O
And One
And Two
And Manifold
Are the 万
Among the skies

If our understanding of physics is to be believed, the world as it really is, is an unfathomably complex place. An average room contains roughly 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 elementary particles. An average galaxy is made of roughly 100,000,000,000 stars (enough space and material for maybe 1000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 rooms in each of those star systems for humans to sit in and ponder these numbers). An average human has roughly 1000,000,000,000 sensory cells sending sensory signals from the body to the brain. The human brain itself has 10,000,000,000 neurons to create an unbelievable amount of different impressions on human consciousness.

Because of combinatorial explosion, the possible number of exact inputs a human mind could receive is even more mind-bogglingly big than all of these numbers. It is so big in fact, that any of the numbers I have mentioned could be off by a factor of a million and the general impression of the endlessness of being in the human mind would be practically unchanged.

Even though the human brain is quite large the human mind is seemingly incapable of fully encapsulating the even larger universe fully in itself. It seems impossible to compress the state of the world losslessly. Since we live in this world however, and since we have to function to live, all things that live and act in the world had to find ways to handle this irreducibility of complexity. The way to handle it, most generally put, is to use lossy compression of input into simplified models that only keep the information that is relevant for survival and flourishing. Animals do this by turning the formless sensory input into distinct objects that can be put into different categories and used to build simplified object relations maps. These models can be used to extrapolate from current observations to likely future sensory inputs and how they will be influenced by personal behavior.

It is important to note here that the extrapolations concern themselves with what is important for the animal. The information compression is not value neutral. These models will not be useful to determine how the animals behavior influences the positions of elementary particles or dust specks. What they are useful for is to determine useful things for the animal. How to get food, how to mate, how ...

Posts

Wikitag Contributions

Comments