compiseverythng

In a dialog with ulyarg he asks I just find it fascinating that here we are, one part of the machine discussing with another. Why is that the case? I reply Me too!

I don't know because of course the question is fundamentally unanswerable, but I think it is because the universe arises out of self-reflection. Both something and nothing are equally impossible. In some preformed KTRZMXTPD, the formless form, asks the unnamable question/answer (something related to but not exactly what am I, and I am that I am) and that question splits the ultraverse into being and non-being and the question is asked again from being and non-being. So starts the first computation, an infinitely accelerating reflection on self. We are the result, the universe that cannot not be; the true theorems.

My conclusion from the class, and before.




I suspect that it is part of the human condition to is yearn for ultimate truth and if we can't have that to know that there is a god that does know it. However our yearning has left us with deep conundrums in this search. One the one hand, the path taken by the most successful idea in human history, namely that we can study and understand the world and thereby make predictions about the [immediate] future, appears to leave us without a god. And on the other hand, this idea is in deep conflict with another idea that has done well by us, namely that the world is a deeply unpredictable place and that we can take solace in the deep unknowable mystery that we call God -- the guy with all the answers. To make matters worse, it turns out that science, back in the early 20th Century, has already proved that world is only minimally predictable whether there is a god or not – except perhaps by that god. However, culture is only now catching up to this undesirable, though when thought about deeply expected, result.



Rudy Rucker's book, Lifebox, Seashell, and the Soul, does a great job of exploring this modern conundrum form the point of view of the computationalist. He takes us to the edge of understanding and drops us off back at not knowing because that is the only place we can be.

A meme, and can life be bad if it is?
Rudy does not talk much about memes in LSS, in fact I can only remember him mentioning them in closing – maybe I missed it. It seems that one of the arguments in the sections that considered social processes could have been that the communication and evolution of ideas by a society as the evolution of memes though a process that is essentially computational.

From the Wikipedia entry on Pascal's Pensées

On soul and body

"It is impossible that our rational part should be other than spiritual; and if any one maintain that we are simply corporeal, this would far more exclude us from the knowledge of things, there being nothing so inconceivable as to say that matter knows itself. It is impossible to imagine how it should know itself."

"What a Chimera is man! What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy! Judge of all things, and imbecile norm of the earth; depository of truth, and sewer of error and doubt; the glory and refuse of the universe. Who shall unravel this confusion?"



This actually reflects something of how I see things. Of course, I do not seperate the spiritual and physical nor is it clear that Pascal did -- to me they are one and the same, part and the whole -- i.e. the computation that is this universe in which we are gliders crusing through the computation wondering about it and us, a gasket computation driving down to nothing as more and more is removed. No matter how many integers are unnamable we can't find them. Maybe we will find there are more unnamable integers then there are namable ones. The real question is of course is, are the namable numbers finite or infinite?

From last nights class

Thought for the day: we are the glider not the computation.

I just came to a section of RR’s book LSS where he talks about lookup tables as a faster algorithm. Here is a proposal. I think there is a sense in which all algorithms are the same. There are all just counting. But they are counting in different spaces. Each algorithm is just a map from here to there, but here is no more valid, natural, useful, then there.

So I'm rereading the story today and realize there is a major flaw in the time line. I will need to fix this, so some rewriting is coming.

Bitter Lemons



Neil Lemon is a brilliant mathematician and hacker extraordinaire . In high school he makes a significant contribution to the theory of infinite sets which turns out to have practiacal application in cryptology. Working on a research project at Cal Tech for Dr. Robert Silverman Neil makes original contributions to Neural network simulation with the local maxima short cut approximation. However, because Neil is seduced into work at the Pentagon on cryptology before he has even completed his freshman year he never gets credit for this ground breaking work with represents tenure for Dr. Silverman. Neil becomes bitter over his loss of recognition. After tens years at the Pentagon things change dramatically for Neil as he comes up with a way, inspired by Iran-Contra, to make millions for covert operations, and to skim millions for himself, even though this capper results in Neil leaving the Pentagon and his secret work he takes away a lot of money that he parlays via the insider trading scheme he developed into many millions more. Not satisfied with riches Neil has bigger schemes in mind as well as revenge on Dr. Silverman. His work with Silverman was in the area of neural networks. Neil plans to parlay his insider trader scheme with the ideas that have been brewing about artificial intelligence and his work as a security consultant with the cell phone companies. The year is 2021, and the cell phone network represents the greatest computational capability on the planet and ever created. Neil plans on exploiting this to make billions and to get back at Dr. Silverman whom he blames for his own lack of recognition. Things go wrong, but an AI is born.

CAPN is like an infant, this really a break though idea for me in this story. I need to allow CAPN (or CAPNs see below) to grow from an infantile “life” to something more mature, and this story can only deal with the infantile portion of the CAPNs existence.




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Form Rudy’s book, LLS, page 401, Suppose that R is some very simple computation that is everywhere defined – to be specific, suppose that, given any input In, the computation R_In simply stays in the In state for ever. Any computation at all can emulate R, but we don’t expect that the do-nothing R can emulate all the other computations. For this reason, we say that R represents a minimal degree of unsolvability.

I want to challenge this seemingly most fundamental of notions. In particular I want to challenge the underlined statement.

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I suspect RR goes on to say this better than I have but I wanted to get my head around this argument before proceeding.