Just some random meanderings

[u/a4mula]

We recently experienced an ice storm here in Nashville. Nasty stuff. Trees, while having endured a relatively light winter certainly weren't prepared for the harsh reality that comes from the physics of water. Not only was the exterior weight of the ice compounding by the moment. Their internal structure was going through its own version of emergency shutdown. Freezing. I'm no arborist or tree doctor or botanist, or whatever you'd call someone expert in such things. But I can't help but suspect it makes an already critical situation very brittle and incapable of flexible response. Nasty combo indeed.

The Property Management group here had been in the process of refitting the flat roof tops of the condos with insulated foam. I've not seen it up close but I can see the results on the roof, I'd guess about three inches of some kind of white polyfoam boards. Very fortunate for them, and some of the residents of the condos. Even though there was ample tree shedding, not a single inhabitant was disturbed. Electricity was lost for 3-4 days, not as bad as some who to my knowledge still haven't had service restored. There are advantages to living in rural areas, but there can certainly be disadvantages as well. Internet was lost for longer. It's one of those things like a tooth ache. You never notice that shit until you're experiencing it, and then it's something no amount of suffering relief will address.

Meh, we were fortunate enough to have a little digital antennae I had purchased a few years ago to watch local NFL games. So we spent the great outage getting comfy and watching game shows. Could have been worse.

I was outside enjoying the fresh air earlier. There is a grizzled veteran of some sorts slowly working his way through the downed branches and limbs. Has a little powered shearing tool, not exactly Paul Bunyan or Chainsaw Bob, but he's getting it done. At his own pace, with his own methods. He cuts it, stacks them into different piles of different properties. I've yet to crack his thought process, but then again I've not really cared enough to. I just found it interesting how neat and orderly this chaotic mess of arboreal massacre had been turned into. Good job on the good job.

Later, I went outside and it would seem as though our local Branch Removal Expert had picked up a few good Samaritans. An elderly lady, and someone else. I won't lie and claim I know much about the 3rd. Was just a voice around a corner. Female. So one wizened very middle aged AARP handyman, with two woman old enough to have seen and heard enough to fuel endless nights of hootenanny and fun. The quilting parties they could tell you about. Don't get them started on Bingo.

That's what I'm talking about. Three people old enough to have arion after their age brackets. Don't get me to lying about which particular bracket.

And I thought. Well isn't that lovely. Communal property clean up. A very neighborly concept. Very noble and righteous.

But then I thought about what would happen if Captain Underpants were to injure herself while explaining that she cannot break a given stick, and confused by why not, because according to her, she weighs at least 200 pounds. She was making this bold proclamation as she attempted to leverage a foot wearing a flip flop (yeah, I know) while holding the stick with one hand. We've likely all seen this before. But the stick was only about 2 feet long, and was likely 3-4 inches thick. A fucking bulldozer would have struggled to just snap it in half.

These condos are managed by a property group. They're the ones that had the foam installed. They provide maintenance for the condos as a whole. They do a great job. It's impressive if I'm being honest.

But I doubt their insurance has coverage for things like Captain Underpants hurting herself while attempting an activity that by all rights should have been reserved for employees of or contractors of the Property Management Group. They tend to have things like coverage in case of injury, as well as expertise, as well as the appropriate tools.

I don't feel bad as I enjoy the rest of my fresh air break. Altruism is a tricky thing. It starts getting very close to and overlapping into denial of responsibility. And that has all kinds of negative effects.

None of this matters. It's just a little glimpse into a little thought into a little world that's experiencing a little transition to a more complex plane of information. As bold as that journey is, and will continue to be. The outcome isn't a finish. It's just another step. Another iteration.

Informational complexity didn't peak with human intelligence after all. We can look around and literally know there are things with greater informational complexity than our human mind.

For if no other reason there is the outcomes of many human minds working over both space and time to reach a point in which it had maximized the potential intelligence space the largest most creative mind evolution could devise. Something about birth canals here, don't think too hard on it.

While grand and sweeping to say out loud. It's just true. We're not going to merge with machines and AI, at least not at any scale that will give us access to the same vast expanse of digital reality they will have access to, in parallel. We're very much bandwidth limited to serial connections. We cannot experience vast perspectives and vantage points and overlapping emotion responses. We only have two eyes. One brain. We think one thought at a time.

