Leo D.M.J. Aurini - December 22, 2012


Kant, FTL, and Ideaspace

Hosted by
Leo D.M.J. Aurini
Mentioned
Immanuel Kant Einstein Newman
Narcissism, Codependence, and Cynicism on Christmas Game & Chivalry

Episode Stats


Length

20 minutes

Words per minute

118.16

Word count

2,381

Sentence count

220

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we discuss the concept of relativity and how it relates to the speed of light. We also talk about the existence of radio communication and why it can't be a part of reality, and why we should be worried about it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I spend a lot of time just reading up on concepts that I want to edify myself on.
00:00:08.000 Stuff that's not particularly directed to an end.
00:00:11.000 And every so often, a couple of ideas bounce together completely unexpectedly,
00:00:17.000 and I need to get them out.
00:00:20.000 This is one of those instances.
00:00:24.000 Sad to say that this morning I knew next to nothing about Immanuel Kant.
00:00:29.000 Now I know a little bit.
00:00:34.000 But before we get to that, we need to discuss relativity.
00:00:41.000 One of my pet peeves as a fan of science fiction is how often relativity is ignored when it's such a cool theory.
00:00:52.000 The speed of light is not like the sound barrier.
00:00:56.000 The speed of light is a fundamental aspect of reality.
00:00:59.000 So, and what does that mean?
00:01:02.000 Okay, let's talk about the speed of light.
00:01:06.000 Imagine a two-dimensional plane.
00:01:08.000 You know, xy-axi, standard Cartesian field.
00:01:12.000 And for this plane, for the sake of this, the horizontal is going to be space.
00:01:18.000 All of space is contained in that horizontal.
00:01:22.000 And the vertical axi is time.
00:01:25.000 So, each space-time event, each one of us, is going to be somewhere in that field.
00:01:34.000 So, going down in the past is a cone of all the things that could have affected you.
00:01:42.000 Out into the future is everything that you can and will affect, even if you only affect it by light bouncing off of you.
00:01:55.000 They, this cone is, you move forward in time and it's light coming off of you.
00:02:03.000 Those are the two cones.
00:02:04.000 Anything outside of those cones do not exist for you.
00:02:09.000 Cannot exist for you.
00:02:10.000 Cannot interact with them.
00:02:11.000 So, now let's imagine two people in this field.
00:02:17.000 You know, we've got person A and person B.
00:02:21.000 And so, they're obviously a huge distance apart.
00:02:26.000 Light days, light hours, whatever.
00:02:30.000 And so, they cannot interact until they move into the future and their light cones reach one another.
00:02:37.000 That is the earliest point there can be any interaction between these people.
00:02:45.000 So, well, why can't we have an Ansible?
00:02:50.000 An instantaneous, etheric communication device.
00:02:57.000 Well, surely these two people, you know, they could just bounce signals off one another.
00:03:02.000 Doesn't seem to be any problems with that so far, does there?
00:03:04.000 It's not violating causality, it's not twisting the universe into a pretzel.
00:03:09.000 They're just talking to each other.
00:03:13.000 Well, here's where it gets interesting.
00:03:16.000 Let's take one of these people and accelerate them to a significant fraction of C. 0.99
00:03:22.000 So, at this point, see, when they both are traveling here, this is because they have the same relative velocity to one another.
00:03:35.000 Of course, as far as they're concerned, they're all standing still.
00:03:38.000 We're all standing still, it's the world that moves around us.
00:03:40.000 But these two people, they can tell when there's a difference between them.
00:03:45.000 It doesn't matter which one is accelerating, but there's an acceleration, there's a difference in velocity in regards to one another.
00:03:54.000 So, what happens then, is as you start to move through space to a substantial fraction of C, your light cone, which used to be vertical, starts to twist in the direction of your travel.
00:04:11.000 So, now you have the one light cone, that looks like this, still vertical cone, according to us.
