Ask A Genius 776: Metaphorical Physics
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/08/08
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: As I’ve said before I’m kind of a broken record with regard to informational cosmology which to some extent could also be called metaphorical physics where you look for parallels between the functioning of the brain/mind in the universe itself. But the thing that’s not a broken record, it’s fairly recent and it has a lot of arguments going for it is galaxies as the nodes within a system of thought, of information storage and recall based on combinatorial coding where the information in the brain is encoded by combinations of nodes lighting up. Process signals flow through the neural net that is your brain causing combinations of neurons to fire and these neurons can be analyzed to be shown to function as nodes and groups of neurons can function as nodes.
Combinations of nodes are like words to a certain extent where each unique combination of nodes can stand for an object, an idea, a mental object, a thing within thought. It’s a durable way to encode thoughts and information because the number of possible combinations using a million or two million possible nodes, the number of possible combinations of say you’re lighting up six nodes is such a large number that you don’t have to use every single node and thus you can give the nodes nice separation in node space. So your well-functioning brain isn’t mistaking one word for another. If the English language had a trillion different words, every different possible combination of letters was a word, if that were the case then people would be confusing shit all the time. The number of actual words versus the number of possible sequences of letters is a very small fraction which makes for fewer mistakes in verbal and written transmission of information.
So, that’s a good system. It’s durable and it can hold up pretty well even as people’s brains degrade due to things like Alzheimer’s, people can keep their shit together longer. They’ve looked at nuns who keep mentally active and they find nuns who are still able to think clearly even though on autopsy their brains are freaking Swiss cheese because it’s the node, the combinational coding thing is combinatorial; it’s robust and it’s loops. You don’t hit the combinational combinatorial code for something exactly you can still get that thing because in combinatorial space the points in space are well separated. So you just get close and you can pretty much guess “Oh you meant that” And that’s a nice looseness when you’re looking at a system with multiple levels of significance like we think the universe is, where we think the universe is a giant information processor at the same time we as denizens of the universe know it’s a place where we’ve evolved and that you’ve got all this like stuff going on in the universe as matter as opposed to the universe as information processor.
And being able to function at two levels kind of requires a certain amount of looseness because if you make things tight that involves too much information to little wiggle room and it doesn’t work. When you make everything in the universe represent something like, this star represents the color mauve in the galaxy of colors; like that’s just not going to work informationally. But if you make galaxies the nodes, the light up with in a system of computational coding that is loose enough, if a galaxy is a node it doesn’t matter that much what is happening with individual stars within a galaxy. What matters more is the large-scale interaction of all the galaxies with each other along the filaments that connect them. The combinatorial space for an information structure that works off combinatorial codes has a gazillion dimensions.
I guess you could say almost as many dimensions as you have nodes, like that say word space I guess you could say has 26 dimensions. There’s a model of word space that might have 26 dimensions depending on which letters are lit up but in practical terms you can collapse a multi-dimensional space into three dimensions via filaments that a combinatorial code space could work on the basis of proximity of points within that space within a space of a gazillion dimensions. But instead you can collapse it down to three dimensions and you can have certain things be a function of proximity within three dimensions and also things being a function of getting lit up along the filaments that the filaments, the connections among galaxies along filaments, it gets rid of the need to have all these extra dimensions but it compactifies the space and makes it doable.
The galaxies are the right level of old and filthy. If galaxies go through a number of cycles of being triggered and lit up and then burning out then getting lit up again, they’re going to generate a lot of debris which can be the collapsed matter, the brown doors, the neutron stars. The black holes at the center, I mean away at the outskirts of the galaxy, shit like that it isn’t at the outskirts may collide with shit in the busier interior of the galaxy and eventually fall into the giant ass black hole at the center of the galaxy. But the stuff on the outskirts, these black holes are spatially compact not super interactive but besides gravitationally and they can form fairly stable orbits where they can keep orbiting around a galaxy for quadrillions of years.
So you got all this junk that is kind of pretty stably orbiting the outskirts of the galaxy that makes it kind of gravitationally sticky because you’ve got all this not very strongly except for gravitationally interacting matter that can make galaxies kind of more interactive with each other gravitational. I don’t know if filament’s work solely gravitationally probably not, but anyway you’ve got filthy old galaxies that have been turned on and off a gazillion times and where the stars are made out of old shit but they’re new in terms of the agglomeration of old matter, old atoms that came together to form the new stars. And then on the outskirts you got all this old stuff that doesn’t readily agglomerate, that is part of what loosely ties galaxies together both via proximity and via filaments. It’s the right amount of looseness and dirtiness and distinctness that makes for a system that’s robust.
[Recording End]
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