Why are time machines and Starship Enterprises a good standard of scientific progress? Why not immorality, sentient computers, and stuff like that, which is equally science-fictiony but possible?
"Immorality" is not only theoretically possible, it has been thoroughly mastered by many ;)
I think there's a noteworthy distinction between science and its applications. In my mind, science is about understanding the world, whereas fields like engineering/medicine are about their practical applications.
I do think that there's a tremendous amount of progress that could be made in sciences like Biology, Psychology etc. But I would draw a distinction between the things that fundamentally change the way we understand the world, vs building really cool toys that we would love to have.
I think the point of the "End of Science" argument is that any discoveries in biology (and physics) will merely be elaborations of basic principles that already exist, rather than elucidations of any as-yet undiscovered principles.
For example, CRISPR. Many people think that CRISPR was an amazing discovery, but really, it's just a biological system that has existed for a long, long time, where a collection of smart people realized that with some engineering it could be used for effective genetic modifications with high precision and no need for engineering custom proteins to bind specific sequences. That seems fundamentally different from, for example, the experiments that established that DNA is the molecule of heredity when nobody had an idea how DNA could encode information.
DNA as the molecule of encoding information for heredity is also "merely" a discovery of an ancient biological system. However, it's not as though physics predicts the existence of DNA specifically, or CRISPR, yet these things are important for understanding biology, and in the case of CRISPR it's been turned into a technology that humans can use. Which is why I have a lot of complaints about the commonly held belief such as this one:
> merely be elaborations of basic principles that already exist, rather than elucidations of any as-yet undiscovered principles.
This is not a meaningful or thoughtful examination of even chemistry. 3D structure of proteins is "merely" an elaboration of physical properties, yet "physics" doesn't have the tools to make much progress on solving the 3D structure of a sequence of amino acids, despite it being a purely physics process.
Is the world "physical" in the sense that probably don't have new fundamental forces of nature? Of course. That doesn't mean that physics helps understand much of the physical world, because the "elaboration" in the "merely elaboration" has nothing to do what physicists or other scientists consider "physics."
No, the elucidation of the structure of the DNA isn't just merely a discovery of an ancient biological system. It was the recognition that the structure was formed by antiparallel strands encoding information in a reversible molecular form, that represents a real level-up in human understanding of the universe. That's the whole point of that throwaway sentence at the end "It has not escaped our notice (12) that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material."
Also, we can simulate protein folding well enough from classical physics and quantum approximations such that "rapid two-state folders" are considered solved. That was a major outcome in the course of my career, to which I contributed significantly :)
If we can simulate protein folding well enough, why was the Google announcement last year such a big deal?
I worked in protein folding over 30 years ago at EMBL, and have loosely followed it since. I could easily have been led astray, but I was absolutely not under the impression that we can do this even close to "well enough".
I work at Google and did protein folding before the Deepmind (not Google) announcement.
The CASP results weren't really a big deal. It was a modest advancement using techniques that were already spreading throughout the community, coupled with a skilled team that understood the score metric very well.
Two state folders can be reversibly folded using empirically determined force fields (two state folders basically go from "any totally unfolded configuration" to "fully folded single structure" in milliseconds); we can just run simulations and let the (quantum-inspired, classically embedded) physics do the folding, or we can use other techniques, like Rosetta (monte carlo plus lots of empirical data from known structures), or evolutionary data-based techniques (like Deepmind and others used).
If I'm filling in the blanks here correctly, what we're still far away from is determining the folded configuration of an arbitrary polypeptide. Is that correct? Or has there been real breakthroughs there? 10 years ago when I last checked in with some folk I knew from EMBL, this still seemed to be a complete pipedream.
Is there a paper that describes the parameters of the peptide structure that go into the "physics do the folding" part? When I was at EMBL, I was focused on using local hydrophobicity to see how predictive it was (not at all). Is the physics model operating at this level, above it, or below it?
> But I would draw a distinction between the things that fundamentally change the way we understand the world, vs building really cool toys that we would love to have.
It may very well be that understanding emergent phenomenon at the appropriate level of emergence will turn out to be vitally important, and that reductionism (while undoubtedly useful in many scenarios) is impeding our understanding of emergent phenomena like consciousness and evolution.
Obviously, we are discussing immortality of non-human species.
