Ask A Genius 791: Combinatorial Coding
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/09/17
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the state of IC?
Rick Rosner: Well, I think that combinatorial coding is the key to a lot of this stuff but before we get to the specifics of that let’s get to the generals of IC which you can start with “What’s the universe for?” And that returns an unsatisfactory answer though it may be surprising to have an answer at all considering how much science hates questions like that.
Jacobsen: Teleological questions?
Rosner: Yeah. But you can pretty much safely answer that the universe’s purpose among other things, at the very least its purpose is to exist to be persistent across time. That leads to a whole bunch of other questions along the lines of how it does that. If you’re doing physics by metaphor, you can answer with how other things persist across time. The basic elements are they’re made of matter, the matter exists in space. Complex living things, the ones we’re familiar with, exists by modeling the external world so that complex living things can position themselves in the world to not be killed by the world. So that’s it for the general kind of underlying teleological stuff.
Another area is… one of the things that I’ve wrestled with over the time we’ve been working together is where the information in the universe is. Is there room for this much information in the universe? How is the universe encoded? And all that stuff.
Jacobsen: In a sense, we have talked about this in some sessions and one of the ones that’s distinct that’s coming to mind is a one based on codeless coding or something like that where coding that has to arise as a basic necessity of existence.
Rosner: Yeah, okay that makes sense. Coding is analogous to spontaneously arising clustering, like you can’t have a universe that does anything if it stays homogeneous. You need stuff; you need matter to clump up into stars and galaxies. One thing I want to get at is, with regard to information is I feel like and we’ve talked about this a lot though not much lately, is the universe mostly runs on protons and everything that supports protons. In other words, you can’t have a proton without having an electron. You can’t have energy being transmitted across the universe without photons, you can’t have protons flipping back and forth into neutrons and forming nuclei without neutrinos and anti-neutrinos.
If you want it you can argue but it’s all pretty much centered on protons and all the junk that goes along with having protons. I would argue two things. One is that informationally protons aren’t some ideal information encoders but they can embody, they can hold, they can contain information, and they’re part of a self-consistent system that can exist which means they work for encoding it, for containing information. They’re not some perfect thing. What makes them perfect, if you want to call it perfect is that they’re part of a system that can materially and temporarily exist and you can have an analogy with numbers.
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Numbers are great for counting things and the system of counting numbers is super consistent and just seems easy but to have the counting numbers, the analogy is you’ve got counting numbers. Counting numbers seem pretty elementary. Protons and the rest of the long lived particles and all seems like compared to the rest of particle, physics. Protons, electrons, and neutrons; they’re kind of a simplistic slice of the whole particle world. And by analogy with the counting numbers, the counting numbers imply all this other stuffs; the Infinity of rational numbers between any two counting numbers, negative numbers, imaginary numbers, rings and groups and fields and all the other things that pop out of mathematics and the non-countably infinite transcendental numbers with a non-countable infinity between any two counting numbers or any two rational numbers or freaking any two numbers period as long as they’re on the number line.
So I would say by analogy and not a good one, the whole support system of all the rest of the particles, I’d say is just kind of a mess that pops out in extension of the things that are useful in terms of information. The way the rest of math pops out once you start poking at the counting numbers. That’s thing one.
Point number two is, I keep saying that the system of matter; protons, electrons, neutrons, and what they clump up to be is not a perfectly regimented containment system for information the way computers and computer code is, where everything’s exactly precise. If you’re coding and you fuck up one symbol in your line in your thousand lines of code, you’ve got something that doesn’t work. Matter is sloppy information containment. So that’s that for those two points.
And then back to combinatorial coding where the universe is clumped up and as an information processor it makes sense that information as is relevant to the information processing that the universe is doing; the macro processing as opposed to the micro phenomena that the macro stuff sits on it is built from. The micro phenomena that we are made out of, the macro stuff I would guess is macro level coding by lighting up galaxies. If you can argue that the universe is a thinking thing, the thoughts are denoted by combinations of lit up galaxies. That galaxies are distributed along filaments and I guess you’re going to light up filaments, relevant filaments as information is being processed and where the filaments intersect you’re going to get combinations of lit up galaxies and these combos are represent to the thinking system, the ideas, the thoughts, the images, and the content of the system.
And the units of coding the letters in the code are entire galaxies because those are the things that are strung together in relevant macro waves. There’s very little to the point of there being no macro information for the purposes of the universe’s processing in the orientation of individual galaxies relative to the rest of the universe, with the possible exception of maybe orientation is important if the black holes at the center of the galaxies are spewing or jetting out or spewing matter, with the direction of the jets being somehow related to the overall orientation of the galaxy. I don’t know about that. But galaxies rotate the position of individual stars in the galaxy versus the rest, all that doesn’t matter.
Now the position of individual stars in a galaxy relative to the information in the galaxy, that may have some relevance if the galaxy is… it’s a fucking complex thing, it contains nearly 10 to the 70th particles. You’ve got 10 to the 11th galaxies in the observable universe, you got 10 to the 80th or 85th particles in the universe, you do the math and you got 10 to the 70th particles in a galaxy. So, there’s information within the galaxy but there’s little information in the orientation of the galaxy versus the rest of the universe as opposed to the position of the galaxy versus other galaxies.
All right one more thing, so if we’re arguing by analogy and metaphor then there’s similar clumping in our brains and we know this. I mean people don’t know it as an analogy to the entire universe but we know that babies are born with a shitload of dendrites and the dendrites die off creating the structure of the brain. Dendrites forming and dendrites dying off is a part of clumping and clustering and so we know that neurons are clumped and clustered and four nodes and these nodes I would guess have a lot in common. The processes that form these clumps and the informational implications of clumping, there are a lot of analogies to be drawn between our minds/brains and the universe and the information processing.
[Recording End]
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