Theory

from the core definition we started with, we will now begin our journey into complexity. to avoid issues with things we don’t know much about (i.e., smaller than atoms), i will begin from the layer onwards. why? considering the model is fractal itself, we can define , where is a sub element of an atom, thus avoiding many issues things of lower layers have. note that the properties of the things we will be dealing with may be broken down, as we noted above, into smaller parts, explained by the constituents for .

so we can either say there are macroscopic properties of such as mass, electronegativity and so on, or we can say the properties of come from the properties of . for example, we could say electronegativity has to do with the balance of positive and negative charges in an atom (a property of its constituents), or we can just say an atom has electronegativity as one of its properties. what we are doing is encapsulating questions into a bigger layer of abstraction, so we can work using only our small brains.

so it’s exactly what i’m doing, and why these terms i’ll be using can be broken down, but won’t. for the sake of validity, any thing has sub things, so if anyone wants to expand any definition to core terms they can do so.

so let’s see how simple laws can quickly show that the whole can be more than the sum of the parts.

let’s say we have water molecules. water molecules are a thing whose constituents are atoms (from layer ). so where m means the “molecule” layer. to specify it completely, we would choose . i will avoid breaking each one of these down but it could be easily done: . this expansion, even though it’s for water alone, already would lead to a lot of unnecessary text. if we also add temperature constraints, isotopes, and so on, we would quickly run into in-computability again.

so one of the properties of the water molecule is that one of its constituents, hydrogen, tends to lose most of its electrons against the stronger oxygen. this leads to a water molecule that is charged in space (see picture). an atom alone is neutral, but when they band up together and create bonds, electrons flow and this leads to spatial charge. so even though the parts are “neutral” alone, the whole isn’t.

so consequence of the differences of its constituents, the whole (water) has a property that isn’t easily understood from the properties of its constituents, unless they are put together and interact.

so to formalize this, we would say we have both the properties of oxygen and hydrogen alone (their charge, their mass, etc), and the properties of oxygen and hydrogen together (how their different masses and charges lead to change in both of them).

this means that our formula for water would seem incomplete at the lever we’re working on. . the fact that they are bounded has led to extra properties that were, even though explainable, not obvious.

this is where reductionists will say “yes, but the bonds are explainable by the laws that govern atoms themselves”, and it is correct. if i break down the higher level definitions, i will see that isn’t really separate from the properties of , rather it is just a property of when the two are together. on the contrary, emergents would claim that this property cannot be seen by the things alone, but only when the whole is created, which leads to emergence.

my answer is that these two claims are compatible. a thing alone is not a thing with another thing. like the two atoms, they bond naturally, therefore they are not entirely separate entities, with independent laws. their laws are generic enough to affect them and others irregardless of what type of atom it is.

a bond exists because the atoms allow for it, but is only possible when two or more are present. we will see this pattern in all layers of abstraction. some characteristics of laws (or properties of things) are only possible when their minimum quantity (as we defined it previously as the core mathematical concept) exists.

so the water molecule itself, as it turns out, also has charge itself (or a dipole), and its hydrogen atoms are somewhat naked versus the highly negative oxygen. what happens when we have a lot of water molecules together? is the law of charge attraction still valid as it was for atoms? as it turns out, yes. this law (the electric force between charges, part of the “physical laws” layer) requires the thing charge and the thing distance as its core properties. so atoms have charge, but apparently molecules have a kind of charge too, and the same with distance. so the law of electric force applies too. let’s formalize this.

, where is, in this case, Coulomb’s law, and becomes and becomes . charge is there on both cases. but what is distance? distance is another law (this time from the realm of mathematics).

