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.

today’s tunes feature uilleann pipes, the singing octopus

in my previous post i talked about the empiric macroscopic fact of the second law of thermodynamics.

just to clear things up, i call facts what is established by the scientific method as a valid theory, therefore facts can be improved on and change but tend to stabilize. i consider facts independent of the observer and don’t want to dive into quantum nonsense, i’m dealing with the macroscopic world and macroscopic laws. i consider many of the current explanations for quantum effects very unfortunate in a practical science point of view, and it has opened the door for all kinds of quackery. but i don’t want to go down that rabbit hole right now. poor quantum has a bad name. it should be called quantified, so people would stop being silly and using it for spiritual mumbo jumbo just because it sounds so cool.

one of the great mysteries of our universe is that it began with very low entropy, or a lot of available energy (in the thermodynamic sense), and with an arrow of time. most laws of physics work well forwards and backwards in time. but thermodynamics only moves forward, like a broken train downhill. but the available energy we have allows us to locally express negative entropy, via useful work.

what is work? work is energy spent to move things. energy, as i said, is part of the mysteries of nature, our universe just happens to have a lot of it and very ordered (low entropy). so work uses this energy, sometimes to create entropy, and sometimes to create ectropy (inverse entropy). remember the second law? the balance is always positive in entropy.

note that it is currently postulated that the universe has zero total energy, but that is not relevant for earthlings. we live in a little rock with a lot of free energy, and i’m not planning on going to live in the empty cold voids of space. so i’m not interested in that side either.

let’s do a little example of this, to see how powerful this model is. let’s say you are an agent (something that can do work on things using energy). you take a pile of things (let’s call them rocks) and after a lot of work hours (many little instant works added up in sequence), you pile them up into a cathedral. your work has generated ectropy in the rocks system (the pile of rocks is now ordered, or has information), it went from disordered to ordered. but to work you had to eat some sandwiches, piss, shit, live your everyday life, and to do that, you produced entropy by consuming free energy (like the calories in your sandwich or in your reserve cells). so, if you do your net universal balance, entropy increased. but if you do a boundary around the rocks and forget everything about the rest (silly, but that’s how we do things down here), you’d say your pile of rocks just became more organized (less entropy). so this kind of work you did is called useful work, because it resulted in ectropy. the work you did to eat the sandwich, not so much, because it consumed free energy, or generated entropy. you now successfully synthesized information (the cathedral).

the main reason why we can have ectropy on earth (and lots of it), is because the sun is our big fat sandwich. we get so many calories from the sun that we can gorge on it and do crazy stuff like living things and flying things and shiny things and what not. so despite the human illusion that we build things, we’re in fact just piggy-backing sun’s calories (or Watt hours). so we can think of the earth as a kind of morbidly obese planet. it is getting so fat on calories it has all this life all over it, making itself pretty.

what happened on earth? why isn’t mercury, which gets many more calories, even fatter? well, in a sense, it is. the problem is that for the thermodynamic conditions for order to emerge, you need agents to do the work, not just sandwiches (or Joules, a sandwich has about 350 Calories or 1464 Joules or 0.4 Watt hours). the first agents are the physical laws, but they don’t tend to transform much. then there are chemical elements, and they only become more ordered in very specific physical conditions (when the laws are right, like gravity). water, for example, is only liquid at a specific range of physical conditions. like water, other, more complex molecules, only emerge if the setting is “just right”. for planets, people like to call this the “goldilocks zone”, though i still wonder who are the three bears. maybe the laws of thermodynamics, raining on goldilocks parade? so for the agents to emerge, you need some kind of setting, like when the weather is great to go to the beach and you think wow, i could really be at the beach right now. you are a thing being affected by your agent (the weather) and turning into something else (a thing at the beach). you’ve been manipulated by the sun! how terrible!

