💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › william-gillis-why-physics.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 14:44:54. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Why Physics Author: William Gillis Date: June 9th, 2015 Language: en Topics: science Source: http://humaniterations.net/2015/06/09/why-physics/
At some point my friends eventually feel compelled to ask me why, as an
anarchist, I would want to work as a theoretical physicist—rather than
say an AI researcher or a geneticist or a cryptographer or a materials
scientist or a restoration ecologist. Those are clearly high-impact
professions; developments in these fields can reshape the world, and
there is desperate need for more people to work in them.
The answer is simple: I want to make sure I’m right.
I’m really concerned that I might be wrong in some deep way that
matters. In a way that ends up hurting people or having a negative
effect I never predicted, or going against an unknown but better desire
that I might’ve otherwise developed. I could never just permanently lock
myself into some random project because it seemed like a good idea at
the time. I’m a due-diligence kinda person. Prior to being an anarchist,
prior to wanting to change the world in any particular direction, I am a
radical. And so my first allegiance is making sure I really am grasping
at the roots. That my values, desires and the strategies I might choose
aren’t predicated on a mistaken impression of the world in some deep
way.
A term that some AI researchers have adopted is the “ontological update
problem” and I think that phrase captures it perfectly. Your goals are
only ever expressible in terms of the map of the world you carry in your
head, and if that map is revealed as poorly matching the actual world
you are never entirely clear on how to proceed. It may well be that the
world is nothing like you thought, that the things you take to be
crystal clear are in fact absurdly murky, and the murky clear. It may be
that what you thought perfectly actionable is in fact not just
impossible but incoherent. Our picture of the world, of how it works and
what is possible, determines what values we gravitate towards, it
determines who we are. To give up on searching for a better map of the
world is to give up on improving yourself.
I could never exclusively dedicate my life to working on some random
tool or campaign, no matter how seemingly commonsensical or certain the
issue. Always at the back of my head would be scratching a ruthless
uncertainty. The infuriating and unrelenting knowledge that the
commitments of my life were an already-made gamble. I would be haunted
by the notion that if I revisited that gamble and thought about my
choice further I might evaluate things differently. I would feel
imprisoned by the having sunk too much into enacting a plan of action,
incapable of revising or updating the hasty assumptions and first
impressions that led to this avenue.
There are, of course, practically infinite things to doubt, to check, to
re-evaluate, to continually probe just to be a vigilant human being. You
will never hit them all up. But some issues are deeper than others, some
far more sweeping in their consequence.
What if everything we think we know about time or causality is wrong?
What if everything we think we know about complexity, about
consciousness, about energy, about the very parameters that so closely
guide and fence in what we consider to be possible, are wrong? How will
the universe end? What are the basic parameters that constrain all
possibilities? What does it mean to speak of “consequence” in an
infinite multiverse of a certain type? Is there a difference between
life and non-life? Etc. Etc. Etc. Sometimes huge ramifications spiral
out from even the most esoteric of mathematical questions.
Philosophy can map out a great many fundamental questions and
dependencies, but it can often only go so far and is quickly exhausted.
Theoretical physics is the first place we start to draw hesitant
answers, where a stray insight could change everything. I cannot imagine
a world where I am not drawn to it like a loadstone. Where the latest
big paper on AdS/CFT doesn’t pull at me with a raw nagging hunger. I am
fascinated by everything. In every subject I feel a needling pull to
explore, to check around every corner for another unforeseen cataclysmic
insight or jarringly missed piece, for just a little more of a map. But
physics is the frontier, the inescapable root.
It is also, of course, utterly beautiful, full of wondrous experiences
that almost cannot be described or compared, granting perspectives that
reveal entirely new colors at play in the world. The qualia of physics
and math, the richness, the crystal clarity, the complex humor of
someone’s proof, the overwhelming resonance of the revealed relations
and their potency at further exploration make sad jokes of all the cheap
fragmentary poetic or neural associations one can momentarily garner and
perhaps struggle to hold onto from drugs and religions. Trying to
explain this kind of experiential depth to those who have never even
glimpsed mathematics beyond arithmetic isn’t like explaining sex to a
preschooler, it’s like trying to explain the subjectivity of other
individuals’ knowledge to a toddler or self-awareness to an newborn. The
doors it opens to experiencing reality and the remarkable solidity of
the whole affair are not even fathomable beforehand. Once you taste
this, once you remember what such world-shattering and then
world-expansion feels like, when you realize that there could still be
yet more of them ahead… there is no ignoring it ever again.
Physics is where I finally fully satiate my yearning humility, and my
desperate need to never give up my agency in some foolhardy or naive
gamble. I am not a physicist because I’m an anarchist—because I want to
make the world a better place—if it was only so I might instead be
content to build cheaper solar panels or even train as a sniper. I am a
physicist because before any of that I care about getting things right.
Because I am a radical. Unlimited in audacity while driven by an
infinite humility that refuses to take anything for granted.
I am drawn to theoretical physics because I want to remain alive. I
don’t want to let the death to creep in anywhere, I don’t want to let
even just one tiny part of me permanently surrender to the putrid rot of
“good enough”.
And I suspect I would be less capable at fighting for a better world if
I was any other sort of person.
Sorry, is that too much to stick in a Statement of Purpose?