learn-lang-diary-part-ten-C.lyx

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\begin_layout Title
Diary - Part Ten-C
\end_layout

\begin_layout Date
January 2025 – present
\end_layout

\begin_layout Author
Linas Vepštas
\end_layout

\begin_layout Abstract
Unlike parts one through nine in this series, this one is not really about
 the language-learning effort.
 It is instead a private diary; a continuation of Part Ten-B, which got
 over-long.
 It is not curated for human consumption; I am making the assumption that
 no human being will ever actually read this.
 Thus, its filled with random stuff I feel like writing.
 Some of it is very personal, some of it is nonsense.
 Mostly, I am finding that the act of writing helps otherwise vague and
 scattered thoughts quantum-collapse into a more coherent form, where I
 can examine them, like a dead butterfly pinned down in a display case.
 Dead words.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Abstract
Human readers are discouraged from reading this, on the grounds that there
 are probably better uses of your time, than to sync your thought-patterns
 onto mine own.
 Live your life.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Section*
Introduction
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Part Ten already got an introduction.
 How many more do you want?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Subsection*
29 December 2024
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
It's a good time to start afresh.
 In short – dafuq am I doing? I seem to be going at max RPM in first gear.
 Is this supposed to be fun? I'm burning out writing the Atomese sensori-motor
 code.
 In the previous diary entry, I convinced myself that this was not a totally
 stupid idea.
 Now, I am not so sure.
 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
One of the early visions for Atomese was to create affordances suitable
 for algorithmic boostrapping.
 This is a nice vision, but perhaps a mistake – and on multiple levels,
 a mistake.
 Perhaps I got lost in the details.
 The details are a vision of computing from 100 years ago: that lambda calculus
 can say anything sayable.
 Updated to more modern time, we find that lambda calculs is the internal
 language of Cartesian Closed Categories.
 These are big words, and the bigness of them is beguiling, and I think
 lie at the heart of the mistake.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Thanks to my physics/math background, it was very natural for me to dive
 deeply into the microscopic details of structural atoms.
 Perhaps one of my finest acheivements is coming to an understanding that
 jigsaw pieces are perhaps an ideal structural element.
 Jigsaw can be used to build anything.
 They are more naturally expressive than lambdas, and have natural identificatio
n with tensors (and the many-world parallelisms of tensors).
 Making them ideal for Bayesian priors, and other many-choice settings.
 They have natural interpretation as graphs.
 But they're typed, and so carry significant information (having significant
 information content.) And I didn't invent them.
 Many other have invented and reinvented them, over the decades.
 So, all around goodness.
 So why am I crying? 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Well, if the goal is to build AGI ...
 well, if jigsaws are like atoms (like literally, cehmical atoms) I'm daydreamin
g of creating biology from them.
 Well, that's nuts: biomolecules have millios of atoms (daltons, or whatever).
 I'm not gonna get there.
 I might discover some cute low-level assemblies.
 But that's it.
 Not scalable.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
OK, second example.
 It's like day-dreaming of building a computer from individual transistors.
 Of course, this has been done, but it took decades and tens of thousands
 of engineers.
 There's pretty much exactly zero infrastructure for working with jigsaws.
 Like just about none at all.
 So I'm at square one.
 No one is interested, no one is helping.
 Basically, it won't happen.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
OK, third example.
 It's like day-dreaming of building a neural net out of individual neurons.
 Oh wait ...
 well, again, this has happened.
 Again, this took decades and tens of thousands of academics, grad students,
 engineers, tinkerers of all kinds.
 So, yes, neural nets all start with a single sum and a single sigmoid,
 but the scaling is the result of a massive engineering effort.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I think jigsaws are as promising as any of these things, as a basic, basal,
 low-level self-assembling structural component.
 Its just that ...
 I'm at square one, and no one shares my vision.
 So its not going anywhere.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
What to do? Well, the lesson to be taken from LLM's or, perhaps, Microsoft
 Copilot, is that the world is filled with human affordances.
 At this stage, in the early 21st century, it is easier to build neural
 nets that can work with the available human affordances, such as coding
 in java or python or whatever, than it is to create this assembly-like
 intermediate language I call 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

Atomese
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 Atomese was meant to make it esy for machines.
 But it starts at such a low level, that leveraging up seems single-handedly
 impossible.
 Just teach the computer to code in python, and be done with it.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Hah.
 And there's the rub.
 Current state of the art in neural nets suggests that they'll never be
 able to arrive at the abstractions needed for doing the kind of reification
 that humans natrually do.
 So licking back and waiting for AI to magically learn how to program seems
 ...
 well, it renders me into an observer, rather than participant.
 I'd rather participate, for now.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So what can I grasp at, what can I do, to be effective? Well, I've got several
 more visions.
 I articulated them on the opencog wiki in the last few days, and also in
 a readme file somewhere.
 But again – they're visions, and from what I can tell, visions shared by
 no one, so I'm like – roll up your sleeves, and get to work, you dog.
 This leads to a feeling of hopelessness.
 I burn out from going max RPM in first gear.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
What should I do instead? When I ask this question explicitly, I rapidly
 get to the general perception of well, I can rattle off all the social,
 psychological, cultural, political, economic activities that humans engage
 in, and they are so varied.
 Somehow, being a medical doctor is worthier than sitting around doing cross-wor
ds all day.
 or being a junkie.
 Western culture got that part right.
 But perhaps medical doctors burn out: there's always one more patient to
 treat.
 So, me here: there's always one more technical paper to read, one more
 line of code to write.
 Max RPM in first gear.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The current Western-civ definition of shifting into higher gear is to garner
 money, power, fame, influence.
 Gaining any of those takes effort and talent, and like any human activities,
 take decades to hone one's skills.
 And as that is done, I read less papers.
 Perhaps this should be like atheltics: don't overtrain one muscle group,
 while leaving others atrophied? I've let my power, fame, money and influence
 atrophy.
 And now here I am, wimpering like the old man that I am, that my ethereal
 being hurts.
 The physical therapist suggests some simple exercises for the weak and
 dibilitated: pay the bills, read the email.
 Like any ordinary person recuperating frome an injury, taking the doctors
 advice is hard.
 I don't want to go out and exercise, to go out and exercise and gain the
 strength so I can go to the olympics of wealth, fame and power.
 Unh, unh.
 Cause people do what they want to do, and I am a person.
 Perhaps whats-hisname from Star Wars could say 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

