mishaps of names
some more gaita from the northeast, including the portuguese harmonic 3 hole flute, and the local explanations of the artifacts
continuing our sequence on things, it should be clear by now that there is a strong ambiguity going on in defining agents versus things. so let’s clarify it. there are no agents, there are things, a lot of them.
let’s take this example to see how a core agent can emerge (the theory of everything of a universe). let’s make a little universe with 6 things, all different, and another, with 6 things but redundant. i don’t want to dabble in “sets of sets” questions, backwards recursion, and so on, it would lead to halting, incompleteness and many other interesting issues, but not practical. as i said in early posts, i take existence as a fact. these problems still exist, but in the realm of ideas, which we are far from approaching. if we live in a real world, then i am imagining real worlds, not hypothetical logical inconsistent worlds, even though they might exist. it doesn’t matter, because i don’t live in one. i can’t tunnel effect through my wall or wave into two people at once. i wish. so let’s begin.
miniverse m: let thing t in miniverse m be in {a,b,c,d,e,f}, arranged in any way;
miniverse n: let thing t in miniverse n be in {a,b,a,b,a,b}, arranged in any way;
on one hand, the possible combinations are the same, because the miniverse doesn’t have a mind and can’t read. so in n, {a,a,a,b,b,b} is just as likely as {a,c,e,b,d,f} (remember letters exist only in our alphabetical minds, for things, they have no clue if they are a, b or c).
but there is a main difference between the two. whereas m needs the 6 letters to be saved and retrieved, n can both require 6 letters or be seen by a mind as an agent acting on things, being this, for example 3 x {a,b}, where “x” means repeat, and “3” means how many repetitions. obviously these two are part of the tools (math) of the mind watching, and not part of the miniverse n. remember n is {a,b,a,b,a,b} just like m is {a,b,c,d,e,f}. neither has a clue of what a letter is. but if a mind exists that knows math, it can compress miniverse n, but not m. note that this compression is no more than a statement of redundacies, or repetition, in things, by observation. the things themselves don’t know and don’t care if they are in m or n, remember they are only letters. but this is only possible because a mind knows that a is the same as a, by observation. for the things themselves, it is impossible to say which of the 3 a_s will be chosen as the central _a. what we’re assuming is that in this miniverse, a single alphabet letter contains all information about the thing. therefore, reading and writing a in sequence over and over is the same as making a universe with genuine a_s from the start. the “3 x {a,b}” expression is an _agent, and it exists as a thing in observer minds, but it doesn’t exist in n.
so this is how i fix the recursion problem. i don’t consider agents real until they themselves can be things. why? well, take this miniverse, there are not enough things to make an alphabet and a fully working mathematics system. so tough the redundancy might be observable from the outside, it isn’t by the things themselves.
so we can say fundamental laws (core agents) only become real once they become things themselves. in a way, an atom can’t appreciate that it’s an atom, but a lot of them combined make a mind capable of understanding that there are only so few atoms around (or letters in my example before).
this demonstrates that in order to fully represent n or m, we can both take a descriptive approach (as i defined the sets), or an algorithmic approach (as i defined with the operator). the two are interchangeable since the set itself is always the same and independent of whoever is observing. this is why reductionism is correct and wrong at the same time. we can use algorithms or laws to describe things just as we can just list them by order, and that gives us compression (saves us time, for what it is uncertain). but this is only possible while the semantics available (the alphabet) is sufficiently rich to save and retrieve all information. that’s why science is working out so well, and why the laws are so good at explaining things (when we explain, we retrieve a copy of the arrangement of things). mathematics is an excellent compressor of data and saves us a lot of time.
but this brings us back to why reductionism is wrong, which is also given by physics itself. even though we can retrieve copies of other things, if they were predicted based purely on agents and not observed directly, it is unwise to say the predicted things are real. they can be real, and that tests how good the agent is. but if we go back to the miniverses, both n and m are real, and they both consist of 6 elements. n isn’t made of 2 elements and 1 agent. it is made of 6 elements, period. and since observation is limited to the observer’s light cone, there is no way of knowing if in a very big miniverse of {a,b}s there isn’t a {c} lurking somewhere.
this speaks only to the limits of observability and agents. it will always be arguable if there is a way to accurately save all the information in something in order to have valid agents, since someone who chooses a spiritual explanation might add non physical things to things, which is legitimate. if we choose that atoms themselves have non physical qualities that need to be saved, which is a legitimate question, then accurately saving and retrieving them is impossible.
the way i approach this, and my simple answer, is that if it can’t be observed, it doesn’t matter. the real for a mind comes from observation. this act of observation can then be refined by improving our means of retrieving information, but is in no way perfect and is highly biased by what we can do as things in our own world. for human minds it gets worse, since the mere act of observing is subjective and depends on previous observations. confirmation bias, change blindness, i could go on. they all remind us that it’s a rocky road to observe without distortion.
so just a quick definition. observing is having the information of a thing fed onto another thing. this is a copy, it can be lossy if information is lost (what i called distorted), or it can be complete if all information is transferred. if redundancies exist, this information can be transferred in terms of both smaller things and agents, or the entire set of things to be copied. usually, when we have restrictions in space or time (our case), we tend to prefer a compressed version of information, rather than the entire data set.
in a way, we can say it is real if it has information to be observed. only real things provide information. and agents become real too, when they exist in minds. but they are a part of them, and don’t exist alone (like in our miniverse). this is where i usually piss off science people. i already lost philosophy people at the sight of sets and curvy brackets. but since this isn’t a popularity test and i’m not trying to convince anyone of anything, i’ll just let this sit as another story.