A

Alyssa Adams

Hi Jeff!

Thank you so much for reading my essay! I'm very glad you enjoyed it. I really enjoy your questions, I'm constantly thinking about them too! I also add, how do our tools and physical abilities allow us to find these patterns? It would be quite difficult to find patterns in chemistry and thermodynamics without a thermometer, and it would be difficult to study astronomy without telescopes. This tells me that our ability to find patterns and extrapolate depends a lot on our ability to access that information. I like to think of the two extreme limits where God is an observer who can observe all possible things, and also the other limit of being a tiny particle that lives in a tiny box for all of eternity.

Cheers!

Alyssa

Hi Jason!

Oh, that's a great point about N vs NP, thank you for pointing that out! I will correct that!

And these are all extremely good points, all of which are crucial for this topic. After thinking about these for quite some time now, I feel more comfortable moving away from the idea of abstract vs. physical and going to the "other side" of the Church-Turing thesis. Turing machines are a very useful abstract tool, but it is only one way to understand a system. But rather than focusing on lambda calculus, I'm now more concerned about where these spaces for abstractions "come from."

Here's what I mean. I can think of a Turing machine in two ways. One is the configuration of the abstract machine (the lookup table) and the other is the states that it produces by running it. As it runs, it marches from one state to another state and given all possible initial conditions, one could map out the entire state space and the "legal" transitions between states. Because of the Halting Problem, it is impossible to look at an abstract Turing Machine and decide whether or not it will eventually halt. It is like looking at a lookup table and asking if it is possible to know some properties of the resulting state-space map. I think the reason this is the case is the entire Turing machine system is described in two ways: A lookup table and a state-space map. In that sense, these two "languages" to describe the same system are encoded in two different spaces of their own. There's the state-space map space, and the lookup-table space.

But are these two spaces the best way to represent a dynamical system? The Church-Turing thesis says this representation is equivalent to a world where programs and data are really the same things. But are there other possibilities?

This gets extremely difficult because it's essentially asking if there exists an "optimal" description for a system, which suggests some kind of objective reality. But I assert that for at least trying to understand biological systems, "optimality" makes no sense without the context of an observer.

So now I'm thinking that state spaces only exist within an interaction between something and something, like an observer and a dynamical system (possibly another observer or even itself). The state space of all possible interactions between me and my cat depends entirely on our current physical configurations at that exact time. Without ears, I couldn't hear him meow, although I could see him do it if he was in my view. Without feet, we would need to invent a new way to play.

Going back to the stock market, I think your points are absolutely correct. For an individual broker, their goal isn't to create a perfect model of the financial world, but rather to make a slightly better prediction than everyone else. I am mostly comfortable thinking that the human factor, just a human by themself, is entirely physical, but then the abstract is only defined by the human's interaction with other "stuff."

I like the old philosophical question: "Does Coulomb's law exist in absence of charged particles?" I don't know enough field theory to answer this for physics, but for biology, I think the answer is a resounding "no." Conservative/liberal politics do not exist without humans, species cannot exist without niches, and fish cannot exist without water. I think the notion of abstract exists within interactions.

Hi Pavel!

Thank you so much for reading my essay! I like your points very much, especially about the feedback mechanisms. I definitely think they are computation. One of my favorite things about humans is how we raise children. Parents spend a ton of energy and resources into raising children to be effective members of society. This is in contrast to "feral" children who were not raised by other humans, or suffered unimaginable abuse to the point where they cannot function at all in society. To me, this says that the role of parents/guardians/caretakers is to "program" children so they can be successful adults, but they are actively intervening on a child's behavior. Parenting is almost entirely a feedback mechanism that results in some kind of "programming."

Cheers!

Alyssa

Hi Chandra!

Thank you so much for your comments and reading my essay! I like your point about information bottlenecks preventing us from having complete information. I think that humans are really good at inventing tools to access additional information that we couldn't reach otherwise. In fact, I think that's what makes humans quite special.

