Born to do Math 148 – Hidden Infinities and the Rules of Information
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/12/08
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Jacobsen: In terms of hidden infinities, could the dimensionality vary based on the amount of precision of each moment?
Rick Rosner: Nope, probably because the amount of freedom that increasing amounts of missing information can give you.
Jacobsen: What is the upper limit to that?
Rosner: The way information works in a self-consistent system. I would guess, it has to be locally 3-dimensional. Unless, you’ve engineered a special space that doesn’t work according to the rules of information, like a simulated world, where you want your characters to live. You could build a 4-dimensional video game.
It would be hard to picture on the screen. You could have the characters battling each other in a 4-dimensional space. But the space has been specifically constructed from the game and is not governed by the rules of information.
Jacobsen: How do the rules of information in that space, where a) a universe for the mechanical philosophy as dead and b) there are non-local effects?
Rosner: It is a fake world. That world isn’t built from the information. That world is a simulated world built within a video game. You can give it whatever physics you want. You can even have some approximation of whatever you picture as multiply dimensional time.
But as you work through the game, you can build worlds, where time works weirdly. But it is all simulated. In the natural world, I think things are generally 3-dimensional. We have 3 spatial dimensions and 1-time dimension.
Discussing variations in dimension is getting caught up in mathematical extrapolation and doesn’t have anything to do with the deeper questions about operating in the world, which has the rules that we are operating in.
Let’s talk about how this effects the experience of time to have increasing abilities to predict the future, and whether that influences the linear experience of time. To do something with time, where time works normally, you need a succession of moments.
Anything that is not a succession of moments is a different game and is not exactly a time-based game. Maybe, I’m wrong, but I think the more interesting thing is what the world looks like if you can extrapolate possible futures with greater and greater power.
We can predict a great deal about the world that we’re in now. But there are plenty of things that we can’t predict, like the behaviour of the people we encounter or dealing with traffic. We can predict the physics of everything.
We can’t predict individual events governed by other people’s actions. We get better and better at predicting weather. I don’t have any good answers for this. But I wonder how the experience of time will be changed when we have greater and greater knowledge, which equals greater and greater predictive knowledge.
Where under linear time, we have no choice but to move along with the flow of time, from moment to moment. Each choice that we make is locked in to the next or subsequent moment. Everything we do is locked in time. We deal with the consequences of the actions of each previous moment.[End of recorded material]
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