conjectureinstitute.org Applied Optimism. Co-founded by President @ChipkinLogan and Board Members @DKedmey & @astupple.
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Over 230 registrations for our Defend the West online conference so far.
Speakers include:
@sapinker
@SRCHicks
@peterboghossian
@jasoncrawford
@yaronbrook
@alananewhouse
@johanknorberg
@DeirdreMcClosk
@michaelshermer
@ToKTeacher
@DavidDFriedman
@mboudry
@nickgillespie
Nadine Strossen
registration link below👇
Defend the West — Conjecture Institute | Enroll here for the online conference. conjectureinstitute.org/even…
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AI has revealed a misalignment not between AI companies and mathematics, but between what mathematicians reward and what the activity of mathematic is about.
The old criterion was: "We reward you if you solve a problem, even if it required only known methods."
AI's ability to solve such problems shows that math was never about that.
If math was about understanding, bringing new ideas and all that, then that should have been the criterion.
So we'll be forced to adopt a better criterion of what constitutes good math, and that can only be a good thing.
~Conjecture Institute Fellow @PaulRRobichaud 👇
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Are There Limits to Human Progress?
The answer seems to be 'no'.
It's not that there are no obstacles, but it does seem like humans can discover ways to get around those obstacles.
And so we keep on going up and up and up, hitting new obstacles along the way, but still being able to get across them.
~Conjecture Institute Fellow @dela3499
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Constructor Theory: A New Approach to Physics
The standard way of describing the universe that we've had so far is to try to guess a law that that explains what trajectory the universe is on.
When you kick a ball, you would like to know where it goes, all the points in spacetime that it goes through from start to end.
You'd like to do the same with the universe, and we have some candidates for that.
But there is a problem in setting the initial conditions and also in explaining why some initial conditions as opposed to others.
Constructor theory has a completely different approach to explaining physics.
Instead of talking about laws of motion, trajectories, and things like that, the main statements of constructor theory are about what transformations are possible or impossible on a particular subset of systems of the
universe.
An example that we already know about would be the conservation of energy, but constructor theory adds additional constraints.
From those constraints, you construct the dynamical laws that are compatible with that and the initial conditions.
Therefore, those constraints become the explanations for those dynamical laws and initial conditions.
So the traditional logic is inverted.
~Conjecture Institute Senior Scientist Chiara Marletto
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Viewed in the right light, the infinity of ignorance is nothing but inspiring.
We could be wrong about anything.
But since we can detect errors and correct them, since we're creative beings capable of coming up with new solutions and explanations, this ignorance means that there is an infinite space for knowledge to grow in.
There is always more knowledge to create.
More problems to solve, problems whose quality keeps getting better and better.
More fun to have!
~Conjecture Institute Fellow @Jaber_Hassoun
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Visit Conjecture Institute Fellow @Jaber_Hassoun's Philosophy Corner:
piped.video/watch?v=77znmTbW…
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By the time Conjecture Institute Fellow @maxdesalle got to the University of Montreal, he was eager to hear what his physics professors would say about the quantum multiverse.
“I was very disappointed,” he says.
“They were all instrumentalists who viewed quantum mechanics as just a tool to do calculations, make predictions.
They didn’t care what it said about what the world was actually like.
I’d waited two whole years after reading @DavidDeutschOxf's book to talk to professional physicists about this, and they told me that my questions were too philosophical.
It was a bit of a shock.”
Fortunately, Maxime would befriend Conjecture Institute Fellows @Sam_kuyp, @CABedardPhysics, and @PaulRRobichaud during his time at university, and the three experienced physicists (technically, Paul is a mathematician whose work applies to physics) welcomed Maxime into the fold.
“They were Everettians, like me,” Maxime recalls.
“And they brought me into their particular world of physicists, virtually all of whom were realists.
Unlike many of the professors around me, Sam, Charles, and Paul actually did care about what our theories actually said about the world.”
Maxime’s eventual primer on Many-Worlds quantum theory is far more a testament to his many conversations with Sam, Charles, and Paul than it is to the content of his official university courses.
👇
Spotlight Article about Conjecture Institute Fellow @maxdesalle
Permissionless Knowledge Creation
Maxime’s expertise in physics, mathematics, and Zcash did not come from years of mandated curricula.
On the contrary, they come from a relentless pursuit of his interests and a fearlessness in the face of technical details or counterintuitive concepts.
He does not have a degree in Zcash, yet he will be the first person on Earth to have written a book about it.
He does not have a PhD in physics, yet he may soon publish peer-reviewed articles.
Like Zcash and research themselves, Maxime’s labors of love are permissionless.
link below👇
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A Quantum Solution to an Ancient Problem: Time
Time is a concept that pervades our everyday lives and is central to our understanding of reality.
However, it is beset by deep explanatory problems. In physics, our best theories of time suggest that we live in a block Universe.
The block Universe itself is timeless, yet within it all the different nows somehow coexist.
Since classical physics does not allow multiple realities to coexist, we face a serious conceptual issue.
In this essay, we illustrate how quantum theory addresses this and other problems related to our classical conception of time.
