In regards to Borges' library...

I think the example is too simplistic to produce meaningful works, like the Sonnets of Shakespeare or the like. One would need randomness along with some rule that enforces directionality to achieve meaning or congruency in any one room. This does appear to arise naturally in the context of non-associative geometry. I got to talk a bit with Tevian Dray about this at GR21 (in the context of quantum gravity), and that forms the basis of my essay. But I have written several pages of octonion poetry, and here's one of my favorite examples.

One open, as multiplicity and formless nothingness, finds peace in true relation and knows all as self.

But the curious thing is that when one follows the rules of progression dictated by the octonion framework, it is a hierarchy of levels of abstraction. In this way; each possible outcome is a span from most abstract to most specific conceptually. So this notion shows more promise, in being able to crank out meaningful works, than the schema of Borges.

However; it would seem the analogy with Borges holds at a level closer to the origin. There is evidence that human language is a paring down of the glossolalia metalanguage of young children, such that the tonal elements of a specific language of one's family or nation of origin - instead of the prior notion that syntax is hard wired. So at that hierarchical level, the example might make more sense. I look forward to seeing your response.

All the Best,

Jonathan

Dear Jonathan --

The difficulty with higher-derivative theories is not that they lead to "unsolvable" equations that then must be approximated, but rather that they contain negative energy states, violate probability conservation, and generally lead to non-physical results. One needs to re-interpret them as effective theories for something else in order to handle these problems. It's important to distinguish higher-order (e.g., polynomial functions of fields and their derivatives) with higher-derivative (e.g., a Lagrangian with a fourth derivative) theories. There's a large and complex literature on this (you can dig into the references from the papers with Alan and Dimitrios, including Jonathan Simon's).

I don't buy the idea that the Mandelbrot set is the kind of self-reference that matters, though it's a nice suggestion. It is indeed a set whose boundary is defined by the fixed point of a function, so there's a recursive feel to it. But not all fixed point questions trigger Gödelian concerns. I can find the Nash equilibrium of a finite game (for example) and it's usually not the most mindblowing thing of all time; indeed, finding the Nash Equilibrium of an arbitrary game is somewhere between P and NP-complete.

I'll have to take a look at Edward Hall's book, and your "octonions" essay, to get a better sense of the things you're after.

Yours,

Simon

Quite impressive, Simon.

You've taken us on somewhat of a metaphorical journey into ontological meaning.

"the universe runs in assembly code, the coarse-grained version runs in LISP, and its from that the world of aim and intention grows." I have used FORTRAN, an older language but not LISP, a perfect language to simulate and characterize life, thus used for AI robotics and function humans perform. Assembly Language, ones and zeros basic.

Math, physics and learning gaps and the eloquent leaps of vivid comparisons: non-life to life, chemical reaction to mind, one thing to everything.

I think that you wax eloquent with vivid comparisons to supercharge your argument.

Hope you get a chance to comment on my essay.

Jim Hoover

    Thanks for the thoughtful reply Simon..

    I think you'll appreciate Hall's book on proxemics, and perhaps your views will grow on me, but I feel that your essay reveals a blind spot to me, which your comments above acknowledge but do not deal with entirely. I'll return to this thread later, and I'll be open to further discussion even when things wrap up.

    I've still got a lot of essays to digest!

    All the Best,

    Jonathan

    Dear Simon DeDeo,

    Thank you for your delightful essay. It was a real pleasure to read and I agree that the counterintuitive nature of specifying scale is very real indeed. In another large-scale example, Hubble's Classification scheme of spiral galaxies was at first deemed too simple because of its simplicity, but it has turned out to stand the test of time precisely because of that, and is still in use today. I also enjoyed your intriguing conclusion that there may be more stages/levels (accelerations) to come in our quest for understanding intelligence and ultimately us.

    I have in the meantime rated your essay and wish you good luck in the contest.