Do you think it would be possible to say "how much information" a person could possibly hold in their brain? Like, if we had a complete map of the neural connections in a brain, could it be possible to say "a human brain can store X number of bits, maximum?" We can do this for computers, but I think it gets more complicated for real biological systems because a "bit" of information can mean so many different things. As an example, language has many "layers" of information. There are letters, words, sentences, but also stories, cultural references, inside jokes. Performing Shannon-based information measures on words would look much different than doing it on letters, which would be different than doing it on the cultural reference space, etc. All of these layers make it seem so difficult and I'm wondering if there's any way to "flatten" it.

Hi Malcom!

I think these are all extremely good points. I've been thinking about this a lot since I first read your latest response and this is what's been baking in my mind since then:

"I think the 'cut' between observer and world, or subject and object, is just such a philosophical abstraction, and an unhelpful one at that."

Absolutely. The more I think about it, the more it seems that these "state spaces" only exist WITHIN an interaction between an observer and something else (could also be itself). It reminds me of the old philosophical question of whether physical laws exist independently of objects. In other words, could Coulomb's law exist in the complete absence of charged particles? I don't know enough field theory to find an answer for physics, but at least for biology, it seems that the answer is "no". In biology, evolution acts on populations/genes/individuals/phenotypes that are physically present. Each example of evolution within biology is so dependent on the properties of physically present individuals that it's even become helpful to think of DNA as the "program" that drives the expression of organisms. But DNA isn't an abstract program in some abstract space, much like the laws of physics. Instead, genetic code itself is subject to evolutionary changes because it is a physical part of the evolutionary process.

If biological entities were charged particles, then Coulomb's law would change according to whatever spatial configuration those particles are arranged it.

So now I'm thinking how it could be possible to map out the complete state space between two generalized interacting individuals. So far, I think it's been successful to do for systems of humans and physical space, but what about cases of virus-bacterial host systems?

Thank you for reading and sharing! I am also glad I do not think in abstract thoughts XD

Thank you so much! And I really love Bayes Theory, I'm constantly thinking about how it applies to information theory. I wish I studied it more!

Hi Chandra!

Wonderful essay! I really love your point, that an observer's limited knowledge has a very real physical effect. And, I love your view of measurement. I read somewhere that a measurement is a "copy" function of some data into an apparatus, but I actually disagree with that notion. Instead, it is a reduction function, or a coarse-graining of some data with the context of an observer in mind. What are your thoughts on this?

Cheers!

Alyssa

Hi Cristi!

Bravo, this is a fantastic essay! I really love how you talk about the hard problem of consciousness along with the idea of coarse-graining and reproducibility. The organization of ideas flows extremely well and the essay is very well-organized.

My questions for you are these: Why do you think nature, particularly biological processes, has some need to coarse grain states? Why at all do you think it occurs, and could it be some unexpected result of thermodynamics for example?

I think a state gets coarse-grained according to the physical abilities of an observer. Observers with vision have the ability to coarse-grain groups of atoms according to color in a painting, while observers that do not have vision would coarse-grain a painting in an entirely different way, based on other senses like touch. The whole process of reproducibility seems to rely so much on the ability of an observer.

Consciousness seems like it could be a special case of an observer coarse-graining itself. Observers are not entirely separate from their environment most of the time, and are embedded as a part of the environment in most cases in biology. I'd be curious to hear about your thoughts here!

Cheers!

Alyssa

Hello Michael!

I really love your point about bias being a filter that we see the world. Actually, my favorite thing about the invention of quantum mechanics is the idea of baking an observer right into the math. I think that is such a nice mathematical trick that was able to explain so many weird things they were observing at the time. I personally think that biology needs to do a similar thing if a mathematical framework were to be fit around it. Just for fun, do you think entropy and the arrow of time are a consequence of us (as observers) having a biased and limited view of the world? (I like to think this could be the case, for no other reason other than it would be very interesting, but I have absolutely no mathematical basis to support my claim!)

Cheers!

Alyssa

Hello SNP!

I think you make a lot of good points in your essay! At the end, you state "Any new theory with such principles should do good to humanity in any other branch of science." Do you think this could extend to animals and other biological groups of creatures as well? I mean, not things like harmful pathogenic bacteria, but in terms of creatures like orangutans and lemurs? Or do you think that if we truly cared about the well-being of humanity, then these creatures would automatically be taken care of because they are a part of our environment? Curious to know how your ideas extend to other parts of biology!