. this brings us a lot of interesting questions, but for now, let’s accept that distance is defined for two things with the single property position. note that it is arguable that position exists when there is no comparison to it, so it might be an illusionary property.

does hydrogen have position and charge? check

does oxygen have position and charge? check

do we have enough of them and are they close enough that they bond? check

the law can be applied. if it is, we have water now

does water have position? check

does water have some kind of charge? check

the law can be applied. we have water interacting with water now. a thing called hydrogen bonds appears for example, which is a property of water in groups, but not a property of water alone.

we slowly moved from the same law applying to atoms (and its constituents) to that law being applied to groups of atoms (molecules) and then the same law applying to molecules between themselves to form clusters of molecules. there are many examples of this in nature.

note that the only reason why this was possible was because:

• there are some invisible things in our universe (laws) that require very little properties to be applicable (like the electric force for anything with charge and distance), in essence, they are layer blind;
• there are things with the said properties so they are affected by these laws;
• there are things that when together with other things, have properties themselves also subject to the same laws, that were undefined for things alone (e.g., bonds).

this is only possible because some of the core things (laws) are layer blind. there is no semantics on charge. it behaves the same way for a molecule and an atom, or an electron and a proton, or the two terminals on a battery. this is what the standard model worries about, and what urges the physicists to claim everything can be explained by simple math. this is one of my favorite deepities, because even though it might be true, it is deeply false, since it explains the behavior of fragmented parts, oblivious of how hard it is to compute any interaction of two or more elements, no matter how simple (see the three body problem for example).

in this sense, we can see how nature itself speaks beyond abstraction, in a more essential manner. this follows the occam’s razor principle for the most part. why have two laws for layers, when the same can be used. occam’s razor is a natural consequence of a natural world with no semantics, no distinction of molecule or atom. in essence, a mindless world with random laws and consequences thereof.

the fact that we understand them, with our tiny brains, is a bit of a mystery. but we can easily see how we live in a world with simple laws but complex interactions. our complexity does not come from formal semantic differences. it comes from the simple excess quantity of things (in our planet at least).

the fractal nature of things exists solely because we have minds that require abstraction. as we saw from this example, abstraction is something we create in mind, because not even the basic laws of the universe seem any different between layers. pattern finding is something we do every day as humans, for survival. but it is also why we are so easily deceived by simple math versus the overwhelming torrent of random events that we swim in.

our journey will now continue on to bigger complexities. we started with the realm of the mathematician, then the physicist, now the chemist. we will visit many trades on our way. i’ll meet you there.

a slow return to our segments on things, with some more gaita from the northeast. this is mestre angelo arribas playing, the same craftsman that fixed my pipes the first time.

we will begin by formalizing what things are and then proceed to generalize them up until we reach minds and beyond.

, where is the label or layer some thing belongs to.

so, if a thing has no properties (or things in it), it is atomic, and has only one quality to it, quantity: . a thing that’s not made of anything is therefore our simplest layer. the study of quantities and properties thereof is mathematics, and it is the simplest form of the analysis of things. for this reason, i chose mathematical notation for it and will use it from now on.

this means that any mathematics that bases itself on quantity as the main axiomatic (most of them do), would be studying the properties of unlayered things, or things with no properties. there is no spin, color or smell in a number. once we get to minds, we will understand why this is so useful and so universal as a language. it also shows why mathematics itself requires minds to exist, since, as far as we can tell, there is no known particle without properties (the mathematicon ?). though simply defined, mathematical things require complex minds to exist.

from now on, will be our number 1, and we will use whatever currently accepted axiomatic is used by scientific standards as the mathematical standard. note that since things are more than numbers, some issues that property-less numbers have will not occur in this framework, but must be dealt with if we restrain our study of things to .

so by using only things, we can produce the formula above. again, we started with an axiom which produces its own definition. any sufficiently knowledgeable mind can produce the above formulas just by having a concept of quantity. it can be arguable whether quantity is the most fundamental concept or not, but in our case, it is by axiomatic definition, therefore, i will not approach it further. any simpler concept can replace it, but you must make sure you are not explaining it in terms of this theory and failing occam’s razor.

