Re: Belief in Big Bang?
On Jan 25, 2:05 am, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: It is not at all camouflaged; Lawrence Krause just wrote a book called A Universe From Nothing. That the universe came from nothing is suggested by calculations of the total energy of the universe. Theories of the origin of the universe have been developed by Alexander Vilenkin, Stephen Hawking and James Hartle. Of course the other view is that there cannot have been Nothing and Something is the default. The most reasonable belief is that we came from nothing, by nothing, and for nothing. --- Quentin Smith I think that we are all familiar with the universe from nothing theories, but the problem is with how nothing is defined. The possibility of creating a universe, or creating anything is not 'nothing', so that any theory of nothingness already fails if the definition of nothing relies on concepts of symmetry and negation, dynamic flux over time, and the potential for physical forces, not to mention living organisms and awareness. An honestly recognized 'nothing' must be in all ways sterile and lacking the potential for existence of any sort, otherwise it's not nothing. My view is that the default is neither nothing or something but rather Everything. If you have an eternal everything then the universe of somethings and sometimes can be easily explained by there being temporary bundling of everything into isolated wholes, collections of wholes, collections of collections, etc, each with their own share of small share of eternity. This is what I am trying to say with Bruno about numbers starting from 1 instead of 0. From 1 we can subtract 1 and get 0, but from 0, no logical concept of 1 need follow. 0 is just 0. 0 minus 0 is still 0. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Belief in Big Bang?
Hi, I am 99% in agreement with Craig here. The 1% difference is a quibble over the math. We have to be careful that we don't reproduce the same slide into sophistry that has happened in physics. Onward! Stephen On 1/25/2012 7:41 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Jan 25, 2:05 am, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: It is not at all camouflaged; Lawrence Krause just wrote a book called A Universe From Nothing. That the universe came from nothing is suggested by calculations of the total energy of the universe. Theories of the origin of the universe have been developed by Alexander Vilenkin, Stephen Hawking and James Hartle. Of course the other view is that there cannot have been Nothing and Something is the default. The most reasonable belief is that we came from nothing, by nothing, and for nothing. --- Quentin Smith I think that we are all familiar with the universe from nothing theories, but the problem is with how nothing is defined. The possibility of creating a universe, or creating anything is not 'nothing', so that any theory of nothingness already fails if the definition of nothing relies on concepts of symmetry and negation, dynamic flux over time, and the potential for physical forces, not to mention living organisms and awareness. An honestly recognized 'nothing' must be in all ways sterile and lacking the potential for existence of any sort, otherwise it's not nothing. My view is that the default is neither nothing or something but rather Everything. If you have an eternal everything then the universe of somethings and sometimes can be easily explained by there being temporary bundling of everything into isolated wholes, collections of wholes, collections of collections, etc, each with their own share of small share of eternity. This is what I am trying to say with Bruno about numbers starting from 1 instead of 0. From 1 we can subtract 1 and get 0, but from 0, no logical concept of 1 need follow. 0 is just 0. 0 minus 0 is still 0. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Belief in Big Bang?
On 25 Jan 2012, at 18:04, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi, I am 99% in agreement with Craig here. The 1% difference is a quibble over the math. We have to be careful that we don't reproduce the same slide into sophistry that has happened in physics. I think I agree. I comment Craig below. Onward! Stephen On 1/25/2012 7:41 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Jan 25, 2:05 am, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: It is not at all camouflaged; Lawrence Krause just wrote a book called A Universe From Nothing. That the universe came from nothing is suggested by calculations of the total energy of the universe. Theories of the origin of the universe have been developed by Alexander Vilenkin, Stephen Hawking and James Hartle. Of course the other view is that there cannot have been Nothing and Something is the default. The most reasonable belief is that we came from nothing, by nothing, and for nothing. --- Quentin Smith I think that we are all familiar with the universe from nothing theories, but the problem is with how nothing is defined. The possibility of creating a universe, or creating anything is not 'nothing', so that any theory of nothingness already fails if the definition of nothing relies on concepts of symmetry and negation, dynamic flux over time, and the potential for physical forces, not to mention living organisms and awareness. An honestly recognized 'nothing' must be in all ways sterile and lacking the potential for existence of any sort, otherwise it's not nothing. I agree too. That is why it is clearer to put *all* our assumptions on the table. Physical theories of the origin, making it appearing from physical nothingness, makes sense only in, usually mathematical, theories of nothingness. It amounts to the fact that the quantum vacuum is unstable, or even more simply, a quantum universal dovetailer. This assumes de facto a particular case of comp, the believes in the existence of at least one (Turing) universal system. As you might know, choosing this particular one is treachery, in the mind body problem, given that if that is the one, it has to be explained in term of a special sum on *all* computational histories independently of the base (the universal system) chosen at the start. Any formalism describing the quantum vaccuum assumes much more that the Robinson tiny arithmetical theory for the ontology needed in comp. Nothing physical does not mean nothing conceptual. You have still too assume the numbers, at the least. So it assumes more and it copies nature (you can't, with comp, or you lost the big half of everything). My view is that the default is neither nothing or something but rather Everything. I think there coexist, and are explanativaely dual of each others. In both case you need the assumptions needed to make precise what can exist and what cannot exist. If you have an eternal everything then the universe of somethings and sometimes can be easily explained by there being temporary bundling of everything into isolated wholes, collections of wholes, collections of collections, etc, each with their own share of small share of eternity. OK. This is what I am trying to say with Bruno about numbers starting from 1 instead of 0. From 1 we can subtract 1 and get 0, So we get 0 after all. but from 0, no logical concept of 1 need follow. No logical concept, you are right (although this is not so easy to proof). But you have the *arithmetical* (yes, *not* logical), notion of a number's successor, noted s(x). We assume that all numbers have successors. And we can even define 0 as the only one which is not a successor, by assuming Ax(~(0= s(x))) (for all number 0 is different from the successor of that number). having the symbol 0, we can actually name all numbers: by 0, s(0), s(s(0)), s(s(s(0))), s(s(s(s(0, s(s(s(s(s(0), ... 0 is just 0. 0 minus 0 is still 0. Yes. That's correct. And for all numbers x, you have also that x + 0 = x. Worst: for all number x, x*0 = 0. That 0 is a famous number! Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Belief in Big Bang?
