-9 karma · joined November 27, 2016
Whether a pessimist urges us to live “heroically” with a knife in our gut or denounces life as not worth living is immaterial. What matters is that he makes no bones about hurt being the Great Problem it is incumbent on philosophy to observe. But this problem can be solved only by establishing an imbalance between hurt and happiness that would enable us in principle to say which is more desirable—existence or nonexistence. While no airtight case has ever been made regarding the undesirability of human life, pessimists still run themselves ragged trying to make one. Optimists have no comparable mission. When they do argue for the desirability of human life it is only in reaction to pessimists arguing the opposite, even though no airtight case has ever been made regarding that desirability. Optimism has always been an undeclared policy of human culture—one that grew out of our animal instincts to survive and reproduce—rather than an articulated body of thought. It is the default condition of our blood and cannot be effectively questioned by our minds or put in grave doubt by our pains. This would explain why at any given time there are more cannibals than philosophical pessimists.
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2696709-the-conspiracy...
We act like stimuli are exact things but the brain is all about abstraction. In fact, a certain amount of entropy/information enters your beain every day from vision, smell, touch, etc. Its not stored in full fidelity. There arent enough nuerons or energy for that. So what is lost? Well...whatever isnt abstractable, right? You celebrate your birthday. You remember blowing out the cake in pristine vision. But how much of that 'movie reel' inside your head is actually a superposition of abstracted reality vs actual observed reality?
All Im asking is, is it even worth it to think of a human being in terms of absolute information when their memories are so sparse from reality. We remember whats important. And the things that are important, weve remembered to remember. But ultimately, the actual holding power of the brain is quite small. The brain is a master of deep abstraction from sparsity.
Is it like a quantum system? Where the superposition values of one subcortical system are flattened by another? So that a whole brain belief/memory is a function of the fuzzyness of each subsystem being exacted/wave function flattened by the heuristic correlation/connection between all the shitty data? I think we need to start thinking about sparsity. The universe is sparse when it comes to using 3d space. Holographic principle says physics is so symmetrical that we sparsely use 3d space. Such that our entire universe could take place on 2d space. Max Tegmark gave a talk about how deep learning works so well because of the sparsity of faces or music or voices, the overwhelming symmetry/redundance in physics and nature. And transitively, humans.
There are ways to organize code without sticking every little one time used code into a function.
Poor article by a pseudo computer scientist. Let him keep 'hacking.'
In fact, natural numbers are the basis for almost all of mathematics. And natural numbers are a manifestation of counting. Information theoretically, to count, one needs two dimensions (or degrees of freedom.) Space for storage of the number. And time to increment the storage medium, again and again, at different points. You could use two dimensions of space instead, and you'd just draw two orthogonal lines..and say the area inside the rectangle is the product.
So if counting is fundamentally related to the relationship between two dimensions, then so is addition since addition is repeated/recursive counting. And multiplication is repeated/recursive addition.
Once you realize this, physics seems less fundamental than mathematics, when it comes to understanding the universe.
Multiplication and addition are related in the way that f(x) and repeat(f(x), y) are related. They distribute over eachother and have certain properties.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_(mathematics)
So..the primes, the chaotic relationship between the modularity of addition over multiplication and the modularity of multiplication over addition, is due to the relationship between our universe's dimensions.
Want to study the universe at the most raw level? Mathematics. Want to study it a little higher? Physics. Want to study it at a higher level..maybe closer to the phaneron? Biology/neurochemistry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaneron
Want to study it at the thinking level? Zen buddhism.
Choose your pick. The causal chain of human to universe doesn't discriminate. The whole chain could be the "real" reality. Pick your choice. It's all beautiful. It's all mystifying and enigmatic. Just do it.