[HN Gopher] Alien Truth
___________________________________________________________________
Alien Truth
Author : pyb
Score : 158 points
Date : 2022-10-18 11:20 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (paulgraham.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (paulgraham.com)
| dadboddilf2 wrote:
| I'm very confused, I see the page with that guy's article (or any
| of his articles for that matter), but I don't see any
| instructions on how you can get paid to read it.
| radford-neal wrote:
| This essay would benefit from some examples of common beliefs
| that he thinks are _not_ "Alien Truths", and what he thinks the
| implications of that are. As it is, I don't really see what he's
| trying to get at...
| bobabob wrote:
| > We'd probably share Occam's razor. There doesn't seem anything
| specifically human about any of these ideas.
|
| Except the fact that humans are the only species that we know so
| far to have thought about them?
| rbanffy wrote:
| > that it would be true for aliens that one can get better at
| something by practicing
|
| I think that one depends a lot on how they learn or can transfer
| knowledge. We rely on language for it, and language is severely
| limited - We can't learn olympic gymnastics from watching TV, but
| a species that could directly transfer memories and behaviors
| would have a huge leg on us in that regard - I'd assume we'd
| quickly notice their fast-paced technological advance.
|
| Or completely miss it, because they'd anyhilate themselves a
| couple hours after discovering the military use of nuclear fusion
| ;-)
| lakomen wrote:
| SCNR has this guy never heard of https?
| cies wrote:
| If Occam's razor is presented as a truth (which is pretty
| subjective, as it depends on what we/someone considers "simple").
| Then finding one case where what most people thought was the
| simple reason, was not actually the reason after evidence came to
| light, then Occam's razor can be rejected as a theory right?
|
| I think this has long happened, and do not understand why this is
| still presented as "truth".
|
| I prefer the standard of truth used by natural-sciences. The rest
| I find pretty bendable (virology included).
| naasking wrote:
| > If Occam's razor is presented as a truth (which is pretty
| subjective, as it depends on what we/someone considers
| "simple").
|
| It doesn't though. Firstly, Occam's razor is not about
| simplicity but about "parsimony". Parsimony is calculated in
| information theory via Kolmogorov complexity:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity
|
| This then lets us describe how to do induction so it provably
| converges in the fastest way possible, Solomonoff Induction:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomonoff%27s_theory_of_induc...
|
| Arguably, this can be seen as a formalization of the scientific
| process.
| mistermann wrote:
| > It doesn't though. Firstly, Occam's razor is not about
| simplicity but about "parsimony". Parsimony is calculated in
| information theory via Kolmogorov complexity
|
| In theory perhaps, but in practice it is firstly calculated
| by the mind of the person who plays the Occam's Razor card,
| and then subsequently by people who ingest the claim, and
| typically all participants are performing their calculations
| using biased heuristics and flawed logic, and have negative
| interest in what is actually true, or if truth is even
| reachable.
| [deleted]
| benreesman wrote:
| simiones wrote:
| > There is no distinct identity. You have no power over space
| time.
|
| Agreed.
|
| > There is no arrow of time.
|
| This is almost certainly wrong. Just because some of our models
| don't include it, doesn't mean it's not a meaningful physical
| construct. Show us an egg unscrambling itself, and then we can
| agree that there is no arrow of time.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't fulminate._"
|
| " _When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of
| calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be
| shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| GistNoesis wrote:
| There is only one truth : There is no single truth !
|
| Is a forest intelligent ? Is a cat intelligent ? Is a human
| intelligent ? Is a chess program intelligent ? Is a proof-
| assistant intelligent ? Is a numerical solver intelligent ? Is
| the universe intelligent ?
|
| Depending on your choice of definitions, you can get the answers
| you like.
|
| Some intelligences will be able to comprehend other types of
| intelligence. Depending on their resources. There is usually a
| price to be paid, whether in raw computation, memory, or speed.
| And this price may often induce a hierarchy where the relation is
| only one way : where the greater intelligence can predict how the
| states of the lesser one will evolve, but the lesser one can't.
|
| Because these resources are of various nature, they generate a
| Pareto frontier. Only while the resources constraint stay
| relevant. For example, once you reach enough intelligence, given
| the rules of tic-tac-toe, you can play the optimal game.
| Similarly there are end-game tables for chess, that allow
| computers to play perfectly, but humans must use heuristics
| because they don't have enough memory.
|
| But you can always create a bigger game, or constrain your
| resources. You can always be a collector of mathematical
| curiosities, that are in some sense some extrema in the space you
| chose to restrict yourself to.
|
| AI will probably choose to live in constructs, where this dynamic
| game of collecting resources until they are no longer a
| constraint is perpetually maintained to keep it interesting,
| because the alternative omnipotence is no fun.
|
| Those constructs will be so disconnected from reality, that we
| won't be able to acknowledge their existence.
| deltasevennine wrote:
| >Justice, for example. I wouldn't want to bet that all
| intelligent beings would understand the concept of justice, but I
| wouldn't want to bet against it either.
|
| Justice is a biased concept. It's a biological phenomenon. Most
| of us are born with justice modules in our brain. Certain people
| aren't, they're called psychopaths and these people are basically
| proof about the genetic component of justice.
|
| Justice is simply a set of behaviors that helps you and your
| tribe survive from an evolutionary perspective. If you robbed and
| killed people all the time, well that doesn't help with survival
| does it? So brains evolve justice modules. There are alternative
| survival strategies that involve behaviors that are
| unjustified... and your emotions reflect this possible
| alternative path. One can be emotionally tempted by unjustified
| behavior and move in that direction when the situation allows for
| it. It's all preprogrammed...
|
| For PG to talk about justice as possibly universal is like
| talking about English as possibly universal. Clearly these are
| biased concepts unique to humanities biological situation. It's
| unlikely that a frog feels justice simply because the
| evolutionary pressures to make him feel that way don't exist.
| Hardly a candidate for even consideration of being universal.
|
| There can be aliens that are highly intelligent but anti-social.
| Such creatures have little need to develop a biological justice
| module as part of their intelligence. I would imagine communities
| of these creatures are only held at equilibrium because of
| mutually assured destruction. This has certainly been the case
| for humanity as humanity has multiple modes of operation, justice
| is just one component, fear of death is another.
| alfor wrote:
| All of our truths are based on biology.
|
| Without our body we cannot see, feel and experience. Something
| is true when it is useful, predictive to us, to our body, when
| it allow us to move away from pain and toward pleasure.
|
| If there is no observer and no sensations(feedback) I don't
| think we can ever come to any truth.
| deltasevennine wrote:
| Some truths seem to be universal meaning they exist separate
| from our biology, for example: logic.
|
| Other truths seem inextricably tied to our biology, for
| example: happiness.
|
| One that is ambiguous is, Justice. To which I say the
| ambiguity is an illusion. Justice is like happiness.
| Completely unique to the human experience.
| dav wrote:
| Paul Graham needs to read this and get back to us.
|
| Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings
| Mathematics into Being by George Lakoff
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53337
| bo1024 wrote:
| (1) The examples he gives of "non-mathematical" concepts are
| pretty mathematizable. Randomized controlled testing --
| mathematics can prove why this is a good idea. Occam's razor -
| usefulness can be formalized in the machine learning context.
| Different conceptions of justice, fairness, etc. can be modeled
| mathematically (at least certain aspects of them can), which
| helps one understand and distinguish them. (Examples:
| utilitarianism, equality of outcome versus equality of
| opportunity.)
|
| (2) The question of "functionally equivalent" is interesting
| here. If an alien species accurately predicts the trajectory of a
| complex rocket, many of us would say they _must_ be using math,
| because we know that our mathematics governs how rockets move.
| Even if they cannot communicate their method in a way we can
| understand. Economists sometimes use the phrase "as if", e.g.
| the alien acts "as if" they have a utility function, regardless
| of whether that's how they conceptualize their own action.
| Similarly. they would certainly act "as if" they had math and
| physics. But the question of whether that would imply they "do",
| I'm less sure of.
| theboywho wrote:
| > it would be true for aliens that one can get better at
| something by practicing
|
| We get better by practicing only because of our brain's
| neuroplasticity, which one might argue, is a mechanism of
| adaptation, and thus a result of evolution. An intelligent life
| might have developed other ways of coping with change, and not
| necessarily through a neuroplastic brain, but for example,
| through an instant rewiring of the brain that doesn't require any
| practice.
|
| The same can be said for justice, even though it might seem as a
| social construct, it's still rooted in our biology (emotions are
| still "physical" reactions in our body) and so an intelligent
| life might have developed a different biological system different
| than that of emotions.
| notshift wrote:
| > for example, through an instant rewiring of the brain that
| doesn't require any practice.
|
| You might have an alien species that can copy the brain state
| of someone who already knows a task, or one that can gain
| skills extremely quickly through practice, but I don't think
| practice is going away. The fact that neural networks have been
| the only way we've been able to solve a lot of problems, which
| approximate the way that the human brain learns, is pretty
| strong evidence of this. You start out with some weights, you
| measure loss, you adjust weights, and then you try again.
|
| Justice as an emotion might go away or exist in a different
| form, but the underlying reason why humans have a sense of
| justice is evolutionary psychology / game theory. Probably any
| life form which is shaped by evolutionary forces would have
| some similar instinct. (Certainly not all possible intelligent
| life forms though, I'd agree.)
| asdff wrote:
| > The fact that neural networks have been the only way we've
| been able to solve a lot of problems, which approximate the
| way that the human brain learns, is pretty strong evidence of
| this.
|
| Chances are a lot of machine learning implementations can be
| replaced with just "boring" statistical models and achieve
| more power.
|
| OTOH plenty of creatures don't need to learn. Does a mosquito
| need to learn? No, it spawns thousands of offspring and
| doesn't live very long. The high spawn rate means you have a
| wide variety of natural mutations in your offspring, meaning
| one or a few of them are likely to have higher fitness in a
| given niche. It doesn't matter if most die if a few go on to
| survive. This is the strategy many organisms use to dominate
| the world in far greater numbers than our own species.
| notshift wrote:
| I sure hope we don't have mass-reproducing space mosquitos
| in our future.
| asdff wrote:
| It's OK, space has too much radiation for things to
| migrate off world unshielded. Except if you are a
| tardigrade though, but the reasons for them being like
| that are due to the types of niches they occupy on earth.
| Mosquitos on earth that have some sort of space proof
| shielding in their exoskeleton would probably be quickly
| outcompeted by those more fit mosquitos that don't have
| to invest resources into this space proof exoskeleton.
| incomingpain wrote:
| I wrote a scifi book in which I wrote 'heaven' as being an alien
| construct. Somewhere in the universe a tremendously
| technologically advanced civilization constructed a device which
| simulates 'heaven' for all people in the universe. Through
| 'enlightenment' the discoverer is able to bring knowledge of
| 'heaven' back to their people but in our history how could a
| figure like Buddha or Jesus post-enlightenment explain aliens and
| advanced technology. So you end up producing a story at a level
| of your current day scientific understanding.
|
| Fundamentally your message to humanity post-enlightenment would
| be the rules on how to get to heaven. Which many world-religions
| classes go into depth. There are fundamental rules that benefit
| everyone to follow that wouldn't really be inherently human to
| follow.
|
| >We'd probably share Occam's razor. There doesn't seem anything
| specifically human about any of these ideas.
|
| Aliens will also have developed the piano and chess. They are
| inherent things to discover eventually.
|
| Fundmantally a great way to analyze what the rules are would be
| impossible to list. Just look at the list of crimes in countries
| which are so large lawyers dont even know them all. So you need a
| system that's much more simply. Isn't that system 'karma'.
| bmitc wrote:
| > Aliens will also have developed the piano and chess. They are
| inherent things to discover eventually.
|
| How could that claim be true? We have highly intelligent beings
| (i.e., "aliens") right here on Earth that have not developed
| these things.
|
| These discussions on aliens are often off the rails from the
| start because they implicitly begin with the assumption that
| humans are the only intelligent beings on Earth.
| incomingpain wrote:
| >How could that claim be true? We have highly intelligent
| beings (i.e., "aliens") right here on Earth that have not
| developed these things.
|
| Are you using the 'illegal immigration' definition of alien?
|
| >These discussions on aliens are often off the rails from the
| start because they implicitly begin with the assumption that
| humans are the only intelligent beings on Earth.
|
| Do please elaborate because I don't share this opinion. Do
| you believe aliens live amongst us?
| bmitc wrote:
| What is an alien other than a biological being from another
| planet? We have biological beings on Earth that share DNA
| with us but possess wildly different intelligences and
| cognitive systems. Is it a stretch to use these as examples
| that aliens may share little in common with us?
| incomingpain wrote:
| >What is an alien other than a biological being from
| another planet?
|
| Alright, agreed. Which as far as I know we have no known
| aliens ever discovered.
|
| >We have biological beings on Earth that share DNA with
| us but possess wildly different intelligences and
| cognitive systems. Is it a stretch to use these as
| examples that aliens may share little in common with us?
|
| You're backpedaling pretty hard. You said there are
| 'highly intelligent beings on earth' besides us. I know
| of no known examples that fit your claim. Happy to
| listen.
| bmitc wrote:
| It's not backpedaling. Both things are true. There are
| wildly different "intelligences". Plants, for example. As
| for highly intelligent, orcas are an example.
|
| And all this relies on some definition of intelligence,
| which I don't think we even have a good one for.
| miki123211 wrote:
| It's also worth thinking about the exact opposite of this, what
| truths are we least likely to share with aliens?
|
| The beauty and importance of art and culture comes to mind, and
| so does humor and jokes. Try explaining, in scientific terms,
| what makes a joke funny, and the task turns out to be far harder
| than expected.
| 0898 wrote:
| > If there were intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe,
| they'd share certain truths in common with us. For example, I
| think we'd share the principle that a controlled experiment
| testing some hypothesis entitles us to have proportionally
| increased belief in it.
|
| I was thinking more "triangular sandwiches taste better than
| square ones", but you do you!
