Ask A Genius 783: You have to work.
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/08/24
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: The deal is that we’ve been talking for eight, eight and a half, almost nine years maybe.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: We started with IC for the most part. We had gone off on all sorts of tangents. But the deal is that looking for a version of an information processing universe that’s metaphorically the same as the information processing done in our minds/brains and you’re looking for the level of flexibility and the scale that makes everything work, that comports to experimental what we know about the universe and about the brain and also works in terms of is there enough information to do? Does it require too much information? And the deal is that a combinatorial coding has the flexibility, the lack of rigidity that is associated with computer-based information processing with super linear where every zero or one affects the whole fucking. It means something. You need something that’s looser and sloppier like clay yet can contain a whole lot of information and is robust.
So combinatorial coding fits the bill for robustness because you can still read what a word is because words are combinatorial codes. You still know what a word is, a six-letter word even if you can’t really read two of the letters especially in context. Your message can be smeared out or partly degraded and it’s still readable which is consistent with the shitty messages that people get from their own brains as they slide into dementia, they get a lot of messages that are still readable even though their brains are turning into Swiss cheese.
And there’s flexibility, a different kind of robustness when the signal you’re sending out to try to retrieve information is shitty. Your brain can still catch that badly thrown falling apart baseball because if it takes you know six lit up nodes to have a perfect signal, your brains can still catch the ball even if it’s only catching four and a half or three and a half lit up nodes especially in context. It’s flexible because each node, depending on the size of the overall system, can be part of thousands or millions of different codes of different words and it makes sense in terms of the universe. If a galaxy is a node, anything smaller doesn’t make sense because anything smaller is caught in like weird orbital dynamics that means like a solar system. Its position is not even that stable within the galaxy itself because the arms of the galaxy are pressure waves that sometimes you’re in an arm, sometimes you’re not and just you’re rotating versus the rest of the universe.
But galaxies are nicely embedded in a whole network of filaments. They can still be pushed around but they’re largely part of networks, incredibly large ass networks. They can be lit up, they can be lit for 20, 30 billion, 40, 50 billion years and then run out of fuel and fade back along with the rest of their network that may or may not have gotten lit up depending on the code. Galaxies have robust positions in the network of the universe as opposed to individual stars within galaxies. So the whole thing has the right scale, the right robustness, the right flexibility, and the right amount of needed information and the right ability to process information.
[Recording End]
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