Hi Brent, On 1/25/2012 2:05 AM, meekerdb wrote: On 1/24/2012 8:27 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi Brent, On 1/24/2012 9:47 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 1/24/2012 6:08 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi John, 1. I see the Big Bang theory as a theory, an explanatory model that attempts to weave together all of the relevant observational facts together into a scheme that is both predictive and explanatory. It has built into it certain ontological and epistemological premises that I have some doubts about. Such as? Let us start with the heavily camouflaged idea that we can get something, a universe!, out of Nothing. It is not at all camouflaged; Lawrence Krause just wrote a book called A Universe From Nothing. That the universe came from nothing is suggested by calculations of the total energy of the universe. Theories of the origin of the universe have been developed by Alexander Vilenkin, Stephen Hawking and James Hartle. Of course the other view is that there cannot have been Nothing and Something is the default. But note that this calculation, which flows inevitably from our knowledge of conservation laws, is done ex post facto, after the fact. We are here, experiencing a universe, and noticing that it is finite both in the spatial and temporal sense. Is this not what we should expect an entity that has a finite limit on its ability to observe? We seem to easily forget or ignore the full implication of finiteness! B/c of the way that time and spatial aspects cannot be taken as separate, the total universe could very well be infinite but we would never observe that totality if only because of the finite limits on resolution of our senses, no matter how extended they might be with technology. I am making a big deal of this as it is the reason why I have been arguing strongly against naive realism while warning against equally fallacious alternatives. The philosophical problems that we have been discussing in this List are very tough but I believe that we have a combined brain trust very capable of figuring this stuff out. :-) 2. Dark energy is nothing more than a conjectured-to-exist entity until we have a better explanation for the effects that it was conjectured to explain. We have never actually detected it. What we have detected is that certain super-novae seem to have light that appears to indicate that the super-novae are accelerating away from us. This was an unexpected observation that was not predicted by the Big Bang theory so the BBT was amended to include a new entity. So be it. But my line of questions is: At what point are we going to keep adding entities to BBT before we start wondering if there is something fundamentally wrong with it? I think what you refer to as the Big Bang Theory is called the concordance theory in the literature. It includes the hot Big Bang, inflation, and vacuum energy. The reason Dark Energy (so called in parallel with Dark Matter) was so readily accepted is that it was already in General Relativity in the form of the cosmological constant. It didn't have to be amended; just accept that a parameter wasn't exactly zero. A constant that Einstein himself called the greatest mistake of his life. Only because it caused him to miss predicting the expansion of the universe - or maybe you don't believe the universe is expanding. Not so. The augmented field equations are unstable and strongly dependent on the precise choice of the Cauchy hypersurface input. The cosmological constant is a two-edged sword because it can give a universe that almost instantly collapses or explodes. You would do well to read up more on it. The problem is that one can add an arbitrary number of such scalar field terms to one's field equations. Frankly IMHO, it is more something from nothing nonsense. But you can't add any others that are simpler than the curvature terms, which are second order, except the constant CC term. OK, I will bow to your knowledge of the math on this point. It is not possible to prove that something exists in an absolute sense, for who is the ultimate arbiter of that question? There is no ultimate arbiter. What is thought to exist is model dependent and it changes as theories change to explain new data. WOW! We been informed that we can now make things pop in and out of existence merely by shifting our belief systems. Who might have imagined such a wondrous possibility! Umm, NO. Existence is not subject to our perceptions, theories of whatever. Read more carefully. I wrote What is *thought* to exist...; which is obviously true. We thought atoms existed long before they could be imaged. We think quarks exist based on a theory that says they can't be observed. OK, but you get my point I hope. What I am trying to drive home is that we must be very careful with our use of the word exist. There is a point where in our drive to have
Re: Belief in Big Bang?