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Just because we use a model of physics to describe our universe
| doesn't mean aliens would use the same model.
| songeater wrote:
| I think this discussion of convergent evolution is pretty
| interesting in context [0]. Namely, "intelligence" arises from
| natural-selection (ie from some non-intelligent predecessor that
| developed incrementally to better fit its environment)... and the
| process of natural-selection would necessarily lead to various
| commonalities between intelligent creatures that came to be
| independently.
|
| PG's essay seems to (implicitly, not explicitly) compare between
| technologically-sophisticated intelligence - ie not between
| octopuses and humans, but between species that could at least
| communicate through inter-stellar distances, if not traverse them
| directly. If so, convergent evolution would have imposed even
| more onerous similarities between such species: to develop a
| radio-transmitter, intelligent creatures would also likely to
| have been very socially developed, or how else would they have
| been able to transform the resources around them to build a
| transmitter?
|
| Therefore it is the physical world in which we live that most
| likely leads us to conceive "math" similarly... and even
| "justice." [1]
|
| [0] https://www.quantamagazine.org/arik-kershenbaum-on-why-
| alien...
|
| [1] tit-for-tat being one of the best strategies to solve an
| infinitely-recurring prisoner's dilemma
| chatterhead wrote:
| 1 + 1 = 3 (Because some aliens understand what state changes
| occur in the future and the equation is specific to the
| singularity of something not the progressive time.)
| zelienople wrote:
| That is a work of stunning arrogance and foolishness.
|
| Math is a game we play in our heads that represents a
| fictionalized ideal version of reality.
|
| An alien intelligence might have realized that two plus two never
| equals four not because the underlying logic is wrong, but
| because two does not exist in reality.
|
| The idea that the little game of math we play represents an
| immutable and universal truth is typical of the overwhelming
| anthropocentrism of our kind.
| dan_mctree wrote:
| This is a comment of stunning ignorance.
|
| Just because some alien societies will not mimic our rules of
| addition, we do know for certain it is possible that other
| societies can build abstract concepts that are isomorphic to
| those we have. And many of these concepts, such as addition,
| are very useful.
|
| Does this guarantee that aliens come up with the same stuff?
| No. Does it guarantee that if they did, they would these
| concepts to the same esteem? No. Is there an element of 'truth'
| here that can be replicated by others? Absolutely
| [deleted]
| hlwaters wrote:
| Timely article to prop up OpenAI.
| rfreytag wrote:
| PBS SpaceTime notes the fine structure constant (~1/137) is
| dimensionless and ubiquitous in physics. As a result,
| transmitting that ratio would be a good and clear indication we
| are intelligent enough to have at least that much physics:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCSSgxV9qNw&t=564s
|
| This might be better than mathematical constructs which
| conceivably do not require technology, "just" thought to
| discover.
| nine_k wrote:
| Another good signal could be transmission at the frequently of
| free hydrogen times pi, or times e, or both.
|
| The problem here is not even in the need to spend colossal
| amounts of energy to signal one's presence. The question is
| whether such advertising is a good idea if the civilization
| strives to survive; very likely it is not.
| HardlyCurious wrote:
| Well, this was held up as a universal truth because it doesn't
| depend on units, and so those don't need to be defined... But
| we still can't just show them the image '1/137' and have them
| understand the characters and operations. Our presentation
| isn't universal.
|
| And I would argue that showing the length of distance we use
| isn't fundamentally different than explaining which syntax we
| use for division.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > But we still can't just show them the image '1/137'
|
| You can dump energy into two frequencies. You're
| overcomplicating it.
|
| The video suggests binary which is also pretty simple.
| koyanisqatsi wrote:
| But this constant is an artifact of our symbolic encoding of
| universal properties. What reason is there to believe that
| alien civilizations would encode physics exactly as we do and
| would recover the same constant?
| jondeval wrote:
| > What reason is there to believe that alien civilizations
| would encode physics exactly as we do and would recover the
| same constant?
|
| There is no reason to believe the symbolic encoding would be
| the same. For example, if they evolved with 8 fingers instead
| of 10 they could be driven to encode their symbols in a base
| 8 system.
|
| I think the point of the OP sharing the PBS spacetime video
| in this context is that we have reason to believe that the
| fine structure constant is truly constant throughout the
| universe. So if the aliens have the capability of measuring
| and reasoning about electron orbitals and their binding
| properties with nucleus, then there will likely be
| significant overlap between our mutual concepts of 'fine-
| structured-constantness'. Just made that word up. :-)
|
| This would be independent of encoding scheme and independent
| of practical communication issues.
| koyanisqatsi wrote:
| Right but I can ask the same/similar question. Why would
| they have particle physics like we do? There are several
| degrees of freedom in existing mathematical theories of
| physics and I don't think there is a good reason to expect
| that electrons would be re-discovered in another encoding
| of physics by an alien civilization. The entirety of
| particle physics is contingent on a bunch of mathematical
| abstractions (e.g. group theory) so then the argument
| becomes that these abstractions are not contingent
| discoveries which then fixes the entire mathematical
| edifice to be the same across all alien life and
| civilizations.
|
| It's an interesting thought exercise but I don't think
| there is any reason to expect mathematics to be the same
| across all potential life in the universe. Human
| mathematics is adapted to human evolutionary contingencies
| and the same would be true for alien mathematics, physics,
| and engineering. By definition of "alien" their mathematics
| would be alien to us and even if there were commonalities
| they would be very hard to uncover.
| jondeval wrote:
| I understand your point. And I completely agree that many
| of our chosen mathematical structures, and even physical
| models are contingent and likely accidents of history and
| sensory constraints.
|
| I'm comfortable living with the tension between these two
| propositions: (1) The manifestation of laws of physics
| are real, measurable, spread across the galaxies, and
| essentially outside of our subjective experience. For
| example, I do believe that gravity and electrons are real
| ... not just real for me. (2) The way in which we
| interpret these physical realities is somewhat
| conditioned by the constraints and experience of being
| messy human animals.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| PG use of image maps for site navigation always bring back 1990s
| Web "1.0" nostalgia to me.
| rrwo wrote:
| That's a rather naive view of truth. For intuitionistic
| mathematics (which is very important for theoretical computer
| science), truth is a mental construct of a proof in a language,
| and only shared by communicating that construct to other minds.
|
| The question is whether we can communicate our mathematics to
| non-humans, whose senses may be radically different from our own.
|
| And likewise, would we be able to understand a non-human proof?
| naasking wrote:
| > The question is whether we can communicate our mathematics to
| non-humans, whose senses may be radically different from our
| own.
|
| I'm not sure why people find this so relevant. Regardless of
| the sense, there must be enough discernible structure to detect
| whether 0 of something is there, whether 1 of something is
| there, or whether there are many more than 1.
|
| Human sense of smell might top out at differentiating maybe 4
| or 5 different things, dogs can probably sense a lot more, but
| either way it lets us set up basic counting, and that's
| generally all you need for most of our math.
| rrwo wrote:
| How can you communicate the axioms of Peano arithmetic to
| intelligent extra-terrestrials, in a way that they would
| recognize it?
| Koshkin wrote:
| Well, first we could send a series of integers, each being
| a sequence of pulses, to convey the fact that we are
| talking about integers. Then express each axiom by a series
| of concrete examples. And repeat. Intelligent species
| should be good at recognizing patterns.
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| Why would we identify a sequence of pulses as integers
| if, for example, the passage of time is perceived
| differently by aliens? Or if mathematics within alien
| life is based on atomic units of group like set logic,
| and so the sequence of pulses itself is seen as "1".
| authpor wrote:
| why would you do that? maybe what you really want is to
| show them that you can count too?
|
| peano arithmetic (an axiomatiazation of counting) isn't how
| we count. It is how we make other things count for us.
| jondeval wrote:
| > That's a rather naive view of truth.
|
| I'm a puzzled by the confidence here. I would assume pg is at
| least minimally familiar with some of the key philosophical
| themes and schools of thought around this topic.
|
| > For intuitionistic mathematics ... truth is a mental
| construct of a proof in a language, and only shared by
| communicating that construct to other minds.
|
| Even assuming you are fully and accurately representing the
| intuitionist view, you must be aware that there are competing
| schools of thought with strong pedigrees, like mathematical
| platonism, that are grounded in a more realist view of
| mathematical objects.
|
| PG didn't go so far as to stake out that position here in the
| essay, but his thought experiment leverages a view of
| mathematical truth that hues closer to this (platonist) camp.
|
| > The question is whether we can communicate our mathematics to
| non-humans ...
|
| That is an interesting question, but pg did not ask that
| question in the essay, and its answer doesn't seem relevant to
| the point he was trying to make.
| n4r9 wrote:
| It's Graham's confidence that I (and I think OP) find
| puzzling. He doesn't say "According to Platonist ideas...",
| or "In my opinion...". Just "mathematical truths are true by
| definition". There's a brashness and lack of nuance there
| that makes me want to stop reading.
| jondeval wrote:
| Some of that is a stylistic judgement call on the part of
| pg. He wants to move quickly to his central idea, not enter
| into a nuanced discussion of the philosophy of mathematics.
|
| I think pg is educated, at least the broad outline, of the
| age-old controversies in this topic and I'm grateful as a
| reader that he spares me the details and assumes some
| preliminary context.
| svnt wrote:
| He's clearly not, is the thing, unless he has acquired
| that education in the last year or two.
|
| His style of pop philosophy is useful in startups because
| it does not require context. It is ungrounded in actual
| philosophy, and would struggle to find an audience
| outside of this group.
| n4r9 wrote:
| I appreciate what you're saying; it's only the first
| paragraph and he wants to nail some initial things down
| that _he_ sees as straightforward context or examples.
|
| But it is not straightforward to me. Or, in my
| impression, most philosophers. I'm reluctant to agree
| that aliens will assign any importance or even
| _understand_ concepts like geometry or calculus. So to
| me, it is not preliminary context but it is a critical
| part of the discussion.
| svnt wrote:
| > I would assume pg is at least minimally familiar with some
| of the key philosophical themes and schools of thought around
| this topic.
|
| But even a brief foray into discussions by actual
| philosophers will show that to not be true. What Paul Graham
| is doing is providing small subcultural insights tailored to
| an audience with a passing interest in philosophy.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| > his thought experiment leverages a view of mathematical
| truth that hues closer to this (platonist) camp
|
| I think the word in that idiom is 'hews', which means to
| adhere strictly to a standard, probably from the sense of the
| word meaning to strike or cut or beat - often used to talk
| about cutting a tree into shape.
| deugtniet wrote:
| I guess I disagree that math and physics are universal truths.
|
| For maths, I would say 1+1=2 is a pretty universal truth
| (although it takes a while to get there in the principa
| mathematica), but didn't we just invent complex numbers because
| they are useful?
|
| Same goes for physics, the speed of light is the same everywhere,
| but how quantum mechanics work is still subject to many
| discussions.
|
| Love to hear some thoughts on this, as claiming a whole field as
| universal truth is something I'm a little uncomfortable with.
| m-watson wrote:
| I think the argument is mostly that there are universal truths
| than math and physics describe not that our current level of
| math and physics are universal truths. So finding an example
| that we do not understand fully doesn't mean that there aren't
| truths in other aspects of math and physics. As for things like
| complex numbers there is an underlying debate that has been
| around in philosophy of science and math that distinguishes
| between discovery and invention. Our representation may have
| been invented but we discovered some thing that works
| historically and has predictive power.
| koyanisqatsi wrote:
| I think you have the right idea. Most human truths are
| contingencies of our evolution and the evolution of life on
| earth. It's very hard to extrapolate from this to universal and
| alien truth.
| simiones wrote:
| > but didn't we just invent complex numbers because they are
| useful?
|
| Not any more than we invented natural numbers because they are
| useful.
|
| There are several ways to naturally derive complex numbers,
| either from mathematics or from physics.
|
| For one, complex numbers are probably the simplest possible
| extension of the real numbers in which all real-valued
| polynomials have roots (for example, x^2 + 1 doesn't have a
| root if x has to be real). This is the same reason why the non-
| transcendental irrational numbers were invented (such as
| sqrt(2) ).
|
| (Incidentally, the transcendental numbers (pi, e) are less
| justified than the complex numbers from this point of view -
| any polynomial of any rank whose coefficients are non-
| transcendental real numbers has roots that are either real non-
| transcendental numbers, or a complex number whose real and
| imaginary parts are real non-transcendental numbers )
|
| For a physical explanation, complex numbers are the best way we
| know of describing wave mechanics (either classical or
| quantum), and in general periodic phenomena and how they
| compose.
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _because they are useful?_
|
| But the usefulness is objective, that is, it is not an
| arbitrary product of the mind but rather it is dictated by the
| logic of things once the goal is set, so invention (or
| discovery) of useful things is more or less unavoidable.
|
| As to quantum mechanics, you are talking about the variety of
| interpretations which from the practical standpoint are simply
| different ways of looking at quantum behavior, which, in turn,
| sometimes leads to different methods of calculation.
| mistermann wrote:
| > But the usefulness is objective, that is, it is not an
| arbitrary product of the mind but rather it is dictated by
| the logic of things once the goal is set, so invention (or
| discovery) of useful things is more or less unavoidable.
|
| It certainly seems like it is objective, and often it
| probably is, but in a more general sense, _any_ instance of
| "x 'is' y" _very often_ turns out to be subjective very
| quickly. Even with "is useful", things get complicated if
| one explicitly injects the dimension of Time into the
| question (it is there in the first place implicitly, but is
| easily overlooked).
| deltasevennine wrote:
| >For example, I think we'd share the principle that a controlled
| experiment testing some hypothesis entitles us to have
| proportionally increased belief in it.
|
| This isn't even a shared principle among humans. How many
| experiments does it take for you to have 50% belief in a
| hypothesis?. What is the number of experiments? It's literally
| impossible to answer. It's not even clear what "belief" is or
| what 50% means.
|
| This ambiguity of the word isn't even the main problem. If I run
| the same experiment with perfect observational tools 10 billion
| times and it verifies my hypothesis. Does that raise my belief
| further? What if on the 10 billionth and first time the test
| shows a negative result? That literally invalidates the
| hypothesis. Keep in mind we are assuming my observational tools
| are perfect. Does this make my belief shoot down to zero?
|
| If this possibility of a negative result remains true after any
| number of tests then what does it say about belief? Why should I
| believe anything if a single negative experiment can invalidate
| 10 billion positive experiments (assuming perfect observational
| tools of course)?
|
| Let me bring a more concrete example. I hypothesize all zebras
| have stripes. I observe zebras 10 billion times. They all confirm
| my hypothesis. Then on the 10 billionth and first time I see a
| zebra with spots. My hypothesis is wrong. This can happen any
| time.
|
| Anyway to bring it back to his point. Don't assume shared
| axiomatic truths. PG already assumed that it's shared among
| humans. He's wrong. The nature of science and the scientific
| method is not universally shared or even fully understood among
| humans. He's likely also wrong about aliens as he is about
| humans.
| simiones wrote:
| > I hypothesize all zebras have stripes. I observe zebras 10
| billion times. They all confirm my hypothesis. Then on the 10
| billionth and first time I see a zebra with spots. My
| hypothesis is wrong. This can happen any time.
|
| Even if the original belief turns out to be wrong, you only
| have to slightly weaken it and it will remain true: "the vast
| majority of zebras have stripes". Even if you discover a new
| continent full of hordes of uniformly-colored zebras, the true
| hypothesis becomes "the vast majority of zebras in my original
| continent are striped".
|
| Essentially every observation brings proof for a whole family
| of hypotheses. We normally only talk about the strongest of
| these hypotheses, but that doesn't meant that a negative
| example rules out the entire family.
|
| For example, even if we didn't find a deductive proof the
| Fermat's last theorem was wrong even after all of the empirical
| proof that it probably wasn't, a weaker version would have
| still remained true - the one validated by that empirical
| proof.
| deltasevennine wrote:
| >Even if the original belief turns out to be wrong, you only
| have to slightly weaken it and it will remain true: "the vast
| majority of zebras have stripes". Even if you discover a new
| continent full of hordes of uniformly-colored zebras, the
| true hypothesis becomes "the vast majority of zebras in my
| original continent are striped".
|
| The hypothesis does not remain true. It was never proven to
| be true and the new hypothesis is still not proven to be
| true. Science cannot prove anything to be true. I can find a
| cave full of of spotted zebras, and you have to further
| weaken your hypothesis of continents, I can then find that
| the stripes were actually microscopic spots and my perfect
| observation tool, though never wrong has limited resolution.
| Ad infinitum. Nobody ever considers your made up philosophy
| because it's changing the rules of the game. It's making a
| statement then adjusting your statement once it's proven
| wrong... people look down on that kind of thing.
|
| What I'm writing here isn't something I pulled out of my ass.
| It's well known that in science, the scientific method, and
| reality itself, nothing can be proven. Proof is the domain of
| math and logic, not science. In science, things can only be
| falsified. To quote Einstein:
|
| "No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a
| single experiment can prove me wrong."
|
| Einstein obviously isn't saying stuff like a single
| experiment causes me to adjust my hypothesis and divide split
| it into two different ones because it's kind of inconsistent.
|
| There are people who truly understand science, but most of
| the population doesn't (including PG). I think what's going
| on with you is you're in the later camp, you've long held the
| incorrect belief that science can prove things and this long
| held ideology is coming into contact with the actual logic of
| the situation and your adjusting your belief to maintain a
| biased ideology.
|
| Do you look up to PG? Bias can be corrected when an authority
| confirms the opposite. I quoted Einstein here. One of the
| ultimate authorities on science, a person who overturned the
| hypothesis about Newtonian physics being a model for motion.
| A single experiment proved it wrong and now Newtonian physics
| is simply an approximation that is ultimately wrong.
| Hopefully that will clear things up, if not... then you must
| be an Alien far more strange then what PG is describing.
| simiones wrote:
| Please don't act condescending. The problem of induction is
| well-known, and is closely related to what you are
| discussing here. I agree that science can't literally prove
| any hypothesis is true in the same sense that
| mathematics/logic can; but we also can't jump from here to
| considering inductive reasoning an entirely useless tool in
| the search for truth.
|
| That is the point that I am trying to make: experimentation
| can bring proof to strengthen a hypothesis. Even if a later
| experiment invalidates a hypothesis, all of the previous
| experiments' results don't disappear, and any new
| hypothesis we formulate still needs to be coherent with
| them to have any value: we have actually learned something
| important from our thousand experiments, even if our 1001st
| showed that the hypothesis we had in mind was false.
