A World Of Atoms, A World Of Humans
How does the world work? This is the question that has fascinated me ever since I figured out the basics of my own life. What frustrates me is that it’s quite hard even to assess humanity’s level of knowledge. There isn’t a two-volume book “Everything We Know“ / “Everything We Don’t Know“.
Many people are captivated by the “base level“ question — what are the atomic gears that add up to reality? This question naturally leads to molecular biology, chemistry, physics. I, surprisingly, have relatively little interest in these gears.
To me, the whole is more interested than its parts, and it seems that the parts themselves are, to a certain extent, fungible. Church-Turing thesis teaches us that computational substrate doesn’t matter, the same notion of computable function emerges irrespective of the specific physics of a computing device. Universal Approximation Theorem means that matrix multiplication and a non-linearity are enough for anything. Newtonian Mechanics makes sense, is logical, and has predictive power, but, strictly speaking, it doesn’t exist, as it is a mere approximation of aggregated quantum mechanics.
But isn’t it fascinating that, starting with QM and adding orders of magnitude of scale, you end up with a system that can be reasonably described by a few laws?
Studying earth history is like catching up on gossip. Who cares what happened here on earth? I want to learn fundamental principles of the universe, things that would be true even if earth had never existed.
I want to study history, but not to memoize the names of glorious kings and the dates of deadly battles. It seems to me that the world of humans has a certain internal logic, psychohistory, if you will, and that an alien species with a completely different biology might nonetheless repeat some of our follies?