Footnote Physicist

          “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."           – Philip K. Dick I           Objectivity is the view that there must be one absolute, correct answer to a given question, one way in which the world really is (this object, the cosmos, is the ontology you read about briefly in the introduction, and which will be the topic of the second volume of this work).  One must conduct their epistemology with a realistic view of what the ontology is like, if they want it to be properly revealed. Relativism (or pluralism ), is the view that the same question may have multiple answers, or that any given answer is about as good as any other. I think this is most often endorsed not genuinely, but practically—the belief that one must “go along to get along”.  But it is dangerous and wrong when it is taken on as-if it is an actual belief.  It is t...

          “Whereas the complexity of an object measures how complicated it is to describe, its information           content measures the extent to which it describes the rest of the world... What I am casually calling           the information content of an object is in technical terms called the mutual information between           the object and the rest of the world.”           – Max Tegmark I           “The rule that dynamical laws must be deterministic and reversible is so central to classical           physics that we sometimes forget to mention it when teaching the subject... what is undoubtedly           the most fundamental of all physical laws— the conservation of information .  The conservation of       ...

          "Some authors such as Konrad Lorenz, John Barrow, Jürgen Schmidhuber and Stephen Wolfram           have gone as far as suggesting that the laws of nature are both computable and finite like a           cellular automaton or computer simulation."           – Max Tegmark I           Computer science (which may as well be called computer mathematics) is necessary for a full understanding of both math and science, and it further ties in engineering.  This is because, even for students who do well in math classes, it can sometimes be unclear why they are performing the rules and calculations they are performing.  By placing the coder in the role of god, computer programming allows one to see how they might reverse engineer the world, which in turn makes them better at discovery on the other side of things in...