John Mikes wrote: 1. I do not 'believe' in the Big Bang, Well, we have excellent empirical evidence that the observable universe is expanding, and a straightforward extrapolation into the past indicates that 13.75 billion years ago everything we can see was concentrated at just one point. So it's clear that something unusual happened 13.75 billion years ago, if not the Big Bang what? And if not the Big Bang what caused the 2.7 degree microwave background radiation that is coming in from every point in the sky? And was it just coincidence that long ago the theory predicted that radiation would change in intensity very very slightly from one point to another, a prediction that was triumphantly confirmed in just the last couple of years? Dark energy (etc.) are postulates No, Dark Energy is just a label for something we are nearly certain exists but can't explain. There is superb evidence that the phenomena given the name Dark Energy exists, but nobody even pretends to understand it. Dark Energy is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, if you want scientific immortality alongside Newton and Einstein explain just 2% of the puzzle. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Belief in Big Bang?
Dear Bruno, I still think that we can synchronize our ideas! On 1/25/2012 1:10 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 25 Jan 2012, at 18:04, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi, I am 99% in agreement with Craig here. The 1% difference is a quibble over the math. We have to be careful that we don't reproduce the same slide into sophistry that has happened in physics. I think I agree. I comment Craig below. Onward! Stephen On 1/25/2012 7:41 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Jan 25, 2:05 am, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: It is not at all camouflaged; Lawrence Krause just wrote a book called A Universe From Nothing. That the universe came from nothing is suggested by calculations of the total energy of the universe. Theories of the origin of the universe have been developed by Alexander Vilenkin, Stephen Hawking and James Hartle. Of course the other view is that there cannot have been Nothing and Something is the default. The most reasonable belief is that we came from nothing, by nothing, and for nothing. --- Quentin Smith I think that we are all familiar with the universe from nothing theories, but the problem is with how nothing is defined. The possibility of creating a universe, or creating anything is not 'nothing', so that any theory of nothingness already fails if the definition of nothing relies on concepts of symmetry and negation, dynamic flux over time, and the potential for physical forces, not to mention living organisms and awareness. An honestly recognized 'nothing' must be in all ways sterile and lacking the potential for existence of any sort, otherwise it's not nothing. I agree too. That is why it is clearer to put *all* our assumptions on the table. Physical theories of the origin, making it appearing from physical nothingness, makes sense only in, usually mathematical, theories of nothingness. It amounts to the fact that the quantum vacuum is unstable, or even more simply, a quantum universal dovetailer. This assumes de facto a particular case of comp, the believes in the existence of at least one (Turing) universal system. As you might know, choosing this particular one is treachery, in the mind body problem, given that if that is the one, it has to be explained in term of a special sum on *all* computational histories independently of the base (the universal system) chosen at the start. The idea of theories of Nothing is that Everything is indistinguishable from Nothing. This is very different from distinctions between Something and Nothing. I cannot emphasize enough how important the role of belief, as it Bpp, has and how belief automatically induces an entity that is capable of having the belief. We simply cannot divorce the action from the actor while we can divorce the action from any *particular* actor. Your idea that we have to count *all* computational histories is equally important, but note that a choice has to be made. This role, in my thinking, is explained in terms of an infinite ensemble of entities, each capable of making the choice. If we can cover all of their necessary and sufficient properties by considering them as *Löb*ian, good, but I think that we need a tiny bit more structure to involve bisimulations between multiple and separate *Löb*ian entities so that we can extract local notions of time and space. Any formalism describing the quantum vaccuum assumes much more that the Robinson tiny arithmetical theory for the ontology needed in comp. Nothing physical does not mean nothing conceptual. You have still too assume the numbers, at the least. So it assumes more and it copies nature (you can't, with comp, or you lost the big half of everything). I would like you to consider that the uniqueness of standard models of arithmetic, such as that defined in the Tennenbaum theorem, as a relative notion. Each and every *Löb*ian entity will always consider themselves as recursive and countable and thus the standard of uniqueness. This refelcts the idea that each of us as observers finds ourselves in the center of the universe. My view is that the default is neither nothing or something but rather Everything. I think there coexist, and are explanativaely dual of each others. In both case you need the assumptions needed to make precise what can exist and what cannot exist. This is a mistake because it tacitly assumes that a finite theory can exactly model the totality of existence. If you have an eternal everything then the universe of somethings and sometimes can be easily explained by there being temporary bundling of everything into isolated wholes, collections of wholes, collections of collections, etc, each with their own share of small share of eternity. OK. Indeed! This is what I am trying to say with Bruno about numbers starting from 1 instead of 0. From 1 we can subtract 1 and get 0, So we get 0 after all. Right, but we recover 0 *after* the first act
Re: Belief in Big Bang?
