Is it possible we are not equiped to understand the universe

[Rum]

We haven't done too bad a job of painting a picture of our house while locked inside the bathroom so far. I think we will continue to improve our understanding but always be left wondering about a few things - not that they are beyond our understanding, just that what we learn shows us more things that we don't know... yet.

I agree with you. But while we have some pretty good drawings of the house (to extend your metaphor), I think we are only just about imagining the garden outside and as to what is outside the gates?..well fuck knows really it seems. Its not what we once - and recently - thought it seems.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

We haven't done too bad a job of painting a picture of our house while locked inside the bathroom so far. I think we will continue to improve our understanding but always be left wondering about a few things - not that they are beyond our understanding, just that what we learn shows us more things that we don't know... yet.

I agree with you. But while we have some pretty good drawings of the house (to extend your metaphor), I think we are only just about imagining the garden outside and as to what is outside the gates?..well fuck knows really it seems. Its not what we once - and recently - thought it seems.

I think that we will always find it fiendishly difficult, if not impossible, to visualise but that is not the same as understanding. I cannot hold the image of a four-dimensional hypercube in my mind - but I can understand its properties.

[normal]

We haven't done too bad a job of painting a picture of our house while locked inside the bathroom so far. I think we will continue to improve our understanding but always be left wondering about a few things - not that they are beyond our understanding, just that what we learn shows us more things that we don't know... yet.

I agree with you. But while we have some pretty good drawings of the house (to extend your metaphor), I think we are only just about imagining the garden outside and as to what is outside the gates?..well fuck knows really it seems. Its not what we once - and recently - thought it seems.

I think that we will always find it fiendishly difficult, if not impossible, to visualise but that is not the same as understanding. I cannot hold the image of a four-dimensional hypercube in my mind - but I can understand its properties.

[susu.exp]

I'm inclined towards Turing's idea that once a machine passes a certain complexity it can in principle compute anything that can be computed ... provided of course that it is an "infinite machine", which fortunately doesn't mean it really has to be infinite in size, only that there is no theoretical limit on how much memory it can access (if you run out, add more). We already use writing, computers, etc., to allow our brains to process far more than we could hold in our heads at a time, so I can't see any reason why we shouldn't be able to do more of the same to understand whatever the universe can throw at us. The only sort of universe we could not, in principle, understand would be one that is completely random and therefore requires the universe itself to describe it. Fortunately the universe is not random and obeys some nice laws, so I am optimistic it can be understood.

And here´s the trouble. The universe follows probabilistic laws. Which Turing machines, being deterministic, can´t get to grips with. When you say "completely random", what do you mean there precisely? Randomness in the mathematical sense follows some rather nice laws, too and these laws are found throughout nature. And that´s where the problem in understanding not only QM, but also Thermodynamics, Evolutionary biology, Chemistry, Economics and a huge range of other disciplines comes from. Humans like two types of stories: Stories of fate and stories of choice. Neither of these is a good mode in most sciences, where the best theories tell us stories of chance and happenstance, which we - pattern seeking machines that we are try to shoehorn into the two categories. It´s not only us, similar thought patterns appear in animals as well. The famous rat experiment where some rats were provided with a food pellet in regular time intervals and kept doing what they were doing when the first pellet came, stopping after the last one came, but keeping on longer, the longer the regular interval was. Rats given pellets at random points in time kept on forever.

Most intelligence tests are to a great degree pattern recognition tests. What number is next in this sequence? Which of the following images completes the sequence? We see sheep in clouds and monsters in trees from early age. What we are terrible at is spotting random when we see it.
One of the following is a sequence of 100 fair coin tosses. One of them isn´t. Guess which one.
1) HHHHHHHHTTTHHHTHTTHTTTTHHTHTHHTHHTHTTHTTTHTTHHTTHTHTTTHHTTTHTHHTHHTHTTTTTHTHHTHHHTTHHHHTHTTTTTHTHHHH
2) THTHTHTHTHTHTHTTHTHHTHTTHTHTHHTHTHTHTHHTHTHTTHTHTHHHTHTHTHTHTTHHTHTHTTHTHTHTHTHTHHTHTHTHTHTHHTHTTHTT

Trigger Warning!!!1! :

2 is not a sequence of fair coin tosses, but starts with a single coin toss and then has a 90% chance of changing to the other result the next time. This is similar to what happened to the random play function of iPods, the first firmware picked songs with uniform probability, this was changed to a non-uniform probability when people complained that the random play wasn´t "random enough", because it´d with some regularity play a song twice or play the next song in the playlist, or the one before

The good news is: One can learn to get past these obstacles. If you start doing some probability theory you start to develop intuitions about how randomness works. And suddenly a huge range of counterintuitive things becomes rather familiar.