00:04:21.000 And you have the person that started traveling, and they have a slanted cone.
00:04:30.000 So, what happens now, when these people try and exchange messages to one another?
00:04:34.000 The person with the vertical cone pings out a message across space instantaneously to the person with the slanted cone, and they receive it.
00:04:46.000 But their cone looks like this.
00:04:49.000 So, when they ping out a message back to the person that was trying to talk to them, it travels at this angle, arriving in the first person's past.
00:05:01.000 They receive a reply to a message before they send the message.
00:05:11.000 This is why they say in science fiction, if you have FTL, you can either have causality or relativity.
00:05:20.000 You can't have both.
00:05:21.000 As soon as anything travels faster than the speed of light, it violates causality, even if it's something as simple as a radio broadcast.
00:05:35.000 Now, that's, of course, assuming that causality is an aspect of reality.
00:05:50.000 I mean, certainly everything seems to have a cause, doesn't it?
00:05:55.000 Can you imagine a universe without one?
00:06:00.000 Hmm.
00:06:01.000 And for the record, we know that relativity is true.
00:06:03.000 A lot of our technology would not work if Einstein hadn't come up with a theory of relativity.
00:06:12.000 Satellites, for instance, are in a different relativistic frame than us.
00:06:15.000 If you don't account for relativity, your GPS would not work.
00:06:21.000 So, moving on.
00:06:26.000 Kant built off of the empiricists.
00:06:30.000 And the empiricists, as he would describe them,
00:06:35.000 said there were two types of reasoning.
00:06:40.000 Analytic and synthetic.
00:06:42.000 Analytic is the reasoning you use to discover a priori.
00:06:49.000 So, the statement, all bachelors are single, is a priori.
00:06:56.000 Because if you understand the concept of bachelor, you understand that the bachelor is single.
00:07:02.000 All bachelors are male, would be another a priori right there.
00:07:05.000 Whereas the synthetic involved the outside world.
00:07:13.000 Nobody can wake up, you know, come to consciousness, grow up, and just know that gravity bends space and time.
00:07:25.000 That things accelerate at 9.81 meters per second towards the Earth.
00:07:28.000 You can't just know this stuff, you need to go investigate to figure it out.
00:07:36.000 This is the realm where science does wicked, wicked things.
00:07:40.000 It's the place where you go and test.
00:07:44.000 This is what science is designed to do, is go invest the empirical.
00:07:47.000 And does a damn fine job of that.
00:07:51.000 As far as the empiricists were concerned, this was all there was. 0.62
00:07:57.000 And certain questions were just unknowable.
00:08:01.000 Kant disagreed.
00:08:02.000 So, you've got the analytic a priori's and the synthetic a posteriori's.
00:08:16.000 Kant suggested that there was a synthetic a priori.
00:08:22.000 The type of knowledge that could only be arrived at from investigation, that was still a priori.
00:08:36.000 Mathematics.
00:08:39.000 Which is precisely what I was saying about all truth being revelation.
00:08:43.000 Kant points out that with this statement, all bachelors are single.
00:08:52.000 The conclusion is present in the predicate.
00:08:55.000 Bachelor means single.
00:08:58.000 So the conclusion that the bachelor is single is in the predicate.
00:09:05.000 Doesn't say, the same thing does not hold true for math, however.
00:09:08.000 With mathematics, 5 plus 5 equals 10.
00:09:17.000 Well, that 10 is new knowledge.
00:09:21.000 You don't start with that knowledge when you say 5 plus 5.
00:09:25.000 There is no knowledge of 10 inherent in the 5's.
00:09:29.000 There is no inherent conclusion to any of that.
00:09:34.000 Instead, you have to investigate it.
00:09:37.000 And you gain something new at the end.
00:09:44.000 See, Kant would argue that the analytic a priori's are so self-evident that we don't even notice them.
00:09:53.000 Bright light is bright.
00:09:55.000 Sweet food is sweet.
00:09:58.000 The definitions of words.
