Eugene I wrote: ↑Fri Aug 20, 2021 8:38 pm
Adur Alkain wrote: ↑Thu Aug 19, 2021 10:26 am
The simulation metaphor: the law of consistency in action
This is how the law of consistency gives rise to the regularity of the observed world. At the beginning of the game, the players would be free to perceive the world around them behaving in any possible way they could imagine. As the game progressed, those perceived behaviours would become “natural laws”. The freedom of the players to perceive whatever they might would diminish, but their impression of being in a “real world” would accordingly increase.
So this is your completely immersive virtual reality game. It would enhance the players’ freedom and creativity. They would be unwittingly creating their own virtual world as they played. There is no way to predict what kind of world they would create. Each new set of players (you could relaunch the game as many times as you liked) would probably end up in a completely different universe. You, as the game designer, would save a lot of work. You could just sit back and watch. And the game would be anything but boring.
I'm afraid this is again too simplistic model. The players don't just see consistent images. When they analyze their images down to very microscopic level and up to very mega-scopic level, they find that their images are not only consistent to each other, but also always precisely consistent with specific mathematical rules (Schrodinger equation, laws of special and general relativity etc). How did that happen? When did they agreed to introduce those precise rules in the game? And why did they forget about those rules and had to later re-discover them?
Eugene, you are missing the whole point of the metaphor. Within the simulation game (which is just a thought experiment) there wouldn't be (at least at first) any mathematical rules, the players' perceptions would be consistent in an obvious, intuitive way (like the perceptions of playing children are consistent: children don't use complex mathematical measurements to find out if their perceptions really are consistent or not).
Further on, still inside the game, if players decided, like you say, to analyze their perceptions with mathematical precission, then and only then the mathematical "laws of nature" would arise. And there is no reason to suppose that every set of players would necessarily end up with the very same set of mathematical rules. The players could end up in a virtual universe where people could fly freely through the air, for example. And they would find, if they did scientific experiments, mathematical laws consistent with that.
My whole point is that the mathematical "laws of nature" are not fundamental. This would explain why it's so difficult (probably impossible) to integrate general relativity and quantum mechanics: these are sets of "laws" that result from completely different types of measurement. These measurements are consistent with each other, but that consistency is not the result of any mathematical "great unifying law".
Something that has always interested me is the strange way in which many of these "fundamental laws" are discovered. Schrödinger's equation is a particularly good example: he apparently wrote it down in a flash of inspiration, and voila! it was the right equation! The way I interpret this is that those "flashes of inspiration" come from a direct intuition of the underlying reality: a universal intelligence observing the physical universe.
Mathematical measurements performed by human scientists give rise to a "mathematical consistency" (which didn't exist previous to those measurements). Then, some genius scientist (with some intuition of universal consciousness) comes up with a mathematical equation that describes that mathematical consistency. But that mathematical equation is always just an approximation. We know this was the case for the Newtonian equations, for example. And in the case of Schrödinger's equation, the approximative nature of the equation becomes explicit: it only provides probabilities.
I believe that mathematics is created by the human brain, and doesn't exist outside it. Universal consciousness uses the human brain to observe the physical universe, so it's inevitable that the universe observed in this way would seem to follow mathematical laws. But the mathematical laws of science are just an approximation to an underlying non-mathematical law: the Law of Consistency.
I might be completely wrong about this. But I think it's an interesting and novel idea. And here is the thing: If I'm correct, we are at the end of mathematical physics. No new "fundamental" mathematical laws will ever be discovered. The new goal of physical science will be to understand what "consistency" actually means, and how it works. This isn't a small question, I believe.