What would an absurd, unknowable universe look like? Would its denizens know science?

I believe the universe is fundamentally knowable by minds. That is the first premise of science.

Nope. It´s not even a premise of science at all. Science rests on rather few premises:
a) I exist and can observe things (whether they exist doesn´t matter)
b) In particular, I can observe others, which can communicate their observations to me (whether they exist and whether they actually observe things doesn´t matter)
c) (A->B AND -B)->-A
None of these requires that the universe exists at all, much less that is fundamentally knowable by minds. Both would be nice, but for science to work, they aren´t neccessary.

[Rum]

We haven't done too bad a job of painting a picture of our house while locked inside the bathroom so far. I think we will continue to improve our understanding but always be left wondering about a few things - not that they are beyond our understanding, just that what we learn shows us more things that we don't know... yet.

I agree with you. But while we have some pretty good drawings of the house (to extend your metaphor), I think we are only just about imagining the garden outside and as to what is outside the gates?..well fuck knows really it seems. Its not what we once - and recently - thought it seems.

I think that we will always find it fiendishly difficult, if not impossible, to visualise but that is not the same as understanding. I cannot hold the image of a four-dimensional hypercube in my mind - but I can understand its properties.

But also

[Trinoc]

And here´s the trouble. The universe follows probabilistic laws. Which Turing machines, being deterministic, can´t get to grips with. When you say "completely random", what do you mean there precisely?

I meant "random" in the sense of the only complete description of the universe being the complete universe itself. A bit like a map that is so detailed that it needs to be as big as the territory it maps.

I think the issue here is that I was not saying that we can know everything about the universe, in the sense of knowing the state of every individual particle. That would be nigh on impossible in a classical universe and completely impossible if you have quantum uncertainty. What I meant to say was that I think it is possible in principle to understand whatever order there is in the universe. We can progress towards knowing whatever there is to know. While I suspect we will never know all of it, there is (I think) no boundary beyond which we can not go, other than the point at which there is no more information to know. We can not know the exact state of a system subject to quantum uncertainty because that information does not exist, but we can know the probability of it being in each of the possible states to any required (finite) degree of accuracy.

(Provided of course that the probability is not subject to a fundamental uncertainty of its own ... and I'm going to stop thinking about what it means to have probabilities of probabilities (of probabilities ...) before my head explodes!)

[susu.exp]

I meant "random" in the sense of the only complete description of the universe being the complete universe itself. A bit like a map that is so detailed that it needs to be as big as the territory it maps.

The technical term (soiled by a popular science writing Creationist) is "irreducibly complex". This uses Kolmogorov complexity, where the complexity of a string is given as the lenght in bits of the shortest program that produces the string. An irreducibly complex string is one, where the shortest program is as long as the string. He then showed that random strings are irreducibly complex.

I think the issue here is that I was not saying that we can know everything about the universe, in the sense of knowing the state of every individual particle. That would be nigh on impossible in a classical universe and completely impossible if you have quantum uncertainty. What I meant to say was that I think it is possible in principle to understand whatever order there is in the universe. We can progress towards knowing whatever there is to know. While I suspect we will never know all of it, there is (I think) no boundary beyond which we can not go, other than the point at which there is no more information to know. We can not know the exact state of a system subject to quantum uncertainty because that information does not exist, but we can know the probability of it being in each of the possible states to any required (finite) degree of accuracy.

(Provided of course that the probability is not subject to a fundamental uncertainty of its own ... and I'm going to stop thinking about what it means to have probabilities of probabilities (of probabilities ...) before my head explodes!)

Not a big problem if you´ve got linear relationships, but if there´s non-linearity, the probabilities of probabilities of... is generally what it boils down to. A particle (smeared out as it is) comes with an electic field, affecting the probabilities for other particles, which... Quantum chaos is a mathematical field, where one can easily find unsolved non-trivial problems. In other fields you have finite states (economy, evolution) and there even the non-linearity doesn´t fundamentally wreck things - though finding problems that would require computers of universe size to actually calculate is easy there as well.

[Trinoc]

Not a big problem if you´ve got linear relationships, but if there´s non-linearity, the probabilities of probabilities of... is generally what it boils down to. A particle (smeared out as it is) comes with an electic field, affecting the probabilities for other particles, which... Quantum chaos is a mathematical field, where one can easily find unsolved non-trivial problems. In other fields you have finite states (economy, evolution) and there even the non-linearity doesn´t fundamentally wreck things - though finding problems that would require computers of universe size to actually calculate is easy there as well.

