Okay.

 

Categories
AI philosophy

What is the question?

In the book “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” Douglas Adams says the meaning of life is the number 42. The problem is that we just don’t know what the right question is.

The author of this article uses the latest AI to try and figure it out.. and isn’t happy with the answer.. or question.

https://muellerberndt.medium.com/i-asked-gpt-3-for-the-question-to-42-i-didnt-like-its-answer-and-neither-will-you-33f425a4d60f

Categories
AI God Physics

Is the Universe a neural network?

https://futurism.com/physicist-entire-universe-neural-network

“We are not just saying that the artificial neural networks can be useful for analyzing physical systems or for discovering physical laws, we are saying that this is how the world around us actually works,” reads the paper’s discussion. “With this respect it could be considered as a proposal for the theory of everything, and as such it should be easy to prove it wrong.”

Categories
God multiverse Quantum

Quantum Jerks (or God?)

https://thenextweb.com/insights/2020/09/01/thought-experiment-shows-how-we-might-be-at-the-mercy-of-quantum-jerks-from-another-universe/

“There’s a conversation about the existence of God to be had here – Halloway eludes to this at the end of his article with a comment about intelligent design – but we’re more interested in the technology side of things.”

 

Categories
Quantum

Quantum reality is a hot mess

https://www.forbes.com/sites/fernandezelizabeth/2020/09/01/quantum-physics-may-upend-our-macroscopic-reality-in-the-universe/#4299bda73285

  1. Either the “observer” and consciousness really is “special”.. or..
  2. Reality is not objective.

 

 

Categories
Simulation

Could we force the Universe to crash?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/could-we-force-the-universe-to-crash/

“If we’re all living in a simulation, as some have suggested, it would be a good, albeit risky, way to find out for sure”

 

 

 

Categories
AI

Are Humans Intelligent (AI written article)

Are Humans Intelligent? An AI Op-Ed

“I propose that intelligence is the ability to do things humans do.

The first step to answering this question is to ask: what are humans doing? Humans have existed for about 200,000 years, and for all but about the last 5,000 of those years, humans have spent most of their time doing one thing: sitting around doing nothing.”

Ouch. Feels like a personal attack.

 

Categories
philosophy Physics Uncategorized

The physics of free will

https://aeon.co/essays/heres-why-so-many-physicists-are-wrong-about-free-will

“But still a nagging thought occurs: if the initial data were known for the entire Universe, then why can’t it determine all these lower-level dynamics in a mechanistic way? After all, aren’t they just smallscale details in this larger picture, where one can claim that no constraints occur? The Universe is by definition all that there is, so it can’t be constrained by effects from a larger environment. Might physics not be deterministic in that case, and my argument fall apart?”

“The problem then is, how did all those words get there? Was there a demiurge who coded all that stuff into the detailed initial state of the Universe? It’s certainly not there in the Schrödinger equation per se, or in a randomly determined set of fluctuations in the early Universe as is normally envisaged in cosmological studies. By definition, they don’t encode either any detailed information or any logical argumentation.

So how could that data have got there? Not just for one book, but for all the books ever written? Is that really a believable story, or some kind of creationist myth?”

 

Categories
Superintelligence

Is the Universe conscious?

https://futurism.com/the-byte/mathematicians-think-universe-conscious

Some mathematicians seem to think they are closer to finding out.

Categories
philosophy Physics

Quantum determinism in popular culture

https://www.engadget.com/alex-garland-devs-interview-quantum-computing-120035468.html

The premise of the TV show “Devs” is that silicon valley company corners the market on quantum computing and uses it to decode the past and possibly future.

How does determinism affect everyone’s lives? Does knowing you are on a predetermined path affect your “decisions”?

Personally, I don’t buy it.. but I can’t back that up with science. Perhaps I just choose not to buy it.