Cheers!

Alyssa

Ha ha ha, best of luck to him! Maybe, we could all engineer some weird machine learning algorithm to process the logical arguments of these essays, then see if it could come up with some reduced logical set! Then we could apply this to trading XD Glad you enjoyed my essay!

Hi Gemma!

I haven't! Thank you so much for sharing this, this is absolutely fascinating. Actually, I think these ideas would fit nicely into Constructor Theory, which I think was missing this exact component. I'll learn AR theory in much more detail because I'd be extremely interested to see how the idea of different observers with access to different knowledge could fit in, especially how observers could be seen as computers using other computers. I think that last part sums up what I think is missing between biology and computation: How do computers use computers?

Cheers!

Alyssa

Hi Malcom!

Actually, this is my exact interest as well! I can't help but think a mathematical model that captures the subjectivity of an observer could be represented with some kind of set theory.

On one hand, you have an observer who is only able to make particular observations of the world, due to the lack of complete knowledge of the entire world. On the other hand, you have the rest of the world, which also includes the observer itself, which is often the case in biology.

I think this "cut" between an observer and the world should have a big impact on the dynamics of both the world and an observer, especially if the observer's dynamics are not fixed in time.

Plus, there's the physical arrangement of these entities in the world. The physical limits of computation put bounds on the actual tasks any entity could possibly take. I think what makes humans so interesting is our ability to extend our computation power beyond the brain, which I personally think why computers and machines are so important to collective human tasks (this is the extended model of cognition in psychology). It makes me think that humans are extremely good at manipulating state spaces to complete computational tasks. There's a lot of fascinating work in psychology about this, so I think, if anything, we should look to the empirical results of human cognition and other biological computation tasks (like chemical networks in metabolism, viral evolution, etc).

There are so many moving parts here, but it is my hope that some mathematical model could formalize these ideas so we get a better picture of the computational landscape we have to work with, then if we're lucky, we could see if it has any explanatory power over real data.

Cheers!

Alysas

Thank you so much for reading! I look forward to posting my questions about your essay and having a great conversation!

Cheers!

Alyssa

Hello SNP!

Yes! I definitely see a lot of overlap between our two essays! I have some questions and comments for you as well, but I will post them on your essay page.

Cheers!

Alyssa

Absolutely! It makes me curious to wonder if there is a nice mathematical framework that would help us shrink the state space in an appropriate way for a particular problem. It makes me think about set theory, and also makes me wish I knew way more about discrete mathematics than I do. The thing is that it's difficult because it depends so much on the problem in question, which has the subjective abilities of the observer built right in.

Hi Jason!

Thank you so much for your essay! It was a very nice read. Just for fun, what are your thought about a reality in which there are no observers? Do you think such a thing is possible? And second, do you think the 3 Uns remain the same for any possible observer? (Basically, I'm wondering just how objective reality is with respect to every possible observer, and how this could change our intuition about the three un's.)

Cheers!

Alyssa

Hi Pavel and Dmitry!

Thank you so much for such an interesting essay! I like your point about digital physics and the results of Russian philosophers on connecting the computational world to the physical one. it's interesting to think that there are two separate worlds, especially since these thoughts come from our minds which are rooted in physical reality! Inherently then, computation comes from physical processes. It seems that algorithms are like a "shortcut" that we use to make predictions and compress the world around us. Great essay, I enjoyed it a lot!

Cheers!

Alyssa

Hi Dr. Guthery!

This is an excellent point, that math should be driven by physical observations! I definitely agree with this. Our models should inform us about the world around us, but we should also let the world around us inform us about new models. Actually, this is why I was so happy to be a data scientist for a few years! It gave me a very good perspective on the data-driven world and the advantages it has to offer. Now returning back to academia, I see a very big need for a two-way street between models and observations! It seems like it should be an iterative process between refining models and giving a causal explanation to data.

Cheers!

Alyssa