Carl Bate

Founder & CEO of @EvidiumAI.
Building epistemological systems.

[Conjecture Institute @ConjectureInst]

The Revolution That Should Have Been—and Still Could Be

Our article explaining how Conjecture Institute Fellow @PaulRRobichaud fulfilled Einstein's dream and unsettled a century of quantum orthodoxy is now live!

link below 👇

[Maxime Desalle @maxdesalle]

.@DavidDeutschOxf on the multiverse:

"In one cubic meter of air, there are 10 to the power of 10²³ different histories, all happening at the same time."

And that's only one cubic meter.

[Robert Greene @RobertGreene]

Think back on the moments when you felt deeply and personally connected to an activity. Think about the pleasure it brought you. In such activities are signs of your true purpose.

[Casey Handmer @CJHandmer]

The lesson I take from the SpaceX IPO is that the only thing stopping us from solving arbitrarily difficult problems is extreme creativity in business models.

No amount of tax and spend programs got us reusable rockets and great electric cars. Customer delight is a necessary precondition for success.

There seems to be some discussion around whether successful entrepreneurs should give up control of their companies so they can subsidize some philanthropic venture that otherwise has no value prop sufficient to run it as a business where customers voluntarily exchange money for goods and services at a competitive and reasonable price.

This misses the point. Transformational products deliver tangible value at 1000x the rate of charities whose value cannot be tested in the market place. Think about the undeniable value of the smart phone, satellite Internet, electric consumer devices, etc etc.

I think the transformational moment for SpaceX was when Elon stepped away from the philanthropic Mars greenhouse concept and fixed his resolve on unlocking radically better rockets for humanity. The greenhouse would have been, at best, a neat trick. Falcon and Starship give humanity a durable economic engine to maintain and improve access to space, forever.

[Palmer Luckey @PalmerLuckey]

When politicians say they want to seize/tax "wealth" but actually mean "shares in your own company that you yourself founded", the real point is making it impossible for anyone to actually control their own company for more than a decade.

They won't let you stay, either.

[Robert Sterling @RobertMSterling]

> you’ll never start a rocket company
> you’ll never build your own engines
> you’ll never be able to use off-the-shelf parts
> you’ll never survive three launch failures
> you’ll never reach orbit
> you’ll never win NASA’s trust
> you’ll never launch cargo to the ISS
> you’ll never compete with Boeing
> you’ll never compete with Lockheed
> you’ll never make rockets reusable
> you’ll never land a rocket vertically
> you’ll never land one on a drone ship
> you’ll never reuse a booster
> you’ll never fly the same booster 10 times
> you’ll never fly the same booster 20 times
> you’ll never fly the same booster 30 times
> you’ll never recover and reuse the fairing
> you’ll never lower launch costs
> you’ll never launch every month
> you’ll never launch every week
> you’ll never launch multiple times a week
> you’ll never carry astronauts
> you’ll never replace Roscosmos
> you’ll never fly civilians to orbit
> you’ll never manufacture satellites at scale
> you’ll never build the biggest constellation ever
> you’ll never make satellite internet work
> you’ll never make satellite internet fast
> you’ll never make satellite internet affordable
> you’ll never serve rural customers
> you’ll never serve aircraft and ships
> you’ll never build a methane rocket engine
> you’ll never make full-flow staged combustion work
> you’ll never build the most powerful rocket ever
> you’ll never build a rocket bigger than Saturn V
> you’ll never build it out of stainless steel
> you’ll never launch Starship
> you’ll never separate Super Heavy and Starship
> you’ll never relight Raptor in space
> you’ll never bring Super Heavy back
> you’ll never catch a booster with Mechazilla tower arms
> you’ll never launch 85% of mass to orbit worldwide
> you’ll never change the economics of space
> you’ll never force the entire industry to copy you
> you’ll never win
> you’ll never IPO

Congratulations to @elonmusk and the SpaceX team. You did what countless people said was impossible, and you did it time and time again.

Today is your day. You deserve this. May it be a glorious one.

[Paul Raymond-Robichaud @PaulRRobichaud]

My advice to all young researchers: be intransigent. Relentlessly pursue the problems you care about and let the bureaucrats bark when you do not care about filling their checkboxes.