note that this is a recursive definition (with somewhat fractal properties). if the laws are agents that create new agents, and those agents create new agents and so on, we have the setting for evolution! obviously, agents die too, when the sun goes down, the beach gets cold and you leave. remember the setting? it’s not that good anymore. so you pick up your stuff and leave. but there’s always that dude that stays longer because he can put up with the cold or took some blankets and wine. look at him as a more evolved beach goer. evolution is just something that happens when you combine agents making agents and agents killing agents but not all of them. so the ones that survive, are fitter. like the delicious chocolate molecule. it’s so delicious you’re bound to eat it and shit it and make new cocoa plants. you’re being manipulated by the cocoa plant! how terrible!

so if laws are agents, what made the laws? big question. i leave that to whoever wants to dabble in those questions. it can be the flying spaguetti monster, or a mad man’s dream, or whatever. we can only test as far as the laws are testable. if it’s not testable, i don’t care. again, i’m an earthling and i’m not considering becoming a god or meeting one or starting my own universe. i think physicists are better at doing that. when i have my feet in the sand, i like to enjoy it. i don’t need to know that the sand is made of jiggly things made of jiggly things made of jiggly things. some people do, and that’s great, but not what i’m discussing at all. for what it’s worth, things jiggle too much already (or why i don’t do nudism that much at the beach).

see reality a bit like an onion. the more you peel it and dig deeper, the more it stinks. and eventually, if you dig deeper, you end up crying and with your hands empty. i kind of think physics is going the way of the onion a bit. so i don’t like crying so much (unless it’s from happiness), so i’m not looking to peel the onion too much.

the problem is that these layers are all mixed up, like a mutant onion. you kick this bottle on the floor one day, it hits a car, makes a dent, the car was the guy’s boss’s, he gets fired, ends up dying because he slipped on the way out of his office and hit his head against the porcelain cat. think of all the agents at work. gravity, friction, but also pavements that required city planning by the state, buildings that required engineers and rich people and architects and a lot of bricks, porcelain cats that required bad taste to exist, the dude himself that didn’t mind taking the boss’s car to get him his suit from the cleaners, the list is huge!

it’s hard to accept that these layers are all entwined and mixed between themselves. that agents from some layers are affected (and affect) agents from other layers. so everyone just chooses one layer (i’m a physicist, i’m a philosopher, i’m a biologist, i’m a priest, i’m a fashionista hipster, etc etc), mostly because it’s too hard to see everything at once with our little primate brains.

then comes the simplification, saying everything is made by agent a or agent b. well, it’s all of them, having a big nonsense party at our expense. it’s like everyone is just looking for a way to feel their “layer” (or trade, or art, or science) is the core of every other. guess what, it isn’t, but since you know so much about it, it’s obvious you’ll see it everywhere. the more a trade deals with complexity (or how these layers of agents intertwine), the more sensitive it will be to hidden variables, or, let’s say, secret agents. like that time you thought the lamp moved on its own and it was a ghost and you were so scared, but in the end it was just a fan behind the couch. the fan! a secret agent! you were manipulated by the fan! how terrible!

each agent has its own rules to be understood. physical laws are probably the easiest, since they fit in tiny pieces of paper and t-shirts (isn’t that why we draw them so pretty? so we can tattoo them and use them in t-shirts?). but some agents are very hard to deal with. special agent DNA for example, or special agent yours truly. and it might be true that if you throw me out of a bridge i will fall (agent gravity can grab me), it might be also true that i might jump for love (agent love can grab me too). it’s not hard to see that agent yours truly is subject to agents of many layers. and since our tiny brains can only deal with a couple of things at once, we just specialize. that’s fine and wonderful. just don’t tell me love is physics. it’s love, and though you can still throw a love letter in the river, you won’t take its story with you. love might be made of smaller things, but it’s not just those things. it has a specific arrangement, order to it. and to try to quantify it (in bits maybe, or money spent on flowers and dinners), you must live it.