|
| Also, this is not unique to science. The same phenomenon
| can happen in mathematics or logic for theorems that have
| been neither proven nor disproven yet. We can perform
| numerical experiments to test a numerical theorem, and gain
| some amount of confidence in that theorem even if we
| haven't proven it to be true. We can often establish lower
| or upper bounds in the course of this experimentation,
| where we find that the theorem is True at least for some
| limited subset of all numbers - and this remains True and
| useful even if it later turns out that there exist counter-
| examples.
|
| This observation is also very important for understanding
| why the history of natural philosophy is essentially one of
| continuous progress, with very little backtracking: even if
| induction is not good enough to know that we have a
| perfectly complete and consistent theory (and we will never
| have one), we always have something salvageable from all of
| the experimentation done so far. Even geocentric models
| with their epicycles were actually working models, which
| predicted the positions of planets in the next 1000 years
| to quite good accuracy, even if they were clearly wrong in
| the end.
| deltasevennine wrote:
| >Please don't act condescending.
|
| Please don't accuse me of acting condescending. It's very
| offensive and hurts my feelings when I'm accused of
| something I'm not doing.
|
| I am criticizing you, but I am not being condescending.
| There is a huge difference.
|
| Perhaps the alien thing was bad. I apologize for that.
| The intent was a joke and was not condescension.
|
| >That is the point that I am trying to make:
| experimentation can bring proof to strengthen a
| hypothesis. Even if a later experiment invalidates a
| hypothesis, all of the previous experiments' results
| don't disappear, and any new hypothesis we formulate
| still needs to be coherent with them to have any value:
| we have actually learned something important from our
| thousand experiments, even if our 1001st showed that the
| hypothesis we had in mind was false.
|
| Yes but this was not part of the discussion. We're
| talking about science as a principle. Not what we have
| learned from the process of science.
|
| >This observation is also very important for
| understanding why the history of natural philosophy is
| essentially one of continuous progress, with very little
| backtracking: even if induction is not good enough to
| know that we have a perfectly complete and consistent
| theory (and we will never have one), we always have
| something salvageable from all of the experimentation
| done so far. Even geocentric models with their epicycles
| were actually working models, which predicted the
| positions of planets in the next 1000 years to quite good
| accuracy, even if they were clearly wrong in the end.
|
| Important or not, we diverged from the point. Whether
| Science is a valid principle shared by humans and aliens
| is the point. My point is, PG's view isn't even shared
| with humans, why should he assume it's going to be shared
| with aliens?
|
| You're talking about the importance of science. The value
| of science. That's off topic.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > Yes
|
| So then you agree that "experimentation can bring proof
| to strengthen a hypothesis"
|
| > Whether Science is a valid principle shared by humans
| and aliens
|
| Well, the experimentation part, that can bring proof to
| strength a hypothesis, is something that you agreed to.
|
| So that part would be shared, that you agreed to.
| deltasevennine wrote:
| no. Don't agree. Experimentation can't prove anything. It
| also doesn't strengthen anything. Proof is not a
| strengthening of something. If you prove something it
| means it's true.
|
| >Well, the experimentation part, that can bring proof to
| strength a hypothesis, is something that you agreed to.
| >So that part would be shared, that you agreed to.
|
| Never agreed. You misinterpreted. I agreed to this: "we
| have actually learned something important from our
| thousand experiments". You learned that for 1000
| experiments you observed something. That's it.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > You learned that for 1000 experiments you observed
| something
|
| Ok great, so then you agree that this is a principle that
| would be shared, which is the point.
| naasking wrote:
| > This isn't even a shared principle among humans. How many
| experiments does it take for you to have 50% belief in a
| hypothesis?. What is the number of experiments? It's literally
| impossible to answer. It's not even clear what "belief" is or
| what 50% means.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomonoff%27s_theory_of_induc...
| deltasevennine wrote:
| A bit of a complicated read. Not sure what you're trying to
| say here and I don't even completely understand it. But
| anything that gets into bayesians and frequentists ends in a
| fundamental divide in humanity. Humans don't agree on which
| interpretation is correct. Which is the point of everything I
| wrote.
|
| So why would aliens hold this "principle" the same if humans
| don't even agree on it? PG is wrong. His own principles
| upended not even by aliens, but by humanity, thus how
| accurate can his assumptions about universal principles even
| be? No that accurate imho.
| naasking wrote:
| > But anything that gets into bayesians and frequentists
| ends in a fundamental divide in humanity. Humans don't
| agree on which interpretation is correct.
|
| There is no divide, there is the illusion of divide because
| we didn't have a rigourous formal model of how to build
| reliable knowledge and everyone focused on different but
| relevant aspects.
|
| Bayesian reasoning is the correct way if you have
| justifiable priors, but we didn't have a way to calculate
| the correct prior.
|
| Solomonoff showed us how with his theory: Kolmogorov
| complexity is a measure of parsimony, and this is how to
| select priors in a formal, rigourous way.
|
| Solomonoff induction is to knowledge what Turing machines
| or the lambda calculus are to computation. Sure, aliens
| might not discover Turing machines exactly, or the lambda
| calculus exactly, but whatever they do build that's capable
| of universal computation, we already know it must be
| isomorphic to a Turing machine, because all constructions
| capable of computation must be by necessity.
|
| The frequentist/Bayesian divide is a separate issue about
| how to interpret statistical data in useful ways, not
| specifically about how we know what we know and what
| confidence we should have in our knowledge, which is what
| you were asking about.
| deltasevennine wrote:
| Interesting. Do you know of any popular science articles
| or books that can describe what you're talking about?
| Academic papers are fine too, just harder to parse.
| jefftk wrote:
| In addition to alien truth there are probably also alien games:
| ones so simple for their level of depth and enjoyment that you
| would expect them to be independently discovered. For example,
| Hex [1] is reasonably deep and has been invented at least twice.
| Go, with something like the Tromp-Taylor rules [2] might be as
| well? Probably not Chess, though!
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hex_(board_game)
|
| [2] https://senseis.xmp.net/?TrompTaylorRules
| verrp wrote:
| I have long suspected that the aliens will recognize Go (the
| game), but (obviously) not Chess (the other game).
|
| I suspect they will even recognize Go's 19x19 board (b/c it has
| properties other board sizes would not have).
|
| But would they recognize 12 tones scales?
| mostlylurks wrote:
| > But would they recognize 12 tones scales?
|
| Assuming they have musical instruments and don't have far more
| digits (fingers or other dextrous appendages) than us, they
| probably would, and even if they did have more digits, it'd
| seem like a fairly obvious choice for a species with our
| anatomy. Especially for equal temperament, but also for just
| intonation, a 12-tone scale provides exceptionally good
| approximations or numerous instances of the simplest possible
| frequency ratios, so any creature that has to limit the number
| of tones on their instruments for practical considerations will
| have a high likelihood of stumbling on a 12-tone scale even
| before developing an understanding of why it actually works so
| well and/or find it a very compelling option given a more in-
| depth analysis.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| > But would they recognize 12 tones scales?
|
| Relatively? More likely. "Oh yeah, we get that. At a number of
| levels which we call honktaves, incidentally."
|
| Absolutely? As in, we have that set of frequencies bolted on to
| our culture too? Seems less likely.
| bmitc wrote:
| > The truths of mathematics would be the same, because they're
| true by definition. Ditto for the truths of physics
|
| These are pretty strong statements for which there's no arguments
| provided for but serve as assumptions for the rest of the
| article. I don't think there's consensus among mathematicians,
| philosophers, cognitive scientist, or biologists on this.
|
| Mathematics is most definitely a human endeavor, and so we can't
| really make claims about its existence in the universe
| independent of humans. I think alien analogs to mathematics are
| unlikely to match ours. If we are lucky, I think it could be the
| case that the various structures could be similar, but the
| likelihood the implementations resemble each other are slim. It's
| even a stretch to assume the structures would relate. Even humans
| do not fully agree on mathematics. There is no "one" mathematics
| because mathematics is the human exploration of idealized objects
| using a variety of human logical systems.
|
| And then there's the possibility that our mathematics and overall
| perception of reality is shaped by our biology in far deeper ways
| than we imagine and currently understand.
| naasking wrote:
| > I think alien analogs to mathematics are unlikely to match
| ours.
|
| So aliens won't be able to count? They won't have a concept of
| zero? They won't have a concept of 1=successor(0)? I find this
| very, very hard to believe, and a lot of mathematics follows
| from the structure of the natural numbers.
|
| If you accept evolution by natural selection is a universal
| law, then I think it naturally follows that ability to count
| must evolve. After all, it's pretty important to know whether
| there are 0, 1, or many predators/food/prey/enemies.
| zhynn wrote:
| What if aliens have no notion of discrete numbers, what if
| everything is probabilistic analog math? What about an
| organism that can see/focus/sense multiple things
| simultaneously, and a single "thing" is a set. What about a
| creature whose primary sensing organ is diffuse molecules
| (smell/taste) instead of sight and use light (instead of meat
| tentacles) to interact with matter. How might an organism
| that touches matter with laser fingers and smells the
| consequences count differently? I wouldn't have the first
| idea, honestly.
|
| There could be an entirely different paradigm to "counting"
| and consequently to the fundamentals of maths.
|
| The math that we invented is influenced by our biology and
| capacity to sense our environment. Our brains and how those
| brains work with our sense organs. This pattern is likely
| universal (all life will have methods of sensing their
| environment and interacting with it), but the methods might
| be very different.
| naasking wrote:
| I'm sure you can imagine any kind of alien, but that
| doesn't make your imagined alien logically coherent or
| physically realizable and consistent with the theory of
| evolution by natural selection. Do you agree that these are
| real, physical constraints that any imagined alien species
| must satisfy?
|
| If not, then you have to explain how an alien species might
| develop that is not subject to physical constraints and
| evolution by natural selection.
|
| If so, then you must agree that any alien must be able to
| distinguish two scenarios, "I sense some food here" and "I
| sense no food here". The basic binary distinction is
| inescapable, and this is the foundation of true/false, 0
| and 1, etc.
| jarpadat wrote:
| Consider an alien which subsists on photons, which is a
| form of life that exists today. We know from heseinberg
| that the sensing of this food "here" or "there" is
| nonphysical. Presumably our creature's civilization would
| require no heisenberg to discover what anyone can see
| from their own photosensor.
|
| Rather it is the concept of objects remaining in a single
| place that would require some real mathematical
| innovation to a creature with no experience of such an
| idea. And so this distinction of entirely separate
| logical states, far from being basic or inescapable, is
| our very human invention. It is useful for creatures like
| us, who perceive things in one place when they are not
| really so, who do their computing with sand in a region
| where it's bountiful, and who encode abstractions as
| software because doing so in dedicated hardware is more
| costly.
|
| While it is certainly possible that all intelligent life
| would have these constraints, there is no particular
| reason to expect it. What we can expect is that humans
| will expect others to be too much like ourselves; it's a
| well-known cognitive defect in our species.
| naasking wrote:
| > Consider an alien which subsists on photons, which is a
| form of life that exists today.
|
| Plants don't just subsist on photons, there are many
| other ingredients.
|
| > We know from heseinberg that the sensing of this food
| "here" or "there" is nonphysical.
|
| I don't know what this means. How do you "non-physically"
| sense photons?
|
| > Rather it is the concept of objects remaining in a
| single place that would require some real mathematical
| innovation to a creature with no experience of such an
| idea. And so this distinction of entirely separate
| logical states, far from being basic or inescapable, is
| our very human invention.
|
| Assuming you're talking about some alien made of bosons
| that aren't subject to the Pauli exclusion principle,
| you'll note that bosons still interact with fermions in
| which that principle does apply, so I don't think your
| argument follows. I admit I don't really understand your
| premises though so I have no idea what you really meant.
| [deleted]
| bena wrote:
| Hacker News, the place where you will get told that we are
| definitely going to invent spacecraft that will be able to
| traverse the galaxy by solving the light speed issue, the
| gravity issue, and the radiation issue (among others) but
| that when we meet extraterrestrial lifeforms, they won't know
| how to fucking count.
|
| Sorry. That's the one. That's the one that broke me. Jeremy
| Bearimy
| bmitc wrote:
| I don't believe we'll solve those issues anytime soon. But
| for aliens counting, which I think is itself arguable, it
| is not really under debate here. There's a vast gap between
| counting and what mathematics is and encapsulates.
| naasking wrote:
| > But for aliens counting, which I think is itself
| arguable
|
| I honestly can't imagine how you can reach this
| conclusion with any rigour. Do you agree that aliens will
| need to consume some energy source to stay alive, which
| we will call "food"? Do you agree that an understanding
| of "there's no food in my environment", "there's some
| food in my environment", and "there's lots of food in my
| environment" would be selected for? I certainly hope so,
| so at the very least they will understand the differences
| between zero, non-zero and "many".
|
| The only way this wouldn't happen is if the environment
| is so rich in abundance that there is never any absence
| of food. But this is impossible, because even single-
| celled life by necessity will reproduce to consume all
| available resources until it reaches an equilibrium
| matching the rate of food production. So any intelligent
| species _will necessarily_ evolve in an environment of
| scarcity where zero and non-zero will be implicitly
| understood.
|
| Since _intelligent_ life will necessarily evolve in
| scarcity, quantifying the amount of food is a useful
| trait that would be selected for. This is why we 've now
| proven that numerous "non-intelligent" animals can count,
| including salamanders, chicks, mosquitofish, honeybees
| and more. Intelligent life needs to understand where they
| are, what they have and what they will need in the
| future. This involves quantifying, aka counting, no way
| to escape it.
|
| > There's a vast gap between counting and what
| mathematics is and encapsulates.
|
| Yes, but you posited intelligent aliens that have their
| own math. The conclusion that they would not understand
| zero and repeated application of a construction over zero
| to build non-zero quantities is impossible. It is the
| very root of building a theoretical structure of any
| kind, so if they have math of any kind, they have some
| kind of counting system that will have an isomorphism to
| ours.
| bena wrote:
| But you believe we will eventually.
|
| And you believe that aliens that can count is something
| that is "arguable".
|
| You're the dot.
| geomark wrote:
| What if aliens did not perceive distinct objects, but rather
| that everything observable is part of a greater whole? Would
| they need counting numbers?
| vecter wrote:
| Counting numbers are such a basic foundational aspect of
| all life that it's hard to imagine any "intelligent" being
| not understanding the concepts of 1, 2, 3, etc.
| naasking wrote:
| You will have to explain how this property might be
| selected for by evolution by natural selection before I can
| even understand what you're suggesting.
| bmitc wrote:
| I think this is one argument that leads to the idea that the
| structures could be relatable, _if_ a being could count. But
| who knows? Our mathematics relies strongly on the logical and
| axiomatic systems used. Things can get weird real quick with
| small tweaks to these systems, so it doesn't seem like a
| stretch that whatever mathematical analogs aliens may possess
| may be wildly different. And there's a lot of developments
| that our perception of reality is shaped by our biology in
| ways we barely understand.
|
| There are intelligent beings on Earth that don't seem to even
| have analogs to human mathematics, at least that are apparent
| to us. We can barely communicate with a small subset of
| animals and plants on Earth. So I am just inherently
| skeptical of claims that alien thinking will bear any
| resemblance to human thinking.
| naasking wrote:
| > Our mathematics relies strongly on the logical and
| axiomatic systems used.
|
| Yes and no. You don't need more structure than 0 and 1 to
| describe literally any form of information, and we're using
| machines right now that use such an encoding. The idea that
| any organism of sufficient complexity to have any kind of
| math won't have any notion of 0 and 1 is very implausible.
|
| That said, we certainly won't have the same syntactic
| descriptions of most structures, but they will certainly be
| relatable via isomorphisms.
|
| > We can barely communicate with a small subset of animals
| and plants on Earth. So I am just inherently skeptical that
| claims that alien thinking will bear any resemblance to
| human thinking.
|
| But what does that have to do with math? Math isn't about
| how thinking works, it's about how _structures_ are related
| to each other. Structures and their relations don 't depend
| on how one thinks. As above, how such structures are
| _described /encoded_ probably depends on how one thinks
| (aliens maybe won't use pencil and paper), but the
| structure being described will be the same and so there
| will necessarily exist some kind of isomorphism between
| their "syntax" and ours, as syntax is a projection of the
| structure.
