IT LETS US UNDERSTAND... WHY?
Sunday, 18. March 2007, 20:06:23
Image: Cypher Code, from Principia Discordia
I have been busy by two things. In my working hours there is, of course, my work. And in my leisure time, there is the spanish blog, and all that fuss about the sabotage of the colombian blogs. But I am sick and tired of that. I stated my opinion in too many places, too many times. I want to move on. And I want to move to some more interesting subjects.
Some time ago I found a very inspiring text by physicist Paul Davies, about why we can understand part of the universe at all. ¿should it be like that? Of course, we are a very arrogant species, and some of us actually believe that there is a god who made uf masters of his creation. However the case, I do not feel inclined to think of us, pink apes, as such a big deal among all existing and possible animals, or living beings, for that matter. There is, for me, something misterious about being able to understand so much about our huge and complex universe, a universe that could be perhaps even huger and more complex. Here is the text. I took a very daring risk in transcirbing the text, changin one word for other, with clarity purposes. Later on, I will explain why I comited such a flagrant inaccuracy.
First it should be noted that our mental model of the world is itself an algorithmic(*) compression. If the world were not comprehensible in this way, there could be no cognition. So the fact that we exist as observers already constrains the universe to have the property of algorithmic comprehensibility. Of course, this anthropic reasonign does not constitute an explanation of why the universe is comprehensible, it merely tells us that we could not be around to debate the issue were it not so. (There is another anthropic conection here. The existence of biological organisms implies depth. But an algorithmically incomprehensible universe would necessarily be shallow.)(**)
Secondly, there is a wide class of physical systems, the so-called chaotic ones, that are not algorithmically comprehensible [2]. One can imagine an universe where there are no regularities at all, only chaos. The fact that there is cosmos rather than chaos is the starting point of science. The existence of non chaotic dynamical regimes is a profound fact about our nature, and one can ask for an explanation fo this fact. I do not know whatever we will ever have such an explanation, or what sort of explanation it might be.But one possible strand of reasoning might be thus: The non-chaotic nature of many sytstems seems to hinge on their approximate linearity, and this, in turn, depends on the smallness of certain coupling constants, radiative corrections, etc. At present we do not have a theory of coupling constants, but one can emerge from attents at grand, or super, unification. If a satisfactory unified theory is found for these constrains are fixed, then that would constitute a partial answer as to why chaos is kept in a bay.
Merely avoiding chaos in the technical sense is necessary, but not sufficient, condition for practical algorithmic comprehension. One can imagine a world in which the relevant algorithms are impenetrably complicated, too complicated to be discovered by systematic enquiry, or even too complicated to be tested in the age of the universe by any conceivably computational system. Part of the reason for the apparent simplicity of the laws of physics rests with the key property of locality. If everything in the universe interacted with everything else in a highly non-local manner, we could not un-entangle all the components to discover the algorithms.
(*)An algorithm is a recipe to operate with signs in a stepwise way, to discover or operate with the relations between the representations of observed things. It is here that I comit my abuse, because I did not write compression, as professor Davies did, but comprehension. It is an abuse, because what he wants to say is that we are abstracting a simple part of the nature to represent it, thus compressing a supposed whole algorithm in a small, treatable one. "comprehension", on the other hand, has something to do with encompassing with the mind, wich would be the opposite process: namely to go from the limited, approximated algorithm, to the total behaviour of nature. However, being each the reversion of the other, I do not think it is a very misleading distorsion.
Our comprehension is based in representing a separate part of reality, separate its components in some sense, represent them, and represent some of their relations. If algorithmical comprehensibility is possible, this procedure would lead us to reproduce some behaviours of nature in an accurate enough way.
(**)I do not completely understand what he refers to with deep. But still I find this statement very suspicious. It could be one of those cases where the limitation of the known life forms limit ungrantedly the way phisicists think of life.
[2] Ford, J. "what is Chaos, that we should be mindful of" The New Physics, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pag. 348
The last text is taken out of "Why is the physical world so comprehensible?" a chapter of "Complexity, Entropy and the Physics of Information", a proceedings book of the Santa Fe Institute, edited by Wojciech H. Zurek in 1989.
The whole chapter is a lot longer than the text, but I extracted the piece that I found to be more suggesting from all. That part of the text, actually, does not explains anything. It just posses the questions. And that is the way I want to finish this post. I do not intend to teach or explain, just put that little disturbing doubt in the reader's mind. I think it is worthwhile, even thought it can be a little bit uncomfortable.
You can find a spanish version of this post in my other blog.
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