Born to do Math 117 – Forms of Order: Universe as Computer, Feedbacks and Feedarounds
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/04/22
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, we were talking about forms of order.
Rick Rosner: We talk about various aspects of the universe as a computer.
Jacobsen: Informational cosmology.
Rosner: We move on in our discussions without locking things down in precise mathematics. Right now, we have been talking about if micro events – particularly the events that happen on our planet – are registered by the computational entity that is the entire universe.
It almost seems too literal to think that every little thing that happens to us is an informational event in the computational awareness of the overall entity that is the universe. You can argue about whether the universe is conscious or not.
You can argue about whether consciousness is an emergent – which we believe – property and a technical property of sufficiently large broadband information processing. Whether or not if the universe is conscious, it is reasonable to think the universe is some kind of information processor and the information that we live in and are made of is, at base, information.
Information whose existence is made possible by an external framework. That is, matter in an external universe, the information that the universe consists of is a model of that external world, regardless of whether the universe itself is conscious.
For the sake of the discussion, let’s say, the universe is an information processor.
Jacobsen: From my knowledge of you, you lean towards tentatively conscious…
Rosner: …Not just tentatively, strongly, I strongly believe, once you get up to a certain level. Max Tegmark posits a measure of mind. It has something to do with bandwidth. I haven’t read his stuff in a while.
If you can somehow make a cross-section of the computations taking place in a human mind at any given moment, that informational cross-section – that is, the number of computations going on and the braidedness/number of places the information is coming from – becomes a metric of the computational magnitude and complexity.
While not agreeing with his methodology entirely, I don’t remember what it was. I think that consciousness is generally an emergent property when you have sufficient computational magnitude and complexity.
That is, the computers that we use and are familiar with in our phones and laptops. They may process a lot of information, but the information is mostly processed linearly. It is just a straight flow-through of information.
It is different than the way information flows through our brains. In our brains and minds, there is a central arena. That is a bunch of linked subsystems that are all, at least, roughly aware of the overall state of what is being considered, which is our moment to moment awareness.
What is generally being considered is the reality that we are in and that we are modelling moment to moment along with our self-talk, the words that we use in our heads, and the other tools that we use in our head to help conceptualize what we’re experiencing, it is our model of the external world and our commentary on that model through various apps.
The verbal app, whether or not we are talking out loud, we are talking to ourselves, “That motherfucker,” or, “What is that dude doing?”, or, “That is a shapely ankle,” if we’re in 1802 and see a women lift her skirt and see her ankle.
There is a commentary. There is a sense of beauty app or an aesthetic app. An app for a sense of fairness and then you decide if it is fair in general, “Is that guy a dick?” If a guy is acting in a way that is impinging on other people, that guy is a dick or an asshole.
It differs if he is acting like a dick or an asshole to you personally, e.g., acting like an asshole in traffic. There is the feeling being tired, of being wrapped in cotton or as if drunk when tired. There is the perspective app.
It is so much a part of our reality that we just experience three dimensionality most of the time as just the way that the world is. Even though, the three-dimensionality is part of our brain constructing the world for us, so that we can understand it.
All of these apps working simultaneously and working with each other moment to moment about this set of sensory input – this flow of sensory input – is unlike how our computers, our mechanical computers, work, which do not have this broad sharing of information among subroutines.
That is changing as various things like Google Translate and machine learning algorithms – I’m sure – is not conscious, but a baby step closer to consciousness than straightforward non-machine learning computing because you have all sorts of feedback and feedarounds.
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