On 1/25/2012 10:10 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 25 Jan 2012, at 18:04, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi, I am 99% in agreement with Craig here. The 1% difference is a quibble over the math. We have to be careful that we don't reproduce the same slide into sophistry that has happened in physics. I think I agree. I comment Craig below. Onward! Stephen On 1/25/2012 7:41 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Jan 25, 2:05 am, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: It is not at all camouflaged; Lawrence Krause just wrote a book called A Universe From Nothing. That the universe came from nothing is suggested by calculations of the total energy of the universe. Theories of the origin of the universe have been developed by Alexander Vilenkin, Stephen Hawking and James Hartle. Of course the other view is that there cannot have been Nothing and Something is the default. The most reasonable belief is that we came from nothing, by nothing, and for nothing. --- Quentin Smith I think that we are all familiar with the universe from nothing theories, but the problem is with how nothing is defined. The possibility of creating a universe, or creating anything is not 'nothing', so that any theory of nothingness already fails if the definition of nothing relies on concepts of symmetry and negation, dynamic flux over time, and the potential for physical forces, not to mention living organisms and awareness. An honestly recognized 'nothing' must be in all ways sterile and lacking the potential for existence of any sort, otherwise it's not nothing. That's the philsopher's idea of 'nothing', but it's not clear that it's even coherent. Our concepts of 'nothing' obviously arise from the idea of eliminating 'something' until no 'something' remains. It is hardly fair to criticize physicists for using a physical, operational concept of nothing. Note that the theories I mentioned do not assume a spacetime vacuum. One may say they assume a potentiality for a spacetime vacuum, but to deny even potential would be to deny that anything can exist. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Information: a basic physical quantity or rather emergence/supervenience phenomenon
On 23.01.2012 01:26 Russell Standish said the following: On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 07:16:23PM +0100, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 20.01.2012 05:59 Russell Standish said the following: On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 08:03:41PM +0100, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: ... and since information is measured by order, a maximum of order is conveyed by a maximum of disorder. Obviously, this is a Babylonian muddle. Somebody or something has confounded our language. I would say it is many people, rather than just one. I wrote On Complexity and Emergence in response to the amount of unmitigated tripe I've seen written about these topics. Russel, I have read your paper http://arxiv.org/abs/nlin/0101006 It is well written. Could you please apply the principles from your paper to a problem on how to determine information in a book (for example let us take your book Theory of Nothing)? Also do you believe earnestly that this information is equal to the thermodynamic entropy of the book? These are two quite different questions. To someone who reads my book, the physical form of the book is unimportant - it could just as easily be a PDF file or a Kindle e-book as a physical paper copy. The PDF is a little over 30,000 bytes long. Computing the information content would be a matter of counting the number 30,000 long byte strings that generate a recognisable variant of ToN when fed into Acrobat reader. Then subtract the logarithm (to base 256) of this figure from 30,000 to get the information content in bytes. This is quite impractical, of course, not to speak of expense in paying for an army of people to go through 256^30,000 variants to decide which ones are the true ToN's. An upper bound can be found by compressing the file - PDFs are already compressed, so we could estimate the information content as being between 25KB and 30KB (say). Yet, this is already information. Hence if take the equivalence between the informational and thermodynamic entropies literally, then even in this case the thermodynamic entropy (that should be possible to measure by experimental thermodynamics) must exist. What it is in this case? To a physicist, it is the physical form that is important - the fact that it is made of paper, with a bit of glue to hold it together. The arrangement of ink on the pages is probably quite unimportant - a book of the same size and shape, but with blank pages would do just as well. Even if the arrangement of ink is important, then does typesetting the book in a different font lead to the same book or a different book? It is a good question and in my view it again shows that thermodynamic entropy and information are some different things, as for the same object we can define the information differently (see also below). To compute the thermodynamic information, one could imagine performing a massive molecular dynamics simulation, and then count the number of states that correspond to the physical book, take the logarithm, then subtract that from the logarithm of the total possible number of states the molecules could take on (if completely disassociated). Do not forget that molecular dynamics simulation is based on the Newton laws (even quantum mechanics molecular dynamics). Hence you probably mean here the Monte-Carlo method. Yet, it is much simpler to employ experimental thermodynamics (see below). This is, of course, completely impractical. Computing the complexity of something is generally NP-hard. But in principle doable. Now, how does this relate to the thermodynamic entropy of the book? It turns out that the information computed by the in-principle process above is equal to the difference between the maximum entropy of the molecules making up the book (if completely disassociated) and the thermodynamic entropy, which could be measured in a calorimeter. If yes, can one determine the information in the book just by means of experimental thermodynamics? One can certainly determine the information of the physical book (defined however you might like) - but that is not the same as the information of the abstract book. Let me suggest a very simple case to understand better what you are saying. Let us consider a string 10 for simplicity. Let us consider the next cases. I will cite first the thermodynamic properties of Ag and Al from CODATA tables (we will need them) S ° (298.15 K) J K-1 mol-1 Ag cr 42.55 ą 0.20 Al cr 28.30 ą 0.10 In J K-1 cm-3 it will be Ag cr 42.55/107.87*10.49 = 4.14 Al cr 28.30/26.98*2.7 = 2.83 1) An abstract string 10 as the abstract book above. 2) Let us make now an aluminum plate (a page) with 10 hammered on it (as on a coin) of the total volume 10 cm^3. The thermodynamic entropy is then 28.3 J/K. 3) Let us make now a silver plate (a page) with 10 hammered on it (as on a coin) of the total volume 10 cm^3. The thermodynamic entropy is then 41.4 J/K. 4) We can easily make another aluminum plate (scaling all dimensions from 2) to the total
