Born to Do Math 183 – Armatures All the Way Down
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/09/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, it was turtles, turtles, all the way down. This is the infinite turtles ‘problem.’
Rick Rosner: In IC, we postulate the universe is made of information, which means a hardware containing the universe. It is not part of the universe, but contains the universe. The information space, we do not see it as information, but as space, matter, and the laws of physics. For that information to be able to exist needs to be stored and kept track of, and manipulated in some other physical environment, which implies another universe, it is made of information, which implies another hardware universe out to infinity.
Infinities are to be avoided in doing physics. We live in a universe that doesn’t have any infinities. It has a limited amount of information. It has a limited, though huge, number of particles. It has a limited, though huge, amount of space. It has a limited, though huge, duration of time. The manifestations of quantum physics are generally manifestations of the less than infinitely perfect defining of matter in space, and space itself, so there’s only a finite amount of information in the universe. So, quantum mechanics is the physics of non-infinite information.
We’re postulating this infinite chain, stack, Russian nesting dolls, of containing universes. Another principles of IC is that existence is dependent on non-contradiction and self-consistency. Requiring an infinity of universes seems to imply circumstances, that seem impossible to the point of “How can that fucking be?”, basically. It seems suspiciously like something that should preclude existence because existence should not require an infinity of universes. I was thinking about our actual, physical environment, and the larger universe containing our more local environment.
Our environment is specific and concrete. It comes with self-consistent history, a non-contradictory history. The universe seems to have played out, at the very least, over many billions of years. The events on Earth have played out for a few billion years for any kind of life and then less time for complicated life, and then you get to human history. It all plays out without any serious complications. It seems like stuff developed through evolution and the laws of physics without crazy contradictory stuff like time travellers, dragons, or stuff popping into the world for no reason or does not comport with the rules of physics as we know them.
Then you compare the specific non-contradictoriness of our world with the potential problematically infinite set of universes. Each bigger than the one it contains outward to infinity. That seems non-demonstrably, non-concretely abstract. It seems abstract. If it is so abstract, and if we only know the universe that we are in, and if we can look across billions of lightyears, our knowledge of the universe drops off dramatically. We only know about our immediate universe. We are perfectly abstract in that external universe. All we know is that we’re postulating that it should exist. Things get more abstract as we get further down the line of container universes out to infinity.
I would postulate that you can’t have inconsistency that serves to make existence impossible in stuff that we can’t know anything about. The stuff that is wildly abstract. You need specifics. We can have a concrete universe that exists in a non-contradictory way, as far as we know the universe, and as far as get to know the container universe. We may develop physics and analytical techniques so powerful; that we learn things about the hardware universe if it turns out that we are contained in another universe.
Still, that’s another island of specific and non-contradictory stuff. As long as you can keep sticking fingers out of exploration and continue to run into non-contradiction, you might be okay. You keep the infinities at bay. It reminds me of the stuff of Godel and the incompleteness theorems. I think it’s been proven that multiplication is never going to steer you wrong. Two pairs of numbers that don’t have prime factors in common will never be able to be multiplied together to make the same product. 7 and 9, and 6 and 10, an never be multiplied together to get the same number.
There is probably some theorem that says, “Multiplication will work that way we always expect it to work without blowing up,” but the overall consistency of mathematics can be proven within mathematics. You may be able to prove some arguments for math. But even that will be hinky because you will not able to prove that type of metaphysics to math, there may some hidden bombs within math that, once discovered, will show math as inconsistent. However, we know math works because we have been using it for thousands of years.
Math gets used quintillions of times a day without a problem. For practical purposes, math is self-consistent enough to exist, at least as a system for analyzing the world. Even though, it may not be infinitely consistent. Similarly, the world exists with enough concreteness and self-consistency that it apparently can exist. Even though, there may be troubling implied infinities that threaten to blow it up. But in practical terms, it is consistent enough. The threats to its consistency, the dangerous infinities, are sufficiently isolated via abstraction and not impinging on our finite world that they may turn out to be problematic. Our existence proves they would not be problematic, at least not making it impossible for anything to exist.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
In-Sight Publishing 