Lee Cronin
speaker
545 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2023
last heard Jun 2024
Lee Cronin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
and accepts that non-determinism is how the universe looks and that gives us our creativity and the way the universe is getting novelty, it's kind of really deeply important in assembly theory because assembly theory starts to actually give you a mechanism why you go from boring time which is basically initial conditions specify everything, to a mismatch in creative time.
And I hope we'll do experiments. I think it's really important to... I would love to do an experiment that proves that time is fundamental and the universe is generating novelty. I don't know all the features of that experiment yet, but by having these conversations openly and getting people to think about the problems in a new way...
Better people, more intelligent people with good mathematical backgrounds can say, oh, hey, I've got an idea. I would love to do an experiment that shows that the universe... I mean, universe is too big for itself going forward in time. And I really... This is why I really hate the idea of the Boltzmann brain. The Boltzmann brain makes me super...
kind of like you know everyone's having a free lunch it's like saying it's like let's break all the laws of physics so a Boltzmann brain is this idea that in a long enough universe a brain will just emerge in the universe as conscious without and that neglects the causal chain of evolution required to produce that brain and this is where the computational argument really falls down because the computationist could say I can calculate the probability of a Boltzmann brain and I can and they'll give you a probability but I can calculate the probability of a Boltzmann brain zero
Yeah, it's like when we start fooling ourselves with numbers that we can't actually measure and we can't ever conceive of, I think it doesn't give us a good explanation. And I want to explain why life is in the universe. I think life is actually a novelty miner. I mean, life basically mines novelty almost from the future and actualizes it in the present.
Yep. I think so.
I'm really struggling with randomness because I had a really good argument with Yasha Bark about randomness. And he said, randomness doesn't give you free will. That's insane because you'd just be random. But I think, and I think he's right at that level. But I don't think we, I don't think he is right on another level. And it's not about randomness.
It's about, it's about constrained, I'm going to sound like, constrained opportunity. I'm making this up as I go along. So making this up. Constrained opportunity. So what I mean is like, so you have to have, so the novelty, what is novelty? You know, this is what I think is a funny thing. You ever want to discuss AI?
Why I think everyone's kind of gone AI mad is that they're misunderstanding novelty. But let's think about novelty. Yes, what is novelty? So I think novelty is a genuinely new configuration that, that is not predicted by the past, right? And that you discover in the present, right? And that is truly different, right? Now, everyone says that some people say that novelty doesn't exist.
It's always with precedent. I want to do experiments that show that that is not the case. And it goes back to a question you asked me a few moments ago, which is, where is the factory? Yeah.
right because i think the same mechanism that gives us a factory gives us novelty and i think that that is that is why i'm so deeply hung up on time i mean of course i'm wrong but how wrong and i and i think that that life opens up that commentarial space in a way that the the
Our current laws of physics, although as contrived in a deterministic initial condition universe, even with the get out of the multiverse, David Deutsch style, which I love, by the way, but I don't think is correct. But it's really beautiful. David Deutsch's conception of the multiverse is kind of like given.
But I think that the problem with wave particle duality and quantum mechanics is not about the multiverse. It's about understanding how determined the past is. Well, I don't just think that actually this is a discussion I was having with Sarah about that, right? She was like, oh, I think we've been debating this for a long time now about how do we reconcile novelty, determinism, indeterminism.
uh i'm i won't speak for sarah but i roughly can't i i think that the universe i think the universe is deterministic looking back in the back in the past right but undetermined going future going forward in the future so i'm kind of having my cake and eat it eating it here this is because i fundamentally don't understand randomness right as yasha told me or other people told me but if i adopt a new view now which um
The new view is the universe is just non-deterministic, but I'd like to refine that and say the universe appears deterministic going back in the past, but it's undetermined going forward in the future. So how can we have a universe that has deterministically looking rules that's non-determined going into the future? It's this breakdown in precision in the initial conditions.
And we have to just stop using initial conditions and start looking at... trajectories and how the combinatorial space behaves in expanding universe in time and space. And assembly theory helps us quantify the transition to biology, and biology appears to be novelty mining, because it's making crazy stuff. That we are unique to Earth, right?
There are objects on Earth that are unique to Earth that will not be found anywhere else, because you can do the combinatorial math.
Yeah.
So what I'm kind of meaning is because the future is bigger than the present, in a deterministic universe, how do you go from the... How do the states go from one to another? I mean, there's a mismatch, right? So that must mean that you have a little bit of indeterminism, whether that's randomness or something else. I don't understand.
I want to do experiments to formulate a theory to refine that as we go forward that might help us explain that. And I think that's why I'm so...
Showing 361–380 of 545 · page 19 of 28
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