Born to do Math 111 – Gettin’ Laid, Gettin’ Paid, Gettin’ Played, and Gettin’ Informational Trade
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/08
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: It can be more general for evolved systems, too. If you have reasonably or sufficiently accurate images or conceptualizations of the world, you can survive better.
Rick Rosner: That’s it. You get paid for success. For evolved beings, that success is continuing to live, getting laid, getting food, getting money, which is the means to all this other stuff. You get paid for understanding.
You are rewarded for understanding. You are more likely to earn more through this information warehouse that we consider consciousness. Then you would get paid via novel information hitting subsystems that are linked to each other.
Consciousness is a more efficient deliverer of the goods of existence. The main good is that you don’t get killed and other things related to success.
Jacobsen: It relates to the more general idea of existence as a good or consistency as a good. In other words, the principles of persistent structures in the universe. Things that exist longer continue to exist. It builds up that fundamental structure, tautological structure.
Rosner: Sure. Consistency in the outside world will kill you less than an inconsistent world. Consistency is good in the outside world. Understanding of the consistencies of the outside world is a second level, a second, good; a necessity for survival good.
But consciousness is expensive. It is not perfect at filtering out trivia. Where every higher level creature we know can be bored, so, one of the prices that you pay for being conscious is being aware of things that, if consciousness weren’t so global, you could turn over to your unconscious systems.
Consciousness is imperfectly efficient at filtering out stuff that could be ignored.
Jacobsen: There’s also the idea of independently evolved structures in organisms so that they can better adapt to the environment. That reflects the general world. Another one is having those likely independently evolved structures such as ants, and bees, and us, in terms of building our own habitat out of the world.
I think there can be a distinction made there too, in terms of activities of different things.
Rosner: Yes. You could almost characterize the global gene pool. All the genes of all the creatures throughout history. That’s almost like a Google Translate. Obviously, there’s not a consciousness running the interactions among the various genes of all the organisms.
But there is a library of genes. We only use like 1% of our genes. The rest of them are kind of not used; they’re options or trash genes. They are the accumulated history of each organism that has generated a bunch of fellow travelers and rider-alonger genes. That don’t usually get used.
Jacobsen: This reminds me of the principles of survival that are widespread. The individual organisms have fewer options than DNA. DNA has lots of options.
Rosner: Yes, the world DNA sphere can act like a giant app. It has no consciousness. But it has a high level of complexity, not a high level – I would say – of efficiency on the scale of individual organisms.
But it can pop up new stuff.
Jacobsen: To clarify, you don’t mean – when you say the world sphere of DNA, there could be misperceptions.
Rosner: Every frickin’ cell in every fucking organism has this library of DNA. This Swiss army knife of stuff that that DNA can do if the parts of the DNA are expressed. But only a small percentage in the DNA of each cell is expressed.
Jacobsen: You mean a concrete sense of the world sphere of DNA. Nothing magical.
Rosner: Nothing handwaving Gaia or gaias. This overall thing. It was big in the 70s, at least in hippy towns, where the Earth is an overall organism. None of that horse shit.
Jacobsen: We’re dismissing James Lovelock here.
Rosner: Yes. It is saying there is a crazy Swiss army knife or library here. If you went into a cell and made it express various strings of DNA, you would get all sorts of crazy stuff. It can get expressed in all sorts of ways.
Epigenetics is one. It is a bit Lamarckian. Some switches can be switched on that weren’t normally expressed. You can have mutations that are random. You can have mutations that aren’t quite random.
Mutations are random, except when they’re epigenetic. I have already confused myself. Epigenetics isn’t a mutation. It is turning on a gene that hasn’t normally been turned on.
Jacobsen: Most normal DNA mutations are random. Most are harmful. Some are helpful. With epigenetic changes, they can more likely helpful, potentially, since they are working with what has been kept.
Rosner: There is creating pressure or biasing breeding toward the characteristics that you want, which can be unintentional with normal Darwinian processes running that deal. The organisms with the best characteristics make more organisms.
You can do that. You can do that with plants that aren’t conscious at all, or bugs that are barely conscious. Then you have these various mechanisms for expressing the various aspects of the DNA in cells.
The basic ones are that the DNA in the cells is expressed according to the normal life cycle of an organism. But now, we’re entering the era of humans messing around with CRISPR and turning on new genes, and ones that haven’t been normally turned on.
It is this world app of genetics that encompasses evolution and genetic engineering, and the world sphere of every cell having a bunch of DNA in it. It is not conscious. It was not designed to be an app. But it really functions to be this not conscious highly complex and not designed app that covers the globe and covers a million, billion, maybe trillion different species.
Jacobsen: We have talked about a quantum mechanical world giving rise to a classical world. That classical world can, at times, have what we call biology. That comes through a principle of evolution.
We have systems that can register something about the environment. Some not only register but can form maps of the world.
Rosner: Let’s talk about going from quantum to macro. One of the reasons that we live in the macro world is because we live in a Mine Craft world. Where for us to be capable of all the things that we’re capable of doing, we need to be built of all these atoms and molecules.
It is boggling to me. I have been working on a micro mosaic. It is the face of a girl from the 1870s. The mosaic is only 20 millimeters across. The girl’s face is only 7 millimeters across. It is comprised of probably 1,200 little tiles that are probably a half millimeter by a quarter millimeter invisible surface.
They are mostly like a millimeter deep. I have been dealing with these tiles. I have filled in the biggest ones. I was working with a piece today that was probably a quarter millimeter by maybe a third of a millimeter by a 1/7th of a millimeter, which is 184/th of a cubic millimeter.
It is only 12 cubic microns. Yet, this teeny teeny pain in the ass glass still has like 10^15th atoms in it, which is fucking crazy. It is the smallest fucking thing. You can barely fucking see it. Yet, it has a million billion atoms in it.
One reason we’re so big; we’re comprised of so many atoms. We are comprised of particles that basically doing nothing. Big because macro is consistent and quantum isn’t consistent. Macro is consistent because you have enough things put together that are fuzzy and then become not fuzzy because of their size.
There is something you learn in first-year high school physics is that the de Broglie wavelength of an object is inversely proportional to its mass. An electron has a long wavelength. They always use a baseball that has a tiny wavelength. An electron is hard to pin down.
It is fuzzy. Baseball is easy. It is big. It contains 10^25th atoms or something. I don’t know. Anyway, we live in a macro world because a macro world is consistent by virtue of various laws of large numbers. That’s all I got. Unless you got another question.
Jacobsen: This is helping. This is helpful. It leads to the next questions. We have general frameworks from bottom to top, in terms of how far we’ve brought it. We factorize things to this level. What would be the next level? That is not an easy question.
Rosner: The sad thing is that the stuff that we’re talking about; there are probably people in the field – AI and machine learning for example – who use different terminology and may not understand things better than we do.
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