Rendered at 18:28:22 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
jimbokun 43 minutes ago [-]
Did Dirac’s prediction that studying “beautiful” mathematics would lead to breakthroughs in the understanding of Physics pan out?
Xmd5a 8 hours ago [-]
> The dominating idea in this application of mathematics to physics is that the equations representing the laws of motion should be of a simple form. The whole success of the scheme is due to the fact that equations of simple form do seem to work. The physicist is thus provided with a principle of simplicity, which he can use as an instrument of research.
> Occam's Razor as a Formal Basis for a Physical Theory
> We introduce the principle of Occam's Razor in a form which can be used as a basis for economical formulations of physics. This allows us to explain the general structure of the Lagrangian for a composite physical system, as well as some other artificial postulates behind the variational formulations of physical laws. As an example, we derive Hamilton's principle of stationary action together with the Lagrangians for the cases of Newtonian mechanics, relativistic mechanics and a relativistic particle in an external gravitational field.
wolfi1 11 hours ago [-]
there is a quote from Pauli about Dirac : 'There is no God and Dirac is his prophet' Heisenberg and Dirac had different opinions on the existence of a god and Pauli, asked for his opinion, had the former to say
Tazerenix 9 hours ago [-]
There's a quote Atiyah has about spin geometry which he heard from his advisor Hodge, who had an office next to Dirac at Cambridge.
Only two people understand spinors: God, and Dirac. And Dirac's dead.
taaha47 9 hours ago [-]
"I would like to put forward a suggestion as to how such a scheme might be realized. If we express the present epoch, 2 x 109 years, in terms of a unit of time defined by the atomic constants, we get a number of the order 1039, which characterizes the present in an absolute sense. Might it not be that all present events correspond to properties of this large number, and, more generally, that the whole history of the universe corresponds to properties of the whole sequence of natural numbers? At first sight it would seem that the universe is far too complex for such a correspondence to be possible. But I think this objection cannot be maintained, since a number of the order 1039 is excessively complicated, just because it is so enormous. We have a brief way of writing it down, but this should not blind us to the fact that it must have excessivly complicated properties."
this cannot be an early hint to the result made by chaitin; Chaitin’s Incompleteness Theorem?
rramadass 8 hours ago [-]
Just to clarify; The term "2 x 109" is actually "2 x 10^9" or 2 billion years which was considered the present epoch i.e. accepted age of the universe at that time.
Correct (but now we know it should be somewhat higher than that), and 1039 should be 10^39, one of Dirac's Large Numbers, the size of the observable universe in atomic units, and also the ratio of electromagnetic to gravitational forces in the hydrogen atom.
rramadass 7 hours ago [-]
Right. Added the wikipedia link to Dirac's LNH above.
Also found this; The fundamental constants and their variation: observational status and theoretical motivations - https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0205340
>but as time goes on it becomes increasingly evident that the rules which the mathematician finds interesting are the same as those which Nature has chosen
This is quantifiable, right? Should be possible to measure how many mathematicians favor ideas like turbulence, macroscopic quantum physics, anthropic principle, analog geometry, finitism. I think, mathematics doesn't really try to match physics yet.
huurtehoog 6 hours ago [-]
I think this passage is more about the fact that mathematics is a form of symbolic computation people create and it is weirdly congruent to the physical measurements and models of reality. Not that mathematicians see certain models and objects used in physical models in a favorable way. What favor even means here?
It is quantifiable: several mathematical objects and categories people invented to do symbolic computation in letters and published papers are somehow very useful to model and understand data from physical measurements of reality.
I highly recommend reading the "Unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" essay by Wigner:
Dirac was talking about the fundamental laws. In favour of his point, and not known at the time he gave the talk, the standard model of particle physics is based on the symmetry groups U(1), SU(2), and SU(3), so Lie groups (which mathematicians find interesting) appear to have been chosen by nature.
empath75 5 hours ago [-]
I sort of have this suspicion that the kinds of phenomena that we can even apprehend are pretty closely related to what we can reason about mathematically, and the reason that math seems to work so well to model behavior that we understand says more about how our brain works than how the universe works.
If a phenomenon isn’t model-able by relatively simple math it doesn’t even look like a phenomenon to us, it looks like a chaotic mess.
