Ask HN: What do you think is all this? (this reality, existence, space-time, us)

The first paragraph of Nabokov’s memoir Speak, Memory.

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged--the same house, the same people--and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.”

I suspect nearly all of physics is some sort of emergent behavior from.. basically nothing. Like that if you could push it hard enough - if we had the tools - you could push it back to set theory, a multiverse of all self-consistent rules or some fundamental property of information.

But that doesn't explain qualia. I see orange on this screen, damnit. Sure, I know it's light interacting with rhodopsin, depolarizing neurons in my retina, relayed to the visual cortex and assigned to a color wheel of cortical columns.. but it looks orange. No amount of physics will ever explain that to my satisfaction. You all could be philosophical zombies for all I know - I don't know for a fact that any of you are subjectively experiencing color, maybe it's just me. But I know I do, and since physics relies on objective measurements that's a dead end.

But then how do I reconcile having written the above, convinced of my subjective experience, if my neural processes can be fully emulated with physics? That requires some sort of binding. But we understand physics at the scale of the brain very well, and there just isn't any place for that binding to look. And the duplicating teleporter thought experiment causes major issues too.

Anyway, lacking any explanation for color or other qualia, and unable to resolve this paradox, I've chosen to believe qualia are external to physical reality in some way, and mine might last beyond death. Maybe a soul. Hopefully.

I don’t know. However, I exist, and presumably you do too.

There was a time when we didn’t exist, then suddenly - life.

Should that happen again, I should hope that the experience is peaceful (as much so as possible).

And it is for this reason that we should treat every living (and potentially non living) being with kindness and consideration. A bug, a dog, a plant, a fellow human.

We don’t know what’s next, if anything. But it’s true that we came into being in a world not of our choosing. If that happens again, I hope it isn’t a misery.

Life didn’t have to be this good. The world we inhibit didn’t have to be so ordered. It could have resembled an extensive misery.

We must treat all beings who move in this realm as we would like ourselves to be treated moving through another.

I’m somewhat hopeful that even if something like a “hell” exists, so does this reality. And while it’s not perfect, there is always hope that while existence in one realm may end, we may move to a more tranquil one.

My preference would be that we die and nothing. Like a deep, dreamless sleep. But the fact we have emerged with the gift of experience from seemingly nothing, doesn’t bode well for a continuation of nothingness.

What is the meaning of life? Well unfortunately this one has to be tremendously mundane. Single Cell life still have a meaning. The meaning of life has to be very simple.

Is there a heaven? This is pretty exciting.

I am sure you have seen the carl sagan's probabilities of alien life. If it the chance of another alien is 1 in a trillion. There's a trillion trillion trillion stars. So there's trillions of different aliens all over the universe.

Now of those trillions of trillions of aliens. What's the probability 1 of them has been around for billions of years. They are tremendously advanced in technology and invented a universe scale machine to create a heaven for everyone?

The rules would have to be pretty simple and universal.

The Golden Rule: Treat Others the Way You Want to Be Treated

There would also be a mechanism to inform other aliens such a system exists. Meditation/Jahnas, near-death experiences, etc.

The buddha enlightened, Jesus as well, amongst others. Imagine what you discover there's aliens(angels) running a heaven. Then you're back on Earth. How do you explain it? Scifi wont be a thing for millennia. You rationalize it to explain to others the best you can. Thus religion is created.

I don't know. And these days I'm making a deliberate choice to focus my attention on areas where I know I can make a difference. Less frustration that way.

We're in an infinite stack of simulations is what I like to think. Now we're unveiling quantum mechanics it seems the rules are what you would find in an game, things act different when obeserved, like it's an optimisation.

Uncertainty is added in the mix just so stuff would evolve and change, to make the simulation worthwhile.

I think we're in an infinite stack because, if our universe or experience is in fact simulated, and we anticipate that with enough energy and resources we too could simulate a full-fledged universe (which I think is likely). Then the odds of our parent universe also being a simulation are basically 100%, and their parent would also be simulated and so on.

Take no man's sky, I mean sure it's orders of magnitude simpler than an actual universe, but it's an 18 Quintillion planet universe simulation, and when you land on a planet there's animals, plants, buildings. All of it originated from a seed with an algorithm that will fill in the details based on the seed.

Infinities stretch in every direction, and the bottom line is that it's all really irrelavant! I try not to think of it too much, focus on what you enjoy and assume this is the only live you will live, get out of your comfort zone.

I think we'll never know because the way our brains are wired. If you ask yourself "what's the origin of reality", there are 2 kinds of answer:

1. Our reality has been created by someone or something. This could be God, or some civilization that lives in an upper reality (so we are being simulated), it could be randomness, anything. The point here is: something started the fire.

2. It has always existed. No beginning, no end.

Now, answer 2 is something we (humans) can't grasp; our brains can't think of something that has existed forever. Imagine no beginning at all... that's hard to grasp (if not impossible), I think.

Answer 1 is just a "local" answer. The immediate follow-up question would be: "so who created our creators?". And again, the same two answers apply. At the end of the day, answer 2 seems the only answer I can imagine (because answer 1 just starts a loop of questions/answers that is never stopped).

