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Feb. 1st, 2004 06:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vaxjediI little metaphysical rambling - aka Why I would make a good Virtual Adept.
It amazes me how much of the world is based in algorithms. Or more properly the result of relatively simple algorithms with variable initial states that lead to wildly different outcomes. This is really one of the essential pillars of chaos theory - sensitivity to initial conditions. These differences compound over series of iterations - piling up on top of each other.
However, when we look at these macro-manifestations, the results of these iterations, most of them (the most enduring and profoundly far-reaching) are not swirling masses of chaos - they are complex systems with immergent rules and internal consistency. And at the core of these complex entities are relatively simple formulae with often discernable rules.
This concept struck me in a Computer Science class in college. We were working with something called an encapsulated series of numbers. It was a way to represent infinite series of numbers in a finite way.
Say you give a program a set of numbers and it processes them. Now say you have to give that program a LOT of numbers, possibly even an 'infinite' set of numbers. How do you get all those numbers. You can pre-generate them all, but that can be prohibitive. So why not have the program generate them?
Well, if you don't know what set of numbers you are going to be using? So you make the program expect to be given a way - you give it a formula for getting the numbers you want - "run your program on the 10th through 200th numbers that come out of this formula". Thus you are giving it instructions on how to make the numbers itself, instead of the numbers itself. That is an encapsulated series. Essentially, you are teaching the program to fish, instead of giving it a trout.
It seems more and more of the world is like that. Some people have theorized that the information contained in DNA isn't a map of an oragnim, but rather a mechanism for drawing that map - an 'encapsulated' map that is generated on the fly during growth. The same for language - the thoery of parameters in a Universal Grammar says that kids don't have a concept of language, but a hardwired concept of the rules and parameters that govern grammar. And as they grow up, the rules are invoked and choices are made to adapt those rules to what they are hearing around them. Thus do children internalize a language.
At the center of these things aren't things or concepts, but meta-rules that construct rules. The source of these complex entities are algorithms, orders which modify orders, information which is operating on itself to create more order. At the core of life seems to be the need to increase order and thus refute entropy.
Pythagoras posited that reality is number. But the source of organization is information, the transformation of datat to order matter and energy. Reality is numbers in motion.
It amazes me how much of the world is based in algorithms. Or more properly the result of relatively simple algorithms with variable initial states that lead to wildly different outcomes. This is really one of the essential pillars of chaos theory - sensitivity to initial conditions. These differences compound over series of iterations - piling up on top of each other.
However, when we look at these macro-manifestations, the results of these iterations, most of them (the most enduring and profoundly far-reaching) are not swirling masses of chaos - they are complex systems with immergent rules and internal consistency. And at the core of these complex entities are relatively simple formulae with often discernable rules.
This concept struck me in a Computer Science class in college. We were working with something called an encapsulated series of numbers. It was a way to represent infinite series of numbers in a finite way.
Say you give a program a set of numbers and it processes them. Now say you have to give that program a LOT of numbers, possibly even an 'infinite' set of numbers. How do you get all those numbers. You can pre-generate them all, but that can be prohibitive. So why not have the program generate them?
Well, if you don't know what set of numbers you are going to be using? So you make the program expect to be given a way - you give it a formula for getting the numbers you want - "run your program on the 10th through 200th numbers that come out of this formula". Thus you are giving it instructions on how to make the numbers itself, instead of the numbers itself. That is an encapsulated series. Essentially, you are teaching the program to fish, instead of giving it a trout.
It seems more and more of the world is like that. Some people have theorized that the information contained in DNA isn't a map of an oragnim, but rather a mechanism for drawing that map - an 'encapsulated' map that is generated on the fly during growth. The same for language - the thoery of parameters in a Universal Grammar says that kids don't have a concept of language, but a hardwired concept of the rules and parameters that govern grammar. And as they grow up, the rules are invoked and choices are made to adapt those rules to what they are hearing around them. Thus do children internalize a language.
At the center of these things aren't things or concepts, but meta-rules that construct rules. The source of these complex entities are algorithms, orders which modify orders, information which is operating on itself to create more order. At the core of life seems to be the need to increase order and thus refute entropy.
Pythagoras posited that reality is number. But the source of organization is information, the transformation of datat to order matter and energy. Reality is numbers in motion.
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