|
| Even plants have observable behaviour showing a distinction
| between 0 and 1: they observably move towards the sun when
| it's shining, and don't move when it's not. This isn't
| knowledge of "math", but simply to demonstrate that
| structure is everywhere and life simply must develop some
| intrinsic understanding of it.
| bmitc wrote:
| What do you mean by "no"? Computers and information
| theory most definitely rely on logical and axiomatic
| systems, and particular ones at that.
|
| Mathematics is also shaped by our thinking, which was my
| point. I think it's a strong claim that aliens would even
| have a "mathematics".
| naasking wrote:
| > What do you mean by "no"? Computers and information
| theory most definitely rely on logical and axiomatic
| systems, and particular ones at that.
|
| I mean "no" to your implicit assertion that such basic
| logical and axiomatic systems would not evolve in any
| alien species capable of mathematics. Any such alien will
| distinguish true and false, will have AND, OR and NOT
| connectives, and will understand a form of implication
| (it's inherent to causality). That's all you need to
| build an understanding of most of our formal systems.
|
| Yes the particular _expression_ of our information theory
| and computer science depends on specific syntactic
| choices which implies a surface dissimilarity, but the
| _underlying structure_ will be the same even when
| expressed in alien math.
|
| For instance, an alien species might evolve in an
| environment in which hyperbolic geometry is more natural
| (say a species large enough that they can sense gravity
| directly), and so they develop that geometry first. This
| will have an isomorphism to our formal model of
| hyperbolic geometry, and we can then explain Euclidean
| geometry to them from there.
|
| Edit:
|
| > Mathematics is also shaped by our thinking, which was
| my point.
|
| Yes, but ultimately irrelevant. This drives the pace of
| mathematical discovery, and what kinds of mathematical
| formulae we develop or find most interesting, but this is
| ultimately irrelevant to the _fundamentals_ which
| underpin all math, which is what this really comes down
| to.
| Koshkin wrote:
| Counting implies the ability to perceive the discrete, but
| such discreteness may not be obvious to a shapeless creature
| living in a liquid or a gaseous substance.
| naasking wrote:
| > Counting implies the ability to perceive the discrete,
| but such discreteness may not be obvious to a shapeless
| creature living in a liquid or a gaseous substance.
|
| Is a shapeless creature even logically coherent?
| Intelligence needed for math requires making distinctions,
| and distinctions imply structure, and structure is
| logically incompatible with true "shapelessness".
| caleb-allen wrote:
| > Is a shapeless creature even logically coherent?
|
| Do you see how your argument is self-defeating?
|
| According to logic that humans have developed, there is
| such thing as a "shape". But Western philosophers have
| pondered the innateness of a "shape" or an "object" from
| very early on (Plato, through Leibniz, beyond).
|
| "Shape" and "logic" are both human constructs
| articulating "structure", another human construct.
|
| A shapeless creature doesn't need to be "logically
| coherent" to exhibit intelligence; logic, truth, and
| structure are features that have emerged from human
| intelligence. I wouldn't accept the argument that an
| entity must exhibit the same features to qualify as
| intelligent simply because humans have.
| naasking wrote:
| > According to logic that humans have developed, there is
| such thing as a "shape"
|
| There is such a thing as "structure", of which "shape" is
| an instance, yes.
|
| > "Shape" and "logic" are both human constructs
| articulating "structure", another human construct.
|
| Structure is not a human concept. We have particular
| conceptions of structure, but structure exists, period. 0
| != 1, they have different structure. This is
| indisputable.
|
| > A shapeless creature doesn't need to be "logically
| coherent" to exhibit intelligence
|
| If you think that reality does not have to be logically
| coherent, or that that does not necessarily imply that
| any creatures within reality have to have a logically
| coherent description consistent with coherent natural
| laws, then you're talking about a fantasy world of your
| imagination and I don't think there's anything further to
| discuss.
| dagw wrote:
| Most mathematical concepts are far from obvious to humans
| (lots of people seem to struggle with the continuum
| hypothesis for example), yet we can still work with them no
| problem. So even if this shapeless intelligent creature
| didn't start with discrete mathematics, they'd probably
| invent it eventually.
| criddell wrote:
| If we can conceive of shapeless blobs living in a liquid
| then surely they can conceive of being like us.
| [deleted]
| RxVd wrote:
| >They won't have a concept of zero? They won't have a concept
| of 1=successor(0)? I find this very, very hard to believe
|
| Most of the world did mathematics for a long time without
| zero (I hope you know that most number systems like Roman
| didn't have zero till that eventually came from India, and we
| evolved to have the current number system). Who knows what
| direction different number systems might have taken if they
| didn't come in contact with zero.
| naasking wrote:
| That's mostly irrelevant. The naturals starting from 1 are
| isomorphic to the naturals starting at 0, which is why math
| didn't need zero for so long.
| Koshkin wrote:
| Not if you take into account the special properties of 0.
| (Generally speaking, a structure that admits a neutral
| element with respect to addition is not isomorphic to one
| that does not.)
| naasking wrote:
| You are correct, hence why I initially said it's mostly
| irrelevant. I should have qualified the claim about
| isomorphism as well. Still, quite a bit of math maps 1:1
| without zero, so you can build a common understanding
| even if they don't have zero.
|
| I also don't think any alien species with which we will
| communicate will _not_ understand zero. It just seems
| impossible. Before philosophers came up with zero in
| formal models, everyone intuitively understood the
| concept. Every animals knows when they have no food vs.
| when they have some food. Humans in ancient civilizations
| also couldn 't just take something without paying.
| RxVd wrote:
| How is it irrelevant to this discussion? Parent proposed
| that aliens will have zero by posing that question. I
| gave an example from our own earth indicating intelligent
| life can manage without zero.
| naasking wrote:
| > I gave an example from our own earth indicating
| intelligent life can manage without zero.
|
| Firstly, I disagree that humanity managed without zero.
| Literally everyone had an intuitive understanding of
| zero, they just didn't have it in their formal systems
| that were being studied by philosophers. For instance,
| try walking walking up to a vendor in Ancient Greece and
| just taking something without paying.
|
| Secondly, it's largely irrelevant because a lot of math
| with zero can be mapped to math without zero with no loss
| of information, so even if aliens used math without zero
| there would be no trouble communicating as there would
| still be an understandable formal correspondence.
| [deleted]
| LocalH wrote:
| > Mathematics is most definitely a human endeavor, and so we
| can't really make claims about its existence in the universe
| independent of humans.
|
| I think the idea is that math is not _created_ by humans, but
| _documented_ by humans. Sure, the specific terminology may be
| our invention, but there are basic mathematical properties that
| seem (from our perspective) like they should be universal. For
| example, whatever names a being has for the numbers 1 and 2, if
| you take that 1 and add 1 more, you must get 2 (or the "local
| equivalent") as the result.
|
| My guess is that, if what we call math isn't truly universal,
| it's probably at least universally true within the realm of
| physical life, and there's likely some massive causal chain
| from the root properties of physics itself to the mathematical
| properties that we call "math". When it comes to raw,
| untethered "consciousness" (or whatever one would prefer to
| call it), this may not hold true even in the slightest.
|
| Yes, this comment steps slightly outside what could ever be
| determined purely by the scientific method at the end. I feel
| it is useful to do so in discussion, even when that cannot
| directly enter into research. There are some truths to the
| larger universe that I don't think the scientific method will
| ever truly be able to uncover, just due to it's rigor. Some
| aspects of the universe are just simply not falsifiable, but
| they're still worthy of discussion with an open mind.
| dTal wrote:
| There is most certainly a massive causal chain between
| physics and what humans call "math", because everything
| humans do is determined by the laws of physics. The causal
| chain leads through millions of years of evolution and tens
| of thousands of years of culture. "The numbers 1 and 2" are a
| complex web of analogies that have not actually been
| demonstrated to "exist" outside of our minds, so evidence
| that alien mathematicians would have words for them is much
| weaker than our intuition would suggest. The question that
| must be answered is "Given the constraint of precisely
| modelling the world in a useful way, to what extent are all
| rule-based systems isomorphic?"
|
| Responding to your second point, I'm afraid I can't agree
| with you that unfalsifiable propositions are "useful"
| discussion contributions - _especially_ not with an "open
| mind". The only criterion on which such propositions can be
| judged is whether they are fun to believe, and that is a very
| dangerous muscle to flex.
| carapace wrote:
| I think mathematics could be defined as that part of philosophy
| which is self-evident and universal. The value of Pi isn't
| contingent?
|
| Aliens may have different biochemistry, but it would be made
| from the same chemical elements as ours. Likewise their formal
| systems may be wildly different from ours, but they will still
| be based on form (even _implication_ is ultimately a very
| simple formal structure. Math doesn 't even require _causality_
| as a prerequisite!)
|
| Last but not least. many people (Kurt Godel among them) believe
| that mathematical thought is actually perception of real
| phenomenon in a "higher" plane of reality, which, if true,
| seems to me to imply that alien mathematicians would be
| perceiving the same phenomenon as humans, literally. In this
| view, the "truths of mathematics" are literally the same
| "objects" for them and for us.
| dbsmith83 wrote:
| > Mathematics is most definitely a human endeavor, and so we
| can't really make claims about its existence in the universe
| independent of humans.
|
| Can you give an example of a mathematical concept which could
| be different?
|
| I believe that math is universal. We may use models to
| understand it (infinity, perfect circles, etc.), but the
| underlying mathematical truth is independent of humans. The
| same is true for science. There are physical laws which we look
| to discover. We use models in science to understand them, but
| the models are not the same as the underlying truth
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _I believe that math is universal_
|
| The only thing that is "universal" is Nature itself.
| Mathematics, on the other hand, is a reflection of Nature _in
| the human mind_ ; or, put differently, it's Nature's language
| we humans are capable of understanding. It is therefore
| conceivable that other creatures, far removed from us, could
| "hear" a language that is just as far removed from ours.
| rendall wrote:
| > _I believe that math is universal. We may use models to
| understand it (infinity, perfect circles, etc.), but the
| underlying mathematical truth is independent of humans._
|
| Humans (probably) perceive and understand a slim subset of
| reality. We have an illusion of universalism of our
| perceptions because we perceive nothing outside of them.
| Also, we are the dominant species of the planet, which gives
| us a reason to believe that our perceptions are "more
| accurate" than, say, a bat's.
|
| Personally, I don't think an alien's perceptions and
| understanding would contradict our own, but if it's given
| that our perceptions are a subset of reality, then an alien's
| understanding might include elements of reality that we
| literally cannot perceive or even understand.
|
| > _Can you give an example of a mathematical concept which
| could be different?_
|
| By definition, no. But, hmm. What would number and a
| mathematical system look like from creatures who thought in
| logarithms? Or in primes? Or that had no concept of "number"?
| What if even "greater than" and "less than" had no relevance
| to an alien civilization?
| DontchaKnowit wrote:
| But see I don't think think what your saying contradicts
| the above post. If our subset intersects with the alien
| subset of perception, then we both will have a perception
| of an underlying truth, and we could conceivably understand
| the alien models and vice versa because they address the
| same subject.
| rendall wrote:
| UP said that mathematics is universal. I believe it
| models only our perception and understanding, which are
| informed by our biological, evolutionary imperatives.
|
| Reality itself is beyond us. All that we have at our
| disposal are our perceptions, which is what we are
| modeling when we "do math". Mathematics is not universal,
| it's a language that we use to communicate what we
| perceive to other humans.
|
| It's speculative, whether an alien species, with a
| perceptual and cognitive system evolved entirely
| elsewhere under other pressures, would have an
| understanding that intersects with our subset of reality.
| I personally think it's unlikely. What that would mean is
| that we wouldn't be able to communicate, never mind trade
| technology and mathematical ideas.
| dbsmith83 wrote:
| > It's speculative, whether an alien species, with a
| perceptual and cognitive system evolved entirely
| elsewhere under other pressures, would have an
| understanding that intersects with our subset of reality.
| I personally think it's unlikely. What that would mean is
| that we wouldn't be able to communicate, never mind trade
| technology and mathematical ideas.
|
| I mean, maybe, but this is conveniently unprovable, much
| like the flying spaghetti monster, since you are saying
| we could not communicate because our slices of reality
| don't intersect. I disagree and think that most likely we
| would live in a reality that was largely the same, but I
| guess we'll never know!
| dagw wrote:
| All of this is arguments for why our understanding of
| science and the nature of the universe might differ. It can
| also explain how our mathematics might evolve very
| differently and we will have made different mathematical
| discoveries and do math in very different ways (all of
| which I agree are very likely). However it doesn't explain
| how an alien race will look at one of our mathematical
| proofs that we have proven True and be able to prove that
| it is False.
| rendall wrote:
| > _However it doesn 't explain how an alien race will
| look at one of our mathematical proofs that we have
| proven True and be able to prove that it is False._
|
| Where is this coming from? Is this relevant to what I
| wrote?
| dagw wrote:
| If both their math and our math agree on what statements
| are true and false then both our maths are functionally
| the same.
| pfortuny wrote:
| I guess he was thinking of arithmetic.
|
| In any case, any model which includes infinity (and Peano
| arithmetic already does) is pure convention and unconsciously
| assumes a lot of things.
|
| Finitary induction may make sense as something "universal".
| Further than that, we are making things up as we go (and I am a
| professional mathematician). The fact that they work to solve
| real problems does not make them more real.
| pattt wrote:
| Fully agreed, the way I'd approach this would be that the said
| mathematical proofs about certain truths "by definition" rely
| on human logic as the main building block and substrate. Logic
| is a human basis of agreeing which seems necessary
| evolutionary. Counting and separating observable objects turned
| out to be quite necessary for survival as well. Hence this
| statement seems to imply that aliens would need to have a
| corresponding logic reasoning system and observational
| abilities. If that was the case perhaps there would be a strong
| inclination to believe that the isomorphic reasoning would be
| deduced.
| rendall wrote:
| > _there's the possibility that our mathematics and overall
| perception of reality is shaped by our biology in far deeper
| ways than we imagine and currently understand._
|
| Almost certainly true. We as evolved creatures do not perceive
| objective reality, but only enough reality as to enable our
| ancestors to survive our very niche environment (niche relative
| to the entirety of the universe). Our science and mathematics
| model only our perceptions of reality, and not reality itself.
|
| It is folly to assume that an alien, evolved along an entirely
| different set of initial conditions, would share our
| perceptions of reality. Our mathematics, modeling as it does
| our _perceptions_ , serves human needs and perceptions only.
| slibhb wrote:
| While it's true that there's no consensus on this topic, that
| doesn't imply that people can't make claims one way or the
| other. In fact, the claims that the essay makes (Platonism) are
| very commonly made.
| sovande wrote:
| Somethings in mathematics are constant, both here and on alpha
| centauri, like the circumference of a circle divide by its
| diameter is P or the hypotenuse squared is the sum of each leg
| squared in a right triangle etc.
| lmkg wrote:
| But neither of those facts are true in non-Euclidean
| geometries like Spherical Geometry or Hyperbolic Geometry.
| The jury is still out on whether the universe is flat or has
| some sort of curvature. Meanwhile spherical geometry is
| fundamentally useful because we live _on a sphere_ , not on a
| plane, and it is more accurate at modeling the 2-D space that
| we navigate in.
|
| My point being, assumptions get baked-in to systems in
| surprising ways. Even something seemingly-objective like
| math. Especially when you're using it as the _basis for
| communication_ , then what counts as "basic" or "fundamental"
| or "standard" reflects a perspective, not a fundamental
| truth.
|
| It's likely their mathematical systems would eventually reach
| the same conclusions as ours, but the prominence or
| significance of fields or results (like circles and
| triangles) might be radically different. Even though we view
| those components as absolutely fundamental, it's possible an
| equivalent system could be built from different primitives.
| rewgs wrote:
| > There is no "one" mathematics because mathematics is the
| human exploration of idealized objects using a variety of human
| logical systems.
|
| But isn't the whole point to to do our best to bypass human-
| centric systems of understanding, and arrive at the "core
| truth" of the matter? Whether that's possible is another
| matter, but even if it's not possible, surely it's something
| that can be theoretically approached, and I would wager is
| precisely what PG means by "one mathematics."
|
| > And then there's the possibility that our mathematics and
| overall perception of reality is shaped by our biology in far
| deeper ways than we imagine and currently understand.