However, we more or less understand that morality of larger lifeforms is encoded in our DNA (e.g. telemers). Mortality seems to be a defense against cancer.
There is no particular reason that a human needs to grow old, except for the accidents of evolution.
They do say “laughter is the best medicine”, and morality is obviously funnier than mortality. No mere telomere can tell me my mortality, as long as I’m defending myself by laughing at spelling errors.
Did I tell you about the time, in 7th grade biology class, the kid sitting next to me was asked to read something aloud from the textbook about ”organisms”, but of course she said “orgasms”. She might have died a little right there, whilst the rest of us got her energy recycled as a power-up.
Mortality is not a defence against cancer. Mortality is a tool that allows species to more speedily adapt to changing environment. Sexual reproduction is another such tool, which ensures enhanced diversity of future generations, so some of the descendants will adapt better and leave more better adapted descendants.
Btw, in this sense cancer is just another tool, that limits lifespan and ensures generations change. Of course, it didn't appear as such, but most species have no natural incentive to develop a resistance to it.
>"Btw, in this sense cancer is just another tool, that limits lifespan and ensures generations change. Of course, it didn't appear as such, but most species have no natural incentive to develop a resistance to it."
Not exactly and i believe there are a rare few that are much much more resistant to it and as such have become subject of research (trough TP53 in elephants or P16 and P27 in naked mole rats)
At the end of the day this natural incentive depends on when the cancer can appear (generally right away at every step of the cell cycles) and how likely it is which probably depends on the turnover and amount of cells of a particular type or in the being overall which one would assume increases as the being grows and additionally how likely it is to inhibit reproduction as it grows.
As it stands i'd say whilst they're not too inhibiting on this front (for example humans are most fertile at relatively young age well before most cancer occurrences become a problem. We've just extended our lifespan quite a bit) they still can be (kids can die of cancer too) and thus an evolutionary incentive against it however minor is present.
I just said time machines and faster than light travel are unlikely to ever occur; I do think life extension and AGI are not technically impossible, but rather inevitable (my training is in biology, and I work on machine learning).
For the first two, we'd need to have a radically different physics than the current model, while the last two, they seem like reasonable extrapolations from modern technology.
The nature of a paradigm shift is that it recasts all the existing laws of nature as special cases of a more powerful, more general model of reality.
Who knows, maybe we'll find that we actually are living in a simulation and then figure out how to hack the matrix. The idea of "travel" and "time" would become obsolete then; you'd just poke new values for your wave function into the simulation's RAM.
This seems implausible for many reasons, it seems more likely that if we're living in a simulation, we'll have trouble figuring out how to proloxify the feeblegarps.
Yes. The idea is that if we "break out" of whatever simulation we purportedly exist within, none of the concepts in the enclosing universe would make any sense to us.
(I happened to be watching How A Plumbus is Made when I wrote the comment, btw).
A radically different paradigm of physics would result in technologies that can't be imagined in the present paradigm of physics. For example nobody had even remotely guessed that transistors were possible until well in to the development of solid state theory.
we have plenty of unrealized technologies that can be imagined in the present paradigm but that we're not exploiting yet (see for example recent advances in 2D topological materials).
(based on my understanding of transistors, the first ones were conceived before the theory for them existed, and the first ones were built around the same time the quantum theory for them was expressed).
You don't send a message if the receiver can't understand it.
People need to have a point of contact with that extrapolated future to became a popular science fiction work, even the culture in the far future fiction is usually pretty similar to our own (or at least, the one of the moment where that book was written).
Present works (not the ones with inherited universes from old ones) are updated to our current expectations of the future, so you have sentient computers and other "possible" technology, and probably in 50 years we will have a different set of standards and not something as naive as what used to stand as possible 50 years before.
Why not better understanding of complexity and complex systems?
The assumption that any of these new technologies would be desirable and create a net positive effect in the world sounds very naive after seeing the results of something as simple as "connecting the world".
We need to have a better understanding of how new technologies interact with our existing technologies (including institutions and communities) and our environment, or else we risk (further) destabilizing everything that has allowed us to get this far.
personally I believe that improving the techniques we use to study complexity is the most important thing in science today. In many fields we are now drowned in tons of high quality data, yet scientists struggle to store, process, and turn that data into knowledge.
