Sublime

An exciting modern idea is that space emerges out of quantum entanglement, rather than being a substance in its own right, so maybe there’s a sense in which relationalism will triumph in the end.

In fact, his act of faith in this factual knowledge was so extreme that he preferred to give up a well-established tenet of common sense: the notion of simultaneity.

What justifies the inferences we draw from these patterns? It is certainly not a matter of logical deduction. There is no way of proving from these or from any other observations that the external universe, or multiverse, exists at all, let alone that the electric currents received by our brains stand in any particular relationship to it.

The odds of numerous input patterns occurring in the same relation over and over again by sheer coincidence are vanishingly small. A predictable sequence of patterns must be part of a larger object that really exists. So reliable predictability is an ironclad way of knowing that different events in the world are physically tied together.

Is the Standard Model Correct?

It is we who create the problem, Borges realized, by the very way we imagine the race. We attribute to Achilles and to the tortoise (as we do to ourselves and indeed to all objects) a persistence in time and space. When we slice time and space into the infinitesimal chunks that Achilles and the tortoise have to cross, we simultaneously impose on

it isn’t nearly enough to have a boundary surface with an immense number of particle-like constituents. Instead, a curved interior emerges only if quantum entanglement interconnects numerous boundary constituents.

It is because the laws of physics support computational universality that human brains can predict and explain the behaviour of very un-human objects like quasars. And it is because of that same universality that mathematicians like Hilbert can build up an intuition of proof, and mistakenly think that it is independent of physics. But it is not