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<p>Jon -</p>
<p>Reponsive to your references to Carroll, et al...</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gmtAeqRs14">Theories of
everything</a> - Sabine Hossenfelder</p>
</blockquote>
<p>and to your rant about iterated colimits of consumeables:<br>
</p>
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<p><img moz-do-not-send="true"
src="https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/universe_price_tiers.png"
alt="" width="646" height="582"></p>
</blockquote>
<p>- Steve<br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 9/17/22 1:15 PM, Jon Zingale wrote:<br>
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<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CAH5Jek2dt34npbiNuH+raAEhPTgVfVkeex2SEC1Kz6HhRmFarQ@mail.gmail.com">
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<div dir="ltr">I am often confused by what people imagine "tech"
to be, and then I<br>
wonder what the forward-looking name for luddite is. From my
twisted<br>
perspective, the newest consumables merely add noise, produce
another<br>
roll of the dice, and leave us only able to speak about the
distance we,<br>
via this stochastic process, are "expected" to be from some
origins.<br>
Mostly when I see new consumables I am confused about the
excitement,<br>
and where some can only see their potential, I immediately
envision<br>
an unremarkable end.<br>
<br>
For instance, I have never owned a cell phone, and the longer I
watch<br>
others explore this technology, the less impressed I am. It
doesn't seem<br>
a strain to imagine a world where they are as disregarded as oil
painting<br>
is today. This week, some coworkers asked me where I manage to
find<br>
payphones, all-the-while I am stunned that not one of them knows
how<br>
computations are performed or what a semiconductor is. As a
side-effect<br>
of my ambivalence, new niches have appeared for the likes of me,
some in<br>
the form of privacy (as telemarketers leave the domain of
landlines or<br>
friends learn that if I do not pick up the phone it is because I
am not<br>
home) and others in terms of inheriting the benefits of a
distributed<br>
network without needing to be an explicit node. My patience
leaves me<br>
wondering how best to identify a luddite.<br>
<br>
I mention the above, in part, because entertaining the notion of
hyper-<br>
computation is to mod out by what even quantum computing adds to
our<br>
understanding of Turing machines. The "tech" in the limit may
not be the<br>
iterated colimits of the consumables we see lying around.
Instead, it<br>
seems reasonable to read technological enhancement as the quest
for<br>
programs not indexed by zahlen, but traced by the reals, and
this is<br>
something wholly different than natural selection amplifying
small<br>
differences in some initial configuration.<br>
<br>
As some on-list may know, I am on a Sean Carroll kick at the
moment. In<br>
his paper "Reality as a Vector in Hilbert Space'', he takes on
Everrett's<br>
project of developing the classical world from the Schrodinger
equation.<br>
This "development" includes the derivation of space-time itself
(light<br>
cones and all) from arguments regarding mutual information.
Additionally,<br>
there is the assumption (and distinct possibility) that *our*
Hilbert<br>
space is finite dimensional, thanks to gravity. Further, in this
work,<br>
we see continued discussion around the importance of being able
to<br>
factor space into tensored products of (potentially open)
systems.<br>
Somewhere in all of this, I can almost see where Wolpert's
questions,<br>
Carroll's quest, and the tremendous amount of work being done by
Baez<br>
and friends on mereology are all part of a quasi-coherent
project,<br>
happening now. Is it willful ignorance to avoid engaging in this
work?<br>
At present, I don't feel like I have the tech to judge.<br>
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<br>
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