Hacker News Reader

Comment by mg | Hacker News Reader

Is there any proof that the universe is bigger than what I experience right now?

For example: My eyes can focus on this word on my screen: "Hello".

I don't know how many bits of information this word contains. I can see the shape of the four chars quite clearly. Maybe that is 100 bits of information or so?

So I would say the universe probably is at least 100 bits large.

Is there any proof that it is larger?

Is there any way it could be smaller?

View on HN

Maybe not definitive proof, but interacting with other agents in your universe (I.E the rest of us) and sharing experiences could prove that the universe is bigger than just you and the words on your screen.

Then you slowly start to realise that all of this activity on Earth could be happening on other planets elsewhere too.

Then you observe the stars, and combined with the mental models/theories from our brightest physicists, you might conclude that the universe is really fucking big, and there must be a shitload of other Earths out there.

But again, we can't really prove it concretely can we? For all you know, i'm an NPC and so is everyone else. You could the subject of an alien crackintro - where they try to simulate whole worlds in 100 bits or less.

I think it's much more pernicious than that. It's not just that everyone else might be an NPC, which is bad enough. (Why is it bad? If others are NPCs, what does that do to my ability to be emotionally and mentally intimate with them? To relate to them on a truly personal level? If my kids are NPCs, do I treat them like that? This idea, taken seriously, is horrible for interpersonal relationships.)

But it's even worse. I might be an NPC. If so, I am just a machine, with no true personality of my own. No free will, either. This pushes me towards living like an NPC - just going through the motions, rather than actually living. Even though it doesn't actually kill me, it destroys life.

This stuff isn't just an intellectual exercise. If you take it seriously, it can drain all the joy out of living.

>This stuff isn't just an intellectual exercise. If you take it seriously, it can drain all the joy out of living.

Fully agreed. I've been down this rabbit hole before. There's a fine line between the thought of us being different ways for God to experience things in this dimension, and the pure and utter delusion.

It's so much easier to accept being human, along with all the limitations that may bring.

You describe more than I can witness simultaneously.

While I look at the shape of the 4 letters "Hello", I can't interact with other agents. I can't even imagine such an interaction without losing the full grasp of how the four chars look like.

So I would say I don't know if anything else exists. Except of the 100 bits of information or so which I can witness.

You would need a reason why the universe would create this existence illusion for itself (in the form of you).

You trust your eyes to tell you what's in front of you?

When I have the experience of seeing the shape of those 4 letters, I can't simultaneously reason about "eyes" or if there is something "in front" or if there is a "you" as you say.

I just have an experience of a certain complexity, which I roughly estimate to be 100 bits or so of information.

Can the universe read your mind? If it can, then the universe need not be larger than your own mind plus some comparatively small constant. When you're done reading this sentence and focus back to "Hello" you'll notice that its appearance and location are consistent with what was on your mind, so it's possible that there's some machinery reconstructing the previous state of what you were perceiving so it matches your memory.

If it can't read your mind then the universe external to it must necessarily be much larger, since it can consistently hold much more information than you're able to recall.

You bring up the concept of time.

But is there a proof that time exists?

I can "remember" something, but that act of "remembering" is happening in the now. I don't know if there really was a past.

When I look at "Hello", I don't remember something at the same time. The shape of the four "Hello" letters are all I can hold in my mind. So from that perspective, "Hello" might be all there is and all there has ever been.

It doesn't matter. The fact that you're able to compare the Hello on your "screen" to the Hello in your "memory" should prove to you that there's at least two of them. A computer can't distinguish if it has started running in the middle of a computation with its registers and memory arbitrarily filled with values, but it can still arrive at results based on those values. Likewise someone might very patiently turn a computer on and off while each time filling its memory and registers with data that would be consistent with the equivalent computation as if it had been running each step of the way. That would mean whoever is doing that needs to hold at least as much state as would be necessary to execute the computation normally.

When I compare the "Hello" on the screen to the concept of "Hello" in my mind, I cannot hold the details of the character shapes in the same clearity as I do when I just focus on the shapes.

So the siutation with the two Hello's might be just as simple (My rough estimation: 100 bits) as the situation where I focus on the shapes.

That's why my feeling is that the lower bound for how complex the universe is, is 100 bits.

Let k be the fraction of the information contained in the original perception that you're able to hold in your mind. Regardless of how large k is, the universe maintains apparent consistency to the subjective observer, so its intermediate states between when you observe it and when you observe it again must be held somewhere, be it in the configuration of particles in a physical universe, or the memory storage of some mad scientist who keeps your brain in a vat and feeds it fabricated data. If the universe consisted solely of whatever it is you're perceiving or contemplating at any given time your thoughts and perceptions would not make sense to you, because there would be no consistency from one moment to the next. You would look at Hello, look away, look again, and see Bye. Even if time is an illusion and you only looked the second time, you would need to account for the fact that your false memory of a moment that never existed matches the perception that you're processing now.

I don't see any proof that time exists. For all I can tell, only the present moment exists. You say I "observe it again". But how do I know I observed something in the past? The memory is just an experience I have in the present moment.

Is there even a "now"? Our neurons add milliseconds to every signal impulse that allows us to experience the "now" (that's not to mention the time it takes for the brain to process everything). We're perpetually experiencing the past whilst moving through space.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com