What possible, fundamental, misunderstanding of the nature of the universe could make current academics look like flat earthers?
If a Maxwell's demon was ever proven practical it would basically disprove the second law of thermodynamics.
Wait, why? What does knowing a perfect state of system has to do with the law of thermodynamics?
Maxwell's demon knowing in advance the exact state of the system isn't really practical as a solution. Sure you can concoct such a situation, but that isn't useful.
Consciousness being an emergent property of the universe instead of the universe being an emergent property of consciousness.
Thank you for this. I was just thinking about it and how it implies consciousness is shared or linked in some way.
This is a good answer. Bernardo Kastrup argues this; check out his very eloquently titled book Why Materialism is Baloney.
Kastrup is entirely unconvincing because he pretends the only two schools of philosophy in the whole universe are his specific idealism and metaphysical realism which he falsely calls the latter "materialism." He thus never feels the need to ever address anything outside of a critique of a single Laymen understanding of materialism which is more popular in western countries than eastern countries, ignoring the actual wealth of philosophical literature.
Anyone who actually reads books on philosophy would inevitably find Kastrup to be incredibly unconvincing as he, by focusing primarily on a single school, never justifies many of his premises. He begins from the very beginning talking about "conscious experience" and whatnot when, if you're not a metaphysical realist, that is what you are supposed to be arguing in the first place. Unless you're already a dualist or metaphysical realist, if you are pretty much any other philosophical school like contextual realist, dialectical materialist, empiriomonist, etc, you probably already view reality as inherently observable, and thus perception is just reality from a particular point-of-view. It then becomes invalid to add qualifiers to it like "conscious experience" or "subjective experience" as reality itself cannot had qualifiers.
I mean, the whole notion of "subjective experience" goes back to Nagel who was a metaphysical realist through-and-through and wrote a whole paper defending that notion, "What is it like to be a Bat?", and this is what Kastrup assumes his audience already agrees with from the get-go. He never addresses any of the criticisms of metaphysical realism but pretends like they don't exist and he is the unique sole critic of it and constantly calls metaphysical realism "materialism" as if they're the same philosophy at all. He then builds all of his arguments off of this premise.
I came here to say this.
Modern physics already gives special status to observer objects and properties that “non-observer” objects don’t have, and every universe needs to be defined from some particular point of view instead of “objectively” from outside. There are a couple other weird things but those are two big ones to me.
And so a physicist from the 2100s where physics is defined in relation to consciousness asks a modern physicist, so why did you think it was all just atoms and numbers in an “objective” universe?
And the modern physicist says what the fuck are you talking about don’t get all weird and religious on me
And the future physicist says okay dude good luck then
You're fundamentally misunderstanding the concept of an "observer" - it's not a conscious entity literally observing something. It's simply an object whose state depends on the quantum particle in question.
There is "observer-dependence" in quantum mechanics in a comparable way that there is observer-dependence in general relativity. It has nothing to do with some "fundamental role of consciousness" but comes from the fact that reality itself depends on how you look at it, it is reference frame dependent. The "observer" is just a chosen coordinate system in which to describe other things. I know, you probably got this from Kastrup too, right? Idealists have been getting desperate and resorting to quantum woo, pretending that something that changes based on coordinate system proves fundamental consciousnesses.
That the universe is infinite. It's unknown if it is but commonly called infinite. It could, however, be finite in some way, such as be wrapping back around on itself out past observable space.
What would cause it to do that? Only thing I can think of is gravity, no? That would imply there's something in the middle that keeps everything from straying too far?
Or do you simply mean that our perception of space is limited and we simply can't perceive it properly and thus we'd go in one direction and end up back where we started? But if that's the case, it means we've also misunderstood light? Doesn't it go infinitely? So shouldn't there be a light source that reaches us from different directions?
Only thing I can think of is gravity, no?
They're not talking about the stuff in the universe being finite. The space itself could be finite, for example by looping back on itself. Tthe usual comparison is to a circular track - you can drive as far as you like on it without hitting an edge, but you'll eventually come back to the point where you started. Now scale this up to three dimensions.
That would imply there's something in the middle that keeps everything from straying too far?
Even if we're talking about a system held together by gravity, it does not need a central mass. The overall system just needs to be dense enough that each piece is stabilised by all the others.
That the many worlds interpretation is sort of correct, but incomplete. Hear me out.
