At least since antiquity (“All is number”), there has always been someone to elevate the latest in mathematical or physical thought to the governing principle of the world. A hundred years ago it was relativity, forty years ago it was chaos theory, a few years ago it was the multiverse.
Among everything that this essay covers, there are definitely some new, interesting, and powerful ideas. Deep learning in quantum Boltzmann machines is new, the holographic dual to the Ising model is new. Ideas like the cosmos being a timelike holographic dual to a quantum Boltzmann machine, have been in the air for a few years.
Still, let me try to be a little critical… There is an overemphasis specifically on the Ising model here, justified on the grounds that everything else can be mapped to it. But that doesn’t mean that everything “is” the Ising model, no more than the universality of computation means that everything is a Turing machine in the classic sense of a read-write device marching back and forth on a tape.
The more universal concept is something like, randomized interacting networks that heat up and then cool down (for some definition of temperature), and which settle into new stable states when they cool down. This is the “annealing” concept. But here I can mention another misplaced emphasis of the essay, which is to say *quantum* annealing all the time. The quantum aspect is negligible or nonexistent in many examples of annealing.
Other critical comments are possible. Qubits don’t have to be superconducting. A number of the alleged connections (e.g. between evolution and the Ising model) are weak or questionable… More constructively, I can also say that rather than the Ising model per se, it’s the modern theory of phase transitions (and renormalization, etc), for which the Ising model was an important theoretical testing ground, that is a central part of a “theory of everything” for complex systems.
The new paradigm begins to run into its limits in a few places, familiar in philosophical systems based upon concepts from physics or mathematics. It doesn’t explain why the universe as such exists. It makes new proposals for which things are conscious (I mean the parts about anxiety and relaxation), but not why they are conscious.
When it gets to the question of humanity’s place in reality, the essay lapses into a kind of wishful thinking. Maybe the second law is periodically overcome by unknown means, and maybe we are an instrument of this change, and maybe we keep making the universe restart because we liked it so much, though we keep none of our memories from the previous time… Innumerable evils are known to occur, just in our little corner of the universe; that this should keep happening eternally, because of an unquenchable impulse to live that keeps restoring this imperfect life, might be regarded as hellishly dystopian.
However, for now that part is just a wacky speculation. What we do see in the universe, are tides of energy, that wash through physical systems, stirring them up, then letting them settle down again, then stirring them up again. This is how the processes like annealing keep happening. It’s very Taoist; things come together, then break apart, then come together. But this doesn’t seem to be driven by human agency, any more than do the sandcrabs on the beach control the tides.
Despite my criticisms, I do respect this essay. It has a lot of truth in it. Perhaps some day we will find out who the author is, and who is behind the “Vessel Project”.
“You this should ruin them, Ising not to join them!” -- *Backstroke of the West*
At least since antiquity (“All is number”), there has always been someone to elevate the latest in mathematical or physical thought to the governing principle of the world. A hundred years ago it was relativity, forty years ago it was chaos theory, a few years ago it was the multiverse.
Among everything that this essay covers, there are definitely some new, interesting, and powerful ideas. Deep learning in quantum Boltzmann machines is new, the holographic dual to the Ising model is new. Ideas like the cosmos being a timelike holographic dual to a quantum Boltzmann machine, have been in the air for a few years.
Still, let me try to be a little critical… There is an overemphasis specifically on the Ising model here, justified on the grounds that everything else can be mapped to it. But that doesn’t mean that everything “is” the Ising model, no more than the universality of computation means that everything is a Turing machine in the classic sense of a read-write device marching back and forth on a tape.
The more universal concept is something like, randomized interacting networks that heat up and then cool down (for some definition of temperature), and which settle into new stable states when they cool down. This is the “annealing” concept. But here I can mention another misplaced emphasis of the essay, which is to say *quantum* annealing all the time. The quantum aspect is negligible or nonexistent in many examples of annealing.
Other critical comments are possible. Qubits don’t have to be superconducting. A number of the alleged connections (e.g. between evolution and the Ising model) are weak or questionable… More constructively, I can also say that rather than the Ising model per se, it’s the modern theory of phase transitions (and renormalization, etc), for which the Ising model was an important theoretical testing ground, that is a central part of a “theory of everything” for complex systems.
The new paradigm begins to run into its limits in a few places, familiar in philosophical systems based upon concepts from physics or mathematics. It doesn’t explain why the universe as such exists. It makes new proposals for which things are conscious (I mean the parts about anxiety and relaxation), but not why they are conscious.
When it gets to the question of humanity’s place in reality, the essay lapses into a kind of wishful thinking. Maybe the second law is periodically overcome by unknown means, and maybe we are an instrument of this change, and maybe we keep making the universe restart because we liked it so much, though we keep none of our memories from the previous time… Innumerable evils are known to occur, just in our little corner of the universe; that this should keep happening eternally, because of an unquenchable impulse to live that keeps restoring this imperfect life, might be regarded as hellishly dystopian.
However, for now that part is just a wacky speculation. What we do see in the universe, are tides of energy, that wash through physical systems, stirring them up, then letting them settle down again, then stirring them up again. This is how the processes like annealing keep happening. It’s very Taoist; things come together, then break apart, then come together. But this doesn’t seem to be driven by human agency, any more than do the sandcrabs on the beach control the tides.
Despite my criticisms, I do respect this essay. It has a lot of truth in it. Perhaps some day we will find out who the author is, and who is behind the “Vessel Project”.
“You this should ruin them, Ising not to join them!” -- *Backstroke of the West*