Born to do Math 139 – Taking the Universe at Face Value (1)
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/10/08
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The universe at face value. Go!
Rick Rosner: So, I am working on this novel. One of the characters in the novel is working in the same direction that we’re working. I thought about it a little. The last time we talked; we talked about the universe being an associative engine
It is just to say that your mind or brain is an associative engine.
Jacobsen: It is the old phrase everything is connected but some things are more connected than others.
Rosner: Yes! Your brain exists to form connections and then to the best of its ability pull up relevant connections given your present mental circumstances. That is, that which is in your current conscious arena and unconscious arena. Your brain will pull up what it thinks what you think is relevant from its store of associations.
Jacobsen: The puller-upper is par of you, too.
Rosner: Everything is you, right. You could argue, maybe less so your unconscious. What you experience as “you” is your conscious, to some extent your subconscious.
Jacobsen: I would mean in terms of the complete makeup of the person as the psyche.
Rosner: You are everything that comes out of your brain. If limited to what you’re conscious of, there are many things that happen outside of your awareness. But that’s a distinction that we can talk about at some point.
Anyway, your brain works to give you the information that you think that you need. It works by association.
Jacobsen: Is there a better term than association?
Rosner: I don’t know. How else could it work?
Jacobsen: Relationally?
Rosner: Relationally, connectedness. But I mean in terms of a sophisticated information processing entity to work.
Jacobsen: Probabilistic network.
Rosner: Is the only alternative to either give you no information or just random information? It is almost tautological to say that your brain works via association, or either tautological or elementary.
Jacobsen: It makes sense too. Anything associational can be built via networks or can build a network.
Rosner: That’s obvious. The game is to figure out how it does that, what the rules are. In thinking about that, we’ve decided that there’s a lot of shared information in, if you consider the universe as an information processor, or being distributed to the universe via the energy lost due to long-distance particles due to the curvature of space, which that energy goes into space itself and makes things more precisely defined in space and, also, determines where things are in space or where they move because that lost energy is manifested in the form of gravitation.
In the lazy way that I half think about things, that’s the way I decided information is shared on a universe-wide basis. It ignores the obvious other way that information is shared. Here’s where taking the universe at face value kicks in; when photons are received, are detected, are seen, that’s another huge way that information is shared.
That is, photons from hundreds of millions and billions of years away; we are perceiving the universe. It makes sense that the universe also perceives itself that way via photons and, also, tacitly via the loss of energy in space via the travelling of long-distance photons.
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