work is what makes agents interact with each other, thanks to the big free energy sandwiches. and patterns in work tell you their rules. for example, gravity is an angry man always pulling people “down”. that’s his job. but he’s also the one that makes planets go round. so maybe he’s not that bad after all, maybe just grumpy from having to pull everyone “down”. hey, we all have to do work we don’t enjoy, right?

so complex agents can be created by simple agents, like a human budding from a single cell. all it takes is free energy and some kind of agent (or agents) working. evolution is a rule that works with most of these agents, and it’s so powerful it led to some agents being able to understand other agents and their rules. that’s us! but that’s also dogs and cats catching flies (hey, they know where the fly is going, they wouldn’t otherwise catch it), sunflowers turning towards the sun (what? they have no brains! maybe they are more like zombies!). ok, sunflowers don’t turn, they “grow towards”. but as an agent understanding the rules of another agent (sun) they do a pretty good job.

what rules matter? what order matters? well. i don’t really know. i have my opinions. i’ll post them later. for now, here’s a bird singing through a pipe octopus. it takes a whole lot of sandwiches to wrestle this one.

this is a first in a series about information, entropy and us. here’s today’s tune, on modern gaita transmontana by the band of some of the makers of my pipes, Roncos do Diabo. i’ll be posting with music and thoughts together, so you can have background music while you read.

of all the natural laws we learn in school (discovered through empirical evidence), there is usually a group of them that is regarded as ugly, inelegant or simply uninteresting.

thermodynamics, namely the second law, states in a crude way that entropy (or “disorder”) always increases in a system. there are a few exceptions to this but they are not relevant to our macroscopic everyday life (though they might be for our very existence, quantum fluctuations that is).

now, what is observed is that the more states are available to something, the bigger its entropy, and it’s a fact of nature that entropy increases. this is why you can’t open your fridge to cool down your house (in fact, you would end up heating it up), why you can’t “unbreak” an egg, and even more so, why time moves forward and not backward. consider the possible futures versus the single causal past. the future has much more entropy than the past (if i can put it this simply, what i just said is incredibly profound).

lurking in this is the notion first of thing and then of state. by thing usually we refer to atoms of a non reactive gas. but the thing can be expanded from that to any other “things” (after all, things are made of things, right?). take your bedroom for example. there are relatively few states for “clean”, but infinitely more states for “dirty”. that’s why your room ends up being dirty most of the time, and to keep it “clean” you need to work for it (more on this on a later post).

a state is no more than an “arrangement” of sorts. your socks in the drawer, your books in the shelf in alphabetical order. note that any state could be the clean state. the problem is that it would remain a single state, against the many possible places you could leave your socks and your books.

so entropy itself requires “minds” to assert whether a state exists or not, and whether it happened or not. nature itself has no mind to say which one is the ordered and which one is the disordered. we can use our minds to develop metrics to assert order and observe it exists (in surplus on earth for example). what is fed to us by nature is that order is both highly improbable and a requirement for complexity.

the study of entropy was mostly driven by industrial necessities and the development of engines. later, information theory emerged on an entirely different field of work: telecommunications.

information can be physically quantified (in bits), and bits themselves are things. so they are subject to entropy and order. take a book. any book. it is an arrangement of n things (letters) repeated m times (words, phrases, etc) where every thing must be in the right place, plus or minus a typo. if your letters are just 1 and 0, like everything online, you’re dealing with physical information (yes! information is physical and can be quantified!).

so communication itself must be subject to entropy. in fact, the two laws in their statistical definition are very similar. the reasoning i used here is not the usual one, it is a very simplified one. information theory and thermodynamics are very different with very different applications. what i’m writing about is the underlying fact, not the applicability of the specific laws.

i believe information, or ordered things, is strong enough of a concept to explain most of what is around us, including in complex systems like human beings, and the laws of entropy and energy are good enough to work with.

i know i’m risking generalizing too much but don’t see this as a simplification. i’m not saying human beings are information. that would be like saying a book is just a collection of letters from a to z. understanding underlying rules (like alphabets, grammar, etc) does not remove any value at all from the information itself (the books), and their emergent qualities (not all sequences of an alphabet hold ideas, only certain arrangements).

