The Fundamental Limits of Knowledge | Hacker News Reader

The Fundamental Limits of Knowledge

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91 pointsD_Guidi9 comments

We don't have to go back to the beginning of the universe to get to the fundamental limits of human knowledge. There are computational limits that stop us from gaining knowledge about things that exist today :)

and we are not even talking about things like knowledge about knowledge (infinitely recursive), or the fact of knowledge being a limited 'concept' constrained to the organs of perceiving 'knowledge', etc ...

That also presumes that knowledge depends on computation, which is not necessarily true.

Two interesting things are going on right now. First, we've come to a crossroads in cosmology [0] where some heavy hitters are rebelling and saying time is real and mathematics is a too-comfortable approximation. Second is a new foundation for mathematics that moves away from set theory to a fusion of type theory and homotopy theory called univalence [1].

It is these kinds of events that permit the scales to fall from our eyes and show us more of the things we didn't know we didn't know. Our meta-ignorance may soon be reduced, just a bit. But back to the point, it may likely also become true that these pull many subjects into the realm of the computable.

  [0] Unger, Smolen http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1107074061
  [1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150519-will-computers-redefine-the-roots-of-math/

A great overview of some really hairy stuff.

So, is there any chance of something OTHER than the heat death or the decay of all matter?

Or, another thought, is there bubbles of 'reality' that arent part of our universe but... exist somewhere. I guess if we can't get there, at some level it "doesnt matter". Although that also begs the question "cant get there" -- how likely is that?

You mean, for the far future?

The Big Rip hasn't been ruled out yet.

"So, is there any chance of something OTHER than the heat death or the decay of all matter?"

The Big Rip, mentioned already, involves extrapolating a present trend that has already changed once in the past of the universe indefinitely into the future. It is not impossible this is wrong somehow.

"Although that also begs the question "cant get there" -- how likely is that?"

Under the inflation model, those parts of the universe can be conceived of as being already out of our light cone, and accelerating away. Unlike "parallel dimensions" or other "quantum realities" that we can imagine being physically not distant, and somehow accessible, in some sense, these realities are "merely" 10 raised to arbitrarily large powers of meters away. It seems somewhat more final to me.

On the other hand, well, don't underestimate what's already here... there's already far more information available locally than any human brain is capable of processing. We need not pine for the universes 10^1,000,000 meters away... we've got more than we can do here already.

> So, is there any chance of something OTHER than the heat death or the decay of all matter?

I might have misunderstood the article but I thought the idea is that after the death of matter in this universe the expansion of space will continue. Quantum fluctuations will continue as well and one of them will be the right size that it will be stretched out by the expanding space and a new universe will be born.

The Wikipedia has a nice article about this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe

at our current rate of debt growth (obv required by the exponential interest rate function applied to the creation of our debt backed currency), how long can we continue our exponentially-mandated growth?

e.g. <6nm lithography is a problem

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