for example, let’s say you choose “nothing” as your most fundamental concept. to create “something” out of nothing, you’d need the concept of “quantity” and also of “symmetry”, for example, since in order to have a thing with more than 0 properties, you’d have to say “nothing” is “something” “cancelled” (i.e., ), which in turn requires you to use the very idea of “quantity” we were starting with, plus some others! instead of being simpler, it was more complicated. we will see this in all layers of things. some things might seem simpler, but if broken down, they will have to be explained by the very same concepts they were trying to simplify. since we’re following occam’s razor, whenever this happens, we discard the more complex definition (the one that requires more things).

to formalize occam’s razor, thing is simpler than if and only if . we will be using this definition in every kind of thing, and it will be our validation criterion whenever decisions between different formulas must be made.

also, things of the same layer may not be the same thing. this would be like saying if you have 5 marbles, all of them are the same marble. quantity is the essential part of distinguishing things, if they have the same properties. each of the 5 marbles, even though observably the same in every way, may be physically apart. this is a problem that comes from imagining property-less things.

another example on what i mean, because i know it is hard to grasp at first. if we could represent a human being entirely by the color of their hair (let’s say that there is such a hairy miniverse). if i had black hair, and someone else had black hair, were we the same person? observably, yes. but essentially, no. i was physically separate from that somebody else, and even though we were indistinguishable, we would’ve led different lives in different spacetimes. again, physical quantity gives us the answer.

so now that we have our simplest thing, we can proceed into greater things. i’ll write more about it in our coming posts.

north eastern stick dancing and pipes

after a short break, let’s continue our series on things. in my previous posts i solved the subject-object problem by claiming the subject is recursively made of objects, and that subjectivity is no more than distorted copies of real information. this was only possible because of my axiomatic opinion that things are real. once i get to minds, subjectivity will become clear by its physicality. you are obviously entitled to make your reality any_real, like _surreal or irreal. doesn’t matter to me, since your thoughts, in this line of thinking, are things too (real things even). this is enough to make a lot of people angry, so i’m moving on.

we had our miniverses, macroscopically different. one with a vocabulary of two (a, b), and one with a vocabulary of six (a, b, c, d, e and f). so now we can define our vocabulary in our own miniverse (the one we live in). this is the quest for the elemental alphabet that we spend so much money on (your bosons give me hadron?). but depending on how deep we want to go, we might not need to know the core letters.

this is what we must ask ourselves every time. where are we drawing the boundary? am i concerned with brownian motion? hydrostatic pressure? rainfall on your wedding? how deep is my zoom in?

let’s try to formalize this question in simple terms in these steps: – what information are you doing work with (how your thing is sufficiently quantifiable, with your chosen distortion or error); – find the simplest alphabet to represent that information, given all the alphabets you have (you can’t use alphabets you don’t have).

an example on how this works. if you are doing simple construction work and want to think (or imagine, or project it), what is your alphabet? let’s take building a simple wall as an example. let’s imagine i don’t want to make them fancy and anti-seismic, rather the old school kind that always kills people at some point. of all the possible letters i could work with (atoms, molecules, chunks of clay, geological formation of rocks, etc), i will choose the simplest amount that allows me to do work within my boundary (this boundary being the one that has my little construction yard inside, and everything else on the outside). my letters are bricks, concrete, the laws of gravity and static forces. why? because to describe my activity (the work i’m doing), this allows me to save and retrieve my project with no loss of information (sometimes the type of brick isn’t important, nor the type of concrete) plus it can be encoded in the smallest chunk of information (occam’s razor). imagine a piece of paper. you could use that piece of paper to write

put bricks alternating on top of each other with concrete between them

or you could use that same piece of paper to write

start a universe make a lot of stars explode and find one that has a good planet have all these things happen to it so we have clay and walking monkeys and concrete and teach them to carry the things and make them build things

in fact, if you only wanted to use core elements, you could go as far as

quark id#1 move to a quark id#2 move to b quark id#3 move to c quark id#4 move to d quark id#5 move to e (…)

in a huge sequence. it’s easy to say that if you choose a deeper alphabet, you might not end up with a simpler explanation. so saying F=ma is simple is a bit naive. it depends on your subject.