Re: Information: a basic physical quantity or rather emergence/supervenience phenomenon
On 24.01.2012 13:49 Craig Weinberg said the following: If you are instead saying that they are inversely proportional then I would agree in general - information can be considered negentropy. Sorry, I thought you were saying that they are directly proportional measures (Brent and Evgenii seem to be talking about it that way). I I am not an expert in the informational entropy. For me it does not matter how they define it in the information theory, whether as entropy or negentropy. My point is that this has nothing to do with the thermodynamic entropy (see my previous message with four cases for the string 10). Evgenii think that we can go further in understanding information though. Negentropy is a good beginning but it does not address significance. The degree to which information has the capacity to inform is even more important than the energy cost to generate. Significance of information is a subjective quality which is independent of entropy but essential to the purpose of information. In fact, information itself could be considered the quantitative shadow of the quality of significance. Information that does not inform something is not information. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Information: a basic physical quantity or rather emergence/supervenience phenomenon
On 24.01.2012 22:56 meekerdb said the following: In thinking about how to answer this I came across an excellent paper by Roman Frigg and Charlotte Werndl http://www.romanfrigg.org/writings/EntropyGuide.pdf which explicates the relation more comprehensively than I could and which also gives some historical background and extensions: specifically look at section 4. Brent Thanks for the link. I will try to work it out to see if they have an answer to the four cases with the string 10 that I have described in my reply to Russell. Evgenii -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Information: a basic physical quantity or rather emergence/supervenience phenomenon
On 1/25/2012 11:47 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 23.01.2012 01:26 Russell Standish said the following: On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 07:16:23PM +0100, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 20.01.2012 05:59 Russell Standish said the following: On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 08:03:41PM +0100, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: ... and since information is measured by order, a maximum of order is conveyed by a maximum of disorder. Obviously, this is a Babylonian muddle. Somebody or something has confounded our language. I would say it is many people, rather than just one. I wrote On Complexity and Emergence in response to the amount of unmitigated tripe I've seen written about these topics. Russel, I have read your paper http://arxiv.org/abs/nlin/0101006 It is well written. Could you please apply the principles from your paper to a problem on how to determine information in a book (for example let us take your book Theory of Nothing)? Also do you believe earnestly that this information is equal to the thermodynamic entropy of the book? These are two quite different questions. To someone who reads my book, the physical form of the book is unimportant - it could just as easily be a PDF file or a Kindle e-book as a physical paper copy. The PDF is a little over 30,000 bytes long. Computing the information content would be a matter of counting the number 30,000 long byte strings that generate a recognisable variant of ToN when fed into Acrobat reader. Then subtract the logarithm (to base 256) of this figure from 30,000 to get the information content in bytes. This is quite impractical, of course, not to speak of expense in paying for an army of people to go through 256^30,000 variants to decide which ones are the true ToN's. An upper bound can be found by compressing the file - PDFs are already compressed, so we could estimate the information content as being between 25KB and 30KB (say). Yet, this is already information. Hence if take the equivalence between the informational and thermodynamic entropies literally, then even in this case the thermodynamic entropy (that should be possible to measure by experimental thermodynamics) must exist. What it is in this case? To a physicist, it is the physical form that is important - the fact that it is made of paper, with a bit of glue to hold it together. The arrangement of ink on the pages is probably quite unimportant - a book of the same size and shape, but with blank pages would do just as well. Even if the arrangement of ink is important, then does typesetting the book in a different font lead to the same book or a different book? It is a good question and in my view it again shows that thermodynamic entropy and information are some different things, as for the same object we can define the information differently (see also below). To compute the thermodynamic information, one could imagine performing a massive molecular dynamics simulation, and then count the number of states that correspond to the physical book, take the logarithm, then subtract that from the logarithm of the total possible number of states the molecules could take on (if completely disassociated). Do not forget that molecular dynamics simulation is based on the Newton laws (even quantum mechanics molecular dynamics). Hence you probably mean here the Monte-Carlo method. Yet, it is much simpler to employ experimental thermodynamics (see below). This is, of course, completely impractical. Computing the complexity of something is generally NP-hard. But in principle doable. Now, how does this relate to the thermodynamic entropy of the book? It turns out that the information computed by the in-principle process above is equal to the difference between the maximum entropy of the molecules making up the book (if completely disassociated) and the thermodynamic entropy, which could be measured in a calorimeter. If yes, can one determine the information in the book just by means of experimental thermodynamics? One can certainly determine the information of the physical book (defined however you might like) - but that is not the same as the information of the abstract book. Let me suggest a very simple case to understand better what you are saying. Let us consider a string 10 for simplicity. Let us consider the next cases. I will cite first the thermodynamic properties of Ag and Al from CODATA tables (we will need them) S ° (298.15 K) J K-1 mol-1 Ag cr 42.55 ą 0.20 Al cr 28.30 ą 0.10 In J K-1 cm-3 it will be Ag cr 42.55/107.87*10.49 = 4.14 Al cr 28.30/26.98*2.7 = 2.83 1) An abstract string 10 as the abstract book above. 2) Let us make now an aluminum plate (a page) with 10 hammered on it (as on a coin) of the total volume 10 cm^3. The thermodynamic entropy is then 28.3 J/K. 3) Let us make now a silver plate (a page) with 10 hammered on it (as on a coin) of the total volume 10 cm^3. The thermodynamic entropy is then 41.4 J/K. 4) We can easily make another aluminum plate
Re: Belief in Big Bang?
