The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Transhuman Future

Fri, 2010-11-12 04:27

#2

Rhyx

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the ...

I think a theory of everything would probably BE a singularity moment but it's not necessary to have singularity moments. The fun part of singularities is that they can be in almost any field: medicine (unraveling the genetic code) , social sciences (memetics as a predictable science in the same way that chemistry is), mathematics (as you have stated). Artificial intelligence (seed AI). All of these things can make for a future that is so alien as to become impossible to predict which is pretty much at the base of what a singularity means. I'd even go as far as to postulate that we already have gone through a singularity type change with the advent of internet.

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Fri, 2010-11-12 08:24

#3

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the ...

As this thread shows, even current math is pretty hard to understand for most people. The math that exist in preprint servers in EP is bound to be amazingly strange and advanced, especially since we have had generations of mathematicians with enhancements and AGI. I suspect that there are branches that are simply not possible to comprehend without specific enhancements (bioware for thinking in multiple dimensions, super-extended working memory for logical predicates, measure theory co-processors...) or may even require that you are an AI who has grown up with it. Of course, technological progress and math have a tricky relation. Often math advances because a new technology appears, rather than vice versa. I would expect that thanks to nanotechnology, AGI and psychosurgery there are whole branches dealing with complex multiagent systems, intelligent processes and mental networks. Not to mention the hints about some profound new physics that seems to be needed to control metallic hydrogen, plasma and antimatter - perhaps there is now a field of chaos control in quantum field theory, or something similar. As for the singularity, it probably has *nothing* to do with a theory of everything. As I see it, a real singularity is an intelligence explosion: the ability to build smarter minds that can build smarter minds reaches a critical point and we get seed AGI or something else leading to superintelligence. That just requires some kind of theory of how to build minds, little else. Once you have your superintelligences they might quickly figure out theories of everything. But I think it is to dilute the already messy concept of a singularity to claim that sudden breakthroughs in a science are singularities: Einstein might have been amazing in 1905, but it was not a singularity. As for the utility of TOEs, they might be pretty useless. We have essentially a TOE today: there doesn't seem to be anything going on on Earth that isn't derivable from the standard model of particle physics, some general relativity and basic quantum mechanics (all the weird things happen at huge or small scales). Yet we cannot use this rough TOE to predict turbulence, stock market prices, medical treatment or even the motion of a rolling rock - it just describes the deep causes, not the information we actually would like to get. For that we need fluid dynamics, economics, medicine and rigid body motion.

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Sat, 2010-11-13 16:59

#4

fafromnice fafromnice's picture

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the ...

I think it will be difficult for us to think about the future of science after all we can theorize all day long and go in the wrong way all that day When Kubrick makes 2001 movie, he called a team of IBM's technician to design the inner circuit of HAL and this guy were the most advanced mind of the world in computer design but they failed with some laughable circumstances So What do we know maybe in 30 years the mathematic will explain how mass of people will react in front of some events (Fondation, Isaac Azimov) Ps: i don't want to be negative ;) and I will keep an eye on this post because it's really interesting :D

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What do you mean a butterfly cause this ? How a butterfly can cause an enviromental system overload on the other side of a 10 000 egos habitat ?

Sun, 2010-11-14 23:16

#5

Rhyx

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the ...

Yeah but if we start thinking that way we might as well stop thinking about the future and wait for it to get here.:D Personally I would much rather be wrong and creative than right and as boring as a rock.

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[img]http://boxall.no-ip.org/img/A_Rep.jpg[/img] 2 [img]http://boxall.no-ip.org/img/R_Rep.jpg[/img] 7 [img]http://boxall.no-ip.org/img/C_Rep.jpg[/img] 2
[img]http://i.imgur.com/qtBZ9.jpg[/img]
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Mon, 2010-11-15 03:15

#6

Decivre

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the ...

fafromnice wrote:
I think it will be difficult for us to think about the future of science after all we can theorize all day long and go in the wrong way all that day When Kubrick makes 2001 movie, he called a team of IBM's technician to design the inner circuit of HAL and this guy were the most advanced mind of the world in computer design but they failed with some laughable circumstances So What do we know maybe in 30 years the mathematic will explain how mass of people will react in front of some events (Fondation, Isaac Azimov) Ps: i don't want to be negative ;) and I will keep an eye on this post because it's really interesting :D