Edit: I'm not talking here about the origin of our universe. That can be discovered just fine. I'm talking about reality as in: the reality of everything.

I try not to take the following thoughts too seriously because ultimately I'm living this life. Also, I'm making some huge assumptions. With that said.

Life isn't real. It's real right now, but only for the time you're alive.

Before you were born you didn't exist, then you were born. Now you exist and start gaining memories. When we go to sleep all of that is gone. In that sense I have the hunch that to some extent sleep simulates what it's like to be dead. In other words, there will be nothing. Going from there to infer what death is like (a huge assumption), I come to the conclusion that all of what you did is forgotten by you. In fact, you will likely not experience anything anymore.

If that's true then it's basically like you haven't lived at all. In other words, life isn't real.

It's a thought I play with, mostly the questions it raises. Sometimes I play with different assumptions. It's a fun pastime, not something to take seriously IMO.

I found asian philosophies very interesting in this regard. There is an interesting Hindu philosophy about 4 states - awake, sleep, dream and turiya. In below video, lecturer explained them very beautifully.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGKFTUuJppU

Also you might enjoy Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid where author tried to explain self-referential systems.

If you pick up any interest in asian philosophies, try https://www.amazon.com/Who-Am-Sri-Ramana-Maharshi/dp/1537599... and https://www.amazon.com/I-Am-That-Nisargadatta-Maharaj/dp/089...

Whatever it is, it's what we can experience, and is therefore real by any definition that we can conceive of. There may be something else that doesn't consider it real, but we can't perceive that, so it can't matter to us.

There are various "World Views". Amongst these, i have found the models in "Hinduism" more self-contained and all-encompassing than others. Specifically i choose to subscribe to the "Model" given by Samkhya Philosophy (no God required).

Wikipedia has a good overview - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samkhya

I don’t know, and I wish more people were honest about admitting that.

Whatever is going on, we’re in it together.

“We’re all just walking each other home.” Ram Dass

If you play the loterry for an infinite amount of time, eventually you're going to guess the winning numbers. I think it's the same thing with us. Our existence is just a product of an infinite lottery on multiple levels. We probably needed an unimaginable amount of planets "brewing" in all corners of the universe for an unimaginable amount of time until a planet succeeded in making and supporting sentient life. But, the environment in which planets can form and be stable is also not given. Maybe it took billions of "generations" of universes until this one appeared. I imagine there is also something more fundamental behind the universe(s), and it probably also had to go through a ton of generations until it generated the concepts of space and time.

To sum up, I think we are nothing more than weird temporarily stable regions dependent upon other temporarily stable regions in the sea of white noise.

The late Derek Parfit explores numerous answers to these questions in his paper “Why Anything? Why This?”[1]. It’s hard to give a quick summary of the paper, but basically a lot of different views are considered—theism, atheism, brute fact view, etc.—and in the end Parfit seems to suggest that the existence of the universe would be somehow non-coincidental if one appeals to simplicity in ruling out or deciding between competing explanations.

[1] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Why-Anything-Why-This-...

Maybe.. We are an Eternal Nothing, dreaming endless lives into being with Will and Imagination. When we're born, we forgot where we come from, and enter into a kind of solipsistic bubble of experience. When we die, we wake up and remember that we're an Infinite All.

But if it's nothing to begin with, how can there be imagination? It doesn't seem logical, but it may be that this "nothing" is not how we think of it, it's empty but it's the raw material of existence with potential to become anything, kind of like "mind".

Well, after thinking about it many time times.. I don't feel comfortable saying I can "believe" any possible theory. I think as of right now, there is no really good answer, to me at least. It is definitely freaky, in a way, to think about though.

Obviously there are things we can measure about existence, but there are still lots of unknowns. And it's very human I think to ask "why?" but I don't know if that's a question with an answer or if it has one that it would even be a satisfying answer.

"... it's just you against your tattered libido, the bank and the mortician forever, man. And it wouldn't be luck if you could get out of life alive."

We are one of an infinite collection of possible states of existence. It‘s super pointless and super scary as there are infinite worlds where we are suffering infinite pain literally forever.

Why isn‘t there just nothing? We will never know I suppose, but there are probably an infinite amount of worlds where we do know.

it's a stack, personally I don't go farther than posting a job ad listing javascript frameworks, but presumably if you go down in the stack far enough there is at some point actual food and metabolic processes involved. I wouldn't know I've never gotten that far.

Do you code? Imagine writing a sentient program and it asks itself the same question.

god is funny, he doesn't spare energy to prove he exist for those who believe in him, but he do the same to prove that universe follow physics law and so he is useless. So is ratatouille.

That's what scientists are trying to figure out. We have more and more answers, but also more questions. I'm glad we have the answers that we do, even if incomplete.

The absurd dream of a sentient universe scale alien consciousness or a really bad series of jokes.

That you are overthinking. Take a deep breath. Yes, you are here.

