Perhaps we don't have the capacity to understand how the universe works?
I can't remember where I read it but someone made the point that no matter how hard you try you can never teach a mouse to understand French.
I can't remember where I read it but someone made the point that no matter how hard you try you can never teach a mouse to understand French.
(Unless you can improve upon those numbers by a good 40 or 50 orders of magnitude, please don't quibble in the replies. I am aware it's not a "grid" or something, but that is the approximate resolution.)
Our best theories of the universe will have to work at that level, or even potentially below it in the case of string theory. A full theory of the universe ought to be able to describe how everything works down there. However, all the phenomena we care about and have concrete data about are literally 40 orders of magnitude bigger, at a minimum, in spatial and temporal extent.
We have proposals for how the simplest elements of the universe work. Heck, for all we know one of them may even be right. But proving that is extraordinarily difficult because of this huge order-of-magnitude gap. You'd love to be able to just plug in the theory, set yourself up a universe, and start computing, but the incredible gulf of magnitudes makes that essentially impossible. And the theories are sufficiently complicated that attempts to approximate break down in various rather distressing ways.
Even if the Great Simulator simply handed us the equations that our universe is based on, could we verify that claim?
Honestly, my guess is that with enough effort, yes... but even with the answer it could well be extraordinarily difficult. Without the answer it's even harder.
humans couldn't so far teach mouse a human language. That doesn't mean that mouse doesn't have something like several thousands or tens of thousands of basic sounds and combinations of them into meaningful (for mouse) sequences. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/catch-the...
After all as a mouse says to another mouse - "no matter how hard you try you can never teach a human to understand mouse language".
The same is through the history of physics/mathematics. It takes a change in fundamental point of view. The notion of derivative took decades of work to develop by geniuses of that time. Imagine how physics/mathematics looked without it.
When i look at strings theory of today i see epicycles, a very intricate and complex system of epicycles in 11 dimensions :) We need a genius like Newton or Einstein to again see and tell us what is behind that apparent complexity.
Maybe humans do not have the capacity to understand the complete workings of physics.
we don't really know what capacity is required to do it. 1PFlops? 1P neuron synapse transfers/minute? What capacity and in what units mouse brain is?
Our human brain evolution has abused low efficiency size increase approach. As result we're using only like 10% of capacity of our brain.
This dog knows 1000 words in human language. That's more than i know in Chinese, and the task of learning a 1000 Chinese hieroglyphs scares the hell out of me:
https://www.thedodo.com/worlds-smartest-dog-chaser-752002926...
>Maybe humans do not have the capacity to understand the complete workings of physics.
why would it be so? So far the physics has been pretty simple (any abnormal complexity has been usually an indication of our lack of understanding and has been successfully cleared with time) , and even several orders of magnitude complexity increase will fit into our brain.
Edit: to the comment below on 10% - there is a difference between 10% capacity and 10% neurons. The fact that most of our brain is physiologically participating while producing that little capacity most of the time in most of the people is exactly the low efficiency i was talking about.
This myth needs to die in a fire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_percent_of_the_brain_myth
Okay; but that dog can't have a conversation. It doesn't know what they mean, it just knows that follows a certain stimulus. It's like saying I understand cloud language, because I can tell when it's going to rain after looking at the sky.
And even if that dog "understands" a thousand words, and you're scared of learning a thousand Chinese characters, you still have the capacity for learning Chinese. Or French. Or Spanish, or Esperanto, or Russian, or Thai. You could spend a year learning Russian, and we could have this conversation in that language; I will never be able to explain this conversation to a dog, in any language.
dogs do have conversations. And other animals too. Check the link on the prairie dogs for example.
>I will never be able to explain this conversation to a dog, in any language.
it is the deficiency of human-to-dog communication, not the dog's lack of mental capacity to handle the complexity of conversation.
No. So the dog has its limits, as we have ours. Where the limits are is certainly up for debate, but hard to believe there is no limit.
And still no. Phrase it however you like, it's still wrong. You are not using just 10% of your brain in any manner or means, there is not some great untapped potential waiting to be turned on, your brain is not low efficiency.
Or this: http://rifters.com/real/2009/01/iterating-towards-bethlehem....
Less than a million neurons and Portia's interpreting complex visual scenes and making detailed attack plans.
While "we only use 10% of our brains" is clearly bollocks, the implication that our brains may not be particularly efficient for our level of intelligence doesn't seem too unlikely given the way evolution works - our brain's a crudely scaled-up pile of accidental hacks guided by endless local maxima it can't readily escape from, it'd be very surprising if you couldn't improve on it.
You might draw parallels with modern computers. All these transistors to play with, but we're certainly not using them as well as we could - we're limited by the software we want to run and know how to write using our existing tools.
But we augment our capacities with tools, something mice don't do.
But mice don't say that. They can't. jahnu's statement wasn't a parable.
check the various articles on animal language decoding. Mice and other animals do say that or similar complexity things.
>They can't.
That just an empty statement of belief unsubstantiated by facts. Again check the articles.
In general, the "only humans have language" is simply the religious "only humans have soul" dogma in disguise.
> Mice and other animals do say that
Okay, find me a link that says mice complain about humans not learning their language.
You aren't stating the solution, you are stating the problem.
You didn't get the point. If all of humanity had limited capabilities to speak and express. Say we could all utter only 3 kinds of sounds namely x,y,z- due to that sheer limitation our language and written systems have to be expressed in permutations and combinations of x, y, z.
That sort of stuff works only for simple things. The moment you start venturing into any complexity, trying to express those concepts in only 3 ways will lead to verbosity and interplay that will blow up beyond practical ability to grasp, given limited resources to interpret them.
And take note if the animal has no means of recording information somewhere and check over time, keeping that level of verbosity in one's brain and workout complex physics is just out of question.
There are things the SM doesn't account for yet, such as dark energy, dark matter, and gravity. That doesn't mean it's beyond human understanding, just that there's more to the universe we haven't discovered yet.
In the worst case, those things will have interesting but not surprising answers. Slight modifications to the SM to account for some new particle types, etc.
In the best case, they turn out to be something completely unexpected and the SM turns out to be the equivalent of Newtonian theory. Perfectly good and accurate theories about the nature of the universe that are just a subset of a wider physics model, like how Newtonian theory exists within the Standard Model.
We don't understand QM but we can still use the equations to make predictions..
You're suggesting that we can't create better equations which explain more the universe? That's quite a bit early to say that.. I'm more worried about our possibility of creating experiments which can be used then to select which equation is the right one.
There's more to that than simply wanting it to be so, no matter how much information we can pass on to future generations.
Maybe because a mouse is not even aware of "French". At least, humans are aware of the universe, they may not understand it completely but they are aware of it.