|
| Yes, but also no. Consider some first principles:
|
| -We have every reason to believe that any and all life would
| not live forever, or if the life in question is "intelligent"
| (a nebulous/human-centric term, for sure) would at the very
| least conceive of other things not lasting forever (such as
| stars, or even the universe itself [or, if you want to be
| really generous, "this current iteration of the universe"]).
| -Therefore we can reasonably assume that all "intelligent" life
| in the universe would understand the concept of scarcity
| (either via finite lifespans/time, food/energy sources, both,
| or something else), non-infinity. I'd go so far as to say that
| any life form that doesn't understand its own mortality or
| other such limits should be not be considered "intelligent," at
| least for the reasons of this discussion. -Therefore we can
| reasonably assume that said intelligent life would somehow
| conceptualize a binary state (you're either alive or you're
| not, you either have access to an energy source or you don't,
| etc), and consequently would somehow or another understand the
| concept of "zero," "nothing," etc, as well as its opposite,
| "something." And from there, would necessarily discern the
| differences between two states of "somethings" (the state of
| "something" that is "one" is different than the state of
| "something" that is "two").
|
| I know I'm using a lot of loaded terms here -- "reasonably,"
| "assume," "discerning" -- but just like we look for life by
| looking for the markers of life that we know were necessary for
| Earth (carbon, water, etc), we can look for intelligence that
| exhibits the properties that we understand it to have. We need
| _some_ sort of frame of reference, after all, if we are to do
| anything other than simply flail. If that frame of reference is
| to be proven wrong, that 's wonderful, but until that's the
| case, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that the
| universe's "primitives" would be perceived in any truly, truly
| different way such that the species' interpretation would cause
| humans to rethink our own understanding of the universe's
| "primitives" from the ground up.
|
| After all, conceiving a difference between hydrogen and helium
| requires being able to tell the difference between one and two
| (electrons, as well as separate elements themselves). And
| considering we have every reason to believe that those make up
| the majority of the mass in the universe, any "intelligent"
| life (there's that human-centric term again) can be expected to
| somehow conceptualize that difference, and thus, do something
| like counting, and thus, approach the same primitives of
| mathematics that we do. The approach might be different, but
| _what_ they 're approaching -- the very fabric of reality,
| hopefully as objectively as possible -- must be assumed to be
| the same (again, that is, until we're given compelling evidence
| to believe otherwise).
|
| That said, I've never studied the philosophy of mathematics, so
| I could be talking out of my ass here, this is just the
| reasoning of a layman after all. If anyone reads this and goes
| "no you're way off base," I'd love to hear it!
| dagw wrote:
| _I think alien analogs to mathematics are unlikely to match
| ours._
|
| Almost certainly not, but they're probably isomorphic. And
| either way if we show them our axioms they will be able to
| validate our mathematics and vice versa.
|
| The truths of mathematics are of the form 'if A then B'. Even
| if they don't start at A or even accept A as true, but will
| should still get B if they assume A.
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _they 're probably isomorphic_
|
| That's a strong statement. I'd probably talk about
| homomorphism.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| > Even humans do not fully agree on mathematics. There is no
| "one" mathematics because mathematics is the human exploration
| of idealized objects using a variety of human logical systems.
|
| Maybe not in its entirety, but I find it hard to imagine that
| any civilization as advanced as ours (let's say a civilization
| that manages to harness nuclear fission, just to set a
| baseline) will not come up with concepts such as prime numbers,
| real number, complex numbers, calculus, etc. If they do that,
| they will inevitably find the same structures we found using
| function theory. They will know about differential equations
| and prove similar theorems about them as we did. And the
| Pythagorean theorem is a universal truth that holds everywhere.
| lmkg wrote:
| > real number, complex numbers, calculus, etc
|
| Some humans believe that the prominence of real numbers is a
| historical accident. It seems quite plausible to me that a
| human society, much less an alien one, would go down a
| mathematical evolutionary path based on the constructable
| numbers and the computable numbers.
|
| Regardless of whether we eventually find the same structures,
| there are things that we might consider basic which they find
| esoteric and vice-versa.
|
| Heaven forbid we encounter an alien civilization that
| discovered an O(log n) algorithm for integer factorization
| before they invented steam power.
| bmitc wrote:
| > Some humans believe that the prominence of real numbers
| is a historical accident.
|
| That is a great point. The continuum is contentious and
| pretty highly debated philosophically.
|
| I also encourage people interested in that to also learn
| about smooth infinitesimal analysis. Just a small tweak in
| the underlying logic and model yields unique mathematics
| and questions established assumptions.
| lostmsu wrote:
| In that list prime numbers might not be a thing.
| cloogshicer wrote:
| Fully agreed.
|
| These _beliefs_ you quoted from the article, which
| unfortunately most people don 't even recognize as beliefs,
| form the basis of the dominant religion of the western world
| (scientism).
|
| The worrying thing is that the majority of people who believe
| in this religion don't even realize they are believers.
| bmitc wrote:
| If I am not mistaken, this is similar to what Feyerabend
| seemed to be on about.
|
| https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/was-
| philoso...
| simonh wrote:
| The thing that differentiates science from religion is
| repeatability. With religion everyone has their own opinion,
| people out of contact with each other come up with radically
| different religious beliefs and there is no way to bridge
| between those beliefs. If we forgot everything we know about
| religion, in a thousand years we might rediscover religion
| again but they'd be entirely different religions from what we
| have now.
|
| With science it doesn't matter who does a given experiment,
| anyone else doing the same experiment will get the same
| results. There's no scope for disagreement about verifiable
| scientific facts. Just do the experiment and find out. If we
| forgot everything we know about science, in a thousand years
| if we rediscovered science, very quickly we'd rediscover all
| the exact same facts about the world again.
| gregmac wrote:
| Science doesn't have "facts" or "truths". It is based on
| falsifiability: for a theory or hypothesis to be considered
| scientific it must be able to be tested and conceivably
| proven false.
|
| This is the key difference from religion, which has no such
| "falsifiability" equivalent.
|
| The closest thing to "beliefs" is probably an individual
| following which of several competing theories is most likely
| correct -- but there's always the underlying basis that any
| of them might have evidence showing they're incorrect at any
| time, and one's view should adjust as a result.
|
| Often this comes in the form of deferring to other people or
| a consensus view, which could be construed as "faith" but is
| different: If you asked me how the universe exists, I'd say
| the big bang theory is the best answer we have, but I don't
| understand enough about the underlying science to explain
| _why_ nor can my brain comprehend the reality of it. I have
| no loyalty or allegiance to this view, though; I could be
| swayed to another theory if the big bang is ever proven false
| or if a better theory arises.
|
| Further reading:
| https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/11/why-
| scie...
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Yeah, lots of strong baseless assumptions in the first
| paragraph made me stop reading.
| p0pcult wrote:
| I also take issue with the author's assumptions. Consider the
| case of AIs trained to identify new variables in a system of
| pendulums:
|
| https://cosmosmagazine.com/technology/artificial-intelligenc...
|
| Different truths that describe the same system.
| agent008t wrote:
| The statement that "the truths of mathematics would be the
| same, because they are true by definition" is correct.
| Mathematics exist independently of biology or perception of
| reality. It is just a collection of arbitrary abstract
| definitions and what follows from them. The alien species may
| come up with different base definitions that they find more
| useful or interesting. But they would derive the same
| conclusions as we would if they were starting from the same
| definitions and applying the same abstract rules.
| bmitc wrote:
| > Mathematics exist independently of biology or perception of
| reality.
|
| Is there a "proof" of that? How could a proof exist? You'd
| probably win several awards if you had one.
|
| > It is just a collection of arbitrary abstract definitions
| and what follows from them.
|
| ... created by humans.
| dagw wrote:
| _Is there a "proof" of that?_
|
| It's how we define the concept "mathematics". If a result
| was dependant on "biology or perception of reality" or
| anything else outside its defining axioms, it wouldn't be
| mathematics.
| bmitc wrote:
| I'm sorry, but I just disagree that that's how
| mathematics is defined and that it doesn't depend on our
| biology and perception, because _we_ are making those
| definitions.
|
| A book I might recommend and that I'm going through at
| the moment is _Where Mathematics Comes From: How the
| Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics Into Being_ by George
| Lakoff and Rafael Nunez. The origin and meaning of
| mathematics is strongly influenced by cognitive sciene,
| and thus biology. I 've been downvoted, but this is not a
| totally novel or off the rails idea. It is basically
| accepted in robotics that embodied cognition is how you
| get a robot to understand and perceive its environment.
| Where do you think that idea came from?
| rendall wrote:
| > _Mathematics exist independently of biology or perception
| of reality._
|
| Even the concept of "number" itself is almost certainly an
| artifact of perception that enabled our ancestors to survive
| our niche, planetary environment, and not an inherent feature
| of objective reality.
|
| Aliens, evolved to survive in another environment entirely
| with a different set of initial conditions, almost certainly
| would not have the same, nor even any, understanding of
| "number".
|
| Would we consider such aliens a civilization or some kind of
| insensate "process"?
| DontchaKnowit wrote:
| Um no.
|
| I'm so over this deconstructionist "reality is your
| perception" line.
|
| Numbers are a thing. In fact they're one of the most basic
| observable things about the universe. And the concept if a
| number holds up all the way down to the quantum level. I.e.
| space and time are discrete and therefore space and time
| can both be COUNTED. Counting is literally one of the most
| basic and early achievements of human cognition and were
| gonna act like we just made it up?
|
| Absolute silliness.
| caleb-allen wrote:
| > I'm so over this deconstructionist "reality is your
| perception" line.
|
| Kant would have a field day with this statement
| rendall wrote:
| > _" reality is your perception"_
|
| You imagined what I meant so vividly that you literally
| made up a quote!
|
| Try responding to what I actually wrote, and if it's
| unclear, asking with some humility.
|
| I'm not even sure what your objection is, exactly.
| Nothing you wrote contradicts what I wrote.
| bmitc wrote:
| > I'm so over this deconstructionist "reality is your
| perception" line.
|
| What makes you completely reject that? I don't think it
| has as much to do with deconstructionism as it does
| embodied cognition. We keep learning more and more about
| how biology and physiology and evolutionary pressures
| affect and inform cognition and thus perception. I was
| recently reading about how there have been scientific
| studies that seem to suggest that certain animals seem to
| experience time differently that we do. So you could say
| "time is a thing", but yet, it appears that it is not the
| same thing across lifeforms. There are animals that sense
| gravitational and electromagnetic fields, something we
| cannot do. Would it make sense to them to say "all beings
| can read these fields because we do"?
|
| I think the problem is that it is all too easy to fall
| into the trap in thinking that alien lifeforms would be
| like us. There's a multitude of evidence of that here on
| Earth in the variety of life, despite even coming from
| the same origin.
| rendall wrote:
| This is a great rebuttal, and gestures towards what I was
| getting at. Thanks.
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _There are animals that sense gravitational and
| electromagnetic fields, something we cannot do._
|
| That actually proves the fact that reality is _not_
| simply someone 's perception. (We humans do not perceive
| these fields, and so it took scientific advances for us
| to _discover_ them as part of the objective reality.)
| adrianN wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that any sufficiently advanced species that
| does any kind of mechanical engineering will have maths that is
| homomorphic to analysis.
| exitb wrote:
| Isn't the basic math largely driven by attempts to understand
| and quantify the world around us? In such case, it depends on
| more universal concepts like distance, time, speed,
| acceleration etc. Concepts which I would imagine to be familiar
| to any intelligent being that takes a physical form. I can't
| imagine an alien wondering about a period of a pendulum and
| arriving at an answer that's really different from ours.
| p0pcult wrote:
| Funny that you chose pendulums:
|
| https://cosmosmagazine.com/technology/artificial-
| intelligenc...
| [deleted]
| kardianos wrote:
| I call Alien Truth "What Is". It must form a common reality that
| each individual can point to and share.
|
| More at: https://corinth.kardianos.com/
| authpor wrote:
| Why doesn't reader mode work in that webpage?
|
| Whatever happened to the (failing) promises of HTML + CSS ? where
| I was gonna be able to swap out this CSS for whatever I wanted?
| breckinloggins wrote:
| > We might find, for example, that it's impossible to create
| something we'd consider intelligent that doesn't use Occam's
| razor. We might one day even be able to prove that.
|
| I have no idea how one would go about proving this but personally
| I would start with something like the "Principle of Least Action"
| applied to thought.
| carapace wrote:
| Speaking in broad generalities (heh) Category Theory is what
| you would use for that (AFAIK.)
| TuringTest wrote:
| Because using Category Theory for explaining things is the
| opposite of applying Occam's Razor? :-P
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Every pg essay seems to bring out a cohort of nay-sayers and
| weirdos.
|
| Maybe there is also a revealed alien truth somewhere in there
| about the psychological effects of differences in expertise,
| knowledge, social status, writing skill, etc...
| koyanisqatsi wrote:
| That wouldn't be an alien truth, that would be a mundane fact
| of human psychology.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| How would you know aliens don't share the same 'mundane
| facts'?
|
| It seems entirely possible.
| koyanisqatsi wrote:
| We could argue about the definitions of "mundane" and
| "alien" but I've observed the same thing about HN comments
| and it's not specific to PG essays so that's why I said it
| is a mundane fact of human psychology.
| Karunamon wrote:
| They very well could, but it is plausible that they do not.
|
| Certain facets of mathematics however, it is not plausible
| that they do not share.
| apriljest wrote:
| What happens upon contact with aliens? I believe that to be an
| important question, and one look at the warfaring, fearful
| history of humankind makes it clear, as best said from the most
| reprehensible book on philosophy I have ever read:
|
| "477. "If intelligent entities from other parts of the universe
| exist at similar or superior technological levels to ours, would
| they draw the same or at least similar philosophical conclusions
| to us?" That is a very good question. And my answer is this. They
| better f#%*ing do if they want to have any hope of withstanding
| our relentless, merciless onslaught."
| [deleted]
| randallsquared wrote:
| > _I wouldn 't want to bet that all intelligent beings would
| understand the concept of justice, but I wouldn't want to bet
| against it either._
|
| Given that even people (loosely) in the same culture often
| disagree about what constitutes "justice" and use the term in
| mutually exclusive ways, we should definitely bet against the
| proposition that "all intelligent beings" understand it.
| hbrn wrote:
| > we should definitely bet against the proposition that "all
| intelligent beings" understand it
|
| Hey, we can always claim that those who disagree with us are
| not intelligent.
|
| I'm only partially joking. Lots of today's "justices" have so
| many internal contradictions that I feel like we should
| separate them into their own category.
| garbagetime wrote:
| For a person to have an opinion about what constitutes justice
| is for them to demonstrate an understanding of the concept of
| justice (assuming their opinion is cogent). So, if people are
| disagreeing about what precisely justice is, it actually means
| that they do understand the concept of justice.
| koliber wrote:
| Maybe for some highly abstract definition of justice. But for
| more everyday use, it's not hard to come up with examples
| that one society considers just while the other unjust.
|
| Justice does not have to be cogent, which is defined as "(of
| an argument or case) clear, logical, and convincing.". There
| were and are justice systems that leave out one or more of
| these ingredients to some extent. Some leave out some logic
| by presuming the existence of a supernatural being. Some are
| more authoritarian and not very convincing.
| Koshkin wrote:
| But "the concept of justice" is not universal, because it
| really cannot be understood outside the context of law.
| garbagetime wrote:
| > it really cannot be understood outside the context of law
|
| What do you mean by that?
| Koshkin wrote:
| There is no justice outside (or without) law.
| garbagetime wrote:
| I can imagine a perfectly just society with no laws.
| Koshkin wrote:
| I, on the other hand, cannot. (I can imagine many strange
| things, but not this one.)
| TuringTest wrote:
| Consider:
|
| * A society of one.
|
| * A society of one family isolated in nature, where each
| member is allowed to express their peculiarities and
| eccentricities, but never do each other any harm - not
| because of established rules, but because they truly love
| and care of each other.
| Koshkin wrote:
| One person is _not_ a society.
|
| The second example is virtually unreal (and even
| expressions of 'love' and 'care' can be harmful).
| TuringTest wrote:
| "Virtually unreal"? It's how humans evolved for hundred
| thousands years.
| dagw wrote:
| I disagree. As long as I have a personal concept of
| 'good' and 'bad', and prefer it when 'good' things to
| happen to 'good' people (and vice versa) then I have a
| concept of justice.
| Koshkin wrote:
| Often, what is good for some is bad for others (and vice
| versa). Justice would be way too relative (subjective)
| outside law, so as to be devoid of any meaning, actually.
| vlunkr wrote:
| Laws are relative as well, they differ in every country.
| Why would justice only exist in another relative system?
| You know vigilante justice is a well accepted concept
| that exists outside of the law by definition.