In quantum theory, the different nows are simply different branches of the overall timeless state of the Universe.
The quantum explanation of time sheds light on questions that humans have wrestled with since antiquity and lays the conceptual foundations for a quantum theory of gravity.
~@s_rijavec in Bold Conjectures, Volume II: Essays Across Physics
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There is nothing selfish about capitalism.
Like every economic model, it is a matrix within which individual actors can behave morally or immorally.
But it does have one exceptional virtue: no one has yet come up with a system that rewards decent behaviour to the same extent.
In an open market based on property rights and free contract, you become wealthy by offering an honest service to others.
I am typing these words on a machine developed by the late Steve Jobs.
He gained from the exchange (adding fractionally to his net wealth) and so did I (adding to my convenience).”
~Conjecture Institute Advisor @DanielJHannan
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Doomers' Failure of Imagination
The intellectual class tends towards prophecy and hence towards pessimism.
There's a straight line between prophecy and pessimism because it's very easy to imagine future problems, all the ways that things can go wrong.
The solutions to those things are much harder to imagine, because they require new ideas in the first place.
~Conjecture Institute Ambassador @ToKTeacher
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Being your kid's adversary, especially on a continual basis, gives kids a reason to put up a phony face to appease the people that are trying to control them.
~Conjecture Institute Cofounder @astupple
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I think that both cancer and aging are fundamentally diseases of multicellularity, of collective intelligence.
If you're going to be a collective intelligence, you're susceptible to certain failure modes, ways that those processes go wrong.
What keeps you together as a collective intelligence is a kind of mind-meld, where all your components have to be sharing information in a way that doesn't let them have too much individuality.
There's the informational linkage between this between the pieces.
There are several ways for that to go wrong: one way is what you see in cancer and another way is what you see in aging.
Development is just a kind of regeneration from one cell.
Metamorphosis, regulative development, actual regeneration from damage - all of those things are self-reinforcing processes that resist aging and cancer for as long as they can.
~@drmichaellevin with Conjecture Institute Fellow @arjunkhemani
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Conjecture Institute retweeted
The Sovereign Child in Spanish!
Mind is blown seeing this.
editorialtenos.com/collectio…
¿Qué pasa cuando damos más espacio a la autonomía, a la curiosidad y a la capacidad de los niños para aprender por sí mismos?
Con la vuelta al cole como telón de fondo, hemos reunido cinco ideas del libro para pensar y debatir con calma.
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A method [in mathematics] is akin to a pattern of how you could go on to solve a problem.
AI will look at a lot of them and try a lot of them, but if a pattern has not yet been found by humans, AI is not going to use it.
~Conjecture Institute Fellow @PaulRRobichaud
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Collectivism is twice self-refuting.
Either you are an individual subjugating yourself to the collective; or you are *actually* a collective, and therefore actually an individual.
~Conjecture Institute Fellow @tomhyde_
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One of the primary examples of doomerism today is the debate over artificial intelligence.
Some think that if we just keep innovating, we will eventually create an entity that is more intelligent and/or powerful than people could ever be and that we will fall to the status of slaves or animals beneath its feet.
First, if the machine is not creative, it will be precisely as obedient as our microwaves are.
And any unintentional side effects of AI can be accounted for with safety measures, as are currently being developed for self-driving cars.
Second, if we do end up creating a machine that is as alive as we are—a so-called artificial general intelligence, or AGI—it is no more rational to assume that it will pursue our destruction as it is to assume that new humans will do so.
New humans—namely children—are raised to adopt the values of the culture around them.
Of course, sometimes they rebel, especially when adults force them to do things they don’t want to do.
Therefore, the problem of how to integrate an AGI into our society is the same as the problem of how to raise children into happy, productive adults—and we’ve been improving at that for centuries.
~Conjecture Institute Fellow @arjunkhemani & President @ChipkinLogan 👇
Socialism, environmentalism, scientism, relativism, dogmatism, and doomerism have all earned their bona fides as enemies of civilization.
humanprogress.org/enemies-of…
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Why Do We Need a Quantum Theory of Gravity?
In the usual way of explaining why there is a why there's a need for a quantum theory of gravity, you don't really get the point.
The usual argument is something like: the Standard Model of fundamental interactions is a quantum theory, and the only fundamental interaction that's not like that is gravity.
So we should maybe want to turn it into a quantum field theory.
But you can make a much stronger case for why you need a quantum theory of gravity via Many Worlds quantum theory.
For example, the earth is a quantum system.
It consists of atoms and things like that.
And therefore, there's some quantum description of the entire earth and everything on it as it is orbiting the sun.
In different branches of the multiverse, the earth will have very slightly different positions, and so will the sun.
So the gravitational field, the spacetime, will be curved slightly differently in those different branches.
But in our best understanding of general relativity, there is no such thing as spacetime being different in different branches.
Spacetime has a definite value, and yet the argument I just gave seems to suggest that it shouldn't.
In this way, Many Worlds quantum theory allows you to see more clearly why you would want something like a quantum theory of gravity.
~Conjecture Institute Fellow @Sam_kuyp with Fellow @maria__violaris
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