    Regards,

    Robert

    Dear Simon,

    thanks for the reading list---there's certainly some interesting stuff on there I'm going to check out!

    And I should reiterate that I did not wish to imply you abused Gödelian reasoning; however, it has been so often abused that it nowadays almost seems to invite a knee-jerk rejection of certain kinds of arguments. If you've never read it, Torkel Franzén's Gödel's Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to Its Use and Abuse indeed provides what its subtitle proclaims.

    Also, I didn't mean to suggest that Kolmogorov complexity is computable, and I don't think the argument needs it---rather, that meaning is incomputable would be a reduction to the incomputability of Kolmogorov complexity, if it's indeed the case that no program/description exists that picks out all the 'meaningful' books which is itself significantly shorter than the collection of these books.

    And I agree with your last paragraph: epistemic does not mean unimportant; but it does mean that we don't have to either accept ontological dualism or eliminativism, which to me are both rather unpalatable options whose individual problems are perhaps even more severe than those they seek to overcome.

    Hope you caught your flight!

    Cheers,

    Jochen

    Dear Jim --

    Thank you for your kind remarks.

    There's an old joke, due to Philip Greenspun--perhaps you know it. Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule

    Yours,

    Simon

    Dear Wilhelmus --

    The flow of time is a lovely problem. I draw from your remarks here that it is indeed connected to memory. What I remember, how long I remember it for, what persists and how, is presumably what is dictating the feeling of the passage of time, rapid or slow, for the organism or process in question.

    The old question--what is it like to ride on the back of a photon? The whole history of the world, in zero proper time...

    Yours,

    Simon

    Dear Jochen --

    Ah, yes! I like what you say about KC here. I remember a similar argument by Stu Kaufmann (I believe he might have referenced it back to others as well)--that when we ask for laws, we are really asking for "compressible" descriptions. KC of course applies only to the notion of a "shortest" law, so if we did believe we had an optimal law-making system, we'd be in trouble.

    I wonder if weaker notions also cause problems, though--e.g., a function that always either compresses something or leaves the same length. It's easy to do a diagonalization argument to show that some things must be missed by this (if you make some things shorter, but nothing longer, then the map is no longer one-to-one for a few things).

    I agree with your remark about dualism. Both ontological dualism and eliminativism really do feel like a hold-over from a previous theology. Perhaps one day they really will seem to be debates about "angels on the head of a pin".

    Yours,

    Simon

    PS: I made it home.

    Simon, I see you will be one of the winers of this first essay contest... congratulations, I already read your essay and rated it.

    Please, consider to have into account my essay which main proposal is:

    "A essay that could revolutionize the future of Cosmological Physics: Aristotle, Newton, Einstein,..."

    The Dynamic Laws of Physics (and Universal Gravitation) have varied over time, and even Einstein had already proposed that they still has to evolve:

    ARISTOTLE: F = m.v

    NEWTON: F = m.a

    EINSTEIN. E = m.c2 (*)

    MOND: F = m.a.(A/A0)

    FRACTAL RAINBOW: F = f (scale) = m.a.(scale factor)

    Or better G (Gravity Constant) vary with the scale/distance due to fractal space-time: G = f ( Scale/distance factor)

    (*) This equation does not correspond to the same dynamic concept but has many similarities.

    Dear Simon DeDeo

    You gave an interesting hypothesis about jerk. I also thought about how third derivation by time can be physically important. According to symmetries it can be strange that it does not exist. Maybe some hidden physics exists where all time derivations are important.

    But, I think that our feeling for jerk can be explained differently. Human beings needed feeling for forces and acceleration in his evolution, he used it at walking, riding, fighting, etc. Therefore, she/he recognizes not only forces, but also changes of forces. Besides, a phenomenon retroactive inhibition is known from physiology. It means, for instance, that if we smell some odour some time, we do not sense it anymore after some time. Similarly it is with forces: if some constant force acts on us, consciousness forgets on this force, but change of force reminds us again.

