spoonless | Tegmark's latest

I've been wanting to sit down and write something about my recent LA trip... but things have been pretty busy since I've gotten back, especially since my processor burnt out and I ended up having to upgrade to almost a completely new system. (I still need to get everything fully into the case, as parts of it have been sitting around on the floor running.)

Instead of writing about LA, which I intended to do at some point soon, I'm going to link to Max Tegmark's latest paper which argues that the External Reality Hypothesis (the idea that there exists an external reality independent of human minds) implies what he calls the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (that physical reality is entirely a mathematical structure). This is, in my opinion, the most powerful argument against the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics (ie, antirealism) as opposed to the Many Worlds Interpretation (ie, realism). He goes into mathematical platonism, Godel incompleteness/undecidability, the halting problem, various multiverses, and the Simulation Argument (the idea that we're living in a computer simulation run by beings living in some other reality outside of our "Matrix"). Many of the points he makes, especially regarding the simulation argument, have been stuff I have also been thinking lately, and meaning to write down and explain. But since he's beat me to the punch, I'll just link to his paper rather than writing them out:

Tegmark: The Mathematical Universe

I do have a few more things (well, a lot more) to say on this besides what he says in this paper, and a few things I might have said slightly differently. But to write that out would delay my post on LA even further, which I don't want to do. So it'll have to wait.

I leave you with Tegmark's poetic closing two paragraphs:

"[The Mathematical Universe Hypothesis] is arguably extreme in the sense of being maximally offensive to human vanity. Since our earliest ancestors admired the stars, our human egos have suffered a series of blows. For starters, we are smaller than we thought. Eratosthenes showed that Earth was larger than millions of humans, and his Hellenic compatriots realized that the solar system was thousands of times larger still. yet for all its grandeur, our Sun turned out to be merely one rather ordinary star among hundreds of billions in a galaxy that in turn is merely one of billions in our observable universe, the spherical region from which light has had time to reach us during the 14 billion years since our big bang. Then there are more (perhaps infinitely many) such regions. Our lives are small temporally as well as spatially: if this 14 billion year cosmic history were scaled to one year, then 100,000 years of human history would be 4 minutes and a 100 year life would be 0.2 seconds. Further deflating our hubris, we have learned that we are not that special either. Darwin taught us that we are animals, Freud taught us that we are irrational, machines now outpower us, and just last year, Deep Fritz outsmarted our Chess champion Vladimir Kramnik. Adding insult to injury, cosmologists have found that we are not even made out of the majority substance. The MUH brings this human demotion to its logical extreme: not only is the Level IV Multiverse larger still, but even the languages, the notions and the common cultural heritage that we have evolved is dismissed as 'baggage', stripped of any fundamental status for describing the ultimate reality."
"The most compelling argument against the MUH hinges on such emotional issues: it arguably feels counterintuitive and disturbing. On the other hand, placing humility over vanity has proven a more fruitful approach to physics, as emphasized by Copernicus, Galileo, and Darwin. Moreover, if MUH is true, then it constitutes great news for science, allowing the possibility that an elegant unification of physics, mathematics, and computer science will one day allow us humans to understand our reality even more deeply than many dreamed would be possible."