Actualization Theory & Meaning of Life (“Why Quantum Mechanics?” - Shtetl Optimized, Jan 26th/27th, 2022)

(1). The notion of “Objective Reality” is a limit that only makes sense after infinite elapsed time from the perspective of observers within reality.

(2). The basic design principle of reality is ‘Actualization’. Reality begins from a ground state of ‘possible worlds’ (non-constructive math), some of which start to get actualized (become actual worlds). Actualization simply means that an objective description of these worlds can increasingly be given purely in terms of computation (i.e, constructive mathematics). From (1), this process continues forever; worlds are always only in various degrees of actualization, which is the measure of their existence.

(3) To actualizae reality there are 3 conditions: (a) the whole can be decompose into understandable parts (Compositionality) (b) the parts can combine into larger integrated systems (Complexity) (b) the parts affect each other in limited, logical ways (Causality)

(4). Quantum mechanics is simply a special case of the general ‘theory of actualization’, which explains the physics of conditions (a), (b) & (c) above. The 3 conditions together give reality the property of ‘comprehensibility’ , which is equivalent to ‘actualization’. Comprehensibility is the ease with which observers within reality can understand it.

(5). Hilbert space is only a description of the space of possible worlds, it does not account for the actual process of actuliazation (properties a,b,c) which are expressed as : (a) computational topology, (b) function spaces, (c) computational geometry.

(6). The full ‘theory of actualization’ is about the mapping between (1) Hilbert space, (2) Computational Geometry & (3). Space-Time. (1) is about the ground-state of reality (the space of possible worlds), (2) is about the actualization of reality (how reality is made comprehensible) & (3) is the actualized structure of reality (the observed physical world).

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I think the ‘ground state’ of reality is simply a space of ‘possible worlds’, and as complexity is built-up, these worlds get increasingly ‘actualized’ entirely via computational processes, so the ball gets rolling without any observers or consciousness, which are emergent systems of computation.

However, I think that after a certain complexity threshold is cleared, the continuing actualization of reality does need minds, and from this point forward consciousness contributes to the on-going actualization of reality! Not through any sort of mystical or non-physical process, but by structuring information (i.e., turning information into knowledge), thus helping to make reality increasingly comprehensible.

So what are minds? Well, remember I talked about the ‘actualization’ process itself, which I said takes place on the level of computational geometry, function spaces and topology. And minds exist at this level. They’re simply the higher-level processes of ‘actualization’. Minds make mappings of (representations of) reality by modelling systems of causal relations that are complex and compositional. And these models are themselves new systems of causal relations that are complex & compositional! This is an open-ended recursive process.

The meaning of life (for conscious observers) is thus simply the high-level version of the same process of ‘actualization’ that I think accounts for physics. It’s ‘Self-Actualization’ ! Of course, now we have to try to achieve a reasonable understanding of the meaning of the term ‘Self-Actualization’

Here’s my explanation of consciousness and values:

Consciousness is the highest level of recursive actualization. It’s a model of the perceived flow of time (temporal awareness). It works by integrating high-level values and low-level facts, to generate mid-level action plans. The representation of values, plans and facts is in the form of the temporal modalities ‘should, ‘would’ & ‘could’ respectively. And the generated ‘action plans’ which are “good” are simply the ones that structure information as knowledge such that it contributes to the on-going actualization of reality (i.e., generation of manageable complexity).

To understand values, consider the motivations of God in the context of ‘actualization’. I believe that these motivations can be considered to consist of two complementary tendencies, (1) rationality & (2) creativity, because this is the combination that generates manageable complexity ( ‘actualized reality’).

Rationality is about the compression of information (manifesting as intelligence) , whereas creativity is about the exploration of possibilities (manifesting as values). The balance between them generates manageable complexity.

In conclusion, the “actualization” of reality is ultimately about the generation of manageable complexity, which is complexity that has enough structured details to be interesting, but can still be compressed enough to make it comprehensible. At a high-level, this is the balance between rationality and creativity in conscious minds.

Practically speaking, it seems to be a bunch of tiny balls kind of like Legos in that they like to stick to others in various ways according to their types. According to the rules of matter and physics we get a bunch of emergent phenomena, basically contraptions made out of the Lego-balls. That's animals. But there's something else funny about it... it's not just a bunch of wild contraptions getting made by tumbling Lego-balls in the dryer for a long time. There's also knowing. It's not the Lego-balls doing the knowing, but certain very complicated configurations of the Lego-balls seem to be needed for the knowing to happen. So there's a vast physics playground, and contraptions are curling up out of the muck, and via their unusual configurations (made by evolution out of necessity to try to keep the contraptions functional in the merciless, remorseless physics playground), knowing arises, to whatever extent the configuration of the contraption allows. If one were to try to zoom out and see the whole progression I think it might look like a mind constructing itself, gradually rising up out of an unbelievable, incomprehensible mass of bloodshed and suffering, to be shining and bright, boundlessly kind, compassionate, joyful, and balanced, like a perfectly clear eye to watch what happens in the playground as if it was a flower in a process of endless blooming, clearly knowing that everything that happens is perfect.

It's completely irrelevant, and spending time thinking about it is time that could be spent on any number of more useful endeavors.