Questions for Wolfram about time
2024-12-07 17:24:00 +07:00 by Mark Smith
The following is just a ramble list of questions I jotted down while listenning to Stephen Wolfram on the Into the Impossible podcast talking about his theories about the nature of time. I sort of wish I had enough time to turn these into a fabulously worded blog post, but realistically given how the world is for me the past few days, that’s not going to happen, so the next best thing is just to publish these questions.
- Why are black holes called black holes? Isn’t that a stupid name for it implying that they are empty? They are actually more like black super concentrated sometimes utterly enormous solid things.
- The notion that matter uses different atoms of space as it moves through space, similar to how a wave uses different water molecules as it moves through the water, is a very strange notion. How is a solid thing like a wave? And isn’t a wave which moves through water ultimately also made up of matter, even if it’s lots of different water molecules? And so aren’t waves also then made of atoms of space?
- So if the previous notion is weird, that means that the notion that matter moving through space takes a fixed amount of computation to move must also be very strange, since it’s based on that idea. But it seems less strange to me for some reason.
- Could there exist a liquid based life form? In fact could waves in water actually be a life form? Could you think of heat currents in water as being consciously moving around?
- We have to believe that we are persistent in time. Do water waves believe they are persistent in time? Even though they are made of different water atoms which are made of different atoms of space. Is the difference that waves don’t seem to have a component that aggregates the observations of all the movements?
- Water waves are in fact persistent in time. We know this. Why does the wave need to believe this?
- Maybe we only believe we are the same us as we move through space, because we can see that waves are the same wave as they move through the water. Maybe without waves, we wouldn’t even have this belief about being the same us as we move through space. Could that belief be limiting our ability to compute?
- The nation that we are just a rewriting of a hyper graph is strange. Isn’t that confusing the model / map with the territory?
- I can’t get over the bizareness of the idea of ‘atoms of space’. So atoms are made up of a different sort of atom?
- Is there a danger as complexity of the things we learn increases that there comes a point or many points where we forget what it’s like to be young, what it’s like to see the world without all this knowledge, and then generations become detached from each other? They are too far apart on the ruliad. Do we need to hold hands so to speak with known good brains all the way back to the initial birth brain, so we can ensure we grow up and don’t loose each other in rulial space?
- What’s the difference between atoms of space and sub atomic particles? Haven’t you just invented yet another level of indirection to explain the previous level of indirection? Will the atoms of space be made up of atoms of money or love or some other human invented popular abstract idea?
Sorry I wish I had more...err...time to formulate all this in a better structured and polished way. Yeah kind of ironic I guess. Perhaps the irony is made up of consciousness atoms. It’s all just a sketch and the back of a virtual napkin.
I also wrote about this in today’s newsletter.
PS - I hope none of this comes across as me being belittleing about the theories, though I am using sarcasm, I do find this all extremely interesting and valuable. There are some parts of these theories that seem inately funny to me. I’m not sure what it is. Perhaps it’s the fact that it’s at such a low level that any mistakes would have unbelievably strange effects on basically everything, so there’s an odd outrageousness to it all, but of course it’s all so serious, because it’s science, which makes it all the more funny. #