so what we’re describing is that activity (work) is what makes us choose our alphabets. for a culture that never deals with earthquakes, a brick and concrete alphabet is enough to do work in their reality (they don’t know earthquakes are real because they haven’t observed them).

again, this is where we specify. every human activity has its own jargon, its own alphabet that is used to accurately do work. that work can be analyzed quantitatively by looking at the thermodynamics of the system. what is generating information, what is destroying it?

so in a couple of lines i jumped from tiny things and miniverses to construction work and made them seem similar. this means that this model is fractal, since it repeats itself in different scales (or zoom factors if you will).

in my trade jargon, you’d call going from lower level to higher level descriptions. obviously everything i write is highly influenced by my trade. again, once we get to minds, it might become clear why. lower level is no more than fewer agents and more data or more descriptions and less models. higher level is the opposite. as you go into more and more abstracted realms, you will have more models and less descriptions.

for example, you have 5 marbles, each in a hue of blue. if you need to telegram this to someone (they call that tweet these days isn’t it?), you could write:

i have a duke blue marble, a federal blue marble, a navy blue marble, a sapphire blue marble and a prussian blue marble

or you could write

i have 5 dark blue marbles

which one do you prefer? one uses more description, the other one uses more modeling. the closest to reality is the descriptive one, since the information has less distortion when compared to the real marble. the smallest one (cheapest one) is the modeling one. they will be equivalent when all your marbles are exactly dark blue (there is no difference in the distortion in both telegrams).

it will always depend on what kind of work you’re doing, and whether you’re a science major or a liberal arts major. literature for example is beautifully descriptive. it can also be a bit exhausting at times. science on the other hand, is beautifully abstractive. it can be a bit unintelligible at times. anywhere in between you can find an expert and a smart ass. that’s how we work, and how we make ourselves feel superior to others.

so is there a more real perspective? the realest perspective is to accurately observe and describe all states of all things at all time. this is impossible. so we can induce from our agents all states of all things at all time. if the distortion between reality and our induction is zero, we have found our theory of everything. this is my version of the formulation of the scientific method.

again, there are some problems that have to do with computation, which i briefly described as “how much you’d have to write on your paper” (we can call that paper the tape on a turing machine), that everyone trying to use models instead of descriptions will have to address. also, due to our light cones, we cannot verify global minimum distortion of our models, only local (even if local is our whole light cone).

so my view of the scientific method, summarized, is the very difficult task of creating a set of agents whose generated thing space has zero distortion relative to the real thing space.

remember the miniverse? our agent 3x(a,b) was our theory of everything. it could generate our miniverse with zero distortion. we could say everything there is to know is known from a model perspective. but we would not know all the arrangements themselves without generating them, which would require, you know it, a lot of paper. in the end, we would be able to telegram our miniverse in a tinier piece of paper, but we would not know the lives of mr. a1 and mr. a2 and how they lived their lives. to do so, we would have to generate their lives from our law. while possible, if you have a lot of letters, it quickly becomes intractable. so we would do:

3x(a,b) = (aaabbb),(ababab),(…),(bbbaaa)

this simple miniverse has only six letters but already 6⁶ ways of arranging things! try writing that in a piece of paper! this is the obvious intractable issue that i fail to have science types understand. but we can see how powerful laws are. ~7 characters (for a mind) can generate 46656 different arrangements of things. it is a compression of 5 orders of magnitude!

math disclaimer: i used the cartesian product of sets (hence 6⁶), not the arrangements. i like to think ababab is not the same word as ababab, because two a_s are not the same _thing, instead they can both be saved and retrieved using the same information (they are redundant). it’s different. but whichever you choose, the compression rate is astounding.

so do i favor models or descriptions? depends on what kind of work i’m doing. so i choose both to signing up to any. but already we can see that reality isn’t black and white, but rather a complex spectrum, like that mutant onion i was talking about, and that it is possible to compress things enough to talk about them, but not to fully represent them (as of today’s knowledge).

now that we’re done with understanding different layers of abstraction and how naturally the scientific method emerges from this way of thinking, we can begin our journey from the objective to the subjective. that will be for the coming posts.