what i’m saying is we should accept the idea that things come to an end, permanently, by definition, and what we humans do, trying to reverse entropy all the time, building, surviving, fighting to be heard and remembered, is both useless and impossible.

it might be useless to paint a pretty portrait, but it doesn’t mean it can’t be beautiful. the japanese have a term for this kind of beauty, Mono no aware, an appreciation for the ephemeral beauty of things, and its bitter taste.

in a way, thanks to the 2nd law, we’re left with a universe permanently Mono no aware to us, leaving us in a permanent bitter awe, cooling asymptotically to absolute zero.

closing up with another tune, from Mono no Aware (an electronic music artist).

hello.

i’ve been writing in many websites, so i decided to have a personal website to write instead. it doesn’t mean i’ll stop any of my other projects, it just means i’m trying to separate personal texts from project specific texts.

so what is this philosopher bagpiper thing about?

i chose to connect both my online story and my offline story. though i’m originally from lisbon, part of my family is from the northeast of portugal (picote, miranda do douro). lost somewhere in the family stuff, i found an old bagpipe that belonged to manuel sampedro, who was known as the philosopher bagpiper of travanca.

how did this come to be? how was such an item lost and abandoned? i asked my grandpa if it was being used or not. it quickly moved from a lost item to the likes of a legendary artifact, as my grandpa loves to create historical mystique around family history.

my mother’s family lived in picote for some years, during the construction and following work of the hydroelectric plant. in fact, it was where my grandpa met my grandma, during a workers ball in the improvised worker town. in those days, building a dam would include building a city for the workers.

in 1970, in an effort to preserve my mom and uncles’ cultural identity, my grandpa went back to miranda and sought a bagpipe from manuel sampedro. as the story goes, he got up to his place and said “hello, i want to buy a bagpipe from you”. “no, you can’t buy one”, manuel said, “you buy me a goat and a glass of wine, i’ll kill the goat, make the pipes out of the goat, and drink the wine to summon «the spirit of the wine»”. and so it was. the pipes were made the ancient way, in manuel’s own style (that also included being drunk while building the pipes), and when they were done, he played for my grandpa, dipping the reed and the stocks in the wine to keep air from leaking.

so, fast forwarding to 2008, my grandpa said that he would give it to me, but only on a special occasion. the family got together to celebrate my grandparents’ 50th marriage anniversary at the same chapel they married in. this chapel was, precisely, in picote, in the same worker town. coincidently, the craftsman and bagpiper ângelo arribas now has his bagpipe workshop there. so the remains of the bagpipe were given to him for restoration, thanks to my mom and grandpa’s funding.

soon it was ready, but in a clunky way. by then i had decided to take on learning the pipes, to add to my ethnic mystique in a globalized world, and took it to apedgf, of which i’m a member and a student. but the people there said it wasn’t an appropriate fix. my naivety for not wanting another animal killed for the bag meant a rubber bag, which turns out is very damaging for the pipes. the reeds were also not very appropriate, so between hands i got the contact of vitor félix and mário estanislau and requested a repair.

it took over a year to go from dusty artifact to fully working pipes, many craftsmen and stories. but now it lives again, and plays both the ancient and the new songs. i’m happy to see the dead goat shouting again through these old pieces of wood and bone, over 40 years after its death.

how about the philosopher side?

with the pipes side settled, i would take refuge on the fact that the word itself bears the answer (i am a passionate lover of knowledge), but i would compliment it with 2 mandatory years of philosophy in school (we still have it in portugal), a philosophy teacher mom and scientist dad (who taught me the great gift of critical thinking), and an obsession with reading, mostly about science, sociology and philosophy. so this might be the weakest side, unless you consider science part of philosophy, which would allow me to add my years of electrical engineering and programming to the mix.

that is my everyday job, programming, but my alter ego is the philosopher bagpiper. these are my stories.