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Comment by goalieca | Hacker News Reader

Modelling is an interesting thing. Our math is such an elegant language that it can describe such amazingly rich abstractions. On one hand, we have category theorists and computer scientists working on the more familiar modelling of computational patterns. On the other, we have physicists coming up with all kinds of equally curious patterns in particle fields. It seems many of the patterns are just abstract nonsense but there are too many coincidences to ignore. To me this hints of some underlying structure that we are completely blind to still. Oh, how i wish to study math from the future.

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Study math now! With reverse ageing in the future you could potentially become one of the best in the field. There is time.

Sounds like an excellent excuse to not study math now.

Aaah...procrastination. "I'll just wait t'ill I'm 150."

Reminds me of some lyrics I like:

Throw it away, what's left to need

When you’ve got infinity

So much out there left to find

We'll do that some other time

...and an excellent reason to put 100% of available resources into anti-aging research.

With reverse ageing, you'll just unlearn all that laboriously learned math.

Benjamin button was a documentary ahead of its time.

Seriously. Real increases in lifespan (I'm thinking about Louis Gridley Wu celebrating his 200 birthday) would have to involve (at least occassionally) revitalizing stem cells to renew the body at rates that would seem normal in a very young person. This would have to include nerve cells. Presumably, this would lead to a reversal of specialization. That implies memory loss ("memory" in all neurological senses: how to write software, but also how to speak English, how to control defecation, how to control urination. Really renewing one's central nervous system would rewind a person back to the unspecialized nervous system they were born with.)

So do it incrementally like the human body does with everything else so that fresh neurons can learn the roles of the neurons they are replacing.

Why would you think that? Information is stored in the configuration of neurons, not in the neurons themselves. Neurons are constantly being replaced, and you don't wake up one morning not knowing how to bike because your "bicycle neuron" died.

Neurons are constantly being replaced

Are they ? As far as I know, neurons last more or less from before birth to death. There is neurogenesis in the hippocampus but it doesn't replace existing neurons, and the new cells themselves last until death.

Is this true for neurons that make up the nervous system as well? Or just neurons in the brain?

I sometimes wonder if there is a way to automate the generation of mathematical abstractions and reporting the ones that have physical relevance. I guess one of the big problems then (besides tractability) is how to feed it with experimental data. Even if it is not feasible, then it would still be interesting to read how mathematical physicists would theoretically approach this problem (and even how they would define it).

Abstraction is almost by definition the information that not-automated (and the automated portion is concealed but the abstraction)

The modeling and the maths allow us to make concrete, precise predictions of how nature behaves, that are testable by experiment.

What coincidences?

Why assume we are blind?

Complex numbers are an underlying structure that has unified wide ranging physical phenomena

> Complex numbers are an underlying structure that has unified wide ranging physical phenomena

And yet complex numbers are merely a shadow of much deeper unifying structures

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_algebra

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