[Conjecture Institute @ConjectureInst]

⚛️🧪NEW PAPER

Tests of constructor theory

~David Deutsch & Conjecture Institute Senior Scientists Chiara Marletto and Vlatko Vedral

Highlights below👇

[Conjecture Institute @ConjectureInst]

Constructor Theory and a Unified Theory of Information

Using constructor theory, we expressed the principles that underly all physical theories of information.

We expressed the regularities in Nature that are needed for information to exist, including quantum information.

Constructor theory allows you to express classical information and quantum information in the same framework.

This is important for situations in which a quantum system is interacting with a system that may not be quantum (like gravity).

In that case, you need a unified framework that can handle both quantum and classical systems simultaneously.

~Conjecture Institute Senior Scientist Chiara Marletto with @TOEwithCurt

[David Deutsch @DavidDeutschOxf]

He did indeed. I was flabbergasted by his result, which has made much existing (and continuing!) work in quantum foundations obsolete. But it has received grossly insufficient recognition from the community. They still don't know what hit them and are still ingeniously discussing non-existent things like "quantum non-locality" (and "the measurement problem") in ever greater detail.

He deserves patrons.

[Conjecture Institute @ConjectureInst]

A Physics Lab Inside Your Head

Thought experiments are where logical reasoning meets storytelling, catalysing progress in quantum science and technology.

Schrodinger’s famous cat brought quantum science to the public consciousness, while Deutsch’s thought experiment to test the many worlds and Copenhagen interpretations involved the first conception of a quantum computer.

I will show how presenting thought experiments using quantum circuits can demystify apparent quantum paradoxes, and provide fun, conceptually important activities for learners to implement themselves on near- term quantum devices.

~Conjecture Institute Fellow @maria__violaris

[Conjecture Institute @ConjectureInst]

When you do any kind of science, when you get to the edge, you find things that are counterintuitive.

If they had been intuitive, they would have been discovered long ago.

Science is about understanding things that go beyond our intuition.

~Conjecture Institute Advisor @DavidDeutschOxf with @GadSaad

[Conjecture Institute @ConjectureInst]

There Is No Final Theory of Everything

I think a theory of everything is perhaps not the most fruitful way of thinking about science...

It is my philosophical position that for any theory, no matter how complete it looks, we may be able to find problems in it, and these problems will lead to something else.

I think there are different levels of explanations, maybe infinitely many.

And we keep going from one to another by understanding things more and more.

I like this more open-ended way of thinking about science and physics.

We just keep digging, and sometimes we find a deeper level of explanation that brings about more unification.

In this view, there will always be something to work on.

The idea of a [final] theory of everything suggests a sense of closure.

~Conjecture Institute Senior Scientist Chiara Marletto with @TOEwithCurt

[Conjecture Institute @ConjectureInst]

Computers, constructors, and the laws of physics

~Conjecture Institute Senior Scientist Chiara Marletto w/ Sean Carroll

[Karl Popper Quotes @QuotePopper]

Karl Popper on How We Gain Knowledge:

––Karl Popper: "People think, usually, that we acquire knowledge by opening our eyes and our ears and let the sensations stream into us, and they believe then that we record this like a camera. In my opinion, if we wish to get knowledge, we have to have a problem. It has to be knowledge of something.

We have to find out something. We don't have to wait for information to stream into us, but we have to be inquisitive if we want to get knowledge. If we were passive, we would gain a confused mass of sensations or something like that, which we would hardly be able to understand and to convert into what one may call knowledge.

Quite apart from that, perception is not really, in my opinion, the main source of our knowledge. The role of perception is to inform us about a momentary situation in our environment. But we couldn't really interpret our perceptions without knowing much more about our environment, namely, we know whether we are in a house or whether we are in a glacier.

So we have two kinds of knowledge: this wider knowledge of a frame in which we orientate ourselves, and the momentary perception which gives us information about the situation at that particular moment. And it is only this situation in which we can use our perception. So we have theoretical knowledge and, if you like, the momentary practical challenge to our theoretical knowledge.

And here comes perception in."