The biggest problem that science fiction has is that science rarely goes straight upward in technological advance. Oftentimes, new discoveries require a technological shift in order to move forward (like the jump from the vacuum tube to the transistor, or from steam engines to combustion engines). Guessing at these technological shifts is near impossible to do, because we are literally talking about things we have yet to discover. I mean really, who honestly saw the discovery of metamaterials happening? Metallic hydrogen? The discovery of antimatter? These things were way out of left field when we found them. Who knows what new things we will find in a generation or two, let alone a century. Then there's the problem of anachronism. Most, if not all, fiction is loosely based on the society of the time, because it is very hard to actually grasp society as it was before or after. Many of us simply can't put ourselves in the shoes of the last generation, and it's damn near impossible to visualize how the next generation will look... let alone how our society will be in a couple centuries just after an apocalyptic singularity event.

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Mon, 2010-11-15 06:21

#7

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the ...

We are actually seriously trying to understand how predictable future technology is at a project in our institute. So far the evidence is very much that we cannot predict the important things. It is quite feasible to extrapolate trends, but trends sometimes break for various reasons that are outside the logic of the trend itself. The oil crisis in early 1970's got Americans to instantly stop consuming an increasing energy per capita (they had been doing that since WWII along a very straight line); it has been roughly constant ever since. Moore's law was horizontal - no or little progress - until 1940, when it suddenly became exponential. The invention of computers (a result from math rather than engineering) boosted it. So understanding what drives progress is more important than curve fitting. Unfortunately these relations can be very complex and messy. Worse, new ideas come out of nearly nowhere and allow progress in new directions. Sometimes you can predict where a new idea will eventually happen - we know that there is something fundamental we are missing in quantum gravity - but we cannot predict when it will happen or what it will actually do. In EP, I think we can safely say that there has been fundamental breakthroughs in physics, cognitive science, nanoscience, biomedicine, computing and economics. There is no way we can say anything sensible about the content of these breakthroughs. For game purposes it is better to leave them as part of the background - it is rare for most people to remark on the ubiquity and importance of the FFT or Schrödinger equation. However, it might be fun to list some of the famous scientists and theories. For example, I would nominate Xu Wang and Selena W. Kaczmarek for the 2053 Nobel price in physics for their discovery of resonant spin stabilization, a key component in stabilizing both metallic hydrogen and antimatter. The same year Darcy Washington, Kuwat Guntur and Jia Zhou got the medicine price for the complete model of the 'gerome', the genetic and biochemical process of ageing. It might not have itself solved the problem of ageing, but using it Lim Huang famously demonstrated non-ageing lab rats.

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Mon, 2010-11-15 08:32

#8

fafromnice fafromnice's picture

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the ...

Arenamontanus wrote:
For example, I would nominate Xu Wang and Selena W. Kaczmarek for the 2053 Nobel price in physics for their discovery of resonant spin stabilization, a key component in stabilizing both metallic hydrogen and antimatter. The same year Darcy Washington, Kuwat Guntur and Jia Zhou got the medicine price for the complete model of the 'gerome', the genetic and biochemical process of ageing. It might not have itself solved the problem of ageing, but using it Lim Huang famously demonstrated non-ageing lab rats.

good idea ...but you need to have some player who can understand such thing ;) for exemple I have no idea of who your talking about :P but I will certainly put one of those names in a cold sorage somewhere and left the player find by herself who is he/she ... or past in front of it and never see it :P anyway mathematics ? I really don't know what will happen ... hell ! i don't know how the cinema will evolve (yeah ! this is my field of study) but one of my friend is studying in math and i will have fun to ask him some questions

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What do you mean a butterfly cause this ? How a butterfly can cause an enviromental system overload on the other side of a 10 000 egos habitat ?

Mon, 2010-11-15 11:36

#9

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the ...

Apropos advances in math, and my other thread on inspirational short stories, here is Greg Egan's short story "Glory". The overall growth of math plays a role in it: https://encrypted.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBAQFjAA&url=...