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _[laws] differ_
|
| So does the definition of justice.
|
| > _vigilante justice_
|
| Except 'vigilante justice' and 'justice' are concepts
| that have little to do with each other. You might as well
| be talking about the 'de facto law' (like for instance
| the "law" enforced by the local mafia) vs. the 'de jure
| law' here.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Except 'vigilante justice' and 'justice' are concepts
| that have little to do with each other.
|
| That depends on how well different people's definitions
| of justice line up. There are many things that vigilantes
| can enforce pretty well.
|
| > You might as well be talking about the 'de facto law'
| (like for instance the "law" enforced by the local mafia)
| vs. the 'de jure law' here.
|
| Sure, why not? Mafia law is often not justice, but I
| think it qualifies as law where sufficiently powerful.
| You seem to think this argument debunks itself?
| jondeval wrote:
| This is spot on. For concreteness, let me give a candidate
| definition for the virtue of justice:
|
| Justice - rendering to each person what is owed to them.
|
| It's obvious that we will very often disagree about 'what is
| owed', but doesn't our passionate disagreement in this case
| show that (1) we agree that practicing justice is good and
| (2) we are closely aligned on the existence of this thing
| called 'justice'?
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _what is owed_
|
| This is _extremely_ subjective.
| jondeval wrote:
| Right. You are touching on the central point of the
| comment.
| randallsquared wrote:
| Lots of conceptions of justice don't align with your
| definition, which centers individuals: Climate Justice,
| (some types of) Social Justice, etc.
| jondeval wrote:
| Gotcha. I did preface this definition with the word
| 'candidate' and I acknowledge that there may be good
| alternate formulations. The spirit of this particular
| exchange is about whether or not 'justice' can be
| formulated as a universal.
|
| I shared an argument above for why it can be viewed as a
| universal and judging by your comment above you are
| somewhat skeptical of this claim.
|
| If we shift the discussion to allow conceptions of
| 'justice' that move away from the classical tradition and
| include modern ideas like 'climate' justice or 'social'
| justice, I will revert to agreeing with your skepticism.
|
| I don't think anyone can plausibly claim that these more
| marxist-oriented modern definitions are universals.
| songeater wrote:
| Tit-for-tat is a highly effective strategy when playing an
| iterated-prisoner's dilemma[0]... ie the "concept of justice"
| can emerge through natural selection if "intelligent beings"
| were forced to play such games on which their survival depends
| (a plausible model of "society").
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#The_itera...
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| In the late 1600s, Christian Huygens proposed that aliens would
| share our geometry (circles, spheres, etc) and even our rough
| musical ratios (like an octave is a doubling of frequency and a
| fifth is 3:2)
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| This seems like lots of camp-fire speculation in awe of the night
| sky.
|
| Before discussing what might be different with our "truth" and
| alien "truth" we should first define what we mean by "truth".
|
| What if there is a War of Worlds? And we win. But according to
| the "alien truth" they win. This kind of thing seems to be going
| on some TV-channels already, The notion of "facts" is diluted by
| claiming that "We have alternate facts". "We have alternate
| electors". That just means it is unclear to many people what
| facts and truth mean and it is easy to misguide them.
| benjaminjosephw wrote:
| Would injustice exist in an alien society if that society didn't
| recognise it as such?
| kmod wrote:
| As much as I like PG's writing in general, this is him dipping
| his toes in waters that are already well studied and coming off
| as ignorant and/or presumptuous.
|
| His very first premise "The truths of mathematics would be the
| same, because they're true by definition" shows an ignorance of
| an entire field of discourse called the philosophy of
| mathematics. Whether aliens would have the same math as us is one
| of the fundamental questions, and to presume the answer shows a
| disdain of the existing body of thought on this topic.
|
| In particular, we humans still hotly debate which math is the
| "right" math. Is the axiom of choice "true"? Does it make sense
| to say that it has a truth value? Is such a truth value amenable
| to human discovery? Does PG know the answers to all of these
| questions?
|
| PG is either unaware of the human-choice nature of the fundaments
| of math or he thinks he has special knowledge of it. Either way
| makes this essay one of my least favorites.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Take some number of things. Lay them out more or less in a
| straight line. Somewhere in that line, put a little gap. Count
| them from left to right. Then count them from right to left.
| You get the same number.
|
| That experiment is saying that addition commutes. If an alien
| ran that experiment, they would get the same answer.
|
| Lay out some things in regular rows in a rectangle. Count the
| things row by row. Then count the things column by column.
| You'll get the same answer. So will an alien. That is,
| multiplication commutes both for us and for the aliens.
|
| Now, as you go further into mathematics, things are true
| because they follow from the definitions, _but the aliens may
| use different definitions_. They may have a different
| definitions for, say, a commutative ring, and so abstract
| algebra may be different for them. _But with the same
| definitions, we would arrive at the same conclusions._
| wizofaus wrote:
| Good analogy but is it so crazy to think the concept of
| counting in a particular direction wouldn't make sense to an
| alien intelligence? That the way their brain processes inputs
| means that the knowledge of the total number occurs to them
| either subconsciously or as the result of parallel processing
| that is beyond what human brains can even imagine being aware
| of? Even if the input signals being counted are separated by
| time (e.g. pulses of light or sound), such that their brains
| must logically store the previous count and increment it as
| new signals are detected, the concept of _ordered_ addition
| (i.e. where we can conceive of "x plus y" and "y plus x" as
| separate concepts, even if they yield the same result) might
| simply not be necessary or possible in an alien brain.
|
| What even qualifies as "addition" at all is somewhat murky -
| e.g. "addition" of relativistic velocities is non-commutative
| (*), but is it meaningfully even addition in the same way
| adding integer counts is?
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity-
| addition_formula#Prop...
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _If an alien ran that experiment, they would get the same
| answer._
|
| This depends on the world they live in. If, for example,
| things were hard to control, tended to move, to disappear
| (and reappear in a different place), to look the same, etc.,
| they would probably discover quantum field theory before
| arithmetic!
| dagw wrote:
| _they would probably discover quantum field theory before
| arithmetic!_
|
| Sure, but much like we eventually discovered quantum field
| theory, they'll eventually discover arithmetic. And even if
| for some weird reason they hadn't, they're probably smart
| enough to understand it once we demonstrate it to them.
| malux85 wrote:
| I agree with what you're saying, at the thresholds of math (and
| even quite a bit before) it gets very murky very quickly,
|
| But I think in this context he may have been better to say
| "arithmetic" or maybe root logical operations, because he was
| trying to convey small axiomatic units of universal truth
| rather than pull an entire field "into purity"
|
| I could say the same about his comment about Carbon, the exact
| mass of carbon we use is influenced by isotopes and is not
| _exactly_ standardised in all human chemistry - so it's likely
| the aliens idea of "the mass of carbon" would also be slightly
| different. A better example would be "the atomic number of
| carbon" which is always the same because it's definitional and
| integer, but the same point is there - he's conveying the
| existence of the tiny axioms (alien truths), not trying to
| define them
| TuringTest wrote:
| _> But I think in this context he may have been better to say
| "arithmetic" or maybe root logical operations, because he was
| trying to convey small axiomatic units of universal truth
| rather than pull an entire field "into purity"_
|
| What makes you think that arithmetic and logic are
| _universal_? A culture with a completely different way of
| thinking may not arrive to a system similar to our
| mathematics based on logical reasoning and search of
| consistency. Heck, we can see it in a lot of human beings who
| are not capable of consistent logical reasoning, and they 're
| not even alien.
| malux85 wrote:
| I was thinking of simple arithmetic like addition and
| simple logical operations like "and" and "or"
|
| I was illustrating the existence of these things - like PG
| was doing in the article - not attempting to define them
| TuringTest wrote:
| Yes, but these things exist because our brains reason
| this way, not because they are constants of nature. Other
| intelligent beings could have different non-symbolic ways
| of gathering and processing information about nature,
| such as evolving cellular automata adequate to represent
| and solve problems.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| > Heck, we can see it in a lot of human beings who are not
| capable of consistent logical reasoning, and they're not
| even alien.
|
| All humans share this flaw (if it is a flaw). Not just
| some. We all do. It's part of what makes us human--we have
| emotions that for better or worse transcend logic and
| reasoning.
|
| In fact I could maybe argue that emotion is an important
| part of logic and reasoning. Emotion leads to skepticism
| and thinking outside the box. Both traits are needed to
| advance our understanding of the world.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| > In particular, we humans still hotly debate which math is the
| "right" math. Is the axiom of choice "true"? Does it make sense
| to say that it has a truth value? Is such a truth value
| amenable to human discovery? Does PG know the answers to all of
| these questions?
|
| If we did encounter intelligent (and peaceful!) beings out in
| the universe, there would be a set theory gold rush as people
| race to put out papers that such-and-such alien axiom implies
| choice, diamond principle, etc., or the other way around.
|
| Every field of math would have such a gold rush really, on both
| sides, as we discover similarities and differences in
| techniques and formulations. And I bet famous unsolved problems
| on both sides would get solutions if not outright provided by
| the other species, then at least using novel tools from the
| other species.
|
| I can't imagine a more exciting time for math as a whole than
| first contact.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Math has proven its predictive powers in the real world over
| and over. It's quite a stretch for it to be fundamentally
| wrong.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| > In particular, we humans still hotly debate which math is the
| "right" math. Is the axiom of choice "true"? Does it make sense
| to say that it has a truth value?
|
| I would love examples of this. Seems pretty cool to think
| about. I always assumed that "math" would be one of the
| constructs we could always reliably communicate with.
| kmod wrote:
| I really like the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. In
| this case: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/philosophy-
| mathematics/
| patientplatypus wrote:
| I agree. Consider the octopus - each of it's limbs contains
| it's own cortex and so it has in essence 8 separable brains. Or
| ants and bees which contain a hive intelligence. An ant has
| almost no neurons, but the collective number of neurons of an
| ant hive approaches that of a human brain. These are only
| creatures that are on our earth that have radically alternative
| ways of experiencing intelligence. Why would we expect aliens
| to have an intelligence that's at all comparable to humanity
| when even somewhat intelligent animals on our planet don't
| exhibit the same characteristics?
| spookthesunset wrote:
| There is also bats who basically navigate the world by
| pinging sound off things.
|
| Don't forget microscopic creatures like Tardigrades. Their
| world is so small that the air around us acts like water.
| jsbg wrote:
| "The truths of mathematics would be the same, because they're
| true by definition" means that "( _x_ = > _y_ ) AND _x_ " means
| _y_ is true based on the definition of = > and AND. There's no
| "philosophy" behind this.
| lupire wrote:
| Why would aliens have the same definitions? Your AND maybe
| wouldn't exist to them. They could have a more
| statistical/global non-binary/discrete mathematics.
| vecter wrote:
| I assume that PG was talking about "intelligent" aliens,
| which, for the sake of argument, let's say are those
| capable of interstellar communication (building radio
| telescopes and whatnot).
|
| I cannot fathom such a civilization not having discovered
| Boolean logic.
| wizofaus wrote:
| I don't see why it's so absurd to think another alien
| species could develop interstellar communication without
| even being sentient in the way we understand it at all,
| or at least have anything like the level of abstract
| self-awareness that humans do. They may just experience
| something more equivalent to "emotional" reactions when
| attempting to manipulate the natural world to create
| technology in such a way that it guides them towards a
| successful outcome. Indeed comprehending Boolean logic
| seems no more necessary for that than it is for a dog in
| order to understand that when something in front of them
| is person 1 OR person 2, AND that certain sounds are
| coming from that person, they should sit.
| vecter wrote:
| You're right about dogs, but dogs cannot build radio
| telescopes so I don't understand the point. To be capable
| of interstellar communication, you have to be able to
| build machines, and doing so requires a systematic
| engineering culture and understanding of at least basic
| principles.
|
| To put it differently, do you think such an advanced
| civilization would not be able to do something as simple
| as calculus, which would be far more advanced than
| manipulating a basic truth table? They almost certainly
| won't do it in any language that we understand on Earth,
| but they'll be manipulating and reasoning about the same
| concepts.
| wizofaus wrote:
| I honestly don't know, but I do think it's dangerous to
| assume an alien mind capable of interstellar
| communication would "think" sufficiently like human
| brains do for abstract concepts like calculus to be
| necessary or even make sense.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| I don't know for the axiom of choice but I would be surprised
| if 1+1=2 is not universal, whatever way is used to express it
| colordrops wrote:
| Is that "math" though, or just a particular construct in the
| system of math? I could imagine an alien mind that does not
| break things down across integer boundaries, when you
| consider that any labelings and groupings are arbitrary. That
| 1 "hat" you are wearing plus that 1 "hat" your buddy is
| wearing are actually not 1 and 1 but a conglomeration of
| fields/particles in an arbitrary configuration that can be
| torn or shredded or turned into plasma.
| zdragnar wrote:
| At the end of the day, you've still identified that
| particular configuration as a "hat"- a configuration
| forming a discrete unit. Without it, you have no concept of
| object permanence and no basis for comprehending any form
| of logic at all. After all, even within plasma, there are
| discrete units which are configurations of other discrete
| units.
| colordrops wrote:
| But these discrete units in the plasma are also model
| constructs of ours rather than fundamental properties of
| nature. The point is that any discrete lines we draw are
| ours, and not necessarily nature's. Of course we have no
| concept of object permanence without these, because
| concepts and objects are discrete models we create
| ourselves. It's tautological.
| lupire wrote:
| You could construct such a mind in a simulation but I doubt
| one would arise naturally in the physical constraints of
| our universe. Approximate discretization is everywhere.
| simonh wrote:
| I think, like many commentators here, you're taking a very
| narrow technical view of what PG is talking about in what is
| actually a very broad a high level discussion.
|
| Whether or not it's possible to prove a specific postulate in
| set theory is formally true (the axiom of choice, which was
| only formulated in 1904) isn't going to stop aliens counting
| objects and calculating the area of squares. They may not agree
| with us about formalism vs intuitionism, but it seems likely
| they would agree with us about a huge array of practical
| mathematical operations and results. PG is just asking what are
| the areas we would be extremely likely to agree on. Pointing
| out that there might be specific, advanced, highly obscure
| controversies we might disagree on isn't even in contention. Of
| course there are.
| kmod wrote:
| It's turtles all the way down -- we don't know what "truth"
| is, or how one can come to "know" truth (as opposed to just
| believe it). I'm less informed on these topics so I avoided
| them, but I've heard that our notion of truth is intimately
| tied to our experience of physical reality, and it seems easy
| to imagine aliens that have different experiences of reality.
|
| For example, what if aliens are so large that the non-
| euclidian nature of space becomes obvious to them? Perhaps
| they would never come up with euclidian geometry. Maybe they
| would never create the notion of pi. Yes it shows up in other
| areas but you can certainly imagine an alien civilization
| that has a different circumference-to-radius ratio or
| disavows the entire idea of having a constant circumference-
| to-radius ratio.
| simonh wrote:
| We only need to evaluate what is practically useful. At the
| end of the day that's all science does - it's a methodology
| for generating guidelines for what actually works in the
| real world and for which accuracy, or truth, can be
| verified. We call those guidelines scientific 'laws', but
| truth in the absolute sense is less critical than is often
| made out by both proponents and critics of science.
|
| Newton's laws of motion strictly speaking are not true,
| Einstein proved this, but they are incredibly useful as is
| the mathematics we use to formalise them. We know that the
| quantum mechanics and relativity theories we have now and
| not complete, but that's beside the point.
|
| PG is simply pointing out that since aliens, if they exist,
| live in the same real world we do they will discover a lot
| of the same practical results we do, and then goes further
| to suggest they might agree with us about a lot of the less
| strictly provable ones as well. Going "Oh well but this
| obscure question here would still be in contention" is,
| well, somewhat sailing past the point by a little
| smidgenette. It's criticising a claim I don't think it's
| reasonable to think PG is making.