[Conjecture Institute @ConjectureInst]

Conjecture Institute's Mission

~Cofounder @astupple with Advisor @peterboghossian

[Naval @naval]

Introducing USVC - a single basket of high-growth venture capital, for everyone.

No accreditation required, SEC-registered, and a very low $500 minimum.

Includes OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Sierra, Crusoe, Legora, and Vercel. As USVC adds more companies, investors will own a piece of that too.

Liquidity typically comes when companies exit, but we’re aiming to let investors redeem up to 5% of the fund every quarter. This isn’t guaranteed, but if we can make it work, you won’t be locked up like in a traditional venture fund.

It runs on AngelList, which already supports $125 billion of investor capital.

And I’ve joined USVC as the Chairman of its Investment Committee.
—

Go back to the 1500s, you set sail for the new world to find tons of gold - that was adventure capital.

Early-stage technology is the modern version. It says we are going to create something new, and it’s risky. It’s daring.

But ordinary people can’t invest until it’s old, until it’s no longer interesting, until everybody has access to it. By the time a stock IPOs, most of the alpha is gone. The adventure is gone. Public market investors are literally last in line.

This problem has become farcical in the last decade. Startups are reaching trillion dollar valuations in the private markets while ordinary investors have their noses up to the glass, wondering when they’ll be let in.

Investing in private markets isn’t easy. You need feet on the ground. You need judgment built over years. Most people don’t have the patience to wait ten or twenty years for an investment to come to fruition.

But there is no more productive, harder-working way to deploy a dollar than in true venture capital.

USVC enables you to invest in venture capital in a broad, accessible, professionally-managed way, through a single basket of innovation, focused on high-growth startups, at all stages.

It is how you bet on the future of tech: the smartest young people in the world, working insane hours, leveraged to the max, with code, hardware, capital, media, and community. Your dollar doesn’t work harder anywhere.

There is an old line - in the future, either you are telling a computer what to do, or a computer is telling you what to do. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of that transaction.

USVC lets you buy the future, but you buy it now. Then you wait, and if you are right, you get paid.

Get access here:

https://t.co/pAj1sqUsG0

[David Deutsch @DavidDeutschOxf]

Amaze! Amaze! Amaze!: https://t.co/P6OXoPOlwR

[Conjecture Institute @ConjectureInst]

Conjecture Institute Advisor @DavidDeutschOxf on some problems he'd like to see solved:

1. The theory of how to create an artificial intelligence (which will be far more illuminating than actually implementing the theory)

2. Progress in constructor theory (fundamental theory in physics that casts all laws of physics in terms of possible and impossible tasks)

3. Revival of optimism (apparent obstacles are just problems to be solved)

[JJ @JosephJacks_]

New post on my blog:

Geometrodynamics and the Brain 🧠

In 1970, John Archibald Wheeler — the legendary physicist who coined “black hole” and “wormhole” — filled a blackboard with the deepest unsolved problems in physics: the destruction of information by black holes, the impossibility of quantizing spacetime geometry, the quantum foam at the Planck scale, and the roles of Gödel’s self-reference and Leibniz’s monads in a participatory universe.

Behind it all was his program of geometrodynamics — the radical claim that everything in physics, including matter itself, is nothing but the dynamics of spacetime geometry, and that geometry ultimately reduces to information (“it from bit”).

Half a century later, physicist Anirban Bandyopadhyay (@anirbanbandyo) at Japan’s National Institute for Materials Science has extended Wheeler’s framework into the brain. His forthcoming book, Symphony of the Helix, argues that the brain is not a chemical system driven by slow ionic currents but a geometrodynamic system in which information travels as electromagnetic vortex structures at the speed of light through nested helical architecture — from protein alpha-helices to microtubules to whole-brain circuits.

The structural parallels to Wheeler are exact: where Wheeler had spacetime foam, Bandyopadhyay has a multi-scale vortex hierarchy; where Wheeler had “charge without charge,” Bandyopadhyay has “thought without ions”; where Wheeler’s universe observes itself into existence, Bandyopadhyay’s consciousness is a self-referential resonance chain spanning every scale of the cosmos.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

https://t.co/gmfKbWDzZU