Which is to say that unless something has mathematical coherence it is more or less invisible to our experience.
sigbottle 4 hours ago [-]
Well there are counting arguments to say that a higher level intelligence that somehow achieves say, 100000× brain efficiency of humans, still can't do that much more work than humans, if humans found the "best abstraction". Think about computability for example - that means you could feasibly solve problem instances of n+20 relative to what a human can solve.
Of course, I think putting numbers to wishy washy meta-quantities like "how efficiently does a certain conceptual scheme help you" are super loaded and hard to properly talk about (incommensurability). I've been toying with trying to make a repository of all the possible "moves" one can make in this kind of abstract analysis - constrain the problem statement, argue something like "the system is what it does", dissolving, etc. but even that seems hard
The thesis is that Science is made for efficiency and hence does not include everything (which is infinite). It only looks for a hierarchy of interesting facts and focuses on simple foundational recurring phenomena from nature. It then uses the language of Mathematics to economize and impose order on the complexity to make it tractable.
Finally, our subconscious prefers aesthetic attributes and hence we often find/create harmony/symmetry/beauty in our mathematical products.
axionbraid 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
voxleone 4 hours ago [-]
There's this little pet project of mine, the Functional Universe [0]. It explores a direction suggested by Dirac: treating mathematical structure and transformation not merely as a language for describing physical reality, but as potentially constitutive of it. FU models physical reality in terms of functional state evolution, with an emphasis on composition, aggregation, and transitions. In that sense, I think there's an interesting point of contact with Dirac's emphasis on transformations: Dirac points toward transformations as fundamental mathematical structures from which physics might be derived; FU asks what happens if physical reality itself is formulated in terms of transitions and their composition.
I think Michael Levin is also doing work around platonic math being a thing that exists moreso than an actual concept. His work is related to biologies discovery of algorithms, the complexity levels of simple algorithms, and n-order effects that life is finding way to exploit for computational purposes.
While not being deeply familiar with the work but I think the short of it is that life has found algorithms at many different orders that we've not discovered them yet, and by 'running' these different algorithms it turns many P problems into NP problems.
The interesting thing about it is you can make falsifiable tests around this and do actual science around it.
lioeters 2 hours ago [-]
Curious, in this model, is there any discussion on whether the mathematical structures underlying space-time are continuous or discrete? Usually the former is assumed, but it seems your "functional" approach may be able to accommodate the latter possibility.
lerp-io 1 hours ago [-]
universe is continuous / cant be proven otherwise but any measurement or simulation of it is discrete by nature same reason pi is computed infinitely and why calculus exists and why math exists at all to try and explain continuity of nature even if all of it is perceived discretely.
pixl97 1 hours ago [-]
The question is what exactly is continuous. The quantum fields themselves? And we have no evidence the the quantum fields are discrete quantum states themselves, but the particles they produce appear otherwise.
It's always possible that continuous maths are a side effect of this field. Of course, the causality could be revered.
3 hours ago [-]
anthk 8 hours ago [-]
Now dive down into Math with Penrose and David Bohm with the implicate order.
In particular, students of Hindu Philosophical Schools will find lots of parallels here. Bohm was heavily influenced by Jiddu Krishnamurti which inspired his take on quantum theory.
Bohm also wrote a great book, "Quantum Theory" based on the Copenhagen Interpretation which contains separate parts on "Physical Formulation" and "Mathematical Formulation" of quantum theory.
lioeters 2 hours ago [-]
Great answer.
sahil50 49 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
VorpalWay 10 hours ago [-]
Shouldn't this have a "(1939)" suffix on the title according to HN rules? ;)
ape4 6 hours ago [-]
If an article is a few years old then it could be out-of-date. But if an article is almost 100 years old then its classic.
Kaffee: Corporal, would you turn to the page in this book that says where the mess hall is, please?
Barnes: Lieutenant Kaffee, that’s not in the book, sir.
Kaffee: You mean to say in all your time at Gitmo you’ve never had a meal?
baxtr 9 hours ago [-]
unwritten rules
3 hours ago [-]
3 hours ago [-]
thisisauserid 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
jdw64 9 hours ago [-]
[dead]
general_reveal 10 hours ago [-]
Haven’t even made too far down, but:
”There is no logical reason why the second method should be possible at all, but one has found in practice that it does work and meets with reasonable success. This must be ascribed to some mathematical quality in Nature, a quality which the casual observer of Nature would not suspect, but which nevertheless plays an important role in Nature's scheme.”
