[FRIAM] Wolpert - discussion thread placeholder

[Steve Smith]

Jon -

Reponsive to your references to Carroll, et al...

    Theories of everything <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gmtAeqRs14>
    - Sabine Hossenfelder

and to your rant about iterated colimits of consumeables:

- Steve

On 9/17/22 1:15 PM, Jon Zingale wrote:
> I am often confused by what people imagine "tech" to be, and then I
> wonder what the forward-looking name for luddite is. From my twisted
> perspective, the newest consumables merely add noise, produce another
> roll of the dice, and leave us only able to speak about the distance we,
> via this stochastic process, are "expected" to be from some origins.
> Mostly when I see new consumables I am confused about the excitement,
> and where some can only see their potential, I immediately envision
> an unremarkable end.
>
> For instance, I have never owned a cell phone, and the longer I watch
> others explore this technology, the less impressed I am. It doesn't seem
> a strain to imagine a world where they are as disregarded as oil painting
> is today. This week, some coworkers asked me where I manage to find
> payphones, all-the-while I am stunned that not one of them knows how
> computations are performed or what a semiconductor is. As a side-effect
> of my ambivalence, new niches have appeared for the likes of me, some in
> the form of privacy (as telemarketers leave the domain of landlines or
> friends learn that if I do not pick up the phone it is because I am not
> home) and others in terms of inheriting the benefits of a distributed
> network without needing to be an explicit node. My patience leaves me
> wondering how best to identify a luddite.
>
> I mention the above, in part, because entertaining the notion of hyper-
> computation is to mod out by what even quantum computing adds to our
> understanding of Turing machines. The "tech" in the limit may not be the
> iterated colimits of the consumables we see lying around. Instead, it
> seems reasonable to read technological enhancement as the quest for
> programs not indexed by zahlen, but traced by the reals, and this is
> something wholly different than natural selection amplifying small
> differences in some initial configuration.
>
> As some on-list may know, I am on a Sean Carroll kick at the moment. In
> his paper "Reality as a Vector in Hilbert Space'', he takes on Everrett's
> project of developing the classical world from the Schrodinger equation.
> This "development" includes the derivation of space-time itself (light
> cones and all) from arguments regarding mutual information. Additionally,
> there is the assumption (and distinct possibility) that *our* Hilbert
> space is finite dimensional, thanks to gravity. Further, in this work,
> we see continued discussion around the importance of being able to
> factor space into tensored products of (potentially open) systems.
> Somewhere in all of this, I can almost see where Wolpert's questions,
> Carroll's quest, and the tremendous amount of work being done by Baez
> and friends on mereology are all part of a quasi-coherent project,
> happening now. Is it willful ignorance to avoid engaging in this work?
> At present, I don't feel like I have the tech to judge.
>
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