force yourself
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, but well, dafuq.
 I can force myself to ride a bike up that hill in Southern Walnut Creek
 bike trail.
 I can force myself to do what it takes to win gold medals at the US masters
 nationals.
 I do NOT have to force myself to read textbooks on general relativity or
 string theory, because I find that actuall fun.
 I do have to force myself to pay the blls and read the emails, cause that's
 not fun.
 Or something.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I feel like I am procrastinating.
 And, well, I am.
 Because the duties that I shirk do not provide the dopamine reward that
 I've grown accustomed to.
 I'm a goddamn dope addict, addicted to reading math textbooks, instead
 of doing whatever the fuck I should be doing.
 Crap.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Worse: I engage in activities without asessing the worthiness of those activites.
 Like I spent a month hacking on the 25th anniversary edition of Bigfoot.
 (the i370 code base.) Its useless, cause no one but no one except maybe
 Paul Edwards, and even then that;s a maybe ...
 no one will ever use it and no one will ever care.
 I might as well have spent the month doing crossword puzzles, or mainlining
 heroin, or something.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
There was one minor utility: in the back of my mind, I got to review the
 landscape of operating system technology, from assemblers and compilers
 to kernels, and file systems and containers.
 It lead to my playing with Ceph, so now I've got my home cloud.
 And its interesting to see how Ceph is multi-machine autonomous in a way
 that single-machine OS'es are not.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Which brings me back to where I started: my current path of tinkering with
 Atomese is not going to recreate Ceph in my lifetime.
 So I'm torn.
 One part of me rests completely assured that million-dimensional vectors
 of jigsaws are absolutely the correct approach.
 Another part of me is repelled by the daunting task of taking the next
 steps.
 Or mis-steps, as they may be.
 A third part of me laments my wasted youth.
 A fourth part of me is more than happy to also waste my waning years.
 A fifth part of me is deluded into thinking that perhaps by verbalizing
 into this diary, something will happen.
 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
But is 10PM Sunday night, and I'm tired.
 I think I will go do something relaxing.
 I think I will got read more of David Tong's Cosmology.
 It's a nice treatment.
 I'd never really seen a decent treatment of FLRW before.
 It's not super-complex; the lectures are aimed at undergrads.
 But they're focused, concise, clear, well-written.
 Unlike a lot of crap I read.
 Why can't people write? I wonder if I can write.
 I think I can, but no one reads what i write, so maybe my topics, my style,
 the things I have to say just aren't, well, they're just not Kardashian
 enough.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
With that, good night, adieu.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Subsection*
30 Dec 2024
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The Big Think.
 Somehow, for decades, longer, since college, before, I've avoided actually
 thinking about the 
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

big question
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

: what is AGI, really? I'm going to avoid it a bit more, with a few paragraphs
 of autobiography.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I remember the first time I built something.
 I stacked two blocks, one on top of another, and they didn't fall down.
 I got to three even, but could not move past that.
 Mother had gone shopping, I guess, and left my sister and I in the basement.
 The basement was kind of a safe space: nothing there, no way to escape,
 nothing to break, no way to get hurt, warm.
 I must have been four.
 My sister is a year and a half younger, I think she was sitting, crawling.
 I tried to show her how amazing it is to stack blocks, but she seemed disintere
sted.
 I think I even got her to stack two.
 No more.
 Actually, I think I got maybe five high.
 There were arch components, and a big trangular block, for a Roman forum
 look.
 I might have stacked two columns, and put that on top.
 See, I don't clearly remember that any more, I remember the thrill of getting
 to three, and once that was mastered, the rest was down-hill.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I remember what the basement looked like.
 Grey enamel floor.
 Stairs in the center, no railings.
 Work-bench to one side, open space to the other, and then the furnace room.
 I could draw a plan, right now; I remember it photographically.
 Well, I did spend a lot of time down there.
 79th and Justine, Chicago, Illinois.
 I remember a lot of that interior.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I remember the day I learned to read.
 Fox in Sox.
 Doctor Suess.
 Mom had a record of that, vinyl LP.
 She put it on.
 Somewhere in the middle, I realized that the words I was hearing correlated
 with the symbols aka words on the page.
 Put it on again, from the beginning.
 Sure enough! The first 3,6,9,12 words correlate perfectly! The first two
 or three pages are similar, having similar arrangements of words, but subtly
 different, and from those subtle differences, I could tell that the spoken
 words started on page one, and not on page two or three.
 That they were in order, and not backwards order, or jumbled.
 The were perfectly synced, and started at the begining.
 I got so busy verifying the correlations on the first three pages, that
 I lost track on page four.
 No matter.
 Start it again.
 Yes, they correlation between sound and words persists through page five.
 I form a hypothesis: I bet it works that way, to the end of the book (which
 seems impossibly long, but there we go...) 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I remember explicitly formulating this hypothesis.
 Of making this prediction.
 Prediction is the wrong word.
 Nor was it an 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

a ha
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 moment.
 I mean it was, but more like, 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

gee, I bet this goes on to the end
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 Not betting with money, but more concretely: if I were to listen to the
 sounds again, they would match the words.
 The ability to listen to sounds again was unquestionable, a subconscious
 given, not available for analysis.
 Ditto the looking at the pages of the book.
 These were not topics of awareness.
 What was in the awareness was that if the actions were repeated, the correlatio
ns would persist.
 Perhaps inference is the right word.
 Prediction is the act of seeing something (visually) and knowing what will
 happen next (in time).
 But this correlation was not in time or space, it was abstract.
 Thus, I was not predicting anything.
 Rather, I made the inference that the sounds and the words are corellated.
 On the third or fourth listen I got maybe ten pages in, to the part 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

Knox in sox on fox in box.
 With a paddle.
 On a noodle eating poodle.
 ...
 a poodle battle paddle noodle eating poodle..
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 I got tangled up in there.
 I think my Mom didn't want to listen to it one more time, so that was it
 for the day.
 I got to finish the book, and eventually memorize it, over the next week.
 But that was it, that is how I learned to read.
 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
A very conscious process, with explicit conscious formulation of hypothesis.
 Starting with a dawning awareness of correlations, the game was on: a sleuthing
, a analyszing a detective mystery: if we go back, and play the record again,
 then the words wer correlate, and they will do so exactly, and not just
 in some impressionistic form, but precisely.
 All this was in my conscious awareness: that it could have been merely
 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

close and suggestive
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, and my hypothesis was that, no, it would not be just 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