I mean, Hume answers this, but so does time, and I guess they both answer it together. Our observed measurements are true for the certain time period we’re in and remain true while we are in that window. To conclude with Hume, it’s all true until it isn’t, in time (well I suppose even in timelessness, entire properties can change - even so, with respect to measuring, I believe that requires a physical step function so we can’t avoid time here :)).
Aside:
”This is a quality which cannot be defined, any more than beauty in art can be defined, but which people who study mathematics usually have no difficulty in appreciating.”
Thorough worshipping of Math and “Mathers”, like as if they are a gift from God. Again, let’s stick with Hume, you’re the shit until you’re not. Einstein went to death not understanding Physics as he wanted to.
Hey, I’m a programmer, I didn’t necessarily want robots to do my job either. God loves that essay Hume wrote, truly.
It’s all fun and games until God mindfucks your understanding.
n4r9 10 hours ago [-]
This is probably a reference to Hume's problem of induction, i.e. that observing a regularity in the past cannot justify assuming that it will hold in the future. It's vaguely related to the article, but talking about "time windows" and "Mathers" muddles the point.
general_reveal 10 hours ago [-]
Is it vaguely related? He wondered why measuring anything even works. Why wouldn’t the measurement disappear, thus making all this measuring pointless? Because, apparently the measurement(s) are true each time-step, and it will be true for that time, until it’s not true. Why it reasonably works well for us? Well, God , I guess. Same way the Sun doesn’t burn our skin off (God, I guess, but some have issues with that).
Sorry, I had to critique that immediately because I could already see that other second paragraph I quoted coming, as in, this author probably worships Math, Science, and those that do it, certainly not God, because he was unable to characterize the phenomena of it as related to God.
n4r9 10 hours ago [-]
Yes, vaguely related. Dirac is not wondering why measurement itself works, but why mathematical reasoning applies so effectively to the measurement results.
I think it's valid to be surprised that all observations of a physical phenomena up until this point have obeyed a beautiful and (relatively) simple mathematical relationship, without even thinking about predicting the future.
GoblinSlayer 8 hours ago [-]
Measurement works because universe moves in a simple way. As Hume indicates, you need very complex motion for irregularity, maybe even sentient, but sentient universe is fairy tale.
pixl97 1 hours ago [-]
> but sentient universe is fairy tale.
Ehhhhh.... this is actually a much bigger claim than you realize and to immediately dismiss it leads to some problematic issues in the continuum of reality.
Without a rigorous falsifiable definition of sentient at all scales it can apply at best the problem is undefined. Are brains sentient? Are neurons sentient? Are the actual algorithms these structures run sentient? Without those answers we can really only say "The universe is probably not sentient".
Also, you are the universe experiencing itself.
26 minutes ago [-]
otabdeveloper4 8 hours ago [-]
> Math, Science, ..., certainly not God
Pretty much everyone worships some sort of God. (The exceptions are non-self-aware people living moment-to-moment.)
What people argue about is the degree of personality and autonomy that God possesses.
pixl97 1 hours ago [-]
Are you talking about god as being, or god as a concept?
lolakutty 10 hours ago [-]
>There is no logical reason why the second method should be possible at all,
One reason I can think of is if we consider that some regularity in the physical behavior is required for consciousness to evolve and so consciousness only forms in such worlds.
rramadass 8 hours ago [-]
Later down in the essay, Dirac himself answers this;
With this kind of cosmological picture one is led to suppose that there was a beginning of time, and that it is meaningless to inquire into what happened before then. One can get a rough idea of the geometrical relationships this involves by imagining the present to be the surface of a sphere, going into the past to be going in towards the centre of the sphere, and going into the future to be going outwards. There is then no limit to how far one may go into the future, but there is a limit to how far one can go into the past, corresponding to when one has reached the centre of the sphere. The beginning of time provides a natural origin from which to measure the time of any event. The result is usually called the epoch of that event. Thus the present epoch is 2 x 109 years [actually 2x10^9].
One further point in connection with the new cosmology is worthy of note. At the beginning of time the laws of Nature were probably very different from what they are now. Thus we should consider the laws of Nature as continually changing with the epoch, instead of as holding uniformly throughout space-time. This idea was first put forward by Milne, who worked it out on the assumptions that the universe at a given epoch is roughly everywhere uniform and spherically symmetrical. I find these assumptions not very satisfying, because the local departures from uniformity are so great and are of such essential importance for our world of life that it seems unlikely there should be a principle of uniformity overlying them. Further, as we already have the laws of Nature depending on the epoch, we should expect them also to depend on position in space, in order to preserve the beautiful idea of the theory of relativity there is fundamental similarity between space and time. This goes more drastically against Milne's assumptions than a mere lack of uniformity in the distribution of matter.
