I haven’t put my finger on it exactly, but I am somewhat concerned that this post is leading us to argue about the meanings of words, whilst thinking that we are doing something else.
What can we really say about the world? What we ought to be doing is almost mathematically defined now. We have observations of various kinds, Bayes’ theorem, and our prior. The prior ought really to start off as a description of our state of initial ignorance, and Bayes’ theorem describes exactly how that initial state of ignorance should be updated as we see further observations.
Being ordinary human beings, we follow this recipe badly. We find collecting far too much data easier than extracting the last drop of meaning from each bit, so we tend to do that. We also need to use our observations to predict the future, which we ought to do by extrapolating what we have in the most probable way.
Having done this, we have discovered that there’s an amazing and notable contrast between the enormous volume of data we have collected about the universe, and the comparatively tiny set of rules which appear to summarise it.
There is quite a lot of discussion about the difference between fundamental and non-fundamental laws. This is rather like arguing in arithmetic about whether addition or multiplication are more fundamental—who cares—the notable factor is that the overall system is highly compressible, and part of that compression process allows you to omit any explicit stating of many aspects of the system. The rules that are still fairly explicitly stated in the compressed version tend to be considered the ‘fundamental’ ones, and the ones that get left out, non-fundamental.
You are of course right in saying that the universe often kind of simulates other rule systems within its fundamental one.
But I am suspicious that beyond that, this article is about words, not the nature of reality.
I haven’t put my finger on it exactly, but I am somewhat concerned that this post is leading us to argue about the meanings of words, whilst thinking that we are doing something else.
What can we really say about the world? What we ought to be doing is almost mathematically defined now. We have observations of various kinds, Bayes’ theorem, and our prior. The prior ought really to start off as a description of our state of initial ignorance, and Bayes’ theorem describes exactly how that initial state of ignorance should be updated as we see further observations.
Being ordinary human beings, we follow this recipe badly. We find collecting far too much data easier than extracting the last drop of meaning from each bit, so we tend to do that. We also need to use our observations to predict the future, which we ought to do by extrapolating what we have in the most probable way.
Having done this, we have discovered that there’s an amazing and notable contrast between the enormous volume of data we have collected about the universe, and the comparatively tiny set of rules which appear to summarise it.
There is quite a lot of discussion about the difference between fundamental and non-fundamental laws. This is rather like arguing in arithmetic about whether addition or multiplication are more fundamental—who cares—the notable factor is that the overall system is highly compressible, and part of that compression process allows you to omit any explicit stating of many aspects of the system. The rules that are still fairly explicitly stated in the compressed version tend to be considered the ‘fundamental’ ones, and the ones that get left out, non-fundamental.
You are of course right in saying that the universe often kind of simulates other rule systems within its fundamental one.
But I am suspicious that beyond that, this article is about words, not the nature of reality.