Hahaha. Thanks! Nothing like some monty python wisdom
E-Sabbath: I’ve seen some of that code and it completely baffled me. But I was talking about a hypothetical programmer with a perfect understanding of the language. A human compiler if you will.
Czarcasm, Voyager: I could probably have phrased my question better (feel free to suggest better ways to put it). I think you understand what I meant though. Human beings have sought to make sense of it all for as long as they’ve been humans I suppose.
Voyager: you have clearly grasped what I was getting at. However, can any single human being ever understand enough mathematics to make sense of the universe? It doesn’t seem possible to me. It’s hard enough for a human being to understand all the math we have now, which is possibly nothing but an infinitesimal fraction of it all.
At a most fundamental level, we probably already know the answer to one of the key concepts of the existance of the Universe. I.e. that it has always existed.
The great mystery was always “How do you get something out of nothing?” Well most likely the Universe didn’t come out of nothing. There is no such thing as nothing, and the Universe has always existed.
That’s the answer, but I’ll be darned if I can understand it. The human mind isn’t built to think in terms that things can exist without being made. But “making” the Universe doesn’t solve that problem either as at some point something would have had to have appeared out of nothing. So simple logic dictates that the Universe has always existed with the exact amount of energy/mass/time as it has now, and presumably always will (though we might find that it’s somehow “shared” with other dimension or such and fluctuates back and forth, for instance.)
While we can and will have to accept that, I don’t think there’s any way to understand it other than as a rote item of factuality.
A human compiler with perfect understanding… but for what hardware?
The same code, compiled for different processors, will have different results. (Memory, order of operations) The hardware is not contained within the knowledge of the language, and thus, even your hypothetical programmer with perfect knowledge will not be able to predict any given code with full certainty.
Fine, fine. Make him a programmer with a perfect understanding of all hardware as well. It’s not really important as long as you understand the metaphor.
All aspects of the universe? No way. I don’t even understand all aspects of programs I’ve written myself. But collectively we can, with person A trusting the math understood by person B. I think humanity as a collective can understand, but not any particular human.
I don’t know if you program, but I do. I’ve often read my old code and been surprised. Forget about hardware issues - and you can have them for different instances of the same processor, which are far from identical. I don’t think our brain capacity is enough to understand, that is remember,. what we’ve put down on paper or in code. That’s what literacy is all about, not just preserving our thoughts for others, but for our future selves. When I work on a new project I write notes about everything, and I depend on them when I pick it up six months later.
Math! For those that have mentioned math, you hit the nail on the head, I think.
I have often searched for help understanding my universe. I have built with scholars, poured over the internet, read books ‘for dummies’.
No matter how much the book, article, or person promises to “put it into easy laymen’s terms” for me, we always end up with math coming in at just the part where I thought I was beginning to get it.
Fast and furious, here comes physics, numbers, sybols, letters…my head spins and I realize that I will never understand the universe, as long as I don’t understand higher math.
I’m not sure you’d understand even if you did know higher math. It’s easy to manipulate object that have four, five, six dimensions. You can generalize equations to find their area, volume, hypervolume, their perimeters, and all sorts of other stuff. You can ask and answer questions about them. But understand them? I don’t think we’re built that way.