suggestive of
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 but that it would be exact.
 I was very concerned with lacunae.
 What if the spoken word skipped over pages? I paid attention to flipping
 the age: that the sounds, the spoken words, would correlate with what was
 non the next page, not skipping a word or two, not sliding in some syllables
 that preserved the beat and rhyme, but failed to actually correlate with
 what was printed on the page.
 All this was in my explicit conscious awareness.
 You, dear reader, might think I am confabulating, but I am not.
 This is what my memory functions recorded of the incident.
 They recorded the process of awning awareness, the inference, the hypothesis
 formulation, the explicit formulation of multiple competing hypothesis
 (that the correlation was poor, inexact, skipped over words...) the surmise,
 surmission, that the correlation would be exact.
 The hope that it would be exact.
 Lurking in the back was even a sense of disappointment: if the spoken words
 failed to correlate with the text, I would be disappointed.
 A grand insight would be dashed.
 Reality would be random and vague and blurry.
 I wanted it to be sharp.
 I hoped it would be sharp.
 This is the emotional side.
 My memories do a poor job of recording emotions, but in this case, I know
 for sure that it would have been a disappointment, if the words didn't
 correlate, and that this sleuthing adventure would be quickly abandoned,
 and forgotten, if this was not the case.
 I had better things to do with my time, than to listen to some artistic
 impressionistic verbal recital that vaguely dealt with the same topics
 as the written book.
 I mean, that was fun and OK-ish, but definitely weak sauce.
 I could do something else.
 Like maybe wander into the living room, or something.
 There were lots of other interesting things to do.
 Crawl under the table, or something.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Of course, I remember the floor plan.
 Visually.
 The radio, Blaupunkt.
 The record-player, in a cabinet above, a cabinet my father had made as
 a college design project.
 We still have it.
 It's up in the attic now.
 The aluminum legs are not quite strong enough to bear the weight.
 Its modern.
 It looks like a Mondrian painting, but furniture.
 Three open bays, a fourth bay with a black formica door.
 But I wander off-topic.
 Of course, everyone remembers many things, for may different reasons, in
 many different ways, in all sorts of different abstraction settings, with
 different kinds of focus on what was important, and what wasn't.
 Some people are ruled emotionally much more; others are analytic.
 I suppose I have to class myself on the analytic side.
 But I'm also normal.
 I'm good with the visual arts.
 I like music, I could play guitar.
 I like sports.
 Socializing with other people is my weak spot; I don't do much of this.
 i think my parents are partly responsible.
 They knew I was smart, and they very much did not want me to hang out with
 other kids, or, at least, other kids who were not Lithuanian.
 SO I got Audrius as a good friend.
 Audrius was not a genius.
 But I digress; this is not meant to be about my childhood, but about AGI.
 So, lets get back on track.
 and that means more autobiography, before I tackle AGI head-on.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
My aunt taught me how to read.
 Aunt Irena.
 When my parents visited, she gave me and my sister some Donald Duck comic
 books to look over.
 She had quite the collection.
 (She also had first editions of Ancient Greek poetry, Sophocles, or something
 like that.
 She loved to read.
 I have a photo of here, knee-deep in Lake Michigan, with two other friends,
 holding a book up.
 In water, With friends.
 Books don't go into lakes, with water and friends.
 But this is my Aunt Irena.
 So...) Anyway, so my uncle walks in, and catches us red-handed: we are merely
 looking at the pictures, and not actually reading the text.
 And it is clarified that at least I know how to read.
 My sister, maybe not quite yet.
 Unclear.
 But me, I can read, and my uncle is demanding in that way: you will submit
 a book report.
 You will read this, and next time I see you, you will submit a book report.
 This is the kind of threatening demands he would make.
 Take fun things and turn them into not-fun.
 My aunt intervenes, I think.
 She's much more gentle.
 She says, don't grill them.
 Never mind him.
 It's OK.
 But you really should read the words.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
And they're right.
 When you read the words to a Donald Duck comic book, the story really has
 nothing at all to do with what you imagined it was about.
 It's completely and totally different.
 The words and the pictures kind of fail to correlate entirely.
 The pictures tell one story, but the words tell a quite different one.
 The pictures are only there for illustration, decoration.
 They loosely, impressionistically illustrate important events in the written
 text, but only loosely.
 This comes as a mixture of disappointment and surprise, and an acknowledgment
 of defeat.
 My defense to my uncle was that I already knew what the story was, because
 I could tell, by looking at the pictures.
 I didn't have to read no god-damned words.
 I didn't swear, of course, I didn't know any swear words.
 But emotionally, it was like that.
 Fuck the words, I don't need no stinkin words.
 I can tell what's happening from the pictures, and goddamned pedants like
 you want me to fucking suffer and read fucking words for something that's
 already obvious from the pictures.
 This is what went through my mind.
 Fuck this shit.
 Words.
 Screw that.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
And yet, I sort of had to acknowledge that the story plot, as told by the
 pictures, was pretty friggin blurry and vague.
 I spent a *lot* of time decoding those pictures, trying to figure out what
 the story was, and failing.
 The panels in a Donald Duck comic book DO NOT TELL A STORY.
 Disney sucked, in that way.
 He could illustrate, but he could not make his illustrations talk.
 They were mute snapshots.
 He had to fucking fall back onto words to get the point across, and those
 words really for the most part had almost nothing at all to do with any
 implied plot-line you could extract from the pictures.
 This is what I was thinking.
 This is how I thought.
 Well, I wasn't directly critical of Disney, not yet, because I hadn't yet
 discovered this non-correlation.
 But I did read one or two or maybe three comic books that day, and I do
 have to say that Disney wrecked the magic.
 There was magic in the pictures, and the words fucking wrecked it.
 I mean, the words were fun, and I do have to say that the plot lines were
 far, far more complex and sophisticated than what the pictures told.
 So, if you could gain satisfaction from reading words, then I guess that's
 an OK thing, but it came at the cost of ruining the pleasure and enjoyment
 of looking at the pictures.
 So, yeah, Disney sucked.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I mean, I read a few more comic books in the years to come, but it was never
 actually fun.
 It was a pass-time.
 It was an OK way to spend some time, but it was not something I looked
 forward to, not something were I'd think, wow, now I get to do this, can't
 wait! Disney ruined comics.
 I wonder if this is an issue with Disney, and other artists don't have
 this problem, or what.
 But I think this stuff is invisible to adults.
 Some adult somewhere would have to take active, conscious effort to do
 better.
 Well, look, maybe its like one of those New Yorker 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

write a caption for this drawing
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 contests.
 See, what Disney should have done was to draw the pictures first, and then
 given them to someone else, to come up with a story and plot.
 But I think he was an illustrator.
 He wrote the words, first, and then just illustrated.
 I have no clue if he was conscious of this.
 If he was aware of this, and did this intentionally.
 I'm thinking he didn't.
 He thought he was creating something fun, imagined that he was creating
 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

magic kingdoms
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 but I can personally attest that it was the opposite.
 He destroyed magic.
 There was magic in the pictures, and the text fucking destroyed the magic.
 And the swear word 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

fucking destroyed
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 is really what it felt like, when I was 5 or 6 years old, at my uncles
 house (apartment, actually.
 58th and Dorchester, Hyde Park).
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
If you don't believe me, just go to the Magic Kingdoms in Florida or California.
 There's damned little, no magic in them.
 They're mostly flat, boring, stupid and meaningless.
 I don't understand what the fuck people see in those places.
 They're just dumb.
 Fuck that.
 No adventure.
 Want to have adventure? Go to fucking Paris.
 Don't go to the fake-Paris cafe in Disneyland.
 But I digress.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Oh, one digression that might be worthwhile, because it explores the world
 of somatic feelings.
 So, as an adult, working for IBM, I'm sent to SIGGRAPH in Florida.
 I book a hotel in Disneyland.
 The Woodlands lodge, when it was brand new.
 Construction completed just weeks earlier.
 I have a late flight in, evening.
 Flying sucks.
 I actually planned to come a day early, to poke around, so took an evening
 flight so that I would not miss too much work.
 And its a long drive from the airport to Disney.
 Stand in a rental car line, all that hassle.
 And its hot, and its muggy, its Florida in the summertime.
 And I refuse to run the A/C in the car, on the grounds of some kind of
 principle, or something.
 So, I'm overdressed, hot muggy, wind-blown from driving wth the windows
 rolled down.
 Tried, vague headache.
 Lugging a heavy suitcase that hurts my hands and arms and back to lift,
 hurts my legs to walk and stand straight after sitting in a car for hours.
 Exhaustion.
 And I walk into the lobby of the Woodlands Hotel.
 And its cold.
 Checkin counter.
 I mean, cold.
 But refreshingly cold.
 And there's a scent of burning pine.
 And as I'm at the counter, waiting for my room key, I'm already being transport
ed to Northern Wisconsin.
 A chill in the air, a mild aroma of pine wafting through the air.
 And its very relaxing.
 After that drive in the Florida humidity, its the perfect antidote.
 And its subtle and its gentle and its refreshing, and it feels good.
 It hits the spot.
 Now this, this is Disney magic.
 This really worked.
 This is what it took, what it feels like.
 Ah.
 Soothing, great, wonderful.
 Relaxing, refreshing.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Well, the wonderful doesn't come until I start looking around the lobby.
 OMG.
 Its a cavernous Canadian, Seattle woodlands lodge.
 There is a two story-tall fireplace in the corner, with a roaring fire.
 To heat the place, because its frankly a bit chilly.
 And it is obviously the source of that burning pine smell.
 And the absurdity of it all is not lost on me: I know, I am aware that
 it is like 95 and humid outside, and its like 65 and dry and piney inside,
 so they've got the A/C cranked, and they are using an open fireplace to
 heat the place.
 Which is how it's done when you're in the Canadian woods on a cool evening,
 and in Canada (or Northern Wisconsin), *all* evenings are cool.
 And I'm looking around, and the whole place is decorated in Cowboys and
 Indians shibboleth.
 Boy-scout knives and axes.
 Drawings of teepees.
 And its luxury.
 So one thing that catches my eye is the floor is half marble, and half
 carpet, and these intermingle along curvy lines, streams.
 Not straight, but meandering.
 And I'm think 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

