J. Random Universe

[Robert Hettinga]

J. Random Universe

Geodesic Culture
Robert A. Hettinga (rah at rah.ai)
Seafeathers Bay, Anguilla
September 5, 2020, 2:37PM AST

I suppose the following may read like a bunch of gobbledegook to most people, but I suppose I can’t really care. It makes sense to me at the moment. Though I need a nap, now.

A frequent trope of the cypherpunk list in the middle 1990’s was the character J. Random Cypherpunk. 

The name is self-explanatory, but he had just as much cred there as a social/political variable as the cryptographic variables Alice, Bob, Carol, or Dave. Mrs. RAH and I had a cat named Alice and still have a dog named Dave. Heh. Never got around to using Randy before Mrs. RAH took away my nomenclature card, but we did get to Eve, Mallory, Rusty (Trusty, Trusted Entity, whatever, Trent was just too foppish, didn’t lend itself to a dog’s call name), all of whom are gone, now. Animals after them had sensible names, like Red, an aging black-mouthed bob-tailed red “heeler” who likes to sleep on my right foot like he owns it, particularly around suppertime.


Somehow this afternoon I’m thinking about the universe, the simulation thereof, the multiverse, and anthropism, and out pops J. Random Universe.

It’s all about randomness. It’s now obvious to me that you can’t study infinity without randomness. Any first semester calculus student knows that. I must have smoked a number on the way to class that day. Epsilons and deltas were boring, and it turns out that they were just tacked onto calculus after the fact to keep it nailed down so it didn’t blow away. 

Nonetheless, I argue this with the same lumpen-enthusiasm that I argue about the recent ‘discovery’ of mine that has been obvious to anyone else, like, say, my recent breathtaking intuition, after four of five decades of acquaintance with it, that Hegelianism is pure and simple moral relativism. In the same Hegelian vein, I suppose it’s safe to say that since history is the application of a human narrative to previous events, it is an art, and not a science to begin with. Another thing that everybody figured out long before I did, and completely agrees to Popper’s proof that Marxism is pseudoscience. You always know the end of a story before you can write it, or at least re-write it into actual coherence. Post hoc, etc.

I have a friend who’s a priest, more fun, a converted Mormon, who has said at least once in public that I’m going to end up a ‘towel-boy in purgatory’ because of my backslid-from-Unitarian-but-declared-anyway metaphysical naturalism. Since we’re talking about stuff that sends the average scientific, or at least mathematical, dogmatic atheist scurrying to the confessional, this should be entertaining. 


Right. Cosmology. Sorry. This is going to be one of those things for which a preamble is not really necessary. I needed to pad things out a bit.

Everybody knows by now that a single universe cannot contain all the unlikelihood that life exists in this one, much less   intelligence, for various values thereof. Gelertner, Berlinsky, and Meyer are all over this like a duck on a junebug. Heard it on a Hoover podcast with Peter Robinson last year. They point and laugh at a multiverse, especially the idea that some anthropic principal dictates it. I don’t agree. Not the first time I don’t agree with geniuses, I guess. It seems to me that anthropism in a multiverse is quite handy. If, like calculus, it hasn’t found it’s epsilons and deltas just yet, relying on infinity as a ‘no matter where you go, there you are’ in answer to ‘why are we here’, is as good a hack as any.

Which brings me to the idea of a universal simulation. Without following the turtles *all* the way down, I’d like to propose a cypherpunk’s solution. 

The universe is discovered, not calculated. God does, it seems, play dice, to the extent that a literary character, um, plays. Not only is the universe unknowable by sheer dint of processing power, any arbitrary community of humans, much less a single one, cannot process enough information to calculate the entire universe in the Newtonian sense, or the Misian sense, for that matter.  Nor can any machine or arbitrary community of machines do that. ‘Community’ is fraught here, machine-wise, because it implies all kinds of things like emotion, the simulation of same, dominance hierarchies of emoting beings versus geodesics of processors, and all kinds of off the wall whoop-de-do, *gasping for air...* but also, the universe, at the quantum level is *random*. Incalculable, all the way up, all the way down. You can’t fool me Lord Russell.

If you were to simulate this universe, you would need to simulate randomness. At this point cypherpunks are waving their arms, semaphore, at the back of the room, while real cryptographers smirk in the front row. Pseudorandomness requires a seed. A key. And if you have a key, you can now *predict* the results of the simulation without having to run it to begin with. 

Heh.

Obviously this is wrong, full of amphiboly. But I’m too lazy to think about it now because it’s time for a nap.

Cheers,
RAH