Ask A Genius 129 – 10^70th
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/03/26
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: There are a bunch of ways to tap dance around some of the problems, but it is taking ignorant stabs in the dark. One way of dealing with it is that there is such a thing as a world that can be self-contained. A world of information that doesn’t need hardware for it to exist. That seems unlikely to me, but maybe it is possible. There could be fluke worlds which are worlds that have arisen by pure happenstance rather than having evolved over time.
If you imagine it as a string rather than a ladder, you can imagine that maybe the string has an end, and then you have to speculate about what the end is, and one possible end is the self-generating or self-containing information world, which seems unlikely. Possibly more likely is the information world that arose by chance. Instead of being one moment in a string of moments that evolve from simplicity to vas complexity.
A moment of vast complexity spontaneously arose, which you could do via the quantum laws of chance that will arise and then in the moment coming up vanish. One thing that might solve this infinite chain of increasingly gigantic universes containing each other. Another awkward thing is that each successive world is bigger than the world below it. Our brains are almost 10^11th neurons.
We can assume that each of the neurons has, on average, how many dendrites?
SDJ: 1,000 to 10,000, something like that.
RR: Okay, a gazillion. A bunch of them. 10^11th neurons time 10^3rd or 4th dendrites that form a framework for our mental world. And if you would use the universe analogy, then our mental world might consist of 10^15th particles. That if it is an exact analogy that our mental universe’s work just like the universe at large, so that the information in our minds can be seen as consisting of protons and neutrons and electrons and all of that stuff.
Then maybe we have 10^15th of those that form our awareness, or maybe a little less, but who knows? Maybe, a little less, then the universe has 10^80th or 10^85th particles in it, so that’s a step up from 10^15th to 10^85th. So it is a jump of 65 or 70 orders of magnitude larger than our mental worlds. The information in the universe contains something like 10^70th times more information.
And if that is an average step up, and who knows if it is, and it is not unreasonable, then if you take a step up from the universe – then you’re multiplying the containing world instead of having 10^80th particles instead 10^150th, and instead of 10^150th then 10^220th. It doesn’t seem like Occam’s Razor is operating very well because you need this whole stack of this bigger and bigger universe to support these dinkier and dinkier universes.
Maybe, there’s a way around that. Maybe not every containing universe has to be 10^70th or 10^65th times bigger than th mind it contains. Maybe, universes aren’t simply connected along a string of magnitudes. Maybe, there’s feedback among the, or maybe there are more intricate and complicated forms of feedback among various information worlds. That somehow at some scale there are complicated forms of containment and feedback among the various information worlds.
That somehow our scales are somewhat self-contained and can avoid the infinity of containers. Maybe, there’s no way to tell what the container beyond the container beyond the container is, and that is lost in uncertainty and being lost in uncertainty is somehow an allowable not quite infinity because the uncertainty somehow erases the necessary infinity. None of these are particularly good solutions.
But if IC is a thing, if matter being made of information is a thing, then that’ll remain a thing and will be one of the problems to explore, which is, “Does the information need a container? If so does the container stack? And if so, do they stack forever?”
[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 