Many worlds isn't as mind bogglingly ridiculous if the worlds are constantly merging back into each other. Like the universe where a photon bounced left and the universe where it bounced right are functionally identical, then they ARE just the same universe. As long as which way the photon bounced didn't make a meaningful difference, those two realities aren't suddenly new separate lines, they're like a rubber band that stretched in two directions, then bounced back together.
But let's say you measure the photon and keep records of it. Now there's two versions of you right? One measuring the photon going left, one measuring it going right. You're in separate universes that shall never meet right?
No... you've stretched the rubber band a little further. Over a timescale that's totally meaningless compared to the age of the universe, you will die, your records will decay and once the information is effectively scrambled into chaos... the two realities can just snap back together. Two universe... but now one again.
Now for some really mind bendy stuff... this stretching isn't just localized in time it's also localized in space. Meaning... if you measure your photon and split into two versions of yourself, but I'm on the other side of the world (or even just down the street from you) and I have no idea that there's two versions of you, stretched across this temporary universe split... Well, there's still only one version of me. Up until I encounter one or the other version of you. And if I never do... or if we just cross paths in the local grocery store and your photon experiment doesn't come up at all... there's still just one version of me.
And that one version of me can EASILY encounter both versions of you simultaneously without me ever knowing or it making a meaningful difference in my life. So your split reality is localized... possibly even microscopically in your body (like... most of your neurons in your brain didn't really change at all because of your experiment, only a few of them have to fire differently, the rest don't have to split... also, wtf) and in the parts of your lab equipment that kept records of the photon measurement.
Now, even whackier... the remerging isn't perfect, just perfect enough that the universe doesn't fall apart. Like... you know how sometimes you're SURE that the neighbor had a red car, but then you look outside and it's green and your spouse tells you it's always been green? Stuff that fuels r/glitchinthematrix.
"OK thebardingreen," you say, "sure, but wouldn't that mean our records would detect the imperfections all the time and we'd have clear evidence when we go an check the database that it's impossible to keep consistent records because of this spliting and remerging?"
"NO!" I say, "because of entropy."
See, if the universe is going to try to flow along the arrow of time to it's lowest energy state... and as we all know, something stretched (like a rubber band, but ANYTHING really) is in a high energy state. If we found lots of evidence this was going on, well that would keep the universe stretched out more, over longer periods of time. The universe can't have that, so when you start checking records, things tend to snap to their lowest energy state (possibly even to the point that you realize the neighbor's car WAS always green, and you just had a dream last night that it was red. But something's bothering you about that... doesn't seem quite right. You post on the internet and tell a eerie story about your strange experience and then go on with your life. The feeling fades. Becomes a funny party story.
Decades later, your grand kids remember a story you used to tell... and they retell it, but they don't quite remember what color you said the car was. There's no need for them to split into multiple versions (one who says red and one who says green), they just both say "the car was blue, then it turned out to be yellow." The universe is FULLY collapsed.
(Also, we KNOW that keeping perfect records / taking perfect measurements is actually incredibly hard and we tend to throw out anomalous results as garbage data, especially if we can't reproduce them, this could be going all the time and we would just consider it statistically insignificant bad data, within our expected margin of error, easily explainable as a common, everyday screw up)
So yes, that means there could be a small infinity of parallel universes where evolution / history went differently. A universe where sapient rat people are squeeking over their version of the internet about weird science facts. Sure.... but so what? The sun is going to expand into a red giant and consume the Earth and erase most of that information and then the local planetary stretch collapses back into it's lowest energy state... one where there might have been rat people, or hairless ape people, but either way, they're gone.
Ready for MORE whackyness?? THIS is the Great Filter. Sort of.
Intelligent civilizations spreading across the stars will create a HIGH energy state, as all those potential diversions splinter in more and more ways across greater distances. SO the universe will tend to favor outcomes where chaotic, clever and unpredictable life forms DON'T spread out of their own solar system, or travel across vast distances, because THAT would be a high energy stretch state. Although even just spreading across a galaxy is still only a LOCAL stretch as far as the universe is concerned. Heck, beings 100 light years away who never build a huge solar system sized radio telescope to pick up our faint emissions don't need to cause weird reality splits. They could exist in a weird little myriad of their own stretched realities and NEVER interact with ours in a meaningful way. And if one day one of their radio astronomers detects a strange radio signal from our star that NEVER repeats and is NEVER explained... well it really doesn't matter to them at all if we sent that signal or the rats did or the sun just hiccuped in way their physical models can't explain. Our whole solar system becomes a Schrodinger's cat box in which both us AND the rat people sent that signal existing in a superpositioned state until someone measures it... which they probably won't and probably CAN'T so the universe maintains it's low energy state.