Show respect to Mathematicians/Physicists/etc. many of whom had studied Philosophy and i dare say had a better understanding/insight of it than mere academic Philosophers. Why? Because they don't go off into la-la land but try very hard to have both observed evidence and a mathematical model of it match cleanly via a Theory.
For your edification, read first "Meditations on First Philosophy by Rene Descartes" followed by "Physics and Philosophy by Werner Heisenberg".
pixl97 56 minutes ago [-]
The difference between science and woo is science makes falsifiable predictions.
I mean, go back 500 years. Tell everyone that everything is actually make of fields (no not the kind you grow things in). These fields manifest waves that carry certain amounts of energy. Those bits of energy build larger structures that are still so incredibly tiny the human imagination fails. But then you take those larger structures in a pattern and it builds atoms. Those atoms are actually 99.9999999% nothing but empty space end fields of force and electricity. This is why you don't pass thru things. Oh yea, these tiny empty things connect to each other in predictable ways creating molecules that are the basis of life. Just a tiny speck of them contains quadrillions of these molecules, crazy tiny.
[The people you are talking to]: Get the wood, we're burning this witch.
> Thorough worshipping of Math and “Mathers”, like as if they are a gift from God
"There is no God and Dirac is his Prophet" -- Wolfgang Pauli.
> Again, let’s stick with Hume, you’re the shit until you’re not.
BS. Hume's ideas of Mathematics and their usage in Science were laughable (they predated modern mathematics and physics). The mathematics used in a theory has tremendous predictive power and does not depend on "miracles". So we know where it works and where it does not.
> Einstein went to death not understanding Physics as he wanted to.
No, that is not quite true. Einstein perfectly understood quantum physics/mechanics but considered it incomplete and philosophically abhorrent.
> God loves that essay Hume wrote, truly. It’s all fun and games until God mindfucks your understanding.
Nonsense.
3lambda 5 hours ago [-]
Given its strength in mathematics, it seems likely that AI should be of great help with discovering new physics. We just need to teach it to ask interesting questions.
jbmchuck 5 hours ago [-]
How does this comment relate to the article?
JimmyBuckets 5 hours ago [-]
Dirac comments that he thinks a potential path to the discovery of new physics is to start with a mathematical domain and work outwards from there, guided by mathematical beauty. This is what I took OP's comment to be about - of course setting aside questions on an LLM's ability to recognize beauty
goatlover 2 hours ago [-]
Superstring theory has been based on the idea of mathematical beauty, but it's run into serious complications when it comes to empirical results. Science is empirical first and foremost, because we need to verify that theories actually predict the universe we live in by testing them.
I don't know how LLMs would help sorting through the 10^500 possible universes when it comes to superstrings. You need to be able to run experiments or obtain observations.
pixl97 47 minutes ago [-]
Actually there are people attempting to find new math via biological entities. Cells and such. The interesting thing here is it is easily falsifiable even though working at these scales is still insanely hard.
Take the golden rule for example. It's a simple algorithm that shows up everywhere in nature. It represents the least amount of energy needed to assemble all kinds of structures. The gist here is nature finds these algorithms via evolution over billions of years and quadrillions of individual life experiments. We see life finding simple algorithms and platonic maths, how complex of algorithms has it found?
You no longer have to do an impossible number of experiments, instead you have to tease apart gene expressions to turn them on and off. Now, that is still a monumental task, but it's still doable in a reasonable amount of time.
https://arxiv.org/abs/math-ph/0009007
> Occam's Razor as a Formal Basis for a Physical Theory
> We introduce the principle of Occam's Razor in a form which can be used as a basis for economical formulations of physics. This allows us to explain the general structure of the Lagrangian for a composite physical system, as well as some other artificial postulates behind the variational formulations of physical laws. As an example, we derive Hamilton's principle of stationary action together with the Lagrangians for the cases of Newtonian mechanics, relativistic mechanics and a relativistic particle in an external gravitational field.