that's pretty classy, right there That.
 This is luxury
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 I mean, the two-story fireplace in the corner, OK.
 But the attention to details, the floor of marble and carpet, that was
 something.
 And you know what? Those curvy lines lead to somewhere.
 There is a small stream in the floor.
 There is a small river-stream in the floor.
 It starts at the end of the lobby.
 You won't find it if you don't explore.
 It's not there to hit you over the head, its subtle and off to one side.
 But it is definitely water, and it definitely is flowing, and its a stream,
 a woodlands stream.
 Like in Wisconsin.
 But its late and its time to go to my room, and I've got these boyscout
 themes percolating all through, coloring my emotions and perceptions and
 visually smack in your face, because like someone took my Boy Scouts of
 America Handbook, and literally copied pictures from it onto the walls
 of this hotel.
 And that is how I go to bed, go to sleep.
 Transported to a wonderland.
 So, yes, Disney is magic.
 Done right, its magic.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I did go there, maybe a decade later.
 It was run down.
 Too many grimy kids scratching the paint off the walls, and puking onto
 the carpet and sticking their grubby little hands into the woodlands stream.
 And I think the fireplace was turned off.
 But that was daytime, maybe they run the fireplace only at night.
 I dunno.
 Magic spells work only once.
 You can't go back there again.
 This is the tragedy of being caught here and now, with your memories.
 There is no time-travel.
 There is no rewind button.
 Careful, Linas, lest your memories turn back to physics.
 I finished Tong's Lecture 2 on Cosmology: Hot Universe, last night.
 I like it.
 Pleasant reading.
 So here I am, typing these words, entering them into the future light-cone
 of my personal sphere of influence in a de Sitter universe.
 I digress.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Back on track: so my Aunt feeds me sci-fi.
 I remember the first short story I ever read.
 I don't remember what it was about, but I do remember reading it.
 Wisconsin.
 Northern Woodlands.
 Nothing to fucking do there.
 Boring, gotta do something.
 The Donald Duck comic books suck (there's piles of them, up there) and
 so I pick up an issue of Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine.
 And I pick the absolute shortest thing that I can find that isn't letters
 to the editor.
 And its kind of disappointing, because its long.
 Like, over twenty pages.
 Oi vey.
 Long slog ahead.
 But whatever.
 I'm not gonna read another comic book, so dammit, if this is it, this is
 it.
 Its still early in the day, and its not like I have something better to
 do.
 So I read the short story.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
And its not bad.
 And, you know, I could read more.
 (I think this is the next day.) and I think there is one more short story.
 But then there is this 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

novella
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 And it is fucking seventy pages long.
 And I'm not going to read that, because it is just wayyyy too fucking long.
 And that sucks, and surely they could have put some short stories in there
 instead, instead of this fucking long novella.
 But, you know, out of desperation, I read it.
 It was not even science fiction, adding insult to injury.
 Thinking back, I think it was Stephen King.
 Something about a man and a high tower and a dusty bottle of whiskey.
 Stephen King has something with those elements.
 I even think they made it into a TV novella or something.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Anyway, I'm raised on sci-fi.
 Of course, the Asimov robot stories.
 And not just some of them, but I think all of them.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
But I also spend a large chunk of my childhood reading electronics manuals.
 Why? I don't know.
 There were some at the library, and it's what I picked, and I could not
 tell you why I picked those instead of something else.
 So that's curious: I can tell you minute details about learning to read,
 but nothing at all about why I chose electronics later in life.
 So I get to the school career counseling session, and you are supposed
 to pick out three different career tracks: these are printed 8.5x11 cards,
 and they each describe a possible career, and you are supposed to pick
 out three of them, something you might want to do with your life, and discuss
 them with the career counselor at the front of the room.
 So I pick three: electronics design, and radio repair, and some distant
 third, like maybe running a TV station, something I did not want to do,
 but you have to pick three, so whatever.
 And the counselor gets mad: you were supposed to pick three *different*
 things, you moron, and you picked all three the same.
 So it is a very very short counseling session.
 He says 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

you know, like sports, or movie acting, or something
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, but I knew how utterly stupid that was.
 Linas, the football star? Really? I don't think so.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So I get to college, and it is time to pick a major, and I pick physics.
 Why? I can tell you exactly why.
 A total and complete lack of imagination.
 Sure, history and art are options.
 I liked Lithuanian history, especially the knights: Karalius Mindaugas.
 And Algirdas and Kestutis.
 The union with the Poles, Liublino Unija, Jadwiga and all that, that kind
 of sucked.
 And I liked Art with a capital A.
 My uncle was a world-class fine artist, painting brilliant paintings.
 And its all lost.
 Well, not lost: those paintings are in my mom's house, and some are now
 in Kaunas, Ciurlionoio museum donation.
 And some canvases in Chicago, the watch-a-ma-call-it Lithuanian museum
 in, wherever that is.
 I don't have much dealings there.
 His paintings sit, forgotten, in a dark basement.
 It sucks.
 And I don't know how to fix that.
 My uncle deserves wayyyyy more recognition than he's gotten.
 Alas.
 Someday, I'll get around to this.
 But I digress.
 Back to college.
 I mean, I'm like really good at art, and I took four fucking years of Art
 History in high school.
 I know this shit.
 But the college major is physics, because, well, because.
 I don't think I even consider anything else, outside of these three.
 All other academic fields of study are on the other side of my personal
 cosmological event horizon.
 Mathematics would have been a distant fourth place.
 Later on I learn how to make mean, snide remarks about PoliSci, but I never
 get a chance to actually say them out loud.
 So physics it is.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The first-year class is a wash-out class.
 Starts with 150 students in a large ampitheatre lecture hall in Ryerson.
 Its already 120 by two weeks in, noticeably thinning, and maybe 70 by the
 fifth week.
 Half wash out in five weeks.
 I'm guessing the quarter ends with about 60.
 Year (two more quarters) end with maybe 50, and sophomore year starts with
 45, and I think its mostly stable.
 Maybe down to 40 or so, I dunno.
 I'm smoking lots of pot, and partying cause that's what you do in college.
 Its either that, or studying in the library from noon to closing time at
 10 PM.
 Fourth floor was my favorite.
 The cool kids say the 3rd floor was the best.
 What do I know.
 I'd try the 3rd floor, time to time.
 I liked the 4th better.
 Front of building, by the window bays.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Junior year, I realize physics is boring.
 I'm desperate.
 I'm ready to slit my wrists.
 No I'm not: that's just hyperbole, a hyperbolic statement.
 It's just something you say, its not like I ever thought about wrists or
 bleeding or killing myself or anything even remotely related to anything
 at all like that.
 But its an excellent hyperbolic statement.
 I'm ready to slit my wrists, that's how boring physics is.
 So I want to change my major.
 To what? I see the counselor.
 Well, there's PERL.
 Join PERL, you can write your own major.
 Do anything you fucking want, a special advisor will oversee your studies.
 Sounds great! I say.
 Sign me up!
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
There's just one catch.
 There's requirements.
 Two years Latin, one year Ancient Greek.
 You must be joking.
 This is my junior year, you think I'm going to...
 what, you're crazy.
 PERL stands for 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