00:09:59.000 These are things that you just know.
00:10:02.000 A priori's are so self-evident that you just know them and you never even have cause to question that you know these things.
00:10:10.000 Whereas with mathematics, we start discovering things that we can know that don't require investigation in the world.
00:10:19.000 They're not empirical.
00:10:20.000 They're purely metaphysical concepts that we discover through synthetic reasoning.
00:10:29.000 That hint of the immaterial.
00:10:36.000 So where do these ideas come from?
00:10:41.000 Well, Kant, he called it transcendental imagination.
00:10:48.000 But I think a better term for modern audiences would be idea space.
00:11:00.000 All of these ideas potentially exist in idea space for us to find.
00:11:08.000 Some of them, like the a priori's, are self-evident.
00:11:11.000 The fact that we even exist in idea space means that we can discover these concepts.
00:11:17.000 There's others that we don't have.
00:11:20.000 These would be the synthetic a priori's that we have to go and learn about or to figure out for ourselves before we can notice them.
00:11:30.000 And then finally, there's the places that don't exist in idea space.
00:11:37.000 Thoughts that we literally cannot conceive of.
00:11:42.000 And who knows how many of those are.
00:11:48.000 And I'll give you an example. 0.91
00:11:51.000 Neon black. 0.50
00:11:55.000 It seems like a meaningful phrase, but it doesn't point to anything.
00:11:59.000 You can't imagine what neon black would look like.
00:12:03.000 The same way, for example, you could imagine a unicorn.
00:12:07.000 Or, if you were particularly good with math, you could even imagine a world with different laws of physics.
00:12:16.000 But you could not imagine neon black.
00:12:20.000 The same way you can't imagine what happened before time began.
00:12:24.000 These are unknowable concepts.
00:12:26.000 And see, it's the limits of idea space and our own ability to observe which imposes upon reality.
00:12:43.000 The term Newman means a thing in and of itself.
00:12:46.000 So the chair I'm sitting on is presumably its own Newman.
00:12:50.000 It exists.
00:12:52.000 It's real.
00:12:53.000 It has an existence apart from my own.
00:12:56.000 I can't see that Newman.
00:12:58.000 I can't see that platonic form.
00:13:00.000 I can only observe my interaction with it.
00:13:03.000 And that interaction is completely limited to my ability to observe.
00:13:16.000 My observations on the universe decide what the universe is going to be.
00:13:23.000 It's similar to the term heuristic, where the theory that you go into something with determines what you're going to get out.
00:13:32.000 Determines what you pay attention to, what you notice.
00:13:34.000 Except this is more fundamental.
00:13:39.000 We cannot observe anything that is neon black.
00:13:43.000 Or that exists outside of time.
00:13:45.000 And in fact, the entire concept of space and time are fundamental to our nature as observing beings.
00:13:54.000 It doesn't mean that time and space are a part of the universe.
00:13:58.000 It means that time and space are a part of us.
00:14:06.000 So now that we've talked about idea space, let's think about different sorts of minds.
00:14:11.000 Let's think of different ways that minds could exist, could be organized.
00:14:16.000 Now the easiest one is probably a dog.
00:14:19.000 A dog is very similar to us.
00:14:21.000 It sees in slightly different colors.
00:14:23.000 It is far more aware of scents.
00:14:26.000 But when you get right down to it, dogs are not particularly dissimilar from the human.
00:14:32.000 You could go to a bat.
00:14:34.000 They observe the universe through sonar.
00:14:37.000 So density is something that they're innately familiar with in a way that we aren't.
00:14:43.000 And yet even the bat.
00:14:45.000 Everything the bat observes, he bounces the echolocation off of a tree.
00:14:50.000 He can feel the texture of it.
00:14:51.000 He can feel the density of it.
00:14:54.000 And you see, I'm using the word feel because we don't have a sense term to describe what the bat is experiencing.
00:15:00.000 But at the end of the day, we can relate to it still.