I've always wondered, in my completely clueless way, whether applying classical chaos theory to the probability functions of quantum particles could account for the quantum uncertainty in the particles themselves that we can observe. In other words, is there a continuum of uncertainty between chaos on the large scale as we see in weather etc., caused by infinitesimal errors in measuring initial conditions, and quantum uncertainty on the small scale, or are they in some sense fundamentally different from each other?

[FedUpWithFaith]

A Newtonian universe is pretty straightforward to understand. It also works well with the sort of mental apparatus, senses and so on we have. This is pretty understandable, because it was those which led us to look at the universe in the way we did.

A Relativistic Universe is harder to comprehend - 'apprehend' might be a better world, but we can just about imagine it, and it certainly makes sense with the physical and mental apparatus at out disposal.

A quantum universe is counter intuitive, 'illogical' and cannot, I would argue, be apprehended at all easily with the physical and mental equipment at out disposal. The logic of the quantum world is the total illogic, or nonsense of our everyday take on it.

It would seem that the universe turns out to be really very weird and my question is this. Given that it may be totally bizarre from a human perspective, is it possible that we will never be able to do more than imagine what it 'looks' like, even if we get some mathematical grasp of it? Perhaps we do not have the capability to apprehend the universe as it truly is.

Rum,

Your post raises questions perhaps better suited to the philosophy section than the science section. I think we have to be extremely careful with language too. For example, I would not say quantum mechanics is illogical. It is the product of logical science and mathematics. What i think you meant is that it is not intuitive or is counter-intuitive as it breaks and violates the types of patterns humans commonly recognize.

What I do like is your use of the word "apprehend". Feynman said nobody understands QM. I think he meant that in the sense of apprehend. In many areas, science and mathematics have gone beyond man's ability to mentally model, making advancement much more difficult. There was not much about 19th century physics you couldn't model as pictures in your mind. After the 20th century, this became difficult or impossible. It is possible that there are intelligent beings in the universe who can directly "visualize" four or more dimensions and to whom a Klein Bottle would look tangible. But we can only "see' it as 3-D shadows of 4-D space just like a Flatlander could only "see" 3-D objects as shadows (projections) on 2-D space.

What might come much easier to intelligences beyond our own that can virtually experience more than 3 dimensions or potentially think in quantum probabilities can still be acquired as knowledge by humans via deeper levels of abstraction that could become less and less intuitive. Such knowledge would have been discovered and acquired by humans in a potentially useful way (via technology) even if humans can't truly "apprehend" any of it tangibly. The barrier to acquiring objective knowledge is probably just as limitless as for far more advanced intelligences but it would take us much more effort and time. Since I believe that ultimate reality is derived completely from computable logic and mathematics I have to ask, is there a form of logic or mathematics the human mind cannot perform? My answer is probably not - especially if we can extend man's reach via computers ultimately understood by human creators - though this does beg questions about the so-called Singularity. As a somebody who believes in digital physics/modal realism, I believe everything in reality is computable by a Universal Turing Machine. So the ultimate question is are there any computations humans can't do. I doubt it.

We do have to distinguish objective knowledge about the universe from subjective knowledge however. Here, there are probably definite limits to what we can understand and Chomsky is correct. Just as an ant is mentally incapable of understanding human thoughts and feelings i don't think we can assume that humans could ever expect to completely understand more advanced minds, or minds just as advanced (that's difficult to define here) that evolved under completely different circumstances. There is no reason to expect that there is a universal grammar or mode of qualia all sentient life possesses and i find such a possibility remote.

[Rum]

*Big Snip*
There is no reason to expect that there is a universal grammar or mode of qualia all sentient life possesses and i find such a possibility remote.

Golly - you are indeed a clever chap. I say that without sarcasm too! You encapsulate my thinking in text far better than I ever could, though I do doubt your faith in technology's ability one to to 'apprehend' the true complexity of the multi-dimensional 'folding' (which I suspect the best metaphor) that makes up the nature of 'us' and the whole shebang.

The universe and its nature are fucking amazing in any case - and far more wonderful than any god created universe ever could be.

[Fact-Man]

The universe and its nature are fucking amazing in any case - and far more wonderful than any god created universe ever could be.

I remember thinking this after spending several hours gazing at the night sky from the top of a 12,000 foot peak in the Selkirk Mountains in British Columbia with a pair of high-powered Nikon field glasses,

I had aways sought out places from which one could gaze upon vast reaches of a natural landscape or the night sky but this was the first time it struck me quite in this way. I knew the Earth was a magnificent work of art created over billons of years (old is good) and it had always atttracted me as such. I couldn't seem to get enough of it and every grand landscape I managed to see only urged me on for more. And sat photos from near space only show this in greater abundance.