Only two people understand spinors: God, and Dirac. And Dirac's dead.
this cannot be an early hint to the result made by chaitin; Chaitin’s Incompleteness Theorem?
Dirac large numbers hypothesis - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_large_numbers_hypothesis
Also found this; The fundamental constants and their variation: observational status and theoretical motivations - https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0205340
From Heisenberg to Goedel via Chaitin - https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0402197
This is quantifiable, right? Should be possible to measure how many mathematicians favor ideas like turbulence, macroscopic quantum physics, anthropic principle, analog geometry, finitism. I think, mathematics doesn't really try to match physics yet.
It is quantifiable: several mathematical objects and categories people invented to do symbolic computation in letters and published papers are somehow very useful to model and understand data from physical measurements of reality.
I highly recommend reading the "Unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" essay by Wigner:
https://www.hep.upenn.edu/~johnda/Papers/wignerUnreasonableE...
If a phenomenon isn’t model-able by relatively simple math it doesn’t even look like a phenomenon to us, it looks like a chaotic mess.
Which is to say that unless something has mathematical coherence it is more or less invisible to our experience.
Of course, I think putting numbers to wishy washy meta-quantities like "how efficiently does a certain conceptual scheme help you" are super loaded and hard to properly talk about (incommensurability). I've been toying with trying to make a repository of all the possible "moves" one can make in this kind of abstract analysis - constrain the problem statement, argue something like "the system is what it does", dissolving, etc. but even that seems hard
Here is a summary - https://thetelos.org/science-and-method-science-et-methode-h...
Here is a video discussion - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQ-t8-igDZo
The thesis is that Science is made for efficiency and hence does not include everything (which is infinite). It only looks for a hierarchy of interesting facts and focuses on simple foundational recurring phenomena from nature. It then uses the language of Mathematics to economize and impose order on the complexity to make it tractable.
Finally, our subconscious prefers aesthetic attributes and hence we often find/create harmony/symmetry/beauty in our mathematical products.
[0] https://voxleone.github.io/FunctionalUniverse/
While not being deeply familiar with the work but I think the short of it is that life has found algorithms at many different orders that we've not discovered them yet, and by 'running' these different algorithms it turns many P problems into NP problems.
The interesting thing about it is you can make falsifiable tests around this and do actual science around it.
It's always possible that continuous maths are a side effect of this field. Of course, the causality could be revered.
In particular, students of Hindu Philosophical Schools will find lots of parallels here. Bohm was heavily influenced by Jiddu Krishnamurti which inspired his take on quantum theory.
Bohm also wrote a great book, "Quantum Theory" based on the Copenhagen Interpretation which contains separate parts on "Physical Formulation" and "Mathematical Formulation" of quantum theory.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
”There is no logical reason why the second method should be possible at all, but one has found in practice that it does work and meets with reasonable success. This must be ascribed to some mathematical quality in Nature, a quality which the casual observer of Nature would not suspect, but which nevertheless plays an important role in Nature's scheme.”
I mean, Hume answers this, but so does time, and I guess they both answer it together. Our observed measurements are true for the certain time period we’re in and remain true while we are in that window. To conclude with Hume, it’s all true until it isn’t, in time (well I suppose even in timelessness, entire properties can change - even so, with respect to measuring, I believe that requires a physical step function so we can’t avoid time here :)).
Aside:
”This is a quality which cannot be defined, any more than beauty in art can be defined, but which people who study mathematics usually have no difficulty in appreciating.”
Thorough worshipping of Math and “Mathers”, like as if they are a gift from God. Again, let’s stick with Hume, you’re the shit until you’re not. Einstein went to death not understanding Physics as he wanted to.
Hey, I’m a programmer, I didn’t necessarily want robots to do my job either. God loves that essay Hume wrote, truly.
It’s all fun and games until God mindfucks your understanding.
Sorry, I had to critique that immediately because I could already see that other second paragraph I quoted coming, as in, this author probably worships Math, Science, and those that do it, certainly not God, because he was unable to characterize the phenomena of it as related to God.
I think it's valid to be surprised that all observations of a physical phenomena up until this point have obeyed a beautiful and (relatively) simple mathematical relationship, without even thinking about predicting the future.
Ehhhhh.... this is actually a much bigger claim than you realize and to immediately dismiss it leads to some problematic issues in the continuum of reality.
