From: everything-list@googlegroups.com
[mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Craig Weinberg
Sent: Thursday, March 06, 2014 8:46 PM
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: Vehiculus automobilius
If the doctor became more ambitious, and decided to replace a species with a
simulation, we have a ready example of what it might be like. Cars have
replaced the functionality of horses in human society. They reproduce in a
different, more centralized way, but otherwise they move around like horses,
carry people and their possessions like horses, they even evolve into new
styles over time.
Bees fly around like bats, but no one confuses bees for bats. The first popular
name for the automobile in fact was the horseless carriage, which is the
negation of the horse… a carriage sans horse. The carriage evolved into the
car, but the radical change was from the grass fed hooved external motive force
– i.e. the horse(s) – to the ICE engine… electric motors came early as well…
then later diesel and gas turbines. So what if both fill a locomotive niche?
One is not the other; that is a rather forced analogy – IMO.
Notice, however, that despite our occasional use of a name like Pinto or
Mustang, no horse-like properties have emerged from cars. They do not whinny or
swat flies. They do not get spooked and send their drivers careening off of the
road. They did not develop DNA. Certainly a car does not perform as many
complex computations as a horse, but neither does it need to. The function of a
horse really doesn't need to be very complicated. A Google self-driving car is
a better horse for almost all practical purposes than a horse.
Just for fun let me argue that they do.. in the abstract. A horse requires fuel
just as a car does; its fuel is hay & grass (maybe oats and a few apples), but
fuel never the less… the horse has an onboard chemical plant to extract the
useable energy content – including elaborate symbiotic relationships with the
microorganisms in its various stomachs and gut; it has an intricate fuel
distribution network delivering highly available oxygen for catalyzed reaction
with fuel to produce the energy to power the muscles to move the hooves that
move the horse that moves the carriage. A car externalizes the refining process
– but who knows maybe one day we will develop hay munching cars (probably not
too fast though) – but it also clearly requires fuel.
Both the horse and the car produce waste products as a result of performing the
useful work they are being used for. Both a horse and a car increase entropy.
There are legions of potential parallels that can be teased out between horse
and car. But to what end; in my current case a bit of idle fun perhaps.
As for your assertion of better.. that depends on a lot of factors. Perhaps the
Google self driving car might be better in a urban commute situation – along
urban freeway systems and arterial roadways. But what about for a travers of
the Andes mountain chain from south to the Panama canal, which means of
locomotion do you think has the better chance of ever even making it from the
cold of Tierra del Fuego (odd name for such a cold dismal damp place) zig
zagging along mighty Andean ranges, through deep roadless canyons, jungle,
desert, swamp and mountains.
I don’t know about you, but in that case I am going for the horse. As always,
whenever one says the word “better”… well better depends doesn’t it.
Chris
Maybe the doctor can replace all species with a functional equivalent? We could
even do without all of the moving around and just keep the cars in the factory
in which they are built and include a simulation screen on each windshield that
interacts with Google Maps. With a powerful enough artificial intelligence, why
not replace function altogether?
Have you ever entertained the thought that maybe you are not actually moving
around, but rather what is really going on is that you are – to coin a word –
informationing around. What if space and time, and hence moving, past, future
are all emergent phenomena of our sensed reality. Consider how if the VR
machine is deep enough – with layer upon layer of code operating on other code,
which is built on code built on code – in an infinite regression of emergent
complexity, of emergent nuance, of emergent whatever qualia you choose… all of
it, reality and self in reality as well – emergent from an information
manifold.. the multiverse Schrödinger equation. What seems impossible to
synthesize, often can become synthesizable given more subtle tools.
I understand your feelings on the matter of the soul being something that
cannot arise from mere programs operating with numbers… there is no f(x) that
produces the soul. But when the f(x) regresses and we begin to have deep
enclosures as in: p(o(n(m(l(k(j(h(g(f(x)))))))))) when any one of the
computational nodes can become self-referent (given some termination
condition); when further more massive (and for the multiverse infinite)
parallelism is added… when so much of this machinery (as is the case in our
actual brains) is susceptible to quantum effects the strange miraculous soul
will finally emerge – given enough depth and breadth of informational
complexity and memory.
And why not? Can you give a reason; not based on metaphor?
What if everything including our conscious self-aware, introspecting being is
emergent phenomena. What if all of reality is reducible to a primordial zero
manifest… a self-emergent, auto-catalyzing, retro-casual zero that becomes both
beginning and end… that just is, because it auto-emerges from its infinite
self, to begin its own beginning – invoking a retro-casual effect. Nothing
manifest becomes everywhere and everytime and every potential connection.
Nothing becomes the null set {} both within and without the set and this really
sets things off.
What is the auto-catalyzing agency? What drives it? When you throw a rock into
a pond ripples go out in spacetime – we experience the one way arrow of time
and live in a causal universe, according to our sensorial perception and
according to our macro scale observations of the universe we inhabit. But what
if waves of ripples can communicate cause in the reverse arrow of time. The
mysterious auto-catalyzing agent… these operators that animate enumerations
into Platonic mathematical entities… on some level retro-casual channels may
exist – at the quantum scale it seems to happen… virtual particle pairs,
quantum wormholes…. Entanglement itself – spooky action at a distance.
The more I think about it the more I am starting to come to the conclusion that
it actually seems quite possible that everything – the multiverse – at all its
orthogonal dimensions of mushrooming mind blowing scale out, is a
self-referent, auto-catalyzing (through retro-causation) mathematical entity,
of infinite complexity and infinite depth and that we first person, beings are,
self-referent, self-emerging phenomena that can experience our illusion of
being and identity through the seeming magic of quantum MWI – each quantum
information event a branching universe, giving us an illusion of causality, of
space and time. It is by this informational self-censorship, this MWI branching
effect with no communication between the branches (at least, at our sensorial
level, within the infinite mathematical self-referent entity that is being)
that provides the means by which we can experience our “free will”.. our
self-aware beingness… our ability to choose.
I am starting to wonder if information censorship explains a lot of things
about reality. The fact that me and my vast array of clones say cannot
communicate or ever know about each other, each believing itself to be the one
and only me, could really explain a lot about the seemingly spontaneous
auto-generation of me as I experience the beingness of me auto-emerging from
within me without me invoking or causing the emergence.
But when the perspective is from the mathematical bird’s eye view of all the
branches that ever were or will be of me things may be playing out very
differently and could even be the result of quite simple initial conditions
(the butterfly effect) – but for each branch of “me” I instead experience a
mystery of being… an inexplicable, ineffable sense of something I can never
grasp or reach.
Information hiding, may paradoxically explain a lot.
Chris
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