I think a lot of Christians fail to look, they rarely if ever see the stars at night or take the trouble to find and get to places from where vast landscapes can be seen ... so they remain duped by their book and their preachers, and their own failure to think, independently, critically, or for themselves.

There's nothing quite so humbling as the view of Grand Canyom from a high rim.

Some of us were on Chief Mountain in Western Montana one time gazing out over the great plains that run eastward, rilled and cut by the Milk River valley, and someone said, "Just think! There's a Senator for all this!"

We howled!

Senator indeed.

[FedUpWithFaith]

*Big Snip*
There is no reason to expect that there is a universal grammar or mode of qualia all sentient life possesses and i find such a possibility remote.

Golly - you are indeed a clever chap. I say that without sarcasm too! You encapsulate my thinking in text far better than I ever could, though I do doubt your faith in technology's ability one to to 'apprehend' the true complexity of the multi-dimensional 'folding' (which I suspect the best metaphor) that makes up the nature of 'us' and the whole shebang.

The universe and its nature are fucking amazing in any case - and far more wonderful than any god created universe ever could be.

Thanks, and I certainly agree with your last sentence. I also agree with Feynman that if and when we do discover the ultimate secrets of the universe, they will turn out to be extremely elegant and simple. He would probably agree with where Wolfram is going (i.e., cellular automata) in "A New Kind of Science" though others deserve more credit than Wolfram for "his" ideas (like Ed Fredkin and Conrad Zuse). However, the phenomena we might have to sift through before we distill those fundamental secrets could be dauntingly complex or require energies we can't generate. It is possible there could also be hard epistemic barriers akin to Godel's Theorem that limit what we can know. I think this will be an amazing century of discovery if we don't destroy ourselves.

[andyx1205]

There are billions and billions of stars in a galaxy, and there are hundreds of billions of galaxies.

It would take 100 000 years to travel across the Milky Way, if you were to travel at the speed of light.

And there are hundreds of billions of galaxies.

On top of that, there are possibly an infinite amount of Universes and an infinite amount of Big Bangs.

So yes, fuck, it is quite impossible for humans to "understand the Universe." We may be able to "understand more," but I doubt we can understand everything.

For one, we do not know if it is even possible to know what came before the Big Bang, either because we are confined to "our known Universe," or because there really was nothing before the Big Bang.

On top of that, our Universe was created out of nothing, and by nothing I mean empty space not "nothing." Virtual particles pop in and out of existence, or rather, pop out of "nothing" all the time. So yes, that is quite mind-boggling. (+4) + (-4) = 0, but 0 =/ nothing. At the quantum level, "nothing" is simply a bubbling soup of virtual particles that can be measured indirectly.

Fuck.

Another interesting note is that in the future, our Universe will be so red-shifted that our ancestors in the distant future will see nothing in the night sky except darkness.

Here's a fascinating video by Lawrence Krauss, titled "A Universe from Nothing," if anyone is interested and has enough spare time to give it a watch.


"Forget Jesus, the stars died so that you could be here today," Lawrence Krauss.

I also remember watching a video that consisted of several Nobel Prize Laureates debating string-theory and such with each other, and it seemed that they were merely inches away from killing one another.

[Rum]

There are billions and billions of stars in a galaxy, and there are hundreds of billions of galaxies.

It would take 100 000 years to travel across the Milky Way, if you were to travel at the speed of light.

And there are hundreds of billions of galaxies.

On top of that, there are possibly an infinite amount of Universes and an infinite amount of Big Bangs.

So yes, fuck, it is quite impossible for humans to "understand the Universe." We may be able to "understand more," but I doubt we can understand everything.
-snipped-

While it is pretty certain we will never go to every corner of the universe, and therefore not 'understand' it directly of course, in terms of having seen all there is to see, I was referring much more to the actual make-up and nature of the universe - or more specifically the nature of the stuff we inhabit and what it 'looks like'. My point when I think about it again, is that our senses and mental equipment are probably not equipped to hold even a model of its true nature in our heads, even if perhaps we one day actually arrive at some sort of mathematical description.

[Elessarina]

It would seem that the universe turns out to be really very weird and my question is this. Given that it may be totally bizarre from a human perspective, is it possible that we will never be able to do more than imagine what it 'looks' like, even if we get some mathematical grasp of it? Perhaps we do not have the capability to apprehend the universe as it truly is.

An argument or idea that i often put forward in the case of such things is that we have eveoled essentially to function o this planet and are tied in with it and its ecosystem and conditions. therefore our abilities are limited byt the fact that we evolved on this one tiny planet on the arse end of a galaxy