Greetings from FQXi's 6th International Meeting, brought to you from Tuscany, Italy.
We're currently coming to the end of another brilliant (though I admit I'm biased) FQXi conference, this time focused on Intelligence and Agency in the Physical World, sponsored by the Fetzer Franklin Institute.
But to give you a flavor of what we've been discussing, here are some of the questions the organisers put together in a survey. They polled the participants here -- a mix of (mainly) physicists, mathematicians, philosophers, computer scientists and biologists. Their answers to the survey questions will follow soon. But before I reveal them, what are your thoughts?
1) Is there a hard problem of consciousness? (Y/N)
2) If the number of particles in a solar mass star is N, is the number of M physically instantiated stars in existence: is M < N, N < M < exp(N), exp(N) < N < infinity, or N = infinity?
3) You've traveled back in time to 1998, and are observing the Earth from Alpha Centauri. What is the probability that in 2000 George Bush is elected US president?
4) If we encountered ET intelligence, what parts of our math would it know? Logic? Algebra? Calculus? None of the above?
5) Do we need a Science Court? What would it do?
6) Is the universe a simulation? (near certain, probably, improbably, almost certainly not)
7) Is there a wavefunction for the entire universe? (Y/N)
8) What do you think of top-down causation, on a scale from (logically incoherent) to (self-evidently part of how things are)?
9) What is the resolution of the Fermi paradox?
10) You are given the choice between (a) a quantum gun that with p=0.5 kills you instantly and with p=0.5 does nothing, or (b) a classical poorly-aimed gun that with p=1/3 kills you, with p=1/3 injures you (bullet hits random location), and with p=1/3 misses you. Which do you choose? (You can vary the setup; the idea is to elicit whether one believes a real version of you always survives the quantum gun and whether this matters.)
11) Is it in principle possible, using a classical computer with the computational capacity of the observable universe, to simulate (via some set of evolution equations) an initial state of a flower seed, soil, water, and air, to see what color flowers bloom?
12) How does mind relate to the fundamental structure of the Universe?
13) And, only for the brave/foolhardy: Which of the versions of QM is best/truest/etc.?
Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
There will be whole bunch of material appearing on the community site over the next few days, including slides and audio of selected talks and analysis on the blog (by the excellent Ian Durham and George Musser). And of course, all the videos will be made available on our YouTube channel (but please be patient while we work on those). In the meantime, you can get a sense of the some of the themes and debates at the conference on Twitter #FQXi2019, where I've been live tweeting the meeting.