The causal-set line of physics research has been (very lightly) touched on here before. (I believe it was Mitchel Porter that had linked to one or two things related to that, though I may be misremembering). But recently I came across something that goes a bit farther: rather than embedding a causal set in a spacetime or otherwise handing it the spacetime structure, it basically just goes “here’s a directed acyclic graph… we’re going to add on a teensy weensy few extra assumptions… and out of it construct the minkowski metric, and relativistic transformations”
I’m slowly making my way through this paper (partly slowed by the fact that I’m not all that familiar with order theory), but the reason I mention the paper (A Derivation of Special Relativity from Causal Sets) is because I can’t help but wonder if it might give us a hook to go in the other direction. That is, if this line of research might let us bring the mathematical machinery of much of physics to help us analyze stuff like Bayes nets and decision theory and give us a (potentially) really powerful mathematical tool.
Maybe I’m completely wrong and nothing interesting will come of trying to “reverse” the causal set line of research, (but causal set stuff is neat anyways, so at least I get some fun from reading and thinking about it) but does seem potentially worth looking into.
Besides, if this does end up being a useful tool, it would be perhaps one of the biggest and subtlest punchlines the universe pulled on us: since causal-sets are an approach to quantum gravity, if it ended up helping with the rationality/AI/etc stuff...
That would mean that Penrose was right about quantum gravity being a key to mind… BUT IN A WAY ENTIRELY DIFFERENT THAN HE INTENDED! bwahahahaha. :)
The causal-set line of physics research has been (very lightly) touched on here before. (I believe it was Mitchel Porter that had linked to one or two things related to that, though I may be misremembering). But recently I came across something that goes a bit farther: rather than embedding a causal set in a spacetime or otherwise handing it the spacetime structure, it basically just goes “here’s a directed acyclic graph… we’re going to add on a teensy weensy few extra assumptions… and out of it construct the minkowski metric, and relativistic transformations”
I’m slowly making my way through this paper (partly slowed by the fact that I’m not all that familiar with order theory), but the reason I mention the paper (A Derivation of Special Relativity from Causal Sets) is because I can’t help but wonder if it might give us a hook to go in the other direction. That is, if this line of research might let us bring the mathematical machinery of much of physics to help us analyze stuff like Bayes nets and decision theory and give us a (potentially) really powerful mathematical tool.
Maybe I’m completely wrong and nothing interesting will come of trying to “reverse” the causal set line of research, (but causal set stuff is neat anyways, so at least I get some fun from reading and thinking about it) but does seem potentially worth looking into.
Besides, if this does end up being a useful tool, it would be perhaps one of the biggest and subtlest punchlines the universe pulled on us: since causal-sets are an approach to quantum gravity, if it ended up helping with the rationality/AI/etc stuff...
That would mean that Penrose was right about quantum gravity being a key to mind… BUT IN A WAY ENTIRELY DIFFERENT THAN HE INTENDED! bwahahahaha. :)