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Tying together some pearls on a strand as they come together. Time for a thread. https://farcaster.xyz/hyp/0x2780bdda Been digging back into "I Am A Strange Loop" a book written back in 2007 by Douglas Hofstadter of Godel, Escher, Bach fame. I was inspired by the theme of recursion that both @know and @downshift mentioned recently. I think I started this book when if first came out but got distracted. I am amazed at how much the themes pick up on what I'm after with this /mirror-loom channel. He gets quickly into how much abstraction leads to what we know of the world around us and how dependent we are upon it in scientific disciplines.
https://farcaster.xyz/hyp/0x17a857f0
Hofstadter's thinking has been reinforced since this time by the likes of Stephen Wolfram, author of New Kind of Science and Eric Hoel, who's theory of causal emergence has been getting some traction (https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.13395). Hard to summarize all this quickly, but that is in fact what this is about: we have to summarize to do sensemaking at certain levels of awareness. It wouldn't do us much good to talk about the velocity of each air molecule outside or we'd never get out of the house. It's much easier to say, "it's 47 deg F, bring a jacket." Long story short, this is the nature of thermodynamics, and of sensory perception, of language, of my quick summary of these ideas here. We summarize, we abstract so that we can make decisions at higher levels of awareness, in different timeframes.
But this summarizing is not just about making relevant information timely in a summarized form (hello, AI), which yes, has tremendous value, but it's also about the very nature of how we perceive time. I mention this in a cast to @mattlee https://farcaster.xyz/hyp/0x3a082b29. Essentially (abstractly?) we see the progression of time due to the very nature of how we summarize. Eggs are not easily uncooked. Broken cups do not reassemble themselves back on to the table. The universe goes from order to disorder.
But as Wolfram says, much of that is in the eye of the beholder. When we see "order" it is because we are effectively summarizing, bringing out the abstract features of something. We condense information to what's relevant. What is seen as "ordered" is more easily condensed.
It's just a matter of statistics and our own perception that we don't see order naturally re-emerge from disorder without energy. This gets into many modern theory of mind, including Karl Friston's Free Energy Principle which is essentially about making predictions (minimizing surprise).
This thread is getting long already but a few final pearls to put on this string. Many have seen the film "Arrival" by Villeneuve, based on the short story "The Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang. The aliens in the story (I don't recall in the film but will need to rewatch) view time differently. It's not so causal and sequential. (Causality can also be viewed through the lens of order and thermodynamics, what is necessary for one arrangement of things to transfer into another). They see time as minimizing/maximizing forces. There is a tautology to the universe, a direction and a meaning, a selective process of paths. Our job is to follow it.
I suspect, but I'm not sure that this is what some martial arts training is about, including Daoist internal alchemy, which is a core to martial arts like Shaoling Kung Fu and Tai Chi. https://www.goldenelixir.com We often hear about them slowing down time or returning to original essence, original being. Perhaps this is a state before discrimination, a state before abstraction, before our natural filtering process, when all forms become a single ocean of being. Being able to act from such a form might undo a lot of biases in seeing and acting in the world, providing new avenues for expression.
From a review on Arrival: "In short, they are there to gift humanity their language, which — when learnt completely — allows a person to view time in full simultaneity, recalling (or precalling) their future as if it were a memory." https://medium.com/@georgegtownsend/revisiting-arrival-7b72c7ec7541
Tying together some pearls on a strand as they come together. Time for a thread. https://farcaster.xyz/hyp/0x2780bdda Been digging back into "I Am A Strange Loop" a book written back in 2007 by Douglas Hofstadter of Godel, Escher, Bach fame. I was inspired by the theme of recursion that both @know and @downshift mentioned recently. I think I started this book when if first came out but got distracted. I am amazed at how much the themes pick up on what I'm after with this /mirror-loom channel. He gets quickly into how much abstraction leads to what we know of the world around us and how dependent we are upon it in scientific disciplines.
https://farcaster.xyz/hyp/0x17a857f0
Hofstadter's thinking has been reinforced since this time by the likes of Stephen Wolfram, author of New Kind of Science and Eric Hoel, who's theory of causal emergence has been getting some traction (https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.13395). Hard to summarize all this quickly, but that is in fact what this is about: we have to summarize to do sensemaking at certain levels of awareness. It wouldn't do us much good to talk about the velocity of each air molecule outside or we'd never get out of the house. It's much easier to say, "it's 47 deg F, bring a jacket." Long story short, this is the nature of thermodynamics, and of sensory perception, of language, of my quick summary of these ideas here. We summarize, we abstract so that we can make decisions at higher levels of awareness, in different timeframes.
But this summarizing is not just about making relevant information timely in a summarized form (hello, AI), which yes, has tremendous value, but it's also about the very nature of how we perceive time. I mention this in a cast to @mattlee https://farcaster.xyz/hyp/0x3a082b29. Essentially (abstractly?) we see the progression of time due to the very nature of how we summarize. Eggs are not easily uncooked. Broken cups do not reassemble themselves back on to the table. The universe goes from order to disorder.
