Talk:Mathematical universe hypothesis

message: While I find Tegmark's proposals intriguing, I dispute calling this one a "theory".  It's more of a provacative proposal that future theories adopt a particular and controversial featureCH  (talk) 21:44, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not sure what "feature" you are referring to. Tegmark's "everything" or UE is frequently discussed as a potential TOE (for example in "New Scientist" magazine http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/toe_frames.html   or...  http://scienceweek.com/2003/sc031031-1.htm). It appears to be a theory rather than a tautology (which it is sometimes derided as). Please elaborate on what you mean by "feature" and why it should not be referred to as a TOE. In the meantime I'm going to remove the "feature of" insertion.Joncolvin 07:24, 9 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Being non-falsifiable, this proposal would not even qualify as science, let alone as a theory of everything. It is perhaps a "theory of everything" in a philosophical sense, but not in a scientific sense. Intriguing and attractive as it is, there is no way that experiment could possibly shed any light on the matter and therefore it lies outside the realms of science. Robin S 01:06, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: An extremely positivist viewpoint, Robin. This theory does in fact make predictions: one such prediction is that physics will become more "mathematical" as it progresses deeper towards the ultimate TOE. To date this prediction has been successful. Tegmark does not pretend that his theory is science; it is metaphysics, but metaphysics of a predictive nature. It bridges science and philosophy in a similar manner to the anthropic principle. Joncolvin 05:44, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

text: This is a wikipedia article, not a research paper. It correctly reports what criticisms other physicists have made---there is even a citation showing you where this criticism was made. Just as a matter of interest, however, if the different parts have absolutely no relation to each other, and we are "in" one part, then presumably you agree with the criticism that the proposal is unverifiable, since we could never find any empirical evidence of the existence of the other, absolutely unrelated, parts. Dark Formal (talk) 05:24, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

text: It is a "theory" in the philosophical sense: a reasoning mindset. Philosophical theories are not provable in the scientific sense, they work, or they don't. Rursus dixit. (mbork3!) 21:13, 29 June 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: It is much more than just a philosophical theory. I argue it is a scientific theory. If you study the articles written on the topic by M.T., you'll see that there is math that goes with it, and some ways are suggested to test aspects of the theory. --IO Device (talk) 23:43, 29 June 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Theory?

message: Apparently both Max Tegmark's ensemble and Jürgen Schmidhuber's ensemble of all computable universes were published in 1997. Their relation should probably be clarified. Discrepancy (talk) 20:50, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Only if there's a reliable source that does so. -- 70.185.144.90 (talk) 21:58, 27 October 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Relation to Schmidhuber's ultimate ensemble 

message: The Criticisms section has three subsections.  The first two are criticisms and the third is entitled "Responses".  It's good to have a "Responses" subsection, but it needs to summarise Tegmark's answers to the two attacks.  It's unsatisfactory just to point the reader to Tegmark's book as if the article was a teaser campaign.  I suggest that somebody who has read the book gives a short precis here of the relevant arguments. Tommy Herbert (talk) 22:25, 11 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Inadequate "Responses" section 

message: The "Criticisms" section says: "Some argue that the "set of all mathematical structures" is not well-defined."
The Kolmogorov_complexity of the universe is 0, but the Kolmogorov_complexity of any part of the universe is more than 0. This means that if the universe was able to be converted to a form the computer would take as input, and if zip files were better optimized, then the universe would compress to a 0 byte zip file. This does not mean it could be represented as 0s and 1s or as a file at all. It means there is no total information because it all balances to 0. Many things decrease Kolmogorov_complexity as they get bigger. For example, "all integers" has more integers than "all integers except 107 and 30", but the Kolmogorov_complexity of "all integers except 107 and 30" is bigger. Similarly, if the universe includes all math structures, then that is very simple to describe: The Kolmogorov_complexity of the universe is 0. Also, the Kolmogorov_complexity of nonexistance is 0, which means if Max Tegmark's theory is true, then the universe does not exist. Its simple. BenRayfield (talk) 19:19, 5 March 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Mathematical structures in the level-4 multiverse exist relative to other mathematical structures. What you're saying is that the KC of both existence and nonexistence is 0, and from that you're implying that existence==nonexistence, from which you imply nonexistence (this is a contradiction). I don't see the logic in your implications. --IO Device (talk) 03:19, 6 March 2010 (UTC)

