Michael Levin

You can imagine playing with it.

There are however many unitless constants of physics.

These are the kind of like knobs on the universe that you could have, could in theory be different.

And then

you'd have different physical properties.

What I'm not saying is that every alien everywhere is going to have the exact same math that we have.

That's not what I'm claiming, although maybe, but that's not what I'm claiming.

What I'm saying is you get more out than you put in.

Once you've made a choice, and maybe some alien somewhere made a different choice of how they're going to do their math, but once you've made your choice...

then you get saddled with a whole bunch of new truths that you discover that you can't do anything about.

They are given to you from somewhere, and you can say they're random, or you can say, no, there's a space of these facts that they're pulled from.

There's a latent space of options that they come from.

So when your E is exactly 2.718 and so on, there is nothing you can do in physics to change it.

I'm not saying it's immutable.

So I think Plato may or may not have thought that these forms are eternal and unchanging.

That's one place we differ.

I actually think that space has some action to it, maybe even some computation to it.

Okay, so I'll circle back around to that whole thing.

So the only thing I was trying to do is blow up the idea that we're cool with how it works in physics, no problem there.

I think that's a much bigger deal than people normally think it is.