If we have figured out billions of years of cosmic evolution in a few decades...

[jberryhill]

...then does that mean that human minds are capable of figuring out the universe faster than the universe can figure it out on its own?

[greyl]

1. No.

Will there be anything else?

[jberryhill]

2. Show your work

[greyl]

3. It cannot be shown directly, only inferred. nt

[Angry Dragon]

4. nope

[pokerfan]

5. I'm beginning to suspect

that there's something akin to Godel's incompleteness theorem going on and that the metaphysics may elude us forever. It seems like the more we learn the less we know.

[bananas]

20. There are at least three ways the universe will elude us forever

One, Godels theorem applies, there will never be a finite TOE.

Two, the observable universe is limited to a certain radius, anything further away is receding faster than light, we'll never know what's out there.

Three, quantum mechanics limits what we can measure right here under our noses.

[pokerfan]

21. 4.

There are some, Lawrence Krauss in his Universe from Nothing lecture and book, who are beginning to suspect (fear) that particle physics may be nothing more than an environmental science, that all the fundamentals (the fine tuning if you will) just randomly coalesced and physicists are basically just collecting stamps. That the universe is capable of supporting intelligent life just means that we are we here to marvel at it. Had it not been capable of intelligent life then we wouldn't be here to complain about it.

47:39 – 47:43 Because all it's saying if it's true is that it's not too surprising
47:44 – 47:47 that we find ourselves living in a universe that allows life!
47:48 – 47:51 Because in the universes that don't allow life, we wouldn't be here!
47:53 – 47:54 It's just that simple!
47:54 – 47:56 So if you wish it's a kind of cosmic evolution,
47:57 – 47:59 or cosmic natural selection is a better way of thinking about it.
47:59 – 48:02 Now as pretty as that is, I think it's wrong!
48:03 – 48:04 It's ugly!
48:04 – 48:07 And it goes against everything I think about, and I know about science!
48:08 – 48:09 Science has told us the last 400 years
48:10 – 48:12 why the universe must be the way it is,
48:12 – 48:14 not why it has to be something different.
48:15 – 48:18 In fact Einstein once asked a question, he said it the wrong way.
48:18 – 48:20 I put it here because, well I wanted to quote him.
48:21 – 48:24 He said: "What really interests me is whether God [and by "God" he didn't mean God]"
48:25 – 48:27 "had any choice in the creation of the universe."
48:28 – 48:31 What he really meant is are the laws of physics fixed
48:31 – 48:33 so that if you changed one parameter, the whole...
48:33 – 48:35 you couln't have a universe?
48:35 – 48:39 or can you have an infinite number of laws of physics that all work,
48:39 – 48:42 and it just happens to be the way it is.
48:42 – 48:45 If this anthropic picture is right, then physics
48:46 – 48:48 is really an environmental science!
48:48 – 48:51 We're... There's no fundamental laws necessarily.
48:51 – 48:53 We're just here by an accident!
48:53 – 48:55 And the laws of physics are the way they are
48:55 – 48:57 not because there's some beautiful mathematical theory
48:57 – 48:58 that tells us they have to be, just because
48:58 – 49:01 if they were different we wouldn't be here.
49:02 – 49:05 Now that I find repugnant although it may be true,

[tridim]

6. Why do you assume the Universe cares what it is doing?

Especially considering our Universe might just be one part in an infinity of other Universes.

[jberryhill]

9. If you take the Universe as a machine to simulate itself

...down to the last particle, then would it have to be so large?

[tama]

23. Because

of the theory of mind I'm participant of, so I assume you care what you are doing (instead of being a philosophical zombie), so in this Universe that includes theory of mind and sentient beings acting according to it, there is caring going on. Hence, caring is intrinsic to universe, not excluded outside it.

Personifying Universe as a subject of English sentence could be, and probably is because other languages behave differently, just a peculiarity of English grammars without need to jump to conclusion that Universe is a person - and nothing else. Likewise, there is no reason to assume that caring can happen only between two grammatical subjects, even though English grammar does not allow sentences without grammatical subjects.

[MarkCharles]

7. Why is this thread in the Science forum?

Got some links to real science?

[jberryhill]

8. Does this count?

"Philosophy and Computational Neuroanatomy," invited, Philosophical Studies, 73 (1994) 89-107.
http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~cherniak/PhilStd94.pdf

[drm604]

10. We are part of the universe.

So human minds figuring out the universe is the universe figuring itself out.

[tridim]

11. It's incredible to think that a cloud of hydrogen and gravity eventually congealed to form brains.

Though I don't think the human brain is anywhere near the final form.

The evolution of the known Universe is amazing, but I'm guessing that what we don't (yet) know is even more amazing.

[ElboRuum]

12. No.

Yeah, just no.

[ElboRuum]

13. Majikthise and Vroomfondel.

"You just let the machines get on with the adding up," warned Majikthise, "and we'll take care of the eternal verities thank you very much. You want to check your legal position you do mate. Under law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we're straight out of a job aren't we? I mean what's the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives us his bleeding phone number the next morning?"

"That's right!" shouted Vroomfondel, "we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"

Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

[laconicsax]

14. How fast does the universe figure itself out?

Without a benchmark, your question is meaningless.

[jberryhill]

15. Okay here

I always take a hammer and chisel with me when I go hiking, so I can collect these things..

[laconicsax]

16. That's a good practice!

[jberryhill]

17. It's like baseball cards

Mount Mitchell, Pike's Peak, Death Valley... I got a bunch of good ones.

[ElboRuum]

19. As fast as it can...

...clearly. When are you going to get around to asking the hard questions?

[tinrobot]

18. You're assuming we have it all figured out.

I suspect there's a lot more that we don't know than we do.

[hunter]

22. We don't know nothing.

Never have, never will.

The universe is very big, our brains are very small.

[tama]

24. Very deep question

related to that of Anthropic Principle, that could be analytically approached by dividing it into subquestions, which could include:
1) What is the relation between geometric time (or rather, theory specific geometric times) and psychological time (and what does ability to theorize various geometric times say about limits of psychological time experiences?)?
2) Nature of causality and causalities in terms of geometric and psychological times - and what else?
3) Information theories, powers of computation and possible thermodynamical restraints over them - current view being that there are no thermodynamical restraints with reverse computation.

At least on first look, the hypothesis that each quantum jump - including that of the universal wave function - rewrites both history and future is at least no less consistent than the reductionist views based on only (psychological) unidirectional time and causality.