It’s a thought-provoking article. I won’t pretend to fully understand everything you’ve presented here, but I think the gist is - there are things that cannot be determined in finite time and therefore there are fundamental limits to what is ‘knowable’. But if we reframe this statement to remove time, then the limits of our knowledge are in reality just the constraints of the compute fabric (ie. the universe itself). Did I get that right? But surely then the inference is that we cannot fully know what those constraints are (and maybe the universe itself cannot fully resolve those constraints) without perhaps requiring infinite time?
What the article is really saying isn’t just “some things take too long to know,” but “some things cannot be computed by the universe at all, given the kind of machine it is.” So limits on knowledge aren’t just human; they’re physical.
And your follow-up is exactly right too: if the universe itself is a finite computational system, then there will be truths about its own structure that it cannot resolve from within. Not because of ignorance, but because doing so would require more computational power than the universe can instantiate, even given infinite time.
So the deepest limit isn’t time, it’s self-reference and causal depth. Some questions about reality are literally unanswerable by reality itself. That’s the unsettling but beautiful implication.
It’s a thought-provoking article. I won’t pretend to fully understand everything you’ve presented here, but I think the gist is - there are things that cannot be determined in finite time and therefore there are fundamental limits to what is ‘knowable’. But if we reframe this statement to remove time, then the limits of our knowledge are in reality just the constraints of the compute fabric (ie. the universe itself). Did I get that right? But surely then the inference is that we cannot fully know what those constraints are (and maybe the universe itself cannot fully resolve those constraints) without perhaps requiring infinite time?
Yeah, you’ve basically got it!!
What the article is really saying isn’t just “some things take too long to know,” but “some things cannot be computed by the universe at all, given the kind of machine it is.” So limits on knowledge aren’t just human; they’re physical.
And your follow-up is exactly right too: if the universe itself is a finite computational system, then there will be truths about its own structure that it cannot resolve from within. Not because of ignorance, but because doing so would require more computational power than the universe can instantiate, even given infinite time.
So the deepest limit isn’t time, it’s self-reference and causal depth. Some questions about reality are literally unanswerable by reality itself. That’s the unsettling but beautiful implication.