| gopher_space wrote:
| > PG is simply pointing out that since aliens, if they
| exist, live in the same real world we do they will
| discover a lot of the same practical results we do
|
| This isn't even accurate for the different peoples on our
| one planet.
| simonh wrote:
| It really is, that's why the basic mathematical
| principled discovered in India, Mesopotamia and Greece
| have spread and been further developed throughout the
| world. Because they work just as well everywhere. The
| Maya discovered the natural numbers and zero, did
| arithmetic and performed calendrical and astronomical
| calculations. China developed their numerical system
| independently, calculated Pi, performed division, root
| extraction and linear algebra and many original
| techniques. The forms of expression and some techniques
| were unique but maths is maths.
| JackFr wrote:
| All those cultures were running on the same hardware, so
| to speak. Let's see what the squids have to say.
| simonh wrote:
| We'll, there's some evidence octopi and squid can count.
| If so then at least there's some elementary maths in
| common. There's no reason to suppose super intelligent
| cephalopod creatures would have particular difficulty
| with things like natural numbers, for all their different
| experience of the world. Two shrimp plus two shrimp is
| still the same amount of food as one shrimp plus three
| shrimp, no matter how many arms you have.
| kmod wrote:
| Agree to disagree, I suppose. Another comment in this
| thread suggested using the value of pi to demonstrate
| intelligence, but you can imagine alien civilizations
| without the same reverence of pi as we do (if they are
| large enough). I mentioned in another comment that you
| can also imagine small enough aliens not inventing a real
| number line because they do not have the experience that
| everything is infinitely divisible.
|
| I believe our difference is that you are presupposing
| that aliens will have essentially the same experience
| with reality that we do. I agree that if somehow a
| separate human civilization evolved in another galaxy,
| their math would likely look similar to ours. But you can
| imagine aliens that have very different experiences of
| "what actually works in the real world" (due to
| experiencing a different set of physics, such as at a
| different physical scale) and thus come up with different
| math.
| karmakaze wrote:
| Pi is the human joke of the galaxy--they all use Tau.
| simonh wrote:
| We already have very robust descriptions of how the world
| works at every scale, from the planck length all the way
| up to the limits of the observable universe, and in
| extremes of environment from the surface of neutron
| stars, to the roiling virtual particles of empty space.
| We can calculate behaviours in these environments very
| precisely right now. Sure, there are things about these
| environments we still need to learn, but they're not
| utterly intractable or inconceivable to us.
|
| There's a character Rimmer in a comedy series Red Dwarf
| that's always going on about how aliens would be
| unimaginable to use because they're alien and everything
| they do would be... well.. 'alien'. It's poking fun at SF
| that presents aliens as inherently utterly unintelligible
| to us simply by virtue of being alien, but frankly that's
| absurd. Physics doesn't care who or where you are, the
| same rules apply.
| JackFr wrote:
| Your brain is lying to you.
|
| It's not your brain's fault, really. It doesn't know any
| better. Your brain has a way of interpreting the sensory
| perceptions communicated to it. It conflates this with
| 'reality' because it doesn't know anything thing else.
| And because it doesn't have anything else, it also
| declares itself the universal understander. Just like
| there are sounds you cannot hear, and chemicals you
| cannot taste, wavelengths you cannot see -- consider that
| there may be thoughts that you physically cannot think.
|
| No magic and no spooky mysterious stuff. Just that it
| seems quite possible that our brains are limited in their
| ability to construct a representation of the universe,
| and insofar as the representation is true, we have kno
| way of knowing if it's the only true one.
| simonh wrote:
| If you know what Turing complete means, and what a
| universal Turing machine is and can do, and that we are
| examples of such, then you must realise that's not true.
| Provably. Unless you're a dualist of some sort and
| believe thinking is some sort of spiritual woo, in which
| case I can't help you. But I can imagine what that's like
| (see what I did there?).
|
| Seriously, there are sensory experiences I can't have,
| but in principle no thoughts that are intractable to
| analysis and understanding given enough information.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Our brains are technically only "turing complete" if you
| ignore their finite memory. (Edit: which is what is
| commonly meant by turing complete.)
|
| It seems pretty obvious that there are thoughts that are
| too big to fit inside our heads.
| simonh wrote:
| Again this is descending into nitpicking at the extremes.
| PG is not saying everything we understand will be in
| common with aliens, or that our cognitive match with them
| will be 1 to 1, just that there is likely to be overlap.
| That given the universality of human cognition, there is
| likely to be thoughts we can mutually appreciate. I am
| not claiming that human brains are capable of all thought
| possible to aliens, only that there will be common
| ground. That's all. It's a very minimal claim.
| msla wrote:
| OK, then walk out the window of my old apartment.
|
| I see it as being on the third floor, but that's only my
| brain lying to me, right?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| You've already presupposed that experimenting across all
| those scales is somehow an integral (necessary?) part of
| being the kind of life that we might encounter.
|
| That could be possible, but I don't think that we can
| assume that.
| TuringTest wrote:
| Yes, but the point I think is that the rules of symbolic
| reasoning are not like the rules of physics; formal
| systems have an arbitrary shape, so exploring the
| universe from a different starting point could yield a
| completely different method of representing it and
| processing information about it. And such methods needs
| not be compatible with our understanding of math.
| mistermann wrote:
| > We only need to evaluate what is practically useful.
|
| As simple as this may seem, a few problematic points:
|
| - who decides who gets included in "we"?
|
| - who decides what "evaluate" is composed of?
|
| - who decides what is practical, and useful?
|
| - there is an implicit dimension of Time: for example,
| many things were initially categorized as useful, but
| then it can turn out to be a lot more complicated
| (Thalidomide, fossil fuels, _arguably_ democracy &
| journalism (at least _as they are practised_ , which
| seems to be fairly immutable))
|
| Of course, these issues can be easily dismissed
| ("pedantic!"), but that doesn't make them go away.
|
| > At the end of the day that's all science does - it's a
| methodology for generating guidelines for what actually
| works in the real world and for which accuracy, or truth,
| can be verified. We call those guidelines scientific
| 'laws', but truth in the absolute sense is less critical
| than is often made out by both proponents and critics of
| science.
|
| Another problem we have is _language_ (and various other
| things, semantics, semiotics, etc) - in this example, a
| reader could easily take away a few _not necessarily_
| correct beliefs from the way you 've worded it:
|
| - _it could be (very poorly) interpreted_ to mean science
| does _only_ this (and nothing else)
|
| - _it could be interpreted_ to mean _science alone_ does
| this
|
| - _it could be interpreted_ to mean that the output of
| science (what actually works in the real world) _is
| comprehensive_ , as in "all that works has been
| discovered by science - and if it isn't, science would
| (or will) find it"
|
| - _it could be interpreted_ to mean that science alone is
| able to produce accuracy, truth, and verification
|
| - _it could be interpreted_ to mean (or, a person may
| just not consider) that "what works" is not necessarily
| a constant over time (see: Thalidomide, fossil fuels)
|
| To be clear, I'm not saying you're asserting these
| things, I'm just pointing out that language is extremely
| ambiguous and can be misleading.
| lupire wrote:
| > imagine an alien civilization that has a different
| circumference-to-radius ratio
|
| Aliens still live in our Universe with our physics. Are
| these aliens bigger than the solar system?
|
| Maybe a different universe with different parameters could
| look m athematically different in major ways.
| kmod wrote:
| Again, talking a bit outside my comfort zone, but I
| believe our universe's physics say that circles only have
| a fixed circumference-to-radius ratio at "small"
| (astronomically) scales. At large enough scales space is
| curved and the ratio begins to change.
|
| In a similar way, a set of different physics would apply
| to small enough aliens that are principally governed by
| quantum mechanics. They might never come up with the real
| numbers because they do not believe that quantities are
| dense.
|
| We could think of more examples -- aliens who typically
| move at speeds close to the speed of light would have
| very different conceptions of time, etc.
| simonh wrote:
| Our best estimate for the topology of the universe at the
| largest scale is that it is 'flat'. If it has curvature,
| it's below the margin of error we are able to measure it
| at. The only thing we know that can curve space
| significantly is gravity, but it would take truly
| stupendously strong gravity fields to significantly
| change basic results from classical geometry, such as
| those close to the event horizon of a black hole. Even
| then we can calculate it accurately nowadays so our
| results would still correspond to theirs even in those
| circumstances.
| msla wrote:
| If we aren't talking about the same things, we wouldn't
| be talking about the same things.
|
| Part of establishing communication is ensuring we're
| talking about the same things.
|
| Therefore, once we've established communication, we'd be
| talking about the same things, such as what a flat plane
| is.
|
| If you think humans are the only species capable of
| comprehending Euclidean geometry, say so, and defend the
| assertion.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| > It's turtles all the way down -- we don't know what
| "truth" is, or how one can come to "know" truth
|
| > I've heard that our notion of truth is intimately tied to
| our experience of physical reality
|
| It's been thousands of years since the first retorsion
| arguments were recorded, and yet I still see obviously
| self-refuting or self-undermining claims being made and
| quite often. Like these.
| waffletower wrote:
| Squares do not exist outside of abstract axioms. Solids
| projected from them share the same status. A mason making a
| tile forces reality to approximate the concept. Even
| crystalline structures which suggest them are too
| approximate. Why is a square implicit to an alien?
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| Not that I agree with the argument, but this is relevant:
|
| https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-aga...
| dooglius wrote:
| This seems like an uncharitable take, the set of axioms and
| definitions used doesn't really fall under "mathematical
| truths", it's about agreement on what is implied by a given set
| of axioms. Even on Earth many people work in alternatives to
| ZFC and generally don't really disagree about what is "true".
| TuringTest wrote:
| Yet "what is implied by a given set of axioms" is the most
| common definition of "what's true" in mathematics. Therefore,
| an alien culture using completely different axioms and rules
| could arrive to an extremely _alien_ math.
|
| There _might_ be some parts of it that are translatable to
| our own systems, but there 's no guarantee that both systems
| will be ultimately compatible.
| nine_k wrote:
| Math is a formal game. You can define vastly varied algebraic
| structures, and, as long as they are internally consistent, we
| could consider them "mathematical".
|
| But the physical reality makes some structures more important
| in practice. Hence natural numbers, or real numbers, or complex
| numbers stand out among the sea of possible group structures.
|
| Chances are very high that aliens live in the universe with the
| same laws of physics, which make the same, or isomorphic,
| structures important for them, and thus informing the
| development of their mathematics.
|
| But this is not a given, of course; there can potentially be
| different ways to describe physical reality which are
| comparably successful, but which grow from entirely different
| foundations, are internally consistent, and otherwise work like
| our mathematics, but are not connected to it (yet).
|
| Even more funny is that Godel's incompleteness theorem
| guarantees that "our" (currently developed) mathematics contain
| true statements which cannot be proven either true or false
| within the set of axioms which produce our mathematics. One can
| imagine that these true statements can be used to successfully
| describe important aspects of physical reality and were
| discovered by aliens for this purpose, while remaining
| incomprehensible for us. (But this is softer sci-fi stuff, of
| course.)
| pluijzer wrote:
| > But this is not a given, of course; there can potentially
| be different ways to describe physical reality which are
| comparably successful, but which grow from entirely different
| foundations, are internally consistent, and otherwise work
| like our mathematics, but are not connected to it (yet).
|
| Are you or anybody else aware of any other way to describe
| physical reality? Maybe some culture took a different path.
| That would be very interesting. It seems almost impossible to
| imagine one for me though.
| nine_k wrote:
| Ted Chiang's short novel "Story of Your Life" [0], later
| turned into the movie "Arrival", describes an alien culture
| which uses variational calculus [1] as the normal way to
| describe physics, that is, their equations are mostly about
| finding functions with extrema of certain kind, not just
| derivatives (as are the normal PDUs we use in physics). The
| idea is that "our" equations mostly deal with the arrow of
| time and thus use terms like dx/dt extensively, while
| "their" equations are about the entire configuration of
| something in spacetime, not singling out the time
| dimension.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Your_Life
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_of_variations
| pluijzer wrote:
| Thank for for the references that is really fascinating.
| theonemind wrote:
| > Math is a formal game
|
| > Even more funny is that Godel's incompleteness theorem
| guarantees that "our" (currently developed) mathematics
| contain true statements which cannot be proven either true or
| false within the set of axioms which produce our mathematics
|
| These two statements together suggest that math isn't
| actually a formal game, but that formal methods offer an
| useful method for dealing with it.
| benlivengood wrote:
| I'd expect aliens to have discovered their equivalent of the
| Church-Turing thesis, Tarski's externality of truth, Godel's
| incompleteness theorems, etc. That would give them a strong
| ability to model our mathematics within their own and see its
| computational structure and begin finding correspondences to
| theirs. Similarly, we could begin modeling their conception of
| mathematics in a similar way and as soon as we both have
| arrived at a morphism between our representation and theirs of
| some particular theorem we could grow our knowledge and
| understanding of the other.
|
| The key is that mathematics flows from logic and logic flows
| from computation and computation is universal.
| solveit wrote:
| > Is the axiom of choice "true"? Does it make sense to say that
| it has a truth value? Is such a truth value amenable to human
| discovery?
|
| I imagine PG would say that these are not purely mathematical
| questions, but rather metamathematical questions. Theorems
| remain theorems regardless of whether the axiom of choice is
| "true", although one may contend that theorems assuming that
| the AOC is false (or true) are vacuous. Aliens would surely
| agree with us on statements of the form "working in first-order
| logic (or whatever) formalized in XXX way, assuming axioms YYY
| and ZZZ, we may prove that...".
| witherk wrote:
| Math isn't choosing which axioms to use, is finding the
| consequences of a given set.
| mcqueenjordan wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
|
| Or, infinitely caveating all of your writing is tedious and
| makes it less interesting to read. It's more respectful to your
| readers to assume they understand this and will apply the
| principle of charity.
| golemotron wrote:
| To be fair, someone writes this type of comment every time he
| posts. It's not a unique take. It falls into the "well studied"
| category you mention.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| No shade to you personally, but I really dislike this frame of
| thought.
|
| There are mountains and mountains of literature about a great
| deal of things, no one human can be expected to be aware of
| them all.
|
| Since that is obviously true, the lack of awareness about a
| single topic isn't "ignorance" - it's not like PG studiously
| ignored all of that literature. More likely he just never came
| across it, so the more apt word is "unaware" rather than
| "ignorant".
|
| To criticize someone merely for pondering about a subject they
| aren't well-versed in is hostile gatekeeping. I think those who
| are educated in the relevant subject would do well to be more
| welcoming and informative to newcomers.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| > the lack of awareness about a single topic isn't
| "ignorance"
|
| Since everybody is nitpicking here, I'll add that this is
| indeed ignorance. We're know what we know, and are ignorant
| of what we don't. Being ignorant by itself shouldn't be
| viewed as a flaw, but an inevitable state of our limited
| capacity to learn. The real flaw is being proud of staying
| willfully ignorant.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| I agree with what you're saying, but practically speaking,
| using the word "ignorant" is universally interpreted as a
| negative term.
| mechanical_bear wrote:
| It is not universally interpreted as negative. I have
| often said in conversation; "Please explain [x] to me, as
| I'm ignorant as to how that fits in/works/etc." I
| certainly don't say it to demean myself.
| mechanical_bear wrote:
| Ignorant is unaware. I'm sure there are loads of things that
| you have ignorance of, such as the meaning of Ignorance:
|
| lacking knowledge, information, or awareness about a
| particular thing: "they were ignorant of astronomy"
| apeace wrote:
| That's true, but this essay is written with an authoritative
| voice, not a pondering one. PG tends to write as if he is
| teaching his audience something profound. So I think it's
| fair to call out when he is wrong or misguided.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| This might just be a subjective thing then. My impression
| was that he was simply following a casual train of thought.
|
| I agree with the other comment that my words "hostile
| gatekeeping" were too strong. I just get irritated with
| philosophers specifically, because philosophy itself is a
| normal human experience. Everyone finds themselves thinking
| about things that veer into philosophical subjects. To even
| criticize people for doing so without reading the
| professional literature is just so annoying to me.
| missingrib wrote:
| I think philosophers get a bit annoyed about this because
| they've spent literal years and years thinking about
| something that might be quite esoteric/tricky, and then
| someone comes along and just assumes the answer as if
| there hasn't been decades of discourse about this exact
| thing.
|
| The subtext in your comment is that everyone does
| philosophy all the time, and there's no difference
| between professional and amateur philosophers.
