Yes, it is willful ignorance (aka Evil). If you extrapolate the rather esoteric work of defining a convex hull around possible worlds (whether it's instantiation from a formal foundation like Schoedinger's, limited to high confidence extension of "adjacent possible", or brute force existentiality like David Lewis') to everyday people's attempts to improve themselves or their situation, then yes, it's willful ignorance to sit on one's ass and do nothing.
I don't see Wolpert's effort as anything categorically different than that of a single mom trying to put food on the table for her kid. It expands to the "hustle culture" or gig economy where our kids' "adjacent possible" consists of duck-face selfies on Instagram, composition shorts on TikTok, NFTs, and scamming socialites out of their money (ala Anna Delvey). The question is what is it we don't know and how can we think about what we don't know. Whether the possible worlds you choose to ... simulate? ... execute? ... realize? involve one or another particular tool (cell phones or category theory) is irrelevant. What matters is that you choose one or many possible worlds to balloon out and see where they go, their extent. Where they do not go, or cannot go, is that convex hull, the corners/edges of which might tell us something about what's outside the hull. Of course, none of us can do nothing. Even if you kill yourself, you're still food for the worms. So extrapolation too far decoheres the work. So it's convenient to bound the definition with something like "finite sequences from a finite alphabet" or "science" or "basic human rights" or whatever. When one group (like Scientismists) define the work in too small a way, potential contributors are left out of the work. And that may well doom the work to sophistry or triviality. Defining it too large, though, carries similar inverted risks. On 9/17/22 12:15, Jon Zingale wrote:
Is it willful ignorance to avoid engaging in this work? At present, I don't feel like I have the tech to judge.
I am often confused by what people imagine "tech" to be, and then I wonder what the forward-looking name for luddite is. From my twisted perspective, the newest consumables merely add noise, produce another roll of the dice, and leave us only able to speak about the distance we, via this stochastic process, are "expected" to be from some origins. Mostly when I see new consumables I am confused about the excitement, and where some can only see their potential, I immediately envision an unremarkable end. For instance, I have never owned a cell phone, and the longer I watch others explore this technology, the less impressed I am. It doesn't seem a strain to imagine a world where they are as disregarded as oil painting is today. This week, some coworkers asked me where I manage to find payphones, all-the-while I am stunned that not one of them knows how computations are performed or what a semiconductor is. As a side-effect of my ambivalence, new niches have appeared for the likes of me, some in the form of privacy (as telemarketers leave the domain of landlines or friends learn that if I do not pick up the phone it is because I am not home) and others in terms of inheriting the benefits of a distributed network without needing to be an explicit node. My patience leaves me wondering how best to identify a luddite. I mention the above, in part, because entertaining the notion of hyper- computation is to mod out by what even quantum computing adds to our understanding of Turing machines. The "tech" in the limit may not be the iterated colimits of the consumables we see lying around. Instead, it seems reasonable to read technological enhancement as the quest for programs not indexed by zahlen, but traced by the reals, and this is something wholly different than natural selection amplifying small differences in some initial configuration. As some on-list may know, I am on a Sean Carroll kick at the moment. In his paper "Reality as a Vector in Hilbert Space'', he takes on Everrett's project of developing the classical world from the Schrodinger equation. This "development" includes the derivation of space-time itself (light cones and all) from arguments regarding mutual information. Additionally, there is the assumption (and distinct possibility) that *our* Hilbert space is finite dimensional, thanks to gravity. Further, in this work, we see continued discussion around the importance of being able to factor space into tensored products of (potentially open) systems. Somewhere in all of this, I can almost see where Wolpert's questions, Carroll's quest, and the tremendous amount of work being done by Baez and friends on mereology are all part of a quasi-coherent project, happening now. Is it willful ignorance to avoid engaging in this work? At present, I don't feel like I have the tech to judge.
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