Politics Economics Rhetoric and Law
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, and if you want to write your own major studying AI, that's in-bounds
 and you can do that.
 And I say, thank you but no thank you.
 I sign up for a course on anthropology.
 South Sea Islands, and Structuralism, and all that.
 Another on child development.
 Lots of Piaget.
 I sit in the math library, and study books on Turing machines and Church
 and Lambda calculus, my junior year.
 I'm drawn to it magnetically, its like the hippest, coolest and most awesome
 thing to be found in the library, and I fervently wish for a universe where
 I could be transported, to study those things full time.
 But I never get very far, very deep, because, you know regular homework
 is, like, due, and there's only so much time for fucking around, no matter
 how beguiling the promise of AI in Turing machines might be.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
And one of the junior-year classes is intro to quantum mechanics.
 And things get weird here.
 So, first of all, its totally impenetrable.
 Ugo Fano, he must be 70 by now, he's fucking old, and I'm like still a
 teenager, I think 19.
 Much much later I find out I'm the youngest kid in my class.
 At University of Chicago.
 So I guess that makes me smart.
 Anyway, Ugo Fano is old and the textbook is impenetrable.
 It is a hand-typed manuscript, with hand-drawings.
 Published by the University of Chicago Press.
 Much later, second or third quarter, one girl in the class (the only girl?
 I wish I could remember her name, but I can't.
 She was ranked #2 in the graduating class.
 I was ranked #3.
 Who was #1? Fuck if I know.
 #1 was some home-schooled kid, like fourteen, who was like, you know too
 fucking young to even attended the classes the rest of us did.
 See, I'm smart.
 Youngest kid in the college, who is actually attending classes.
 Ranked #3 of all graduating physics majors.
 Number fucking three.
 Everything in my life, I'm number three.
 It's quite humbling.
 Even a kind of a curse.
 I could have been just plain stupid.
 Or I could have been number one and shrugged it off.
 But no, I'm number three.
 And still shrugging it off.
 But I digress.) So she comes back from the stacks, and she's got a book
 that explains what quantum spin is, cause you know its a total fucking
 mystery, what the fuck is spin? And there's this glossy, hard-cover textbook,
 classic crisp high-kaolin-content glossy paper textbook pages, elegant
 typesetting, good layout.
 Like a super-mainstream college textbook, the very model of what a textboook
 should be.
 And it explains spin.
 And there a diagram, and equations, recognizable equations, that we understand
 and somehow shed insight and understanding.
 And we are both like, wtf, why can't we use this textbook for class? This
 textbook is clear.
 And who wrote it? Ugo Fano.
 Yes.
 The same guy who is teaching us now.
 He wrote it 20 or 30 years earlier, published in the 1950's.
 A mainstream college physics quantum mechanics textbook.
 And not the only one.
 I think he wrote another, too.
 And instead of that, we are studying from this type-written, hand-drawn
 manuscript printed on plain white paper.
 This impenetrable morass of meandering re-analysis of the most fundamental
 and the most basic experiments from the dawn of the atomic age, trying
 to articulate quantum phenomena in a semi-classical language appropriate
 for 1910 or 1920.
 Thinking the way people were thinking in 1910 or 1920, before they had
 figured it out.
 Fano didn't say so, and we didn't know so, but in retrospect, that is what
 it was.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
And what was that? I think, when he got old, he realized that he did not
 understand quantum either, and had no clue what spin was.
 Here, the man who helped found quantum chemistry, and MO-LCAO (Molecular
 Orbital=Linear Combination of Atomic Orbiitals), a man who was actually
 famous for his contributions ot quantum mechanics.
 He didn't understand it.
 And so this typewritten manuscript was his last, best attempt to go back
 to the basics, and see if we missed something.
 Maybe there was a needle in the haystack.
 Something we missed, something important.
 If we only go back, and look at the evidence again.
 And that is what he was teaching.
 The raw evidence.
 The experiments.
 The minimalist, confusing semi-classical explanations of the experimental
 results.
 Confusing as shit for use youngsters.
 There is a reason that mainstream college textbooks win out.
 Even stupid kids can read mainstream college textbooks, and say 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

I learned something from that
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 Or worse: 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

I like this textbook much better than that, it is much more clear.
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 This dooms the unclear text.
 Stupid people consign confusing things to the dustbin of history.
 The University of Chicago did not publish Ugo Fano's last and greatest
 attempt at explaining quantum mechanics on glossy paper with proper fonts.
 They did the minimal, honorable thing to do: they at least used acid-free
 paper.
 It hasn't yellowed.
 I still have it.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So, yeah, quantum is weird.
 My senior year, I take the first-year grad-school course in quantum mechanics.
 Love it.
 It's great.
 Quantum is fugnuts weird.
 I think I wrote about the prof in this diary before: he's the one who pulls
 me into his office, shuts the door, and makes me swear an oath to never-ever
 talk about quantum with ordinary laymen, people who do not have a formal
 education in physics.
 Like you know, he was swearing me into the Manhattan Project, or something.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So AI, and those classes on anthropology, and child development psychology,
 Piaget, that all pales and wastes away in the potent LSD of quantum mechanics.
 We're not talking Disney Magic, here.
 This is the real thing.
 Not fake Paris in DisneyWorld, but the real Paris.
 And Paris on LSD and shrooms.
 That's what quantum was.
 Except weirder.
 Like my prof pointed out, it's stranger than any Hollywood script (I nod),
 it's beyond the imagination of any script-writer (I nod).
 Beyond the ken of any sci fi writer.
 (I nod.
 I want to say, 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