So if you're ever like "If I go back in time and kill my grandfather, does that mean I never existed", what if you just created a weird stretch reality that will paradoxically persist for a while and then all collapse back together as soon as the universe can get away with it?
In this thought experiment, it's possible that a small infinity of time travelers showed up to Stephen Hawking's time travel party. BUT, that would cause a high energy stretch over a weird knot in time... so the universe will TOTALLY favor outcomes in which no one showed up, so in the vast majority of universes, NO time travelers show up to hang out with Stephen Hawking, BECAUSE that's less stretching for the universe to do before it snaps back to a low energy state.
So, the many worlds interpretation doesn't mean that infinities of universes are being created constantly, it means there's JUST one universe, but multiple pocket realities can exist in it, localized in both space and time, and these pocket realities are constantly snapping back and merging with each other, sometimes inconsistently. Which is EXACTLY what we'd expect from an energetic system progressing through time, experiencing entropy.
Man I want whatever drugs you have.
(Honestly this was a fun read, thank you!)
I like it, and also second the request for whatever drugs you're on
This doesn't feel accurate for some reason. Maybe because I'm on drugs.
I like it, but after reading this my brain feels like it needs a nap.
While it does appear that facts can be relative, it does not appear the universe bends backwards over itself to resolve the discrepancy when it happens:
https://www.science.org/content/article/quantum-paradox-points-shaky-foundations-reality
Nature religions were right and we're all part of a single bigger organism of which every part can feel and communicate with every other part.
We’re like fingers who don’t know there’s a hand
Thinking of it as quantum first.
Before the 20th century, there was a preference for the idea that things were continuous.
Then there was experimental evidence that things were quantized when interacted with, and we ended up with wave particle duality. The pendulum swung in that direction and is still going.
This came with a ton of weird behaviors that didn't make philosophical sense - things like Einstein saying "well if no one is looking at the moon does it not exist?"
So they decided fuck the philosophy and told the new generation to just shut up and calculate.
Now we have two incompatible frameworks. At cosmic scales, the best model (general relatively) is based on continuous behavior. And at small scales the framework is "continuous until interacted with when it becomes discrete."
But had they kept the 'why' in mind, as time went on things like the moon not existing when you don't look at it or the incompatibility of those two models would have made a lot more sense.
It's impossible to simulate the interactions of free agents with a continuous universe. It would take an uncountably infinite amount of information to keep track.
So at the very point that our universe would be impossible to simulate, it suddenly switches from behaving in an impossible to simulate way to behaving in a way with finite discrete state changes.
Even more eyebrow raising, if you erase the information about the interaction, it switches back to continuous as if memory optimized/garbage collected with orphaned references cleaned up (the quantum eraser variation of Young's double slit experiment).
The latching on to the quantum experimental results and ditching the 'why' in favor of "shut up and calculate" has created an entire generation of physicists chasing the ghost of a unified theory of gravity while never really entertaining the idea that maybe the quantum experimental results are the side effects of emulating a continuous universe.
Sometimes the Dark Matter, Dark Energy conversations reminds me of waves moving through aether
As long as we are talking esotericlly, I think of fixed points on a primordial map. Like the fabric of everything and where the aether concentrates celestial bodies emerge. Like the backside of a cross stitch where we only see the stitch work rather than the image.
edit:
I don't know enough about black holes to speak credibly on the subject but another thought comes to mind.
Pretend there is a loading point for any fixed volume of space that when the gravity gets massive enough matter can collapse in on itself. That matter still exists but it now occupies space within matter.
I think dark matter is spot on. We're not finding it because it isn't a thing.
However... Relevant explanation of why people think there's dark matter.
Dark matter IS A THING. At least there is some thing out there that interacts weakly with the elctroweak force and interacts normally with gravity. We have plenty of evidence of it EXISTING. The problem of dark matter is we don't know what it is.... But sure as hell there is something. See the Bullet cluster if you don't believe me. And if you are a bit physics savvy, you can understand that it's evidence is imprinted in the CMB. We just don't know what it is.
Something simple like if we just ignored Gravity we could move faster than light.
Or time maybe?
Or time maybe?
Time and space is one.
Or is it? {Dramatic Chipmunk music}
When we finally figure out and understand, in a real world mechanical sort of way, quantum mechanics, all bets will be off.
It'll open up a new perspective on the Universe (dare I say Metaverse?), and where we fit in with everything.
