the agents of change
some gaida today.
in my previous post i used the terms things and agents separately. well, one key thing must be clarified. agents are things too. so the agents that do the work are themselves subject to the 2nd law, and can be encoded as information (this is known as Kolmogorov complexity ).
let’s say you draw a boundary around brushes, paint buckets and a canvas and you take two pictures. the first one has an empty canvas, full buckets and clean brushes. the second one, a pretty portrait on the canvas, not-so-full buckets and dirty brushes. what went by? can this be the work of the painter ghost? not likely. something occurred that made a state go towards another state.
if we draw a boundary around it, we’ll easily note that the information required to save our second picture is higher than the information required to save our first picture. let’s say information is encoded by having someone describing the two pictures in plain writing using an alphabet. more likely than not, they will have to spend a bit more time describing the canvas with a portrait versus the one without. obviously some people love dissertations about empty canvases, so this metric might not be that good. anyway, we’re seeing a case where complexity increased inside our system via some hidden hand (a secret agent).
now we have two choices. we can say the pictures we took are enough to represent the event. this is fine if we don’t want to paint new things, rather just look at them. but to adequately save the painting, you cannot simply include the two pictures. what about the agent? his training? the craftsmen that did the tools? the paint itself, mined and purified? big issue. here we have two very simple states, and we could probably fit the descriptions of the two pictures in a tiny booklet to have at our posh party, but we’d need heavy volumes to save the rest of the information, in this case, the information for the agent.
usually we avoid this problem because our boundary is just around our tiny observation. which is fine for portraits of things, but not fine for making things.
in order to make things, we need the agent too (or the algorithm). sometimes the agent is simple, like special agent photon bouncing off things and then bouncing off our eyes. again, if we go back to the beginning, things don’t require minds. minds are things that can know things. so i’m talking about our understanding of the agent we call photon, that is a consequence of the fact that that agent is around. i’m not talking about our concept of a photon, which requires humans and thousands of years of culture to analyze.
essentially, what i’m saying is that what’s real (things) do not need minds to be real. but wait, isn’t all of this just a delusion of my own mind? excellent question, and undecidable. so i just choose to solve it with an axiom, things are real. if i don’t accept this, i might as well believe i’m being anal probed by aliens and living a permanent hallucination. i can make up so many stories i could fill up many interesting books but do no useful work (kind of).
so the core (our monad) is things, a lot of them, with free energy to work on new things. if we didn’t have free energy, we could still have things, but no work. for simplicity, i call agents the ones that are working, but everything works in someway, even if it’s just sitting there doing nothing. when you’re sitting around, your heart still beats and you still breathe. there are always tiny things inside things that do something (entropy is there pushing them, one of those secret agents).
so, our building block is a thing with free energy, which in turn allows various available states and structure, that structure being the information required to represent that structure. note that without free energy all things tend to be very quiet plus or minus a tiny jiggle.
is energy a thing? yes, actually they are interchangeable. the problem is, as i said before, the 2nd law degrades everything. so think of energy as this very nice chocolate santa claus that you have to eat. it has this wonderful shape and the pointy hat and all, but you can’t help but eat it and shit it into a less organized form of chocolate (i wouldn’t eat that one, sorry). and to make that chocolate into a chocolate santa claus again, well, you might as well go get a new chocolate santa, because you just shat all over your floor.
so things degrade. they degrade anyway, whether minds are around or not. like i said before, an agent is there anyway, it just hasn’t been saved onto any mind yet. like when you were crying the other day and nobody listened. you know you cried, right? don’t you just hate it then when people show up and say you don’t cry? don’t you feel like saying “but i did!”? but then, how can you prove you cried? only with a picture. you would’ve had to save the picture and keep it with you. saving pictures is observing things. they add nothing to whether you cried or not for you, but they add to other things‘ perspective on whether you cried or not. so what we just described is a process of information replication. in order for your bff believe you, you had to copy your crying (your thing, or its information) to another thing (your bff hmm not so much anymore amirite).
so we can see how important it is to have not only things, but also the things that make things. that’s what usually people leave out of their math. i’ll take the potatoes and the garlic. since we’re not taking the farmer with them (sometimes unfortunately, they’re very healthy people you know?), we forget that to save (or fully represent) a modern shopping cart potato, we also need the algorithm (the agent) that produced the potato. so there are two potatoes: the one we can eat (the real), and the one we can make (the real plus all the farmers and potato elves and rainwater and kittens). look at the one we can make as the potato maker society. it can’t exist without a potato, but the potato ends up being a very tiny part of it.
so we can never make anything by this definition, because of entropy. what we can is add information to things via useful work. but that requires destroying information anyway. so as you write your novel, 20 cows were killed just so you could keep your mind on the writing. that’s the net balance, always. dead cows for anything. poor cows.
so what we’re doing is taking the pretty chocolate santa the universe is (some people call this original santa the Big Bang) and nibbling it every day. change is always for the worse in this sense. so what’s the difference between me and my stories and just empty space? empty space doesn’t eat as much chocolate as i do. my argument is that the main difference is information. wait, isn’t santa all the information we had? great point. yes it is. but when your boundary is around you and the empty space, you don’t require the equal bits of information to be encoded and restored. for empty space you could just say “NOTHING HERE FOR LIGHT YEARS SO COLD BRRRR” to whoever. but for a human being, well, that would be a lot of encoding. probably would fit in a future hard drive, but not today. more on this when i get to minds.
even if you’re alone and empty space is alone, their proper information (or the information without replicas), your informations are different. so it’s pretty cold out there, but there are these tiny pockets of information around. like lost gems in a big empty box. in fact, this box is so fucking empty, you can’t even see the gems usually. we’re poor, and getting poorer by the minute. but since we have all these free things, might as well do some useful work.
so now that i clumsily explained my “building block” from which i’ll be building most ideas on this blog, i’ll leave another gaida tune and start working on heavier concepts soon. also, expect math too. i just need to find a way to typeset it here.