Dwarkesh Patel: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Ah, great question. A vacuum is like a possible, well, what we would perceive as a possible set of laws of physics as we see them. So what it really is, is a minima in some higher dimensional abstract laws of physics, space in which you can find yourself in a minima. But these minima may just be local minima. In fact, according to our understanding, the minima which we live today, that gives us all of the laws of physics that we see around us, is in fact just a local minimum. And there's a lower minimum. In fact, there's many lower minima out there to which we can transition spontaneously or because of our own deliberate action. Yeah, absolutely. Almost certainly anything that humans can do can happen without humans. It's interesting to reflect on what aspects of human behavior nature has a tough time doing without us and what it just does on its own. For example, we make colder things in our laboratories than really exist naturally in the universe. But the universe certainly could make anything colder just by chance. Vacuum decay is something that if it is possible, will in our future definitely happen. That's just a feature of the world that eventually in our distant future, if it's possible at all, it will happen due to a quantum fluctuation. Our descendants may not wish to wait around for a quantum fluctuation to happen. They may wish to take the fate into their own hands, since a quantum fluctuations can take exponentially long times to happen. And if they even happened, you'd end up in an unfavorable vacuum, not hospitable for life, rather than trying to steer the cosmological constant in a happy direction. But they certainly can happen, and in our future, and indeed definitely will happen, if they're permitted. According to our understanding of quantum mechanics, if they're permitted, they must eventually happen. Furthermore, there are again speculative, but not wild theories of the early universe in which this happened in our past, in which we transitioned far, far in the past, maybe into what's called a bubble universe. So we started off in some other much higher vacuum long in the past. And then what we see as the Big Bang was in fact just a sort of local vacuum decay that then gave rise to our the bubble in which we live, everything we see around us. Okay, I'm just going to throw all my confusion at you and you figure out which one is worth dealing with first. What is the nature of the loss function that makes one value a minimum and one higher up? You know, what is exactly the ball rolling up on when it gets out or into a valley here? And then you're hinting at the possibility that there are other places in. I'm not sure if you're suggesting in the physical universe or in some hypothetical universe where the vacuum could be different, as in, in reality there are other pockets with different vacuums, or that hypothetically they could exist, or that our universe counterfactually could have been one of these? I don't know. This is the kind of thing I'd like throw into. Put everything I can into a Claude prompt and see what comes out the other end. Who would be in a position to seed these bubbles? Usually people are thinking that something just spontaneously happens, in the same way that rain spontaneously happens in a cloud, that somebody didn't go and seed it deliberately to make it happen. But you could more than free to speculate that somebody seeded it to make it happen as well.…

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