One-Electron Universe

117 points•pella•10 days ago•94 comments•

#electron #universe #one electron #electron universe #one electron universe

94 comments

stared10 days ago

In the line, I recommend „The Egg” by Andy Weir https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html

ndarray10 days ago

Engage in the thought experiment that you are/were/will be every human for a sec. Is self-harm morally ok? Many would say yes. So "the egg" already gives those people a pass to hurt everyone else in this world because it's a form of self-harm. Great. Now for those who explicitly don't want to self-harm. "The egg" implies that your rebirths happen serially in meta-time. You live this life, then the next, then another,... those lives may overlap on earth, but in egg-time, they don't. This means you can statistically expect you've already lived 50% of them. There's no guarantee of this, but the distribution is normal, not uniform [1] (similar reasoning found in doomsday argument [2]). 50%, give or take, humans out there you've already been. Everything you do to them, you do to your PAST self. You're not only absolved of moral accountability, but also of the physical consequences of treating them horribly. So while "the egg" tries to do the opposite, it really seems to justify psycho maxxing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument

orangebread10 days ago

Everyone is hung up on the self-harm thing. This thought experiment is bigger than what most people give it credit for, in fact one could say this is the be all end all of thought experiments because the question factors in things like quantum physics, consciousness, determinism, etc. You could go up your own theoretical butthole with the kinds of philosophical extrapolations through this rabbit hole (so to speak).

Self-harm isn't moral or amoral, it just is. It's as moral or amoral as deciding if you should or shouldn't eat another animal (yes, this includes humans -- Donner party anyone?).

Life isn't black and white. Where I've landed with this thought experiment through my own meditations and readings is that the universe/reality is a recursive fractal of spectrums within spectrums.

And this is just scratching the surface of this stuff.

amelius10 days ago

1. No, self harm is not ok.

2. Who says the living of lives does not repeat over time? Your/our "next" life may start in 300 B.C.

Two things science knows barely something about: consciousness and the arrow of time. The self is only an illusion. Physics has lots of symmetry. Therefore, it would make sense if the universe was fair in the end. So the egg theory actually makes sense, more sense than anything else I've heard actually.

c1ccccc110 days ago

The situation described in The Egg replaces morality with a direct reason not to harm others, because you are the person who will suffer because of it. So if you're complaining that the story's premise kinda eliminates our usual ideas about morality, my response is: Yes. That's part of what makes it an interesting story.

As for the meta-time thing, functional decision theory [1] solves this. The application is particularly clean because your memories are erased between lives. There's no factor of 2 free lunch from temporal ordering.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.05060

curtisblaine10 days ago

I don't think you're "absolved" if you don't know you're harming, in fact, yourself. Guilt is all about intention.

sph10 days ago

What is moral? It is not a law of the universe. It is a subjective and culture-defined human construct. It is very ineffective to try and understand metaphysics through the ever-shifting lens of morality.

itsalwaysgood10 days ago

That's such a great read.

Asimov's 'The Last Question' is another good one that's in line: https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html

sph10 days ago

I love both of these, and I wonder why would I need mainstream religion when stories like these are deep enough to provide answers, hope and meaning for those who seek it. If the message resonates with you, why not adopt it? Nobody could ever prove they’re just fantasy.

Sorry for the digression, I’m just an atheist with a love for philosophy and spirituality.

amelius10 days ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6fcK_fRYaI

(animated version)

ralfd10 days ago

I go against the grain and say that I dislike the egg. It is spiritually stupid and heretic and morally fake enlightened.

JKCalhoun10 days ago

I don't know. I just read it now—my thought was that it was an interesting idea (thankfully now overly long).

"“Seriously? You’re asking me for the meaning of life? Isn’t that a little stereotypical?”"

I think the word he was looking for was clichéd.

cesarsk10 days ago

Amazing. So, I am most of you commenting here, and the author of this incredible short story. Thank [myself] for sharing!

lioeters10 days ago

A twist on this theory: One-Observer Universe.

It is the hypothesis that all observers are actually manifestations of a single observer experiencing all of time, space, and every point of view. All world lines across spacetime are parts of one single line "like a huge tangled knot" traced out by the one observer.

pandoro10 days ago

I'd go further and say this isn't just a hypothesis, it's the actual nature of reality. Any subjective experience is always mine and now for all observers, for all times. No subject has ever experienced or will experience reality any other way. The screen is the same no matter what movie is playing on it.

Arnold Zuboff makes a case for this in "One Self: The Logic of Experience" (Inquiry, 1990) [0]. He calls it universalism: there has only ever been one subject of experience.

One of his thought experiments: imagine a meteorite is about to wipe out all life around you right now, instantly. If this exact experience - being you, here, thinking this - is instantiated anywhere else in the universe, it will continue there without any gaps.

Hindu mystics were already exploring and articulating these non-dual concepts in great detail thousands of years ago, in the Upanishads. As Robert Jastrow would say:

"For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."

[0] https://gwern.net/doc/philosophy/mind/1990-zuboff.pdf

lioeters10 days ago

Thanks for the article, reading it now, good stuff. Exactly the same idea, that there is a single subject across the space of all experiences. Apparently another name for it is Open Individualism, on which I commented here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49786470

NDlurker10 days ago

I experienced that after smoking salvia

paulddraper10 days ago

https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html

Razengan10 days ago

Wow, dammit! That syndrome of "something you always wondered or thought only you thought already having a name" strikes again!

My intuition for all sentience between "fragments" of a single consciousness from outside the universe was that, if Free Will™ is real, then true randomness can only come from outside a system..

Enginerrrd10 days ago

If you subscribe the the many worlds interpretation, you can basically look at observers as existing within the space of eigenvalues of operators acting on the massively entangled wave function of their respective universe.

edgyquant10 days ago

I always loved this as it seems to be a more modern way of interpreting the monad. Could it not be the case that all particles are actually just one thing that is not subject to time and that our reality is a snapshot of a matrix of its different potentials?

chasil10 days ago

CP-violation would appear to rule this out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP_violation

The main referenced wiki suggests that the missing positrons are inside protons, but recent a recent LHC experiment asserts CP-violation over baryons.

Svoka10 days ago

Whole idea is from 40s and nonsensical with modern understanding of quantum fields.

doctorzook10 days ago

Wouldn’t this be a CPT exchange, though?

ck210 days ago

it's important to realize that very few physicists accept that idea

right up there with everything that will happen in the universe has already happened and it's just a matter of zooming out on the entire time dimension (some use that idea to explain "spooky action at a distance" quantum entanglement and the quantum eraser)

but I love how wikipedia even links the PBS Space Time about it

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dqtW9MslFk

Read the full thread on Hacker News →

94 comments

Related stories