Thermontology

Contents(Main)

• 0. What is this document?

  • 0.1 Motivating question: Why these laws of physics?
  • 0.2 Strategic considerations. Superintelligence possibly developed soon
  • 0.3 Outline. Recommended reading order.

• 1. Metaphilosophy

  • 1.1 What is philosophy? Development of concepts at they very highest level of abstraction
  • 1.2 Anti-foundationalist ethos. "Hermeneutics": Developing theories of things we are already doing/enmeshed in. Time pressure.
  • 1.3: Toy model: Solomonoff-induction-like.
  • 1.4 How to go about this? Two ways. Analysis of things we already know. Learning new things.
  • 1.5 The relation of math and physics to philosophy. Flywheels of modernity.
  • 1.6 Why good high-level concepts are useful. Examples.
  • 1.7 Methodology: hermeneutics of physics.

• 2. Meta - Physics

  • 2.1 Baseline: materialism, computational functionalism.
  • 2.2 Why don't we live in the game of life? Ways in which our universe differs mathematically from a "generic" Turing machine.
  • 2.3: Conservation of energy, flow of heat. Local reversibility.
    • 2.3.1: Origin of objects: quenching.
    • 2.3.2: Global irreversibility. The universe is gradually expanding and cooling.
  • 2.4: Chaos. Amplification of small fluctuations to large scale.
  • 2.5: Quantum foundations.
    • 2.5.1: The pointer basis problem
    • 2.5.2: Quantum darwinism, redundant records
    • 2.5.3: Adrian Kent's proposal. "Take a giant measurement at the end of time".
    • 2.5.4* The holographic entropy bound, covariant entropy bound.
    • 2.5.5 Bell's inequality, contextuality.
  • 2.6 Other stuff. Group theory, continuous space&time, relativity, sympectic geometry.

• 3. Other phenomena of note.

  • 3.1: Consciousness and the brain. Global workspace theory.
  • 3.2: Markets. Bayesianism, logical induction. Nash equilibria.
  • 3.3: Interpersonal attention. Randall Collins' sociology.
  • 3.4: The transformer architecture. GANs.
  • 3.5: Literal biological evolution.
  • 3.6: Things defined relative to a time parameter.
    • 3.6.1*: Excellence. Achilles is great only relative to a given time.
  • 3.9* Mathematics. Progression from concrete to abstract notions. "The rising sea".

• 4. An ontology of heat flow.

  • 4.1 Reality as two-sided contexts.
  • 4.2 Past and future.
  • 4.3 Relations between frames. Nesting.
  • 4.4 Generalized contextuality.
  • 4.5 Consciousness and flow
  • 4.6: Romantic metaphysics

• 5. Suffering, complexity, nostalgia

  • 5.1: Brief theory of buddhism
  • 5.2 Mathematical theories of valence.
    • 5.2.1 Is existence suffering?
    • 5.2.2 ...incompressibility suffering?
  • 5.3 Is the universe asymptotically perfect?
  • 5.4 "Modal realism theodicy".
    • 5.4.1 Eternity is in love with the productions of time.
  • 5.5* Some notions of complexity. Schimdhuber's definition of beauty.
  • 5.6 What are values? Particularity, evolutionary contingency
  • 5.7: Familiarity, nostalgia. Branch-dependence.
  • 5.8: Seizing the moment.

• 6. Upshot.

  • 6.1. Flywheels
    • 6.1.1: Universe code golf
    • 5.1.2 Concrete models of many-body quantum branching. Spin glasses?
    • 5.1.3 Representation theory?
    • 6.1.4 Actual mathematizations of this stuff.
  • 6.2: Applications to artificial intelligence(??)
  • 6.3: Conclusion. Good luck!