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| > then someone comes along and just assumes the answer as
| if there hasn't been decades of discourse about this
| exact thing.
|
| I'd think that would present itself as a rather pleasant
| opportunity for any bypassing philosopher to stop and
| teach them about the "decades of discourse" on it rather
| than being annoyed?
| deltasevennine wrote:
| True. But PG's authoritative status is weakened due to his
| lack of awareness no matter how you change the wording. This
| entire essay is weaker because of it as my opinion about his
| knowledge.
|
| >To criticize someone merely for pondering about a subject
| they aren't well-versed in is hostile gatekeeping.
|
| The words "hostile gatekeeping" makes me classify your
| statement as accusatory and an actual attack. The Op's
| statements are just criticism. Harsh but valid, it certainly
| isn't hostile gatekeeping. In fact, PG is the gatekeeper
| here. He owns the site.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| Yeah my words were too strong, I'll own that. I didn't mean
| to come across so aggressive.
|
| Another way to phrase it: if someone were to follow a
| thought experiment in a another subject like biology or
| geology, the response from the educated community would be
| different. I've seen it on here before. The response is
| something akin to "hey yep that's an interesting thought.
| It's been done before, here are some links if you're
| interested in reading further".
|
| I just tend to see a very different (much more critical)
| response from people in philosophy, often with overtones of
| condescension and smugness. Not saying OP was guilty of
| that, just that I mistakenly responded as if they did.
| jondeval wrote:
| I really liked this essay. It poses some interesting questions,
| but it's short and it doesn't try to do too much.
|
| There is overlap between pg's ideas and what in the classical
| tradition is called Natural Law Theory. PG may or may not be
| interested in drawing out the connection, but since he references
| Aristotle I have to believe he is at least aware of a touch
| point.
|
| To give a distilled definition, Natural Law Theory is the
| application of the laws of nature to rational creatures.
|
| In the context in which NLT developed, the only free rational
| creature was the human being. But both AI development, and
| concepts from evolution through natural selection, potentially
| allow us to apply aspects of the theory to different rational
| agents.
| bglazer wrote:
| One of the bitter lessons I've learned is that when I think of
| something, I should always (always!) do a couple searches to see
| if anyone else has thought of it, before I commit to writing down
| my thoughts as novel or authoritative.
|
| Someone (typically at Bell Labs in like 1973) has nearly always
| already had my thought, but then explored it in much richer,
| finer detail than I have. It's disappointing to learn I'm not an
| unmatched genius, but much more illuminating to read and think
| about how others have considered similar issues.
|
| I don't fault Paul for not doing this, it happens to everyone,
| and I imagine he's quite busy. I do fault all the people who read
| this draft and didn't do this very easy exercise for him. I think
| it reflects a undue deference towards frankly uninformed and
| pretty basic observations.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| An alien truth that we can derive a lot of alien truth from is
| that life forms all prefer order rather than chaos. Having life
| is by itself is a very orderly process in relation to chaos,
| which implicitly opposes it.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| one derivative would be discipline vs procrastinating, aliens
| won't get far if they didn't have any discipline. Heck even
| single cell organisms are highly single track disciplined.
| li4ick wrote:
| Yeah, that first paragraph is completely wrong if you think about
| the universe in terms of computation...
| hangaard wrote:
| We'd also share algorithms. Including evolution.
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| This is a side topic, but does anyone else have problems with the
| RSS feed for pg's essays? http://paulgraham.com/rss.html I
| regularly find every essay appearing together in my reader, as
| though they were all new again.
|
| Apparently the feed was created by Aaron Swartz himself, so I
| wouldn't think there would be any errors there. But it looks like
| it's hosted via Aaron's own site, so perhaps there's some problem
| caused by it not being maintained?
| jtwebman wrote:
| So very human of us to think our truths are some other beings
| truths. Maybe they proved math isn't true? Maybe they don't think
| in any way like we do.
| adamc wrote:
| "The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy" covers this, and a lot
| more: https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Zoologists-Guide-to-the-
| Galax...
| amelius wrote:
| Hopefully they don't share the belief with us that there must be
| one species conquering them all.
| boh wrote:
| My dog is an intelligent being and he doesn't share our affinity
| for math. We have to acknowledge that our concept of intelligence
| is human-centric. What we interpret as knowledge is based on our
| specific limitations and perceptions. We don't know what
| intelligence is and won't necessarily know it when we see it.
| yetihehe wrote:
| My dog is pretty dissatisfied when I show him 3 treats and then
| give him 2, so he has uses for maths, but he can no longer
| multiply.
| swader999 wrote:
| Why does my dog growl at my other dog when it tries to eat it's
| food? It seems to understand subtraction at a basic level.
| swalsh wrote:
| Your dog is unlikely to visit other planets searching for other
| intelligent life
| myshpa wrote:
| Let's hope then that aliens coming here will be vegan.
|
| We're not intelligent enough yet not to harm others, or to go
| to other star systems, or even other galaxies. Would we be
| considered intelligent, or a source of protein?
| carapace wrote:
| Has your dog ever jumped somewhere and landed where he intended
| to? Has he ever caught a ball or frisbee that you've thrown?
|
| If so, then he understands basic calculus.
|
| He can't write the equations, but he can solve them.
| dandanua wrote:
| Many "successful" humans don't know a lot of math or physics
| either. It seems you only need to know how to subtract and
| divide.
| [deleted]
| ncmncm wrote:
| gnramires wrote:
| I personally believe we should also approach ethics from an Alien
| Truth perspective -- there's a lot of ethics and how we live our
| lives that's specific to our human being species, but we should
| expect the principles of human life to be compatible with more
| general principles, of which ours would be a special case. This
| really allows having a clearer global picture of ethics, and
| striving towards progress in ethics and human existence.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| >For example, I think we'd share the principle that a controlled
| experiment testing some hypothesis entitles us to have
| proportionally increased belief in it.
|
| vs
|
| >I wouldn't want to bet that all intelligent beings would
| understand the concept of justice
|
| It would be unjust if a technologically advanced society murdered
| all its scientists for heresy during a religious coup, but Paul
| is unwilling to bet that all alien societies understand justice.
| Why the belief in science then? Our own planet has theocracies
| and a President of the supposed #1 country has updated scientific
| hurricane reports with a sharpie.
|
| Plenty of science fiction authors have speculated meeting
| theocratic aliens. Peter Hamilton's Salvation comes to mind (you
| get where that series is going from the title).
| skybrian wrote:
| An assumption that this essay buys into is that "universal"
| truths are somehow higher-status and more worthy of study. How
| people come up with reasonable fixes to local messes doesn't get
| enough attention.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| If I had to lay money on it, I'd be willing to favor the position
| that aliens we're talking to via radio have the concept of
| electrons, and metals, and the number forty-seven.
|
| The really esoteric branches of mathematics, I could see huge
| variances. Materials sciences would vary widely. But the basic
| high school stuff? I'd lay odds on it.
| mberning wrote:
| I didn't realize that the concept of absolute or universal truths
| was so boring that it needed an "ancient aliens" style rebrand.
| znpy wrote:
| What did you expect from the idol of the startup scene?
| felipeccastro wrote:
| Perhaps it's not that they are boring, but fearful. I can't
| recall a single time I mentioned these words in a conversation
| that weren't abruptly interrupted with "there is no absolute
| truth!". If the rebranding helps us calm down and think about
| it without fear, it might be worth it.
| koyanisqatsi wrote:
| Michael Levin has an interesting perspective on this. The idea is
| that biology and evolution are processes that reveal some
| inherent and latent universal structures and so they would be the
| same across all life in the universe even if such life was not
| carbon based. But at this level of generality it gets pretty
| abstract and the definition of truth essentially becomes some
| kind of structural similarity in form and function.
| bkishan wrote:
| Looks like PG was inspired by reading Project Hail Mary, and
| decided to be philosophical about it :)
| [deleted]
| mikkergp wrote:
| I appreciate what he is saying, but this also feels like the
| speech given at the beginning of a sci-fi/horror movie where you
| realize you're completely wrong.
| asdff wrote:
| Why do people assume alien life would be intelligent? Intelligent
| life is extremely rare on earth and has only occured for a brief
| moment in its history due to highly specific environmental
| scenarios at the time as well has historical events. If we didn't
| get that meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs, mammals would
| probably still be shrew like creatures as they were for millions
| of years until mass extinction exposed new ecological niches. The
| great oxygenation event could have easily killed off all life on
| earth too. Most of the biomass on earth today comes from plants,
| famously unintelligent and sessile, commonly using strategies
| that favor spawning thousands of offspring that have random
| mutations, with a few who go on to survive in an ecological
| niche.
|
| If we use our own earth as a model, alien life is far more likely
| to be unintelligent. Its a big human bias to assume that if there
| were intelligent life out there, it would even think like human
| life, so our abstractions such as mathmatics and physics will
| probably look entirely different when a completely different mind
| formed from a different evolutionary trajectory encounters
| natural phenomenon and attempts to make truths. Even with our own
| species it took us millions of years to establish our current
| truths about what we consider true. This begs the question, if in
| millions of years we will consider our current abstractions that
| interpret physical laws of the universe to be just as worthless
| as past interpretations for these same physical laws that we used
| as truths in centuries previous.
| blueprint wrote:
| that's the definition of truth. all truths are fixed.
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| lol tarski
| blueprint wrote:
| "[when] the inferior scholar hears of Dao, he greatly
| ridicules it" -laotzu
| benevol wrote:
| > If there were intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe
|
| Wow some people still think we're alone. Wow. Just, wow.
| srvmshr wrote:
| It makes me slightly sad that a well-read tech icon like PG
| dabble in writing things which are not only beyond his creative
| expertise, but also speculative, imaginative & open to wide
| variety of interpretation, spirituality including.
|
| Aliens may exist as very intelligent species or maybe dumb
| bacteria. We are discovering the laws of nature ourselves. We
| don't know enough of the laws of nature, despite the vast strides
| we have made in the last century. Maybe there are universal
| truths & representations, like the GUT which all life forms may
| eventually discover in their notation/formalism. Or maybe the
| laws of physics will have different implications in different
| corners of universe or multiverses, and we don't know those too
| with any degree of certainty.
|
| Sufficiently long timelines of existence doesn't guarantee
| intelligence of species. Dinosaurs existed for about 140 million
| year & more, whereas we have stepped on moon in less than 25000
| years of evolution. These things are entirely uncharted
| territory, left best to astronomers who discover life form or
| make any contact one day
| dropit_sphere wrote:
| lol holy shit you guys are a rough crowd
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Perhaps a little off topic, but I have thought about this a bit:
| the type of consciousness and ways of acting in physical reality
| would probably be very different for digital vs. biology-based
| life. As strangely different alien biological life might be, true
| AI will be stranger, unless it is designed and evolves to emulate
| us in some sense.
|
| I am reading the sci-fi book The Sea of Rust right now, that
| takes place on earth after AI's have finally killed the last
| humans. In this fictional work, AIs take on human traits and I
| don't find that "believable" even for sci-fi.
| songeater wrote:
| I disagree. "AI" even if it were to exist independently of
| humans or other pre-existing life still needs to process and
| dissipate energy in order to perpetuate itself... ie it needs
| to be "life" first. Intelligence requires the processing of
| information, and the processing of information requires energy.
|
| For example, even if silicon-based AI replaced humans on earth,
| it would eventually [0] need to find a way to power itself /
| continue itself. Ultimately, it would have to revert to solving
| the same "problem of life"... how do we transform
| energy/entropy available in the environment into something that
| "perpetuates the system." When that happens, this AI will
| itself become subject to the forces of natural-selection, and -
| over a long enough period of time - naturally-selected traits
| will be re-aquired (even if such traits were "lost" during a
| human-to-AI hand-over).
|
| [0] Yes, of course, there could be a very large period of time
| during which currently constructed energy infrastructure
| continues on... and this period could be measured in
| hundreds/thousands of years... very long in terms of human
| lifespans, but not in geological terms.
| gpvos wrote:
| Indeed. Intelligent alien life is likely to have evolved out of
| other forms of life, so concepts as competition, survival,
| cooperation, are likely to be innate somehow (not necessarily
| in a conscious way). AI does not need to share that basis at
| all.
| akomtu wrote:
| In the ancient Greece there was a tradition of studying math. To
| the outsiders it appeared as if a bunch of dudes in white robes
| studied triangles, but the inner circle studied the absolute
| truths that happened to be represented well by geometry. The
| Pythagora's triangle wasn't just a shallow numeric relationship
| to them, they saw the inner truth behind it.
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| These threads seem to invite lots of comments of the form
| "[I|someone I know of|both] [am|is|are] smarter than PG for xyz
| reasons". These can be interesting to read if you want to get
| into the nitty gritty.
|
| But they don't often seem to engage with the overall point. In
| this case, I think that point is that there are probably local
| truths and universal truths, and wouldn't it be neat to focus on
| the universal ones, or figure out which ones are only locally
| true, and why? But who knows, that's just my interpretation.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Agreed. One of pg's examples was "If there are aliens, they'd
| probably discover that a stool with three legs is the most
| stable." I'm surprised he didn't include it in this essay.
| asdff wrote:
| What was the reason a three legged stool is the best? Doesn't
| that depend on your environment? E.g. the amount of gravity,
| perhaps wind, or the quality of materials available to
| construct a stool?
| webstrand wrote:
| Three points make a plane, a fourth point is redundant.
| Three equidistant stool legs are stable on any surface
| regardless of flatness, but four equidistant stool legs
| need to be aligned correctly with a non-flat surface to be
| stable.
| asdff wrote:
| If you live on a world where your wood is more like laffy
| taffy or whatever, maybe the stool buckles when it only
| has three legs.
| motohagiography wrote:
| The beauty of thinking about other civilizations is it provides a
| due balance for materialist views, where instead of a universal
| truth, the question becomes what values and principles would be
| sufficient for us to co-exist with more (and less) advanced
| beings without respective reduction to foodstuffs, pets, or
| slavery.
|
| To a more advanced civilization, we are chimpanzees who are both
| outwardly intelligent, but also tremendously dangerous, and so on
| what basis could they establish trust with us, or could we
| establish trust with a civilization of others? As Graham notes,
| math is one indicator that we are capable of apprehending the
| universe around us, but given the infinity of life and its
| necessary physical conditions of beginning and ending, and
| evolving in aggregate using tools and principles, it's not
| sufficient. Maybe one way to ensure trust is to share DNA, so
| that we become each other and we are all "us" - or, perhaps the
| Girardian mimetic concept generalizes such that it is better to
| preserve our differences so that we are not competitors for the
| same resources, and so that we can co-exist with an obvious other
| but without an existential threat or intrinsic power struggles.
|
| Are there existing moral or philosophical systems that are suited
| to this problem? Probably, I'm not a religious scholar, but the
| golden thread that links them seems pretty consistent in
| attempting to derive alignment to an external truth. The proto-
| Christian tribe of Essenes, from whom John the Baptist originates
| and who was the one who baptized Jesus into what became
| Christianity (solving a weird bootstrapping problem, imo)
| espoused the values that became the first Church, so there is a
| historiographical way of looking at moral systems instead of as
| dogma. Outside religion, in the search for these values that
| would be suitable for a community of inhabitants, I've come to
| suspect this is what freemasonry is about, and while not about
| aliens, I was impressed by their allegorical emphasis on tools
| instead of doctrine as the landmarks for discovery.
|
| The essential question to me is, once you have accepted there is
| an other that is greater, or a place that is elsewhere, does it
| matter whether it's a dude with a beard, multi-armed flying blue
| people, or an ineffable oneness? That there is a concievable
| elsewhere beyond your current limits, there must therefore be
| some point or idea to align and orient yourself to so as to be
| able to relate to the other beings who have discovered the same
| point outside our current perspective.
|
| It's all very meta, but it implies a logical and even rational
| case for some guidance or alignment to this otherness to navigate
| our present, and that isn't material. The value of the idea of an
| "alien" truth is it is a means to reconcile secular rational
| thinking and moralism with universal, essential, or spiritual
| values, and that could be a very useful tool.
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