[FRIAM] The God Equation

[Marcus Daniels]

That was Glen.   (My explanation is just that we have limited short term memory and can’t tolerate any other representation than terribly compressed forms.   So it is hard to gain confidence in simulations because we can’t get them entirely in our heads, nor prove them correct, nor reason very effectively about how mutations will change their behavior.   The natural world has no such hesitation.)

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Stephen Guerin
Sent: Monday, April 5, 2021 11:57 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The God Equation


Marcus writes:
Why "equation"? What is this obsession with equality or equivalence or even similarity/symmetry? OK. I get it, equations help us ask questions like "How does this thing over here transmogrify into that thing over there?" And if you have a bunch of terms in the equation, you can "solve" for this thing or that thing as a function of those other things.

I agree with your questioning, Marcus. Personally, if there is a unified theory, I think it will come in the form of an algorithm and not equation. In the same way natural selection is more of an algorithm than an equation. Of course, my personal Quixotic ranting on Dual Field Theory / Bi-Directional Path Tracing is of the algorithmic type. :-)

David Krakauer speaks eloquently about if there is ever a Unified Theory in complexity will probably be in the form of a computer program (algorithmic).
  https://youtu.be/0lDryEt80-g?t=108
  I linked to that point in the 1-hour talk, but highly recommend Friam folk listen to the whole bit as David hits on a lot of points raised on the list.

Brian Arthur makes a similar point of the gradual transition of representation in Science from equations to computationa/algorithmic and points out that science took 500 years to transition from representing numbers in Roman numerals to Arabic numerals. He sees the transition to computational representations to take maybe 50 years (we're probably 30-years into it).

-S
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On Mon, Apr 5, 2021 at 12:09 PM uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ <gepropella at gmail.com<mailto:gepropella at gmail.com>> wrote:

https://bookshop.org/books/the-god-equation-the-quest-for-a-theory-of-everything-9780593396445/9780385542746

I'm tempted to buy this book. I doubt I will. But one of the sentences in the blurb triggered me:

"This would be the crowning achievement of science, a profound merging of all the forces of nature into one beautiful, magnificent equation to unlock the deepest mysteries in science: ..."

Why "equation"? What is this obsession with equality or equivalence or even similarity/symmetry? OK. I get it, equations help us ask questions like "How does this thing over here transmogrify into that thing over there?" And if you have a bunch of terms in the equation, you can "solve" for this thing or that thing as a function of those other things.

But why should any 1 thing from an N-tuple of things necessarily be representable in terms of the remaining N-1 things? Where does that urge come from? It sounds like a need for cognitive closure [⛧]. It dovetails nicely with the free will thread where everyone's convinced of their own brain farts and fond of giving authoritarian answers even though the emperor's nude.

The interview that sent me to Kaku's book is here: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/apr/03/string-theory-michio-kaku-aliens-god-equation-large-hadron-collider
wherein he suggests the Multiverse can help harmonize religious beliefs! I'm tempted into pseudoscience nonsense to think that a feeling of free will (and the more collective "adjacent possible") is not justified by some meso-scopic biological evolutionary purpose, but because it's possible to see the "shadows" of other universes [⛤]. 8^D


[⛧] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1997-06343-011
[⛤] I think I'm getting that from Deutsch's Fabric of Reality ... but who knows at this point?

--
↙↙↙ uǝlƃ

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