    Anyway, it is interesting that sense of jerk is informatics, but sense of force is physics. At this, I claim that real physics does not exist, everything is only informatics or mathematics. Namely, I wrote also about dimensionless constants. Thus, 200 years ago, it was understood that one meter is a pure physical quantity. Today one meter is, the most probably, dimensionless quantity, which can be expressed as multiple of Planck's distance. Therefore, it can be operater only as mathematical quantity, and probably it is only mathematical quantity. The same is true for one second and for one kilogram.

    My essay

    Best regards, Janko Kokošar

    Dear Simon,

    This is a wonderful essay and found great interest reading it.

    I enjoyed your thoughts on the 2nd derivatives in nature yet we nonetheless are able to sense higher derivatives. I think it's profound that the fundamental laws of nature are typically unstable in some way if formulated with higher derivatives. I'm aware of many higher derivative theories of gravity, some of which have interesting ways to get around pathologies that I'm not completely familiar with.

    I definitely agree with your ideas on effective field theories. Even in my field of particle physics, people are often too cavalier to dismiss non-renormalisable theories as broken, despite being perfectly predictive effective theories. It is definitely interesting to consider renormlisation at once with emergent phenomena such as social dynamics even. You link coarse-graining with memory, and it is intriguing that coarse graining is actually a loss of (microscopic) information, yet it allows new structures like the brain or silicon chips to store richer information.

    Self-reference and renormalisation are themes we also touch on in what I wrote with my coauthor.

    Thank you again for a really enjoyable read.

    Best,

    Jesse

    Simon - Thank you for a delightful and imaginative essay. I was reminded of the old "God of the Gaps" trope - your essay hints at a "physics of the gaps" that stems from logical limits in self-referential systems (my favorite topic in the 2015 contest - see The Hole at the Center of Creation). However, I do not find the appeal to renormalization convincing - for the same reasons you allude to in discussing the difficulty or origins.

    Our essays have some interesting parallels - although I think your treatment of Borges library is a more interesting narrative than my appeal to the 100 monkeys theorem, we both end up with all of the works of Shakespeare.

    I hope you have a chance to read and score my essay if you have not already - The How and The Why of Emergence and Intention.

    Regards - George Gantz

    Simon,

    Interesting approach. Do you think it's wrong to consider higher orders in terms of perturbation theory? I've not heard the word 'jerk' before but have considered 'change in rates of change, such as accelerations, as always implemented THROUGH the 'next order up'. i.e. If a pendulum 'feels and shows' acceleration (brains and accelerometers don't require you to video a pendulum!) does it not equally and simply show all ('higher order') CHANGES IN RATE of that acceleration?

    I agree much of your content, and don't mind the word 'jerk' (I suspect English has less than half the words science really needs!) But do you think what you describe may be just a glimpse of a far more universal truth about nature and logic; from the quanta upwards through relativity to universes, that a scale hierarchy with consistent unseen relationship laws may be a fundamental structure?

    My essay last year identified the rules of brackets in arithmetic and 'layered' ('modal' or 'quantum') propositional dynamic logic (DL) as consistent with that. (No part of a compound proposition can relate another outside it's local 'frame' in the hierarchy, yet it's product directly relates). Is that consistent with your schema?

    I agree with your comment above about the; "crazy arguments about quantum mechanics and free will which I think are both wrong ("quantum" randomness is not special, and the wavefunction evolves deterministically)" This year I link memory with hierarchies & 'feedback loops' to produce decisions as aims & intents, and identify a momentum 'missed' at the finest scale (QM) allowing a casual derivation of it's predictions. Most find that hard to conceive but your excellent work suggest an ability to overcome the cognitive dissonance produced. I hope you can read it and respond.

    Very well done and thank you for yours which I feel is certainly a top 10 candidate.

    Peter

      Simon,

      Time grows short, so I am reviewing those I've read to see if I have rated them. Yours I enjoyed so I wanted to make sure. I did on 3/24.

