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#4675·Tyler Mills, 1 day agoBetter example maybe: A whirlpool in water only exists to an observer that can create whirlpools in its VR. If the observer only has molecule-scale abstraction, it cannot coarse-grain, so there are no whirlpools for it, or explanations in terms of them. (Such a system also cannot be a person, because a person can create all possible explanations).
I'm realizing this is very related to Stephen Wolfram's "Observer Theory", which is interesting, but sounds worryingly relativist to me at times. Something like: Different observers will coarse-grain different laws of physics than the ones we have, for the same reason that the flipbook appears to have motion to us, but not to an observer viewing through a high-speed camera. Debating with LLMs about how that seems to violate computational universality has left me frustrated.