On 1/25/2012 11:01 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: Dear Bruno, I still think that we can synchronize our ideas! On 1/25/2012 1:10 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 25 Jan 2012, at 18:04, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi, I am 99% in agreement with Craig here. The 1% difference is a quibble over the math. We have to be careful that we don't reproduce the same slide into sophistry that has happened in physics. I think I agree. I comment Craig below. Onward! Stephen On 1/25/2012 7:41 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Jan 25, 2:05 am, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: It is not at all camouflaged; Lawrence Krause just wrote a book called A Universe From Nothing. That the universe came from nothing is suggested by calculations of the total energy of the universe. Theories of the origin of the universe have been developed by Alexander Vilenkin, Stephen Hawking and James Hartle. Of course the other view is that there cannot have been Nothing and Something is the default. The most reasonable belief is that we came from nothing, by nothing, and for nothing. --- Quentin Smith I think that we are all familiar with the universe from nothing theories, but the problem is with how nothing is defined. The possibility of creating a universe, or creating anything is not 'nothing', so that any theory of nothingness already fails if the definition of nothing relies on concepts of symmetry and negation, dynamic flux over time, and the potential for physical forces, not to mention living organisms and awareness. An honestly recognized 'nothing' must be in all ways sterile and lacking the potential for existence of any sort, otherwise it's not nothing. I agree too. That is why it is clearer to put *all* our assumptions on the table. Physical theories of the origin, making it appearing from physical nothingness, makes sense only in, usually mathematical, theories of nothingness. It amounts to the fact that the quantum vacuum is unstable, or even more simply, a quantum universal dovetailer. This assumes de facto a particular case of comp, the believes in the existence of at least one (Turing) universal system. As you might know, choosing this particular one is treachery, in the mind body problem, given that if that is the one, it has to be explained in term of a special sum on *all* computational histories independently of the base (the universal system) chosen at the start. The idea of theories of Nothing is that Everything is indistinguishable from Nothing. Sounds like the sophistry you accuse physcists of. While 'everything' may be as uninformative a 'nothing', they seem pretty distinct to me. This is very different from distinctions between Something and Nothing. I cannot emphasize enough how important the role of belief, as it Bpp, has and how belief automatically induces an entity that is capable of having the belief. Induces? Are you saying the concept of belief is efficacious in creating a believer? In Bruno's idea, what he denotes by B is provability, a concept that is implicit in the axioms and rules of inference. Brent We simply cannot divorce the action from the actor while we can divorce the action from any *particular* actor. Your idea that we have to count *all* computational histories is equally important, but note that a choice has to be made. This role, in my thinking, is explained in terms of an infinite ensemble of entities, each capable of making the choice. If we can cover all of their necessary and sufficient properties by considering them as *Löb*ian, good, but I think that we need a tiny bit more structure to involve bisimulations between multiple and separate *Löb*ian entities so that we can extract local notions of time and space. Any formalism describing the quantum vaccuum assumes much more that the Robinson tiny arithmetical theory for the ontology needed in comp. Nothing physical does not mean nothing conceptual. You have still too assume the numbers, at the least. So it assumes more and it copies nature (you can't, with comp, or you lost the big half of everything). I would like you to consider that the uniqueness of standard models of arithmetic, such as that defined in the Tennenbaum theorem, as a relative notion. Each and every *Löb*ian entity will always consider themselves as recursive and countable and thus the standard of uniqueness. This refelcts the idea that each of us as observers finds ourselves in the center of the universe. My view is that the default is neither nothing or something but rather Everything. I think there coexist, and are explanativaely dual of each others. In both case you need the assumptions needed to make precise what can exist and what cannot exist. This is a mistake because it tacitly assumes that a finite theory can exactly model the totality of existence. If you have an eternal everything then the universe of somethings and sometimes can be easily
Re: Belief in Big Bang?