      Hope you enjoyed the interchange of ideas as much as I did.

      Jim Hoover

      Dear Jerk,

      very well-written essay which I gave a high mark. I like the 'jerks' (first I heart this word).

      As an expert for non-linear systems you are interested in my essay?

      AI and the renormalization group are connected. In my essay I considered an arbitrary graph which has a phse transition to a tree. The graph is connected to the brain network and the tree represents the process of learning in the brain.

      All the best and good luck in the contest

      Torsten

      Dear Simon,

      A very well written essay, which made me think new thoughts, which is

      always very pleasant. Thanks!

      Thanks for that reply Simon, and I'm now certain that I agree more or less completely with you, and having thought about it I can now say less vaguely what I liked most about your essay.

      The underlying theme this year, at least among the contestants who believe that intentions obviously do emerge from math, is the nature of emergence. The best entries have all come, in my opinion, from people who work in one of the 'origins' communities, and they have all done a good job explaining the role of large-numbers scaling, effective field theories, coarse-graining and so forth in producing macroscopic descriptions, but of course a truly emergent phenomena is typically the result of a phase transition in a strongly-correlated regime which will interrupt simple scaling under the law of large numbers and generally change the phase space of the system in some non-prestatable way and thus the basic technique of first listing everything possible and then finding the distribution of probability amongst the possibilities also fails and we have an "origin gap." I think that your essay has seen to the heart of the matter most directly by abstracting away all of the variable particulars of such gaps and identifying what is invariant in any origin story of interest, and I think that is what makes physical thinking powerful and this is a wonderful example of thinking like a physicist at any scale of natural complexity.

      Also as per the irrelevance of microscopic dynamics to questions about human freedom, I agree and don't understand why this is so difficult for people. In this point, the fact that I don't know the first thing about QCD doesn't stop me at all, since I'm quite comfortable with molecular behavior and it's totally obvious that there is no "free will" in our molecular components, and I don't see how violating unitarity at the microscopic level would matter in that judgment. Whatever we mean by our capacity to make choices then, this is obviously an emergent property of biological systems. The most basic issue is probably that people don't understand emergence, and have some default metaphysical view that if something isn't a fundamental, time-independent constituent of the universe it must be an illusion. Consciousness is the most obvious example but on that reading literally every solid, macroscopic structure in existence is an illusion too, and the assertion becomes nonsense. So absolutely with you there.

      Finally, at the end when you suggest that we may be in the midst of authoring our own origin gap, I felt the urge to shout triumphantly. Let it be so!

      Joe

      Dear Peter -- so many excellent comments here since I last poked in. But yours I can answer! It's true that higher-derivative terms ("jerk" terms) can appear in a perturbative expansion, say at Order epsilon. Perturbative expansions have been part of physics since early QM, if not Laplace and solar system mechanics.

      So they can look innocuous! But danger Will Robinson: if you treat that perturbative expansion as a fundamental theory then there's a discontinuity at epsilon = 0; as soon as you move away from zero, traumatic things happen. Take a look at Jonathan Z. Simon's papers (cited in ours with Dimitrios and Alan) for the gory details. To follow the Laplace name-check, it's as if you said hey, what if I allow the planets to have a tiny component like this... and the solar system blows apart.

      Arguments like this have been used against string theory, which can appear to induce them in a field theory (I saw a great fight about this at Perimeter Institute once). I don't know how those arguments resolve (one answer is that there's a no perturbative string theory hiding behind -- that this is just an effective theory and then all the paper's arguments go through as before).

      I do wonder about scale hierarchies being built in. If we're a simulation in super-Elon's computer, it's what I'd build in to amuse my animats. Could we derive them from other (non-anthropic) arguments? I hestitate to tread this maddening ground. (Like the Kabbalah, there may be questions best restricted to those over 40.)

      Yours and hoping that's of help,

      Simon

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