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.

apropos: pipes made of stuff

this is just a short post not connected to the recent stream about things. if you read this far, it should be easy to understand a common mistake i hear more and more from westerners. more and more people are considering themselves minimalists, saying they only need their computer and/or cell phone. but if you go back to the posts about work, the work required to build a cell phone makes it a bit ridiculous to claim it as a possible minimalism.

even though all we’re holding is a cell phone, to have it we needed a whole chain of production and marketing. we need the mines, the miners, the engineers, the designers, the salesmen, the transport system, the globalized economy, the hardware and software designs, the job to get the money to buy the stuff, which in turn requires an economy to work.

so saying we can just have a cell phone, or any other modern artifact, is the same thing as claiming we just need an entire capitalism globalized market. that is hardly minimalism.

until we can build our own chips and hardware at home, using dust or dirt, there is no way one can be a minimalist. and even if we could build everything ourselves, we would still need the knowledge to build the things, which would come from a society, and probably after a lot of work done by that very same society.

another one i love is how minimalists these days easily dumpster for everything, but still have a laptop and an online connection. the online connection alone is a massive energy sink and requires an immense telecommunications infrastructure. i know when you use your cell phone, you don’t “see” the cables, so it’s like “magic”. but nearby i bet there is at least one cell tower with a broadband connection, and plugged in to the city main electrical grid. there is nothing “independent” about a cell phone except that you can’t see the wire. the same works for everything we do. even if we dumpster everything and use nothing from the main economy, we are still using byproducts of that economy. if capitalism magically “disappeared”, so would dumpstered goods and broadband.

unless the items we use last or made by ourselves (including the mining), it is pretty much useless to dumpster, because the engine is still moving. how long do your items last? we have technology to make electronics (and other items) to last forever (lifetimes). capitalism just doesn’t work that way (see planned obsolescence). the article is highly disputed on wikipedia, but i learned that same technique in project management. it’s just not widely broadcast because it might make people realize what’s really going on.

you make light bulbs. thick filament and glass means it’s more expensive, but that it will last 400 years. you sell a batch to all citizens. you’re out of business. that’s the essence of planned obsolescence, which has been around for a long time (even since henry ford days). there is little extra cost to make a lifetime thing, but there is a big cost to stay in business afterwards.

once we moved from a culture of making things to a culture of making money, lifetime goods are no longer an option.

when was the last time a cell phone lasted you more than 2 years? a tv? a computer? my laptop failed exactly 1 year and 11 months after i bought it. i could call the warranty just for that 1 month, but it’s a bell curve around 2 years, so most fail one month after anyway.

management likes to say this is a conspiracy theory. despite the evidence it isn’t, let’s be a bit naive and just say we’re doing it only for the money. the cheapest components don’t last as long. so the effect of saving money is equivalent to planned obsolescence. electronics break down when the worst part breaks down. some computers can break down because of a fucking cheap capacitor. so even if planned obsolescence wasn’t a management technique (false statement), profit driven management also guarantees planned obsolescence.

so how can we be real minimalists? an easy one would be becoming a hermit. another one is building your own infrastructures and hardware and producing your own goods. this is impossible for most things at this point, since electronics requires a lot of power and rare minerals. it’s easy to see how being a minimalist requires either having nothing or having a massive infrastructure to support you. either way, you’re left with joining society or building your own.

a more practical way of avoiding such traps is reducing consumption, fixing and recycling. but you can’t fix or recycle everything. until you can, you can’t be a minimalist in a western society. you could be if all of a sudden everything you had became self powered and “payed off” the energy necessary to build it. from then on, maybe. but your hardware would be so obsolete you couldn’t plug in to the rest of the world, making it useless. planned obsolescence always wins.

our world is moving fast enough to be unstoppable. i would say jump off, take the speed you got from the ride and start something new, like we’ve been doing with the places we built. but don’t fall for the trap of believing you magically became “sustainable” or a “minimalist”. that requires the entropy math i just did. where are your things coming from?