what do you take me for? A moron? Why are you telling me all these obvious
 and self-evident things?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 I had read EPR by that point in time, and EPR broke me.
 Look, I was 19, maybe 20.
 Gimme a break.) and he says: I'll tell you why I'm telling you.
 And you have to swear an oath.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So yes, my studies and pursuits of AI now take a back seat to physics.
 The same utter and complete lack of imagination on my part that lead me
 to select physics as a college major now cause me to get a PhD in physics.
 p.s.
 Did I mention I finished college in less than four years? Youngest kid,
 and I did it in three years and two quarters.
 Youngest kid except for that home-schooled boy.
 I took the last quarter to work at LASR more-or-less full time, writing
 FORTRAN to analyze Pioneer-10/11 spacecraft data.
 For John A.
 Simpson.
 I was fucking twenty.
 Just turned twenty.
 I was also fucking.
 Lost my virginity a few years earlier, and well, more or less lived with
 my girl.
 Fucking all the time.
 Margert Edsall.
 My understanding is she's Dean of Students at Columbia in New York City.
 So, not just any school, but like Ivy League.
 She married her housemate Mike Parides.
 Who lived in the room next door, while we fucked.
 He would fall asleep with the TV on.
 Poor guy.
 He's an MD.
 Margarets's dad was an MD.
 A world-class heart and pulmonary MD.
 Some Arab hired him once.
 Guys in dark suits, black mustaches and mirror shades whisked him off to
 a limo one night.
 I was there.
 They looked at me, and decided I was not a threat to Arabs.
 I assume Margaret married Mike because, well, Mike could get a job in New
 York, and I, well, I couldn't.
 I'd be an academic loser, tossing and turning and unable to find my place
 in life.
 Margaret was on a track.
 She knew where she was going.
 She also had some talents for manipulation.
 She wasn't mean or bad, or even controlling.
 But she got what she wanted.
 She knew how to get what she wanted.
 I didn't.
 I was lost and dazed and confused.
 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So I did undergrad in under four years, but the PhD takes five.
 Not because it was hard; it wasn't.
 It was easy.
 But I wasn't serious.
 Physics wasn't really my calling.
 It was merely something I was good at.
 The grass was greener on the other side.
 I had an opportunity to study Chaos Theory with Per Bak at Brookhaven,
 but I blew it.
 I had the opportunity to study conformal field theory with Zuber in Paris,
 but I blew it.
 I read some preprint by some russians, apply renormalization group theory
 to DNA, but who fucking cared about that? No one.
 I read a significant chunk of a book on computing, semi-Thue systems and
 proof theory.
 But I wasn't thinking, and my housemates were like 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

Linas, why the heck are you reading that? Its not physics.
 Come watch Jeopardy on TV with us.
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset


\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I recall reading about the collapse of some small mom-n-pop bank in Oklahoma
 that summer.
 It was on page twenty of section three of the New York Times.
 The next day, there was another story, this time on page ten.
 And again, page three, because, you see, somehow Illinois Continental had
 purchased a bunch of overnight repurchase agreements from this little mom-n-pop
 bank in Oklahoma.
 And Illinois Continental was the largest commercial bank in all of the
 United States.
 So that merited page three.
 A few weeks later, it was a fixture on the front page of the first section.
 The Savings & Loan Crisis of 1988 had begun.
 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So I fucked around.
 And it sucked.
 No more post-doc.
 I had to get a job.
 I did not want to do nuclear bomb design in Los Alamos.
 It sickened me that this was the only employable talent that I had: making
 nuclear bombs.
 Whatever.
 lost and dazed and confused, I fucked up.
 This was the low point in my life.
 Couldn't get much worse.
 Got a job at IBM eventually.
 So, actually, yeah, it could get worse.
 I spent what, two decades fucking dazed and confused at IBM? I learned
 everything, and I really mean everything that there is to know about computer
 engineering at IBM.
 There is not a topic anywhere in all of computer engineering that I did
 not spend at least half a year on, or more.
 And for what? What did it get me? The urge to slit my wrists.
 Metaphorically, of course.
 Fucking hated it, quit IBM an angry young man.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
There's more to this story.
 I sank even lower.
 I'm recovering now, but its a bit late in life for that.
 I'm sixty-five, not twenty.
 I'm still smart.
 I've been doing AGI for 15-plus years now.
 Leveraging both physics and computer engineering, and of course, math,
 to do it.
 And all this time, the 15+ years I've been working on AGI, I never actually
 stopped and asked 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

what is AGI?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 Because it seems to be a self-evident question.
 But I want to ask that question in all seriousness now.
 To really explore it.
 What is AGI?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So here's the catch.
 It's 4PM.
 It is sunny outside, and I need some exercise.
 I am exhausted by the time/effort to write the above, I need to take a
 break.
 This is the same reason I'm not a bitcoin billionaire: it was sunny and
 warm outside, I needed to take a break.
 Installing that bitcoin miner would have been a cool thing to do, but I
 needed a break.
 So I'm going to do this to AGI, too.
 I told myself I'd get back to bitcoin mining, but I never did.
 I do plan to get back to AGI.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Here's the deal.
 Talking and thinking about AGI won't be just a few pages or a few hours.
 As I told my son this morning: physics traps us in the prison of the here
 and now, the present.
 It gives us things like love, which I've known intimately, and things like
 evil, which I do not.
 Suffice it to say that some people really do seem to be evil (and not just
 stupid), and to be evil from a young age.
 Or something.
 This requires some intellectual effort.
 And now, with AGI, we (I? no, we.) We talk of building an artificial silicon
 intelligence that will occupy the same prison of here and now, and it is
 to be generally intelligent, which means, to me, to know love and evil.
 So the AGI topic will have to encompass that.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
And, of course, I will also ramble on about state vectors and high dimensions,
 and parallel Baysian priors (ahem, integrals) (Oh, I gotta copy those essays
 from the opencog wiki to here.) and I will talk about neural nets and LLMs.
 And of course high-dimensional vectors of jigsaws: sheafs, that is.
 Sheafs of networks.
 Sheaf-theoretic sheafs, and for what? The reason I have to step back and
 ask 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

what is AGI?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 is because I'm getting lost in these details.
 Yes, blah blah agentic.
 Blah-blah sensori-motor.
 Blah blah world-model.
 Self and not self.
 And fucking free fucking will.
 This diary has already witnessed my flailing about with free will, and
 more than once.
 And so this is the question, the narrative: 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

What is AGI?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 and if the answer doesn't give proper justice and dues to love and evil,
 if it doesn't give proper justice to free will and the prison of now, and
 if it doesn't give justice to everything we know about computer science
 and engineering and physics and math, and if that answer fails to incorporate
 the reality of Wetern Civilization and Political Economy (and captialist
 economy) and the affordances for humans to manipulated the world in which
 they live, affordances in the sense of handles on coffee cups taht allow
 me to pick up coffee cups easily without burning my hands, if the answer
 to the question of AGI does not somehow encompass fucking everything, then
 it is a failure.
 So that's the ground rules.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Oh and one more rule, perhaps the most important of all: now what? What
 is there to be done, next? I mean, in the practical, immediate, consequential
 sense: what is to be done next? We've got the OODA loop.
 We've started the first O 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

Observe
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, and we started that with my autobiography, my curriculum vitae: a life
 of observering, and what i have observed.
 The second O 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

Orient
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 well, there will be a bit of that, it will revisit old ground, so I'll
 keep it brief.
 I think.
 I might be wrong about orientation.
 The D 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

Decide
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 That's the big one, That's the challenge.
 That's what I don't know.
 That's the question 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

What is AGI?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 which is not so much about what AGI is, because we answered that already:
 its everything.
 So, 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