On Jan 25, 1:10 pm, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: I agree too. That is why it is clearer to put *all* our assumptions on the table. Physical theories of the origin, making it appearing from physical nothingness, makes sense only in, usually mathematical, theories of nothingness. It amounts to the fact that the quantum vacuum is unstable, or even more simply, a quantum universal dovetailer. This assumes de facto a particular case of comp, the believes in the existence of at least one (Turing) universal system. As you might know, choosing this particular one is treachery, in the mind body problem, given that if that is the one, it has to be explained in term of a special sum on *all* computational histories independently of the base (the universal system) chosen at the start. Any formalism describing the quantum vaccuum assumes much more that the Robinson tiny arithmetical theory for the ontology needed in comp. Nothing physical does not mean nothing conceptual. You have still too assume the numbers, at the least. So it assumes more and it copies nature (you can't, with comp, or you lost the big half of everything). My view is that the default is neither nothing or something but rather Everything. I think there coexist, and are explanativaely dual of each others. In both case you need the assumptions needed to make precise what can exist and what cannot exist. Yes, they coexist or coexplain. The word nothing has to discriminate from some other possibility, which would always be some thing, and once there is a thing, then that thing is automatically every thing as well, hah. These contingencies are all part of a something though. If we look to a nothingness beyond the word though, a true existential vacuum, then that is all it is and all it can be. If you have an eternal everything then the universe of somethings and sometimes can be easily explained by there being temporary bundling of everything into isolated wholes, collections of wholes, collections of collections, etc, each with their own share of small share of eternity. OK. This is what I am trying to say with Bruno about numbers starting from 1 instead of 0. From 1 we can subtract 1 and get 0, So we get 0 after all. Sure. Although 0 might be not be a number so much as neutralizing or clearing of the enumerating motive. but from 0, no logical concept of 1 need follow. No logical concept, you are right (although this is not so easy to proof). But you have the *arithmetical* (yes, *not* logical), notion of a number's successor, noted s(x). We assume that all numbers have successors. And we can even define 0 as the only one which is not a successor, by assuming Ax(~(0= s(x))) (for all number 0 is different from the successor of that number). Yeah, I can't see how 0 could be the successor of any number. having the symbol 0, we can actually name all numbers: by 0, s(0), s(s(0)), s(s(s(0))), s(s(s(s(0, s(s(s(s(s(0), ... 0 is just 0. 0 minus 0 is still 0. Yes. That's correct. And for all numbers x, you have also that x + 0 = x. Worst: for all number x, x*0 = 0. That 0 is a famous number! Haha. I have always had sort of a dread about x*0. Sort of a remorseless destructive power there... Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Belief in Big Bang?
On 1/25/2012 7:41 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 1/25/2012 4:16 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: Sounds like the sophistry you accuse physcists of. While 'everything' may be as uninformative a 'nothing', they seem pretty distinct to me. Exactly how is this distinction made? Is it merely semantics for you, this difference? Well, for one, if everything exists I'm around to see somethings. Brent -- And it it is not you? Does it not exist? Interesting role that you have cast yourself into! Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Belief in Big Bang?
On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 11:27 PM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.netwrote: Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net Wrote: A constant that Einstein himself called the greatest mistake of his life. The problem is that one can add an arbitrary number of such scalar field terms to one's field equations. Frankly IMHO, it is more something from nothing nonsense. Yes, it amounted to a repulsive effect that came from space itself, and you can set that constant to anything and mathematically the field equations of General Relativity would still work. Originally Einstein saw no physical reason for that additional complication so he set it to zero. But then he noticed that if it was zero the universe could not be stable, it must be expanding or contracting; at the time everybody including Einstein thought the universe was stable so he set it to a non zero value and the cosmological constant was born. However just a few years later Hubble found that the universe was expanding, so Einstein thought the cosmological constant no longer had a purpose and said that changing it from zero was the greatest mistake of his life. In act 2 people working with quantum mechanics found that empty space should indeed have a repulsive effect, but the numbers were huge, gigantic astronomical, so large that the universe would blow itself apart in far far less than a billionth of a nanosecond. This was clearly a nonsensical result but most felt that once a quantum theory of gravity was discovered a way would be found to cancel this out and the true value of the cosmological constant would be zero. In act 3 just a few years ago it was observed that the universe is was not just expanding but accelerating, so now theoreticians must find a way to cancel out, not the entire cosmological constant, but the vastly more difficult task of canceling it all out EXCEPT for one part in 10^120. There are only about 10^90 atoms in the observable universe. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Intelligence and consciousness
On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: My chasing you with an ax would be no different than colon cancer or heart disease chasing you. You would not project criminality on the cancer Yes exactly, I want any cancer in my body to die and I want the guy chasing me with a bloody ax to die, and I don't care one bit if either of them is a criminal or had bad genes or had a bad childhood, and I don't care if the cancer or the ax-man has free will or not whatever the hell that term is supposed to mean. Once we understand that computers are never going to become conscious in any non-trivial way, that frees us up to turn our efforts into making outstanding digital servants to toil away forever for us. That just ain't going to happen. Having a slave that is a thousand times smarter than you and can think a million times faster than you is not a stable situation, its like balancing a pencil on its point. Logic 101 is reductionist theory. It's not reality. [...] Maybe' is not yes and it is not not-yes. It is my understanding that in a debate both parties try to advance logical reasons to support their position, but if we can't even agree that logical analysis is preferable to silliness and magical thinking then I fear there is nothing more to say. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Qualia and mathematics