Without a rigorous falsifiable definition of sentient at all scales it can apply at best the problem is undefined. Are brains sentient? Are neurons sentient? Are the actual algorithms these structures run sentient? Without those answers we can really only say "The universe is probably not sentient".
Also, you are the universe experiencing itself.
Pretty much everyone worships some sort of God. (The exceptions are non-self-aware people living moment-to-moment.)
What people argue about is the degree of personality and autonomy that God possesses.
One reason I can think of is if we consider that some regularity in the physical behavior is required for consciousness to evolve and so consciousness only forms in such worlds.
With this kind of cosmological picture one is led to suppose that there was a beginning of time, and that it is meaningless to inquire into what happened before then. One can get a rough idea of the geometrical relationships this involves by imagining the present to be the surface of a sphere, going into the past to be going in towards the centre of the sphere, and going into the future to be going outwards. There is then no limit to how far one may go into the future, but there is a limit to how far one can go into the past, corresponding to when one has reached the centre of the sphere. The beginning of time provides a natural origin from which to measure the time of any event. The result is usually called the epoch of that event. Thus the present epoch is 2 x 109 years [actually 2x10^9].
One further point in connection with the new cosmology is worthy of note. At the beginning of time the laws of Nature were probably very different from what they are now. Thus we should consider the laws of Nature as continually changing with the epoch, instead of as holding uniformly throughout space-time. This idea was first put forward by Milne, who worked it out on the assumptions that the universe at a given epoch is roughly everywhere uniform and spherically symmetrical. I find these assumptions not very satisfying, because the local departures from uniformity are so great and are of such essential importance for our world of life that it seems unlikely there should be a principle of uniformity overlying them. Further, as we already have the laws of Nature depending on the epoch, we should expect them also to depend on position in space, in order to preserve the beautiful idea of the theory of relativity there is fundamental similarity between space and time. This goes more drastically against Milne's assumptions than a mere lack of uniformity in the distribution of matter.
Show respect to Mathematicians/Physicists/etc. many of whom had studied Philosophy and i dare say had a better understanding/insight of it than mere academic Philosophers. Why? Because they don't go off into la-la land but try very hard to have both observed evidence and a mathematical model of it match cleanly via a Theory.
For your edification, read first "Meditations on First Philosophy by Rene Descartes" followed by "Physics and Philosophy by Werner Heisenberg".
I mean, go back 500 years. Tell everyone that everything is actually make of fields (no not the kind you grow things in). These fields manifest waves that carry certain amounts of energy. Those bits of energy build larger structures that are still so incredibly tiny the human imagination fails. But then you take those larger structures in a pattern and it builds atoms. Those atoms are actually 99.9999999% nothing but empty space end fields of force and electricity. This is why you don't pass thru things. Oh yea, these tiny empty things connect to each other in predictable ways creating molecules that are the basis of life. Just a tiny speck of them contains quadrillions of these molecules, crazy tiny.
[The people you are talking to]: Get the wood, we're burning this witch.
> Thorough worshipping of Math and “Mathers”, like as if they are a gift from God
"There is no God and Dirac is his Prophet" -- Wolfgang Pauli.
> Again, let’s stick with Hume, you’re the shit until you’re not.
BS. Hume's ideas of Mathematics and their usage in Science were laughable (they predated modern mathematics and physics). The mathematics used in a theory has tremendous predictive power and does not depend on "miracles". So we know where it works and where it does not.
> Einstein went to death not understanding Physics as he wanted to.
No, that is not quite true. Einstein perfectly understood quantum physics/mechanics but considered it incomplete and philosophically abhorrent.
> God loves that essay Hume wrote, truly. It’s all fun and games until God mindfucks your understanding.
Nonsense.
I don't know how LLMs would help sorting through the 10^500 possible universes when it comes to superstrings. You need to be able to run experiments or obtain observations.
Take the golden rule for example. It's a simple algorithm that shows up everywhere in nature. It represents the least amount of energy needed to assemble all kinds of structures. The gist here is nature finds these algorithms via evolution over billions of years and quadrillions of individual life experiments. We see life finding simple algorithms and platonic maths, how complex of algorithms has it found?
You no longer have to do an impossible number of experiments, instead you have to tease apart gene expressions to turn them on and off. Now, that is still a monumental task, but it's still doable in a reasonable amount of time.
Added: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenobot
Individual cells like this can perform all kind of higher order operations that would appear to be intelligent actors.