00:15:04.000 These are all mundane variants upon our own sorts of minds.
00:15:11.000 Even if you go to something as low as an insect, an ant or a grasshopper or a cockroach, these are things that do have urges that we can understand.
00:15:25.000 They need to eat, they want to mate, they have a sort of very primitive fear in them.
00:15:32.000 And they exist in time and space.
00:15:35.000 They have eyes, they observe, they move, they are very primitive and quite odd.
00:15:41.000 But when you get right down to it, they're not fundamentally different from us.
00:15:46.000 So what is a fundamentally different mind?
00:15:51.000 Well, something that's about as intelligent as a cockroach or an ant or a grasshopper.
00:16:02.000 The computer sitting in front of you.
00:16:04.000 The computer is a very primitive mind.
00:16:12.000 It's far more primitive than the ant or the cockroach because it only has one or maybe four processing units.
00:16:19.000 As opposed to however many hundreds of thousands or millions the insect has.
00:16:24.000 But I think it's a good comparison, it's a good place to start.
00:16:29.000 Because they are very, very complex neural networks, computers.
00:16:35.000 Even if they aren't technically a neural network, they are a sort of a mind.
00:16:38.000 They are a proto-mind.
00:16:40.000 How does the computer experience the universe?
00:16:43.000 Now when we experience the computer, we have inputs and outputs from the computer.
00:16:50.000 Printers, monitors, keyboards, mice, speakers, microphones.
00:16:56.000 But to the computer, none of this actually matters.
00:17:01.000 The computer exists in a world that these inputs do affect things.
00:17:05.000 But the computer's world is all about the processes going on.
00:17:09.000 The mathematical relationships of ones and zeros.
00:17:14.000 Now certainly it has a chronometer inside of it.
00:17:17.000 But if you imagine a computer experiencing time,
00:17:21.000 do you think when it's in hibernate mode, it's experiencing every second tick by?
00:17:30.000 Or does it exist within the complexities of the processing power?
00:17:33.000 Like I almost imagine the computer mind as being like a sort of web of electrical impulses shooting all over the place.
00:17:42.000 Which again is showing my own bias as a creature of space and time.
00:17:48.000 But I think it's eminently plausible to imagine that sort of a mind.
00:17:57.000 More complex than a modern computer, but that does not exist in space and time.
00:18:02.000 Science fiction writers have proposed life on the outside of a sun.
00:18:07.000 On the corona of a sun.
00:18:08.000 These would be creatures without a conception of space.
00:18:11.000 And with a very bizarre conception of time.
00:18:19.000 Space and time are things we project onto the universe, as is causality.
00:18:26.000 It is part of our nature.
00:18:31.000 Just because we can't imagine things without causality doesn't mean that they can't exist.
00:18:37.000 It just means that because they don't fit into our idea space, we can't observe them.
00:18:44.000 And the point of all of this...
00:18:45.000 The point of all of this is that faster than light travel should be possible.
00:18:56.000 Not for creatures like us.
00:19:01.000 But for something better than us, our descendants.
00:19:04.000 Something more advanced, more complex, that has discovered different ways to observe and understand.
00:19:08.000 And I know I'm going to get the physicists on here.
00:19:16.000 Saying this is a bunch of rhetorical nonsense falling deep into a black hole.
00:19:25.000 It's not.
00:19:29.000 Until you can explain how you observe reality.
00:19:33.000 And how you have this limited understanding of spatial concepts.
00:19:45.000 It's not reducible in the way you want it to.
00:19:49.000 Not the way you want it to be.
00:19:51.000 And the possibilities this holds for the future are absolutely fascinating.
00:19:56.000 And the implications for how we live our own lives.
00:20:00.000 For how we consider knowledge to exist.
00:20:03.000 Should not be ignored.
00:20:05.000 Anyway, there's your weird thought for the evening, folks.
00:20:08.000 Irini out.