But as Wolfram says, much of that is in the eye of the beholder. When we see "order" it is because we are effectively summarizing, bringing out the abstract features of something. We condense information to what's relevant. What is seen as "ordered" is more easily condensed.
It's just a matter of statistics and our own perception that we don't see order naturally re-emerge from disorder without energy. This gets into many modern theory of mind, including Karl Friston's Free Energy Principle which is essentially about making predictions (minimizing surprise).
This thread is getting long already but a few final pearls to put on this string. Many have seen the film "Arrival" by Villeneuve, based on the short story "The Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang. The aliens in the story (I don't recall in the film but will need to rewatch) view time differently. It's not so causal and sequential. (Causality can also be viewed through the lens of order and thermodynamics, what is necessary for one arrangement of things to transfer into another). They see time as minimizing/maximizing forces. There is a tautology to the universe, a direction and a meaning, a selective process of paths. Our job is to follow it.
I suspect, but I'm not sure that this is what some martial arts training is about, including Daoist internal alchemy, which is a core to martial arts like Shaoling Kung Fu and Tai Chi. https://www.goldenelixir.com We often hear about them slowing down time or returning to original essence, original being. Perhaps this is a state before discrimination, a state before abstraction, before our natural filtering process, when all forms become a single ocean of being. Being able to act from such a form might undo a lot of biases in seeing and acting in the world, providing new avenues for expression.
From a review on Arrival: "In short, they are there to gift humanity their language, which — when learnt completely — allows a person to view time in full simultaneity, recalling (or precalling) their future as if it were a memory." https://medium.com/@georgegtownsend/revisiting-arrival-7b72c7ec7541
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Tying together some pearls on a strand as they come together. Time for a thread. 🧵 Been digging back into "I Am A Strange Loop" a book written back in 2007 by Douglas Hofstadter of Godel, Escher, Bach fame. I was inspired by the theme of recursion that both @know and @downshift.eth mentioned recently. I think I started this book when if first came out but got distracted. I am amazed at how much the themes pick up on what I'm after with this /mirror-loom channel. He gets quickly into how much abstraction leads to what we know of the world around us and how dependent we are upon it in scientific disciplines. 1/5 https://farcaster.xyz/hyp/0x17a857f0
Hofstadter's thinking has been reinforced since this time by the likes of Stephen Wolfram, author of New Kind of Science and Eric Hoel, who's theory of causal emergence has been getting some traction. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.13395 Hard to summarize all this quickly, but that is in fact what this is about: we have to summarize to do sense making at certain levels of awareness. It wouldn't do us much good to talk about the velocity of each air molecule outside or we'd never get out of the house. It's much easier to say, "it's 47 deg F, bring a jacket." Long story short, this is the nature of thermodynamics, and of sensory perception, of language, of my quick summary of these ideas here. We summarize, we abstract so that we can make decisions at higher levels of awareness, in different timeframes. 2/5
But this summarizing is not just about making relevant information timely in a summarized form (hello, AI), which yes, has tremendous value, but it's also about the very nature of how we perceive time. I mention this in a cast to @mattlee https://farcaster.xyz/hyp/0x3a082b29. Essentially (abstractly?) we see the progression of time due to the very nature of how we summarize. Eggs are not easily uncooked. Broken cups do not reassemble themselves back on to the table. The universe goes from order to disorder. But as Wolfram says, much of that is in the eye of the beholder. When we see "order" it is because we are effectively summarizing, bringing out the abstract features of something. We condense information to what's relevant. What is seen as "ordered" is more easily condensed. 3/5
It's just a matter of statistics and our own perception that we don't see order naturally re-emerge from disorder without energy. This gets into many modern theory of mind, including Karl Friston's Free Energy Principle which is essentially about making predictions (minimizing surprise). This thread is getting long already but a few final pearls to put on this string. Many have seen the film "Arrival" by Villeneuve https://medium.com/@georgegtownsend/revisiting-arrival-7b72c7ec7541, based on the short story "The Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang. The aliens in the story (I don't recall in the film but will need to rewatch) view time differently. It's not so causal and sequential. (Causality can also be viewed through the lens of order and thermodynamics, what is necessary for one arrangement of things to transfer into another). They see time as minimizing/maximizing forces. There is a tautology to the universe, a direction and a meaning, a selective process of paths. Our job is to follow it. 4/5
I suspect, but I'm not sure that this is what some martial arts training is about, including Daoist internal alchemy, which is a core to martial arts like Shaoling Kung Fu and Tai Chi. https://www.goldenelixir.com We often hear about them slowing down time or returning to original essence, original being. Perhaps this is a state before discrimination, a state before abstraction, before our natural filtering process, when all forms become a single ocean of being. Being able to act from such a form might undo a lot of biases in seeing and acting in the world, providing new avenues for expression. From the write-up above on Arrival: "In short, they are there to gift humanity their language, which — when learnt completely — allows a person to view time in full simultaneity, recalling (or precalling) their future as if it were a memory." 5/5
Gonna nerd snipe me