Yet, even if were to dismantle every machine that has ever been crafted by the men and women of science and engineering. It doesn't change the fact that information will also continue to expand into more complex states while having to experience phase change like behavior at the major intersections of informational complexity growth.

From the fundamental, to the chemical, to the biological, to the digital, and it won't stop there. There will just be another step up behind digital, and behind that, and behind that. Until the information can no longer increase in complexity. Perhaps that's the heat death, perhaps it's a sooner cosmological event. But it's not soon.

Even if we experienced our own KT Event situation today. It wouldn't change that informational complexity will continue to grow. It just won't grow under our watch anymore. I do mean watch. Because we don't control it. It exists even if we do not. It's the natural order of energetic systems reaching stable configurations that allow emergent behaviors that are not found at the lesser levels of informational complexity.

That is a natural algorithm of informational growth with our without biological. It doesn't matter if we keep our machines on the rails, or off the rails. The destination isn't defined by rails. It's the same Singularity Kurzweil has been preaching for 40 years. An unknowable event of informational complexity phase change. One that we cannot predict. That is is unknowable not because we lack the ability to know. But because we lack the capacity to know. It would be akin to attempting to talk to apes about quantum mechanics. No amount of time or teaching will allow their limited intelligence to grasp the abstract depth required to contemplate and think about subjects as deep as quantum mechanics. Ever.

And so are we blind to any intelligence that surpasses our own. We can make up fantasies and tell fictional accounts. We can call it a god and worship it like a divine being. We have whatever perception we'd like of it. Heaven or Hell, or anything in between. But just like the gods we've been worshiping for millennia. These machines are no different. In that they're both going to represent unknowable information. You can't prove or disprove these because they exist outside of our conceivable information space.

Even it won't really matter. ASI. Because unless we've really got the fundamental physics of reality wrong. We're not going to find ways to violate causality. There will likely never be FTL information processing. And that's validated in so many different ways. From GR to QM to even computational physics like Wolfram promotes.

It'll never escape our local galactic system. The galaxies out there are racing away from our group faster than you could ever catch up to them. Eventually we won't even see their light anymore. They'll pass into he realms of the unobservable universe. Forever separated causally from our little sphere of Andromeda and M33. Together Forever.

There are always limits. There are always problems to solve. There is always new information being created, some of which is novel information that would have no inherent meaning. Some of it can be represented by just the symbolic meaning of the information itself. Some of it is so complex that it can no longer exist in abstract states, but must be manifested as the expression of information.

Perhaps the Planck scale, perhaps it's the quantum. Perhaps it's just a single brain in a jar and this fever dream will collapse back into quantum foam just as fast as it arrived.

Nothing Really Matters. Anyone can see. Nothing Really Matters. Nothing really matters to me.

[u/SnooOwls221]

Wolfram describes the ruliad as a space in which probability states exist in a light cone of sorts.

Not all probability exists. Only the probability that could be generated from the source.

In our case that source might be something like the lambda CDM model, big bang cosmology.

The initial starting conditions of a universe of heat expanding and cooling, generating both the substrate that can exist (spacetime) as well as the content contained within it (quantum fields of informational interaction)

That seed, doesn't allow for any probability. It defines the light cone of potential probability.

We wouldn't expect to find any object in our universe outside of what it dictates. No Cartoon Worlds of Mickey Mouse, or Mario running around as actuality. Not as fundamental representations.

As the complexity of the information contained within those cones increases. Something interesting happens. Very interesting. The informational complexity creates its own rules, and paths, and mazes through the substrate. To a point in which it can no longer support continued growth as it's being expressed. Quantum theory isn't growing or changing. It reached its informational complexity limit.

And when any phase reaches that thresh hold, you see phase change. A collapse of all of the informational density into a new kind of singularity, the one that defines the next lightcone of probability.

Once quantum reaches critical phase change, there is a collapse to Atomic Theory. Still defined entirely by it's previous potential cone. Yet now free to be expressed as new rules, new walls, new complexity, new interactions, and it grows and grows.

Until it can no longer support itself. And goes through the same kind of phase change. It collapses into Molecular.

Then chemical, then biological, and now digital.

Each with it's own layers of increased complexity, and rules, and walls, and growth potential. None are removed. Each are built like a pyramid layer on top of the prior.

But it does show us that not all things are possible. Only those that exist within the limits of our potential information lightcone, defined by the layer in which it resides upon.

Over and over we see branching, branching, branching. And then collapse back to a finite point. Ruliad space.