Like you said the science we don’t know is at inaccessibly large or small scales.
Yes maybe in the far future in a society spread across multiple galaxies, or that can make things near Planck lengths, they could do something that would totally stump us.
But your never going to find a final answer to this in the present day for exactly those reasons.
In fact it’s unlikely anyone on LW could even grasp the answers even if by some miracle a helpful time traveller from the future showed up and started answering.
Well, as I said, there might be some general insight. For example biological cells are effectively nanomachines far beyond our ability to build, yet they are not all-powerful; no individual bacterium has single-handedly grown to grey goo its way through the entire Earth, despite there being no particular reasons why it wouldn’t be able to. This likely comes from a mixture of limits of the specific substrate (carbon, DNA for information storage), the result of competition between multiple species (which can be seen as inevitable result of imprecise copying and following divergence, even though mostly cells have mechanisms to try and prevent those sort of mistakes) and perhaps intrinsic thermodynamic limits of Von Neumann machines as a whole. So understanding which is which would be interesting and useful.
This kind of understanding is already available in higher level textbooks, within known energy and space-time scales, as previously mentioned?
If your asking, for example, whether with infinite time and energy some sort of grey goo ‘superorganism’ is possible, assuming some sort of far future technology that goes beyond our current comprehension, then that is obviously not going to have an answer for the aformentioned reasons...
Assuming you already have sufficient knowledge of the fundamental sciences and engineering and mathematics at the graduate level, then finding the textbooks, reading them, comparatively analyzing them, and drawing your own conclusions wouldn’t take more then a few weeks. This sort of exhaustive analysis would presumably satisfy even a very demanding level of certainty (perhaps 99.9% confidence?).
If your asking for literally 100% certainty then that’s impossible. In fact, nothing on LW every written, nor ever can be written, will meet that bar, especially when the Standard Model is known to be incomplete.
If your asking whether someone has already done this and will offer it in easily digestable chunks in the form of LW comments, then it seems exceedingly unlikely.
I’m asking if there is a name and a specific theory of these things. I strongly disagree that just studying thermodynamics or statistical mechanics answers these questions, at least directly—though sure, if there is a theory of it, those are the tools you need to derive it. There are obvious thermodynamic limits of course, but they are usually ridiculously permissive. I’m asking if there’s a theory that tries to study things at a lower level of generality, is all, and sets more narrow bounds than just “any nanomachine could not go above Carnot efficiency” or “any nanomachine would be subject to Brownian motion” or such.
By having a MD in Engineering and a Physics PhD, following the same exact courses you recommend as potentially containing the answer and in fact finding no direct answer to these specific questions in them.
You could argue “the answer can be derived from that knowledge” and sure, if it exists it probably can, but that’s why I’m asking. Lots of theories can be derived from other knowledge. Most of machine learning can be derived from a basic knowledge of Bayes’ theorem and multivariate calculus, but that doesn’t make any math undergrad a ML expert. I was asking so that I could read any previous work on the topic. I might actually spend some more time thinking about approaches myself later, but wouldn’t do it without first knowing if I’m just reinventing the wheel, so I was probing for answers. I don’t think this is particularly weird or controversial.
Like you said the science we don’t know is at inaccessibly large or small scales.
Yes maybe in the far future in a society spread across multiple galaxies, or that can make things near Planck lengths, they could do something that would totally stump us.
But your never going to find a final answer to this in the present day for exactly those reasons.
In fact it’s unlikely anyone on LW could even grasp the answers even if by some miracle a helpful time traveller from the future showed up and started answering.
Well, as I said, there might be some general insight. For example biological cells are effectively nanomachines far beyond our ability to build, yet they are not all-powerful; no individual bacterium has single-handedly grown to grey goo its way through the entire Earth, despite there being no particular reasons why it wouldn’t be able to. This likely comes from a mixture of limits of the specific substrate (carbon, DNA for information storage), the result of competition between multiple species (which can be seen as inevitable result of imprecise copying and following divergence, even though mostly cells have mechanisms to try and prevent those sort of mistakes) and perhaps intrinsic thermodynamic limits of Von Neumann machines as a whole. So understanding which is which would be interesting and useful.
This kind of understanding is already available in higher level textbooks, within known energy and space-time scales, as previously mentioned?
If your asking, for example, whether with infinite time and energy some sort of grey goo ‘superorganism’ is possible, assuming some sort of far future technology that goes beyond our current comprehension, then that is obviously not going to have an answer for the aformentioned reasons...
Assuming you already have sufficient knowledge of the fundamental sciences and engineering and mathematics at the graduate level, then finding the textbooks, reading them, comparatively analyzing them, and drawing your own conclusions wouldn’t take more then a few weeks. This sort of exhaustive analysis would presumably satisfy even a very demanding level of certainty (perhaps 99.9% confidence?).
If your asking for literally 100% certainty then that’s impossible. In fact, nothing on LW every written, nor ever can be written, will meet that bar, especially when the Standard Model is known to be incomplete.
If your asking whether someone has already done this and will offer it in easily digestable chunks in the form of LW comments, then it seems exceedingly unlikely.
I’m asking if there is a name and a specific theory of these things. I strongly disagree that just studying thermodynamics or statistical mechanics answers these questions, at least directly—though sure, if there is a theory of it, those are the tools you need to derive it. There are obvious thermodynamic limits of course, but they are usually ridiculously permissive. I’m asking if there’s a theory that tries to study things at a lower level of generality, is all, and sets more narrow bounds than just “any nanomachine could not go above Carnot efficiency” or “any nanomachine would be subject to Brownian motion” or such.
Why do you believe there is one?
I don’t? I wondered if there might be one, and asked if anyone else knew any better.
Then on what basis do you “strongly disagree that just studying thermodynamics or statistical mechanics answers these questions, at least directly”?
How did you attain the knowledge for this?
By having a MD in Engineering and a Physics PhD, following the same exact courses you recommend as potentially containing the answer and in fact finding no direct answer to these specific questions in them.
You could argue “the answer can be derived from that knowledge” and sure, if it exists it probably can, but that’s why I’m asking. Lots of theories can be derived from other knowledge. Most of machine learning can be derived from a basic knowledge of Bayes’ theorem and multivariate calculus, but that doesn’t make any math undergrad a ML expert. I was asking so that I could read any previous work on the topic. I might actually spend some more time thinking about approaches myself later, but wouldn’t do it without first knowing if I’m just reinventing the wheel, so I was probing for answers. I don’t think this is particularly weird or controversial.