text: The KC of nonexistence is 0? Nonexistence isn't a thing, so how can it have a KC?Joncolvin (talk) 02:04, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  The theory is well defined if you write it this way 

message: Tegmark is known to produce elaborate intellectual jokes one time in ten or so. Funny enough, a few of them gain some considerable serious interest despite being jokes. Is this one of them? Just consider the sound of "MUH" and possibly also "TOE"... Rursus dixit. (mbork3!) 21:17, 29 June 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Are you kidding? You're practically defaming the man. MUH ain't a joke. Just consider the number of articles by him on the topic. --IO Device (talk) 23:41, 29 June 2010 (UTC)

text: Perhaps more of a Shaggy dog story than a joke. And who cares how many articles X writes about X's idea? What counts is how many articles other experts (not popular media like New Scientist) write about X's idea.  84.177.47.244 (talk) 19:33, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

text: Intuition is not a reliable source of knowledge so say you intuitively knew it as a child means nothing. As has been said this is a philosophical theory not fact or science. Folks like Tegmark exist but that doesn't make them right. You need to expand your mind and not rely on intuition.2600:1700:1C80:5190:134:731B:172D:3A10 (talk) 18:57, 5 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: Joke?

message: Do you think they are related? --46.24.151.10 (talk) 10:31, 31 March 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I think ANKOS is more relevant to the fine tuning debate (Wolfram's systems require fine tuning to exhibit complexity) than MUH. That said, it is a nice illustration of how complexity can arise from very simple formal systems.Joncolvin (talk) 06:06, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: @Joncolvin Fine tune or salvational crosses? Evidences of countless crosses are undeniable. Tanengtiong0918 (talk) 00:30, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

text: @46.24.151.10 No. Common sense tell us infinite physical energy and matters are impossible, and dimensions are limited in universes. There could be just this universe and the parallel one. Even the parallel one is just a hypotheses. Pseudo-science that is. Tanengtiong0918 (talk) 00:26, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Stephen Wolfram :"A New Kind of Science" 

message: From The Library of Babel#Influence on later writers:
:*Russell Standish's Theory of Nothinghttp://www.hpcoders.com.au/nothing.html uses the concept of the Library of Babel to illustrate how an ultimate ensemble containing all possible descriptions would in sum contain zero information and would thus be the simplest possible explanation for the existence of the universe.  This theory therefore implies the reality of all universes.
This refers to a book by Standish from 2006 with the title Theory of Nothing, described on the given website. Obviously his book does not precede Tegmark's hypothesis, but I wonder if it acknowledges Tegmark as precedent. The book seems to deserve mention here as supporting or possibly inadvertently recreating Tegmark's idea.
:Russel Standish' Theory of Nothing explicitly credits Tegmark as its inspiration. Much of it is based on discussions on the "everything" list, which was created to discuss Tegmark's Ultimate EnsembleJoncolvin (talk) 06:13, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Russell K. Standish (2006) 

message: This Oxford University philosophy journal described (in 2015) a book by a PhD professor author using Mike Hockney's term ('philosophical mathematics') and basically same definition, for a forthcoming MUH: New Foundations for Physical Geometry, by Tim Maudlin  (Maudlin, Tim. New Foundations for Physical Geometry: The Theory of Linear Structures. Oxford University Press. 2014.) Others used the term at least since the 1960s in a different sense.--dchmelik (t|c) 10:50, 11 May 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  philosophical mathematics 

message: kin universes = a specific set of mathematically related univeses (study set theory and mathematical filters, they're are used in some theories of topological cosmogony) = a generation of univeses (that might be a subset though) = Greek: συμπαντογενεά, κοσμογενεά (note that cosmogony/creation of a universe is not cosmogeneration/mathematically related univeses which share some common cosmogonous topological properties (in topological algebra); they are different nouns)  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:587:410E:700:AC0C:14C4:8940:2AC1 (talk) 03:30, 11 August 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Translations