shminux comments on Causal Universes - Less Wrong

60 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 November 2012 04:08AM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 28 November 2012 06:13:09AM 22 points [-]

Mainstream status:

I haven't yet particularly seen anyone else point out that there is in fact a way to finitely Turing-compute a discrete universe with self-consistent Time-Turners in it. (In fact I hadn't yet thought of how to do it at the time I wrote Harry's panic attack in Ch. 14 of HPMOR, though a primary literary goal of that scene was to promise my readers that Harry would not turn out to be living in a computer simulation. I think there might have been an LW comment somewhere that put me on that track or maybe even outright suggested it, but I'm not sure.)

The requisite behavior of the Time Turner is known as Stable Time Loops on the wiki that will ruin your life, and known as the Novikov self-consistency principle to physicists discussing "closed timelike curve" solutions to General Relativity. Scott Aaronson showed that time loop logic collapses PSPACE to polynomial time.

I haven't yet seen anyone else point out that space and time look like a simple generalization of discrete causal graphs to continuous metrics of relatedness and determination, with c being the generalization of locality. This strikes me as important, so any precedent for it or pointer to related work would be much appreciated.

Comment author: shminux 30 November 2012 12:34:37AM *  6 points [-]

It is rarely appreciated that the Novikov self-consistency principle is a trivial consequence of the uniqueness of the metric tensor (up to diffeomorphisms) in GR.

Indeed, given that (a neighborhood of) each spacetime point, even in a spacetime with CTCs, has a unique metric, it also has unique stress-energy tensor derived from this metric (you neighborhoods to do derivatives). So there is a unique matter content at each spacetime point. In other words, your grandfather cannot be alternately alive (first time through the loop) or dead (when you kill him the second time through the loop) at a given moment in space and time.

The unfortunate fact that we can even imagine the grandfather paradox to begin with is due to our intuitive thinking that that the spacetime is only a background for "real events", a picture as incompatible with GR as perfectly rigid bodies are with SR.

Comment author: iainjcoleman 05 December 2012 11:32:29PM 0 points [-]

How does the mass-energy of a dead grandfather differ from the mass-energy of a live one?

Comment author: shminux 05 December 2012 11:37:13PM 5 points [-]

Pretty drastically. One is decaying in the ground, the other is moving about in search of a mate. Most people have no trouble telling the difference.

Comment author: [deleted] 06 December 2012 01:20:20AM 3 points [-]

The total four-momentum may well be the same in both case, but the stress-energy-momentum tensor is different (the blood is moving in the live grandfather but not the dead one, etc., etc.)