nhamann comments on Open Thread - Less Wrong
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I feel like I need to post this somewhere. This is the most ridiculously broad journal article I've ever seen. The paper is Categorical Ontology of Complex Spacetime Structures: The Emergence of Life and Human Consciousness, and here's the abstract:
I can't tell whether these guys solved science or are just really, really confused.
I've been skimming it for ~20 minutes. Every single paragraph or page that I've read made sense to me, although for the non-math parts I have to trust that their citations and references are correct and in context.
I can't yet say what the overarching purpose of the paper is exactly, beyond the general idea of "Hey guys, let's formalise this shit!", but I would put the chances of there actually being meaningful work in the PDF at between 0.6 and 0.7. I will certainly agree that there's a ton of filler in there, but it's quite useful if - as they claim - the target readership for this paper is an ensemble of philosophers, psychologists and scientists with the most diverse backgrounds.
It reminds me a bit of a paper by two of my professors, which took the Kantian philosophy of knowledge and rephrased it in the form of topology, in the process (allegedly) managing to clear away the ambiguity from a few philosophical terms. Though in their case they treated it quite lightly, as little more than LaTeX-ing up some of their coffee chats.
Looks like concentrated confusion to me.
That's probably the most likely answer, but I don't understand it well enough to judge its validity.
Looks like category theory. There seems to be a bunch of weird theory of everything type stuff there, especially systems theory like this, but also people who appear seriously competent. No idea about these guys though.
Maybe if we look into a mirror and say John Baez's name three times, he'll appear here and say this is crackpottery.
Yes, but its not just category theory, it's partially a philosophical theory for "super-complex systems" as well (from what I understand). But the prereqs to understand this paper are far beyond what I'm at right now, so I really don't know what to say about it other than that a theory as broad as that one should have a lot of evidence for its formulation.