Decide
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 Now what, What do we do next? The Act part is easy: its a long slide downhill
 again.
 One foot in front of the other.
 But the Orient-Decide phase: this is the trap a trap like a fly on fly-paper.
 I have to be able to grasp AGI, which is, well, everything, and wrestle
 it into a position where I can decide to act, and to do so, unlike that
 unfortunate fly, of getting my belly stuck to the fly-paper.
 This is going to be a challenge.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I thought I knew what I was going to write next, and I think perhaps I still
 will.
 But its nice outside, and I really must get to going.
 I've spilt too many words.
 Toodle-oo.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Oh, I am going to eat an apple first.
 So one or two more paragraphs.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
First, lets get out of the way some basics: an AI has to be agentic.
 But a cruise missile is agentic, too.
 So this is where free will gets tangled in.
 I'm not sure I want to do that tangle, but it might be unavoidable.
 Classic AI is focused on rational inference, deduction.
 And I guess this is OK.
 When I learned to read Dr.
 Seuss, I was creating rational, inferential hypothesis about how my local
 sensory environment worked.
 And I was conscious of making those hypothesis.
 I recorded them in memory as my main intellectual activity.
 The actual 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

learning to read
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 was a side-show, a pleasant distraction.
 The intellectual heavy-lifting was the decision to look for correlations
 between sight and sound.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
And so we can weave this together to form the first lesson of AGI.
 We can create a system capable of reasoning and deduction, in the very
 classical AI sense, but the result might just be a cruise missile.
 Feeling-less, emotionless, formal deduction towards an end and then boom.
 We can build these kinds of formal reasoning systems, but this is not quite
 exactly what we want to identify with as 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

being alive
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 Cruise missiles don't fall in love, nor would formal reasoning systems.
 Now, I employed a formal reasoning system, when I learned how to read.
 But I would like to say I am not a cruise-missile.
 Now, nature gave me a brain that allowed me to perform the activities of
 analyzing my environment, and thereby getting drawn into the activity of
 learning to read.
 But there was more: I was bored.
 I had nothing better to do.
 Well, maybe I did.
 Maybe I could have crawled around under the dining room table, which is
 a pretty marvelous architectural space, with all those columns of chair
 legs and table legs all about, a large open central atrium at the center
 of the table.
 A table cloth forming a curtain along the edges.
 Humans like to wander around in Medieval Catholic Cathedrals.
 They like to shop at malls with atriums.
 Even hotels are built like that.
 So crawling under the living room dining table is a thing, a real thing,
 and a valid pursuit as an alternative to deploying my intellectual abilities
 to discern sight and sound, to correlate the printed and spoken word in
 a Dr.
 Suess book.
 And cruise missiles don't get bored, and cruise missiles don't crawl under
 tables, and cruise missiles do not employ their deductive, theorem-proving,
 inference and correlation engines to learn to read.
 Because, I guess, cruise missiles don't get bored.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So, yes, the classic AI concept of 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

logical reasoning
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 is important.
 But its not everything.
 And being an agent in the world is important, but its not everything.
 Having a world model is important, but not everything.
 The fucking thermostat has a one-bit model of the world: on or off, and
 it has the agential motor control of a header, coupled to a thermometric
 sensor.
 Does a thermostat have free will? The conventional, mainstream answer would
 be no.
 Does a thermostat get bored? I think not.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So where does free will and boredom come from? I don't know.
 But one more aside first.
 Liebniz had the idea of monads, in pursuing the question of intelligence:
 splitting up intelligence into smaller and smaller pieces, and so we get
 panpsychism.
 The thing is, Liebniz did not know about phase transitions.
 I've already talked about percolation in this diary.
 Less than a certain fracture, oil does not flow.
 More than that, it does.
 And so with intelligence.
 There is a phase transition, below which there is no intelligence, and
 above which there is.
 We do not know where that phase transition is.
 And so perhaps that is one of the central questions of AGI: where is that
 phase transition? And where are cruise missiles located with respect to
 that transition? Or, fuck all, ants.
 Or amoeba.
 Yikes!
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I've eaten that apple.
 Once again, time to go.
 Later.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Subsection*
30 December 2024, 8PM
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Later in the day.
 Post shower.
 What am I doing here? Writing a diary, obviously.
 Not science.
 Nothing I write here conforms to any conventional standards of science.
 Nothing would pass peer review.
 Amateur philosophy? See, the problem is most famous philosophers were crackpots.
 Smart, brilliant, even, but making inferences far beyond the ken of science.
 Give them some credit I guess, for venturing into the unknown.
 Subtract points for making assured claims with nothing but hand-waving
 for support.
 So I don't want to do that.
 Feynmann might advise 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

shut up and calculate
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, but I already calculate a lot, so coming up for air, and asking 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

why calculate this and not that?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 seems like a legit thing to do.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The problem with saying 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

intelligence appears on one side of a phase transition
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 is that we don't have a coherent definition of intelligence.
 Clearly animals have it.
 Is it limited to neural nets? One can make coherent arguments that it is
 not.
 But is the behavior of slime molds 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

intelligent
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

? One slides down a panpsychic slide, attributing intelligence, or fractions
 thereof, to simpler and simpler systems.
 There's no obvious phase transition in there, somewhere.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
What about free will? A few weeks earlier, in this diary, I came to conclusion,
 arguably total nonsense and hallucination, that free will arises at a Cauchy
 horizon.
 Now this is meant to be taken not literally, but metaphorically, but also
 meta-literally, in that there might be differentiable, causal structures
 appearing in our brains that have singularaties, singular solutions.
 So, first lets regurgitate the conventional reasons why my idea here is
 fundamentally bad.
 First, one hand-waves, 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

quantum gravity
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, implying that if we had a theory of quantum gravity, then the singularities
 (in black holes) go away, and everything is hunky-dory, and no more Cauchy
 horizon, tah-dah.
 But that's physics.
 In math, we still have the issue that we can write down systems of equations,
 that happen to have applicability to physics, but those systems of equations
 admit solutions that are wonky.
 Quantum gravity does not alter the math one whit.
 The formal mathematical phenomena remains.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
What makes the Cauchy horizon interesting is that its not a set of measure
 zero.
 We've got a gazillion examples of singularities on the complex plane, but
 any geodesic-like curve one could draw, well most of them would have to
 bump into a set of measure zero.
 Now, there's some fascinating descent into the theory of the sizes of things,
 which promptly leads to the Axiom of Choice, and to Borel Hierarchies,
 and Cohen's forcing and all that.
 Wikedly interesting stuff.
 But the Cauchy horizon is not like that: living between the cracks.
 The Cauchy horizon is big and bold and measure-theoretically large.
 There's no Alexander's horns here, No knots sitting the three-spaces that
 bound 4-spheres.
 The horizon is big and bold and in your face.
 Its not going away.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So my question is: are there any dynamical systems, aside from gravity,
 that exhibit Cauchy horizons, and might any of those dynamical systems
 appear in settings where intelligence arises? Can I build some mechanical
 or fluid-dynamic system, some analog, in which there is a Cauchy horizon?
 I'm thinking yes, I can.
 Well, maybe not me, but in principle, and maybe it is doable, and maybe
 someone has done it.
 Gonna search-engine that later.
 Say its doable, then are there any biological systems that would have that?
 We could go all reductionist here, but that's absurd because it would imply
 that we'd need quantum gravity to explain biology, and that is a non-starter.
 But still, are there any systems in nature, outside of the setting of gravitati
on, that exhibit a Cauchy horizon? If so, then can I ascribe this some property
 of free will? Anyone who reads this and is smart enough to understand what
 I'm saying will say 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

fuck no, Linas, that's crazy, that's wrong.
 You're nuts.
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 So whatever.
 fuck you, too.
 See, I'm looking for free will, because if I can find that, it provides
 a workable definition of intelligence: things that have free will are intellige
nt, no matter how small and simple they are.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
OK, so here I anticipate another obvious objection.
 I can hear it now: 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

