“But!” Susan should’ve said. “When we judge the universe we’re comparing it to a logical referent, a sort of thing that isn’t in the universe! Why, it’s just like looking at a heap of 2 apples and a heap of 3 apples on a table, and comparing their invisible product to the number 6 - there isn’t any 6 if you grind up the whole table, even if you grind up the whole universe, but the product is still 6, physico-logically speaking.”
There won’t even be a “2” or “3“ left if you grind everything up. But what if you carefully grind up the brain that’s thinking about the product of 2 and 3? If you do it carefully enough you’ll preserve a “2” and a “3” encoded in the brain structure. My intuition is that you’ll also preserve the answer the brain had in mind, “6.” Logic does exist in the universe; it exists encoded in the relationships in the matter and energy in human brains and in the artifacts they’ve created. If there’s nothing to implement the logical rules then there is no logic.
Perhaps that’s your entire point; that we’re the only vessels of (our particular) logic and morality in the universe. If that’s true then Susan should have said something more like what Harry said.
I’m pretty sure this is roughly one of the points E.Y. is attempting to convey.
There isn’t “our particular logic”, though. Logic is the only valid pattern that self-consistently describes more than one instance of physics. I really want to reduce “pattern” in the previous sentence and add more specific details, but I’m either not strong enough yet, or my brain just isn’t making the right connections right now.
Which thing Harry said? Harry said lots of smart things in HPMoR. And some stupid things, too.
By “our particular logic” I mean the particular method we’ve learned for exploiting how the universe works to cause our discrete symbols to have consistent behavior that mostly models the universe. There’s no requirement that logic be only represented as a finite sequence of symbols generated by replacement rules and variable substitution from a set of axioms; it’s just what works best for us right now. There are almost certainly other (and probably better) representations of how the universe works that we haven’t found yet. For instance it seems like it would be really useful to have a quantum logic that “just worked” by being made out of entangled particles and having rules that exploit quantum mechanics directly instead of having to simulate how the wavefunction behaves using our mathematics. They both might be able to fully embed the other but I think it’s worth making a distinction between them.
Which thing Harry said? Harry said lots of smart things in HPMoR. And some stupid things, too.
The last thing Harry was quoted saying in the post, specifically.
Thanks. That clarified things. And I was (incorrectly) adjusting for inferential distance in the other direction regarding the “our particular logic” referent. In fact, it was me who hadn’t fully understood the things you implied and the steps that were skipped in the reasoning, for whatever reason.
There won’t even be a “2” or “3“ left if you grind everything up. But what if you carefully grind up the brain that’s thinking about the product of 2 and 3? If you do it carefully enough you’ll preserve a “2” and a “3” encoded in the brain structure. My intuition is that you’ll also preserve the answer the brain had in mind, “6.” Logic does exist in the universe; it exists encoded in the relationships in the matter and energy in human brains and in the artifacts they’ve created. If there’s nothing to implement the logical rules then there is no logic.
Perhaps that’s your entire point; that we’re the only vessels of (our particular) logic and morality in the universe. If that’s true then Susan should have said something more like what Harry said.
I’m pretty sure this is roughly one of the points E.Y. is attempting to convey.
There isn’t “our particular logic”, though. Logic is the only valid pattern that self-consistently describes more than one instance of physics. I really want to reduce “pattern” in the previous sentence and add more specific details, but I’m either not strong enough yet, or my brain just isn’t making the right connections right now.
Which thing Harry said? Harry said lots of smart things in HPMoR. And some stupid things, too.
By “our particular logic” I mean the particular method we’ve learned for exploiting how the universe works to cause our discrete symbols to have consistent behavior that mostly models the universe. There’s no requirement that logic be only represented as a finite sequence of symbols generated by replacement rules and variable substitution from a set of axioms; it’s just what works best for us right now. There are almost certainly other (and probably better) representations of how the universe works that we haven’t found yet. For instance it seems like it would be really useful to have a quantum logic that “just worked” by being made out of entangled particles and having rules that exploit quantum mechanics directly instead of having to simulate how the wavefunction behaves using our mathematics. They both might be able to fully embed the other but I think it’s worth making a distinction between them.
The last thing Harry was quoted saying in the post, specifically.
Thanks. That clarified things. And I was (incorrectly) adjusting for inferential distance in the other direction regarding the “our particular logic” referent. In fact, it was me who hadn’t fully understood the things you implied and the steps that were skipped in the reasoning, for whatever reason.