Gravity is an unproven hypothesis.
Yeah, I’m not smart enough for thread, imma head out
I read some odd magic words like fabric of the universe idk if sounded like scufi and fintasy I got confused
Immediately knew it was Sabine
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That evolution is purely randomness + fitness landscape rather than that DNA guides the process at least somewhat. Don’t burn me alive guys
I don’t understand your point but it seems interesting. Could you rephrase?
I would expect randomness to play a larger roll than fitness.
In the short term (single digit generations) that's probably true, but I don't see how it could be on longer scales. If the random mutations decrease fitness, they won't be passed on at some point, since there is less reproduction. If they increase fitness, they will be passed on to more individuals.
Time (capital T) is vastly different than time (lowercase t).
I don't know for sure, but there are some debates that simply don't make sense to me. For example, whether or not dark matter/energy exists is something many just absolutely insist upon. To me, I would imagine, if something exists, being "measurable" is a badge or prerequisite of its existence, but here we have a name for the black omnipresence essence everywhere, the substance of nothing, so to speak, to the point where one of the theories put forward about the gravitational anomalies in the outer solar system is that it's simply dark matter. I'm not buying it. I'm of the school of thought that what we see really is just plain nothingness. For those who constantly accuse the "it could be aliens" theory, it ranks up there to float around a go-to for everything.
Another one are the constant asteroid theories. What made the moon? An asteroid. What tipped Uranus? An asteroid. What killed the dinosaurs? The ice age An asteroid. It doesn't come off as very critical, especially when imprecisions are growing out of them all, for example people went from saying dinosaurs were all genocided specifically by the asteroid to some people saying there were some who became birds to some saying all of them became birds and animals to saying the asteroid did almost nothing to any whole species.
Dark matter isn't something that was randomly invented and is believed for no good reason. We observe something going on, and the best way to describe the effect is through dark matter, as in matter that doesn't interact with electromagnetic waves, but does affect gravity. There have been many alternative explanations for the effects (e.g. MOND), but none line up as well as dark matter.
So it's something that is measurable, insofar that we even came up with the idea due to measurements. We don't know how to detect it directly, but we can detect its influence.
Isn't it judging a book by its cover that something so unknown to us is seen as so applicable as a go-to before we know what applies to it? It would be like seeing fire for the first time and thinking "we only know one thing about fire, that it's hot, therefore anything that's hot must be heated by internal fire".
I think you're right about black matter, it might just be the modern day aether. The asteroid theories not so much, there is proof for the dinosaur extinction event being caused by an asteroid, and there is a measurable anomaly in the earth core which gives evidence to the moon origin theory (which was not so much an asteroid but a Mars-sized object). Also, asteroids are considered proven to excist.
FYI, dinosaurs are not extinct; they're quite abundant, and we walk alongside them. For example, chickens are dinosaurs.
I acknowledged that in the last sentence.
I once heard that dark matter is just the consequence of using approximations and then having equations not balance out further down the line. So we inject dark matter in there so that the math maths all right.
Thats literally how it started, yes.
Then scientists realized that their math hack might actually hold some weight.
None. Flat Earth is characterized by their denial of science. By performing empirical experiments then rejecting the results.
That is antithetical to the very core of science. So any scientist who is given experimental data that contradicts their theory is, should make new theories.
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with saying the Earth is flat, and then thinking about the implications, and then verifying the implications match reality, and then when you get bad data you modify your hypothesis. We need creative and curious minds to challenge the status quo with new measurements data and science. It's the rejection of empirical data that is the death of science
I imagine there are many academics that won't budge from their current beliefs even when confronted with proof.
They might be academics, but definitely not scientists
Yup! I don’t understand the downvotes, because this absolutely happens. Especially when technology has progressed to enable us to answer certain questions that we couldn’t in the past. Old curmudgeonly academics can definitely be resistant to accepting that they’ve been wrong, even when confronted with proof. Sometimes the only way for old theories to die is for their proponents to die or retire. It’s a shame, but ego can be a massive problem in some disciplines.
Some, sure. And they are indeed acting like flat earthers. I think they're likely to be the minority though and they're not acting like scientists if they do that.
Sounds like you're saying The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is flawed because those pesky stubborn holdouts weren't scientists.
Holding out on a belief when presented with a mountain of evidence to the contrary is definitively unscientific. What don't we call people who are unscientific about their methodologies?
If you apply the scientific method, you're a scientist. Congratulations