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Mon, 2010-11-15 12:17

#10

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the ...

fafromnice wrote:
good idea ...but you need to have some player who can understand such thing ;) for exemple I have no idea of who your talking about :P

Actually, most science is like this. If you randomly browse the papers at http://arxiv.org/ you will find amazingly opaque titles. Some from this week:

Entropy of extremal black holes from entropy of quasiblack holes
Masking a singularity with k-essence fields in an emergent gravity metric
An AdS_3 Dual for Minimal Model CFTs
Regular hyperbolicity, dominant energy condition and causality for Lagrangian theory of maps
Metropolising forward particle filtering backward sampling and Rao-Blackwellisation of Metropolised particle smoothers
Efficient Bayesian Inference for Switching State-Space Models using Discrete Particle Markov Chain Monte Carlo Methods
Applications of the quadratic covariation differentiation theory: variants of the Clark-Ocone and Stroock's formulas
On using shadow prices in portfolio optimization with transaction costs
Kramers-Kronig analysis of biological skin
Discrete Partitioning and Coverage Control for Gossiping Robots
N-Dark-Dark Solitons in the Generally Coupled Nonlinear Schroedinger Equations
Splitting broad beams into arrays of dissipative spatial solitons by material and virtual gratings
A Super Version of the Connes-Moscovici Hopf Algebra
Weights on bimodules
Families of 4-manifolds with nontrivial stable cohomotopy Seiberg-Witten invariants, and normalized Ricci flow
Constraints on the threshold K- nuclear potential from FINUDA (stopped K-, pi-) hypernuclear spectra
Subspaces of a para-quaternionic Hermitian vector space
Singularities of the asymptotic completion of developable Möbius strips
Special 2-flags in lengths not exceeding four: a study in strong nilpotency of distributions
Entropy Production during Asymptotically Safe Inflation
Holographic conductors near the Breitenlohner-Freedman bound

These are just some that have cool titles. There are plenty more with even stranger *content* (and plenty of stuff where I cannot even tell whether the content is strange or pedestrian - many fields are truly obscure to outsiders). So if you need science-babble for the game, just go to arxiv and pick up some terms from the abstracts.

Quote:
but I will certainly put one of those names in a cold sorage somewhere and left the player find by herself who is he/she ... or past in front of it and never see it :P

"What?! You have had a singularity and *still* don't know whether there are magnetic monopoles! Sheesh, where are the superintelligences when you need them?"

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Mon, 2010-11-15 13:02

#11

King Shere King Shere's picture

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the ...

[i]"What the inventors of ego forking still hasn't won the Nobel prize!" "Nor did the creators of the accelerated simspaces or ... Palo Alto Research Center" "What!" "Well its not entirely true. PARC, at least, got recognition with the "Charles Stark Draper Prize". Sort of 'the engineers equivalent to the antiquated Nobel prize"[/i]

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Mon, 2010-11-15 15:01

#12

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the ...

As an aside, the possibility of getting a Nobel prize in 10 AF is still iffy. The Nobel foundation might still have survived in some form, but it has trouble getting things done properly. In my game, the remnants of the Swedish government has folded itself into a Titanian microcorp after a referendum among surviving citizens, not giving up its sovereign status but leaving it "resting" for the time being. There is a bona fide king of Sweden, a programmer on Luna who was the closest in line (and now the formal head of a small club of royalists having meetings in Erato). There is likely no Swedish academy to select literature prizes, and the other academies selecting the other prizes are equally non-existent. And Norway (where the peace prize is supposed to be delivered) is somewhat inaccessible. Most likely the foundation is considering its options and trying to figure out the closest approximation of what the will stipulated that can actually be done. What other science prizes exist in 10 AF? The various X-foundations have clearly done well. Some gerontocrats and hypercorps might institute prizes that fit with their ideologies. The Cognite Prize for psychosurgery, anyone?

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Mon, 2010-11-15 15:14

#13

CodeBreaker CodeBreaker's picture

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the ...

An X-Prize for the first group of individuals who can, under scientific conditions and within a monitored environment, prove viable techniques for raising a new generation of Lost who will not go schizo-crazy and start killing each other might be an interesting one. Cognite still catch flak for them Lost, so it is probably not something any of the big hypercorps want to publicly be involved with, but maybe in the Outer System.

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