As I continue to ponder the UDA, I keep coming back to a niggling doubt that an arithmetical ontology can ever really give a satisfactory explanation of qualia. It seems to me that imputing qualia to calculations (indeed consciousness at all, thought that may be the same thing) adds something that is not given by, or derivable from, any mathematical axiom. Surely this is illegitimate from a mathematical point of view. Every mathematical statement can only be made in terms of numbers and operators, so to talk about *qualities* arising out of numbers is not mathematics so much as numerology or qabbala. Here of course is where people start to invoke the wonderfully protean notion of ‘emergent properties’. Perhaps qualia emerge when a calculation becomes deep enough.Perhaps consciousness emerges from a complicated enough arrangement of neurons. But I’ll venture an axiom of my own here: no properties can emerge from a complex system that are not present in primitive form in the parts of that system. There is nothing mystical about emergent properties. When the emergent property of ‘pumping blood’ arises out of collections of heart cells, that property is a logical extension of the properties of the parts - physical properties such as elasticity, electrical conductivity, volume and so on that belong to the individual cells. But nobody invoking ‘emergent properties’ to explain consciousness in the brain has yet explained how consciousness arises as a natural extension of the known properties of brain cells - or indeed of matter at all. In the same way, I can’t see how qualia can emerge from arithmetic, unless the rudiments of qualia are present in the natural numbers or the operations of addition and mutiplication. And yet it seems to me they can’t be, because the only properties that belong to arithmetic are those leant to them by the axioms that define them. Indeed arithmetic *is* exactly those axioms and nothing more. Matter may in principle contain untold, undiscovered mysterious properties which I suppose might include the rudiments of consciousness. Yet mathematics is only what it is defined to be. Certainly it contains many mysteries emergent properties, but all these properties arise logically from its axioms and thus cannot include qualia. I call the idea that it can numerology because numerology also ascribes qualities to numbers. A ‘2’ in one’s birthdate indicates creativity (or something), a ‘4’ material ambition and so on. Because the emergent properties of numbers can indeed be deeply amazing and wonderful - Mandelbrot sets and so on - there is a natural human tendency to mystify them, to project properties of the imagination into them. But if these qualities really do inhere in numbers and are not put there purely by our projection, then numbers must be more than their definitions. We must posit the numbers as something that projects out of a supraordinate reality that is not purely mathematical - ie, not merely composed of the axioms that define an arithmetic. This then can no longer be described as a mathematical ontology, but rather a kind of numerical mysticism. And because something extrinsic to the axioms has been added, it opens the way for all kinds of other unicorns and fairies that can never be proved from the maths alone. This is unprovability not of the mathematical variety, but more of the variety that cries out for Mr Occam’s shaving apparatus. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Belief in Big Bang?
Hi John, On 1/25/2012 11:57 PM, John Clark wrote: On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 11:27 PM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net mailto:stephe...@charter.net wrote: Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net mailto:stephe...@charter.net Wrote: A constant that Einstein himself called the greatest mistake of his life. The problem is that one can add an arbitrary number of such scalar field terms to one's field equations. Frankly IMHO, it is more something from nothing nonsense. Yes, it amounted to a repulsive effect that came from space itself, and you can set that constant to anything and mathematically the field equations of General Relativity would still work. Originally Einstein saw no physical reason for that additional complication so he set it to zero. But then he noticed that if it was zero the universe could not be stable, it must be expanding or contracting; at the time everybody including Einstein thought the universe was stable so he set it to a non zero value and the cosmological constant was born. However just a few years later Hubble found that the universe was expanding, so Einstein thought the cosmological constant no longer had a purpose and said that changing it from zero was the greatest mistake of his life. Interesting. That is not quite the the story that I recall from Abraham Pais' biography of Einstein, but I might be misremembering. In act 2 people working with quantum mechanics found that empty space should indeed have a repulsive effect, but the numbers were huge, gigantic astronomical, so large that the universe would blow itself apart in far far less than a billionth of a nanosecond. This was clearly a nonsensical result but most felt that once a quantum theory of gravity was discovered a way would be found to cancel this out and the true value of the cosmological constant would be zero. In act 3 just a few years ago it was observed that the universe is was not just expanding but accelerating, so now theoreticians must find a way to cancel out, not the entire cosmological constant, but the vastly more difficult task of canceling it all out EXCEPT for one part in 10^120. There are only about 10^90 atoms in the observable universe. John K Clark And it is this amazing pin-point cancellation that is required to make the CC idea work that makes it even more suspect, IMHO. Perhaps the simple answer is that the mass-energy associated with the vacuum is purely off-shell and virtual and does *not* act as a gravitational source. Perhaps that 1 in 10^120 is a second or third order effect from something else or perhaps there are no primitive scalar fields at all. I have looked very hard at this question and so far have not found a single observed effect that gives evidence that virtual particles, or vacuum fluctuations or whatever one wishes to call them have any mass effects. What we do find evidence of is electromagnetic effects, but no mass effects. But this is getting away from the point that I am trying to make, finite systems subject to quantum mechanics have finite abilities to resolve, transform, receive and transmit information. Does this not have an effect on the world that we observe? Could it be that the finiteness we observe is merely the result of this constraint and *not* an objective 3p aspect of the universe? If my hunch is true, this idea would go a long way in solving many riddles of cosmology. For one thing we would not have to deal with all that what caused the universe to Bang in the first place. We would get the perfect cosmological principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Cosmological_Principle as a guide to proceed: The universe looks about the same to an average observer no mater where or when they find themselves. The average observer will always find itself in the center of a finite universe that has an event horizon in its extremal past. Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
