this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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It's simply irrelevant. If you believe this theory exactly nothing changes about what you can predict about the world. That's what knowledge is all about. If you have a theory that doesn't behave differently under some different circumstances, you've essentially said nothing.
Also reminds me a bit of the chapter in "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!" called "Is Electricity Fire?", if someone knows that.
Consider math, it doesn’t make any empirical predictions on its own, as it is just a set of abstract symbols and rules. Do you consider mathematical facts to be a form of knowledge?
Maths and reality are different. Very different. Reality can be explored empirically while maths is logic not empirical. We can never say we are 100% sure about the rules/laws we have discovered about our reality, but we can say for sure that a maths theorem is true or false.
Maths is a set of self-consistent tools that can be used to predict what happens in reality. The mathematical description of reality is an estimate, contains countless assumptions and inaccuracies about where things are and what properties they have. In fact in quantum physics, we literally can't know momentum and location at the same time.
Maths can describe (or I should say, approximate) realities that don't exist.
Because maths and reality are different domains, we can know different things about them using different approaches.
I mean, we can know a precise wavefunction, though. That's a bit like saying we can't give a single point where a tsunami is. It seems highly likely to me personally that physics is mathematical and we've just kind of absorbed it in the process of evolving intelligence.
Arguably "it's impossible to violate energy conservation given time-invariant action" is an empirical prediction, and that's a specific case of Noether's theorem.
There’s nothing wrong with speculation as long as everyone knows that’s what going on.
Take the work of Julian Jaynes for example; it’s fringe, it’s speculative, but he’s asking questions that nobody else asked before and that in itself is worthwhile because it can pave the way for better questions which are falsifiable.
Yeah, this isn't really a theory yet. That doesn't necessarily mean it's an invalid concept, though. For example, if game theory turned up in fundamental physics somehow, wouldn't that suggest intelligence might be more fundamental than we assumed?