On 8/22/2012 7:43 PM, meekerdb wrote:
On 8/22/2012 1:09 PM, Stephen P. King wrote:
On 8/22/2012 2:44 PM, meekerdb wrote:
On 8/22/2012 4:36 AM, Stephen P. King wrote:
Hi Jason,
Nothing "in the theory" suggests that landscapes are a problem!
But that is kinda my point, we have to use meta-theories of one
sort or another to evaluate theories. Occam's Razor is a nice
example... My point is that explanations should be hard to vary and
get the result that one needs to "match the data" or else it is not
an explanation at all. One can get anything they want with a theory
that has landscapes. Look!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory_landscape
"The string theory landscape or anthropic landscape refers to the
large number of possible false vacua in string theory. The
"landscape" includes so many possible configurations that some
physicists think that the known laws of physics, the standard model
and general relativity with a positive cosmological constant, occur
in at least one of them. The anthropic landscape refers to the
collection of those portions of the landscape that are suitable for
supporting human life, an application of the anthropic principle
that selects a subset of the theoretically possible configurations.
In string theory the number of false vacua is commonly quoted as
10500. The large number of possibilities arises from different
choices of Calabi-Yau manifolds and different values of generalized
magnetic fluxes over different homology cycles. If one assumes that
there is no structure in the space of vacua, the problem of finding
one with a sufficiently small cosmological constant is NP complete,
being a version of the subset sum problem."
Boom, there it is! The computation problem!
NP-complete problems, or just N-problems, are ones that consume a
lot of computational resources for large problems. But the required
resources are finite and the problems are solvable. So what's the
problem?
Brent
--
It is all about how big the finite problems grow to and whether
or not their demand for resources can be kept up with the load. It
seems to me that Nature would divide up the labor into as many niches
as possible and have a distributed "on demand" system rather than a
single top down computation system.
But you're trying to explain nature. You seem to be assuming nature
as a limited resource in the explanation, thus assuming the thing
you're trying to explain. Bruno at least puts his explanation in
Platonia where the resources are infinite.
Brent
--
Hi Brent,
Of course I am trying to explain Nature, in the sense of building a
ontological theoretical framework. If one starts assuming that Nature
has infinite resources available then one has to ask why is there a
finite world with all the thermodynamic drudgery? Bruno does not seem to
ever actually address this directly. It is left as an "open problem".
This is why he dismisses the NP-Complete problem so casually... It is
easy to think that way when thinking in top -> down terms. I am assuming
the known physical laws, particularly thermodynamics and working back
down to the ontology. He and I are looking from opposite directions. It
does not mean that we fundamentally disagree on the general picture.
There is really only one major disagreement between Bruno and I and
it is our definitions of Universality. He defines computations and
numbers are existing completely seperated from the physical and I insist
that there must be at least one physical system that can actually
implement a given computation. This puts the material worlds and
immaterial realm on equal ontological footings and joined together in a
isomorphism type duality relation because of this restriction. I care
more about the philosophical stuff and he the logical stuff. That a nice
division of labor. :-)
--
Onward!
Stephen
"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."
~ Francis Bacon
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