Linas you are talking about a random number generator, and mechanical systems
 hooked up to random number generators are not intelligent.
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 And this is true.
 But the Cauchy horizon is not a random number generator.
 I want to argue more: it is an all-possibilities generator.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So here.
 Conventionally, all-possibilities appear in the partition function:
\begin_inset Formula 
\[
Z=\int\left[d\phi\right]\exp i\mbox{Action}
\]

\end_inset

Since the action contains derivatives, the discontinuous possibilities get
 a weighting of zero and don't contribute.
 Now, there are severe measure-theoretic difficulties plaguing the partition
 function, but that never stopped the physics community.
 Some what I'm now saying is, what if the action doesn't suppress a sizable
 number of non-differentiable field configurations 
\begin_inset Formula $\phi$
\end_inset

? Yes, of course, I'm piling on a mathematically ill-defined idea on top
 of something that is already ill-defined when its behaving nicely.
 What if free will and choice are those things that glue together the disparate
 universes?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
To be clear on terminology: a single choice of 
\begin_inset Formula $\phi$
\end_inset

 is a 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

universe
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

; universes and 
\begin_inset Formula $\phi$
\end_inset

 are in one-to-one correspondence, and the integral 
\begin_inset Formula $\int\left[d\phi\right]$
\end_inset

 is an integral over all universes.
 The exp i Action just gives the weighting or likelihood of that universe
 contributing to the partition function.
 FWIW, Bayesian priors work exactly like this.
 Now, by convention, one is to imagine that all of these distinct 
\begin_inset Formula $\phi$
\end_inset

 are entirely independent of one-another.
 Nothing one can do in one can influence another.
 Perhaps oe imagines the 
\begin_inset Formula $\phi$
\end_inset

 as sheets of paper, stacked.
 Close, but nothing written on one page bleeds to another.
 That's the conventional view.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Now what if, instead, the Cauchy horizon (or it's metaphorical replacement)
 is where all these sheets come together? The hand-waving argument would
 be that its like a singularity, say, the location 
\begin_inset Formula $z=0$
\end_inset

 in the complex plane for 
\begin_inset Formula $\log z$
\end_inset

.
 If you sit on a curve and fly into 
\begin_inset Formula $z=0,$
\end_inset

 you don't die, you just come out on every or any other sheet.
 If there's going to be a conservation of curves, then you're allowed to
 come out on any sheet of your choosing, but only one.
 What is that? A random–number choice? A flip-coin choice? Some axiom-of-choice
 thing? I don't know.
 I don't think its a 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

random number
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 and I don't know what it means 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

to choose
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 in this situation.
 But this is an example of where a singular point glues together many sheets.
 But, you say, 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

those sheeets were never independent universes.
 You could always get from one to the other by circling around the pole,
 gaining a factor of 
\begin_inset Formula $2\pi i$
\end_inset

 each time around
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 And, yeah, well covering spaces tend to be simply connected.
 Or perhaps that's the definition of a covering space: its that simply-connected
 thing.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I dunno.
 Perhaps I've gone off the deep end.
 But it seems like free will needs this kind of lugubrious theorizing, because
 otherwise, we are trapped with the nitwits who insist we don't have free
 will and its all just random numbers, but those people are nitwits.
 And they say, never argue with a fool, because the onlookers won't be able
 to tell the difference.
 So I'm not gonna argue with those fools.
 Instead I'll do some vague mathematical fantasizing.
 But really.
 I think part of what I sketch above has legs.
 I think something can be made of it.
 Tightened up, made concrete.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
But this puts us in a chicken-and-egg scenario.
 If intelligent systems are exactly those that have free will, and I cannot
 give a workable definition of free will, then I'm hosed again.
 There are others, who are not nitwits, who think panpsychism is the answer.
 And anyway, its not like the panpsychists can offer up any kind of theoretical
 mechanics that allows a workable definition of intelligence to be coded
 up in software.
 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So I seem to hit a dead end here.
 One that I've hit before.
 Although this time, I think I made a tiny amount of progress.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Are there other ways of thinking about AGI? Well, I suppose I could take
 a more mundane and pedestrian view.
 Lets take a moment to walk through those.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So one is the agentic system.
 A system that has a model of the world, a distinct inside and outside,
 a sensori-motor system.
 But we've already noted that thermostats and cruise missiles have this,
 and I don't want to give those any ascriptions of being alive or intelligent.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Then there's explosive replicators.
 DNA embodied in bacteria, etc.
 explosively replicate as long as there's food.
 And conventionally, we say bacteria are alive.
 So I'm OK with saying explosive replicators are alive.
 But that's also not AGI.
 I can't build a computer model of a bacterium and pass it off as AGI, because...
 because why? Because it cannot be hooked up to google and work as an oracle
 for answering questions.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So is an oracle for answering questions, is that AGI? Well clearly, good
 AGI would be an oracle (well, oracle-like in the informal sense, not the
 computer-science sense).
 But the converse ain't true.
 Oracles aren't AGI.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I felt I was onto something, when I started talking about boredom, and love,
 and evil.
 Love is ...
 well, love can be explained away as some limbic, somatic, reptilian-brain
 response for procreation, but anyone who has been in love knows that this
 is an inadequate, mechanistic explanation offered up by nitwits who like
 to pretend that they're know-it-alls.
 I can't speak for the poets, but the movie 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

The Fifth Element
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 with Bruce Willis and Milla Jovovich does get the general nature of the
 thing correct.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Dafuq.
 I used the word lugubrious.
 I can use it again.
 Wander down the hallways of love, boredom and evil and kind of not get
 any closer to a workable definition of AGI than I didn't have before.
 Is it like Art? 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

I can't define it, but I know it when I see it?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 But I'm not trying to reduce Art to an algorithm.
 I am trying to reduce AGI to an algorithm but it seems right up there with
 trying to reduce love, boredom and evil to an algorithm.
 I mean, if you can't define it, you can't create software that works at
 that level.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
And the risks are equally obvious: like creating that 18th century robotic
 schoolboy, sitting at his desk writing schoolwork: a simulacrum can be
 created, but that's not the 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

real thing
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 The Polish sci-fi writer, Stanislaw Lem, has some story where reality is
 shown to be some LP recording, the mechanism of which is dicey and jamming.
 I can build a simulacrum of love, but that's not love.
 Again, we slip into philosophy.
 I had a book, while still a teen, Daniel Dennet.
 It was OK.
 It did not light my fire.
 But it did illustrate one story with a cute robotic mouse with winking
 glowing LED eyes, and cooing sounds, and the protagonist is asked to smash
 it with a hammer.
 Its just a freakin robot, but we have this mammalian gut reaction to little
 furballs.
 There's even a TV commercial, from Ikea, that features an old sad desk
 lamp abandoned in the rain by the garbage.
 And a full length feature film, Brave Little Toaster, the ending of which
 is heart-rending.
 So these are the mammalian, limbic, somatic shadows of existence that we
 are immersed in.
 And my definition of AGI says that it too must partake of this world.
 And of course, I can create some software that claims that it does, but
 this is like that Star Trek episode where Data is placed on trial, accused
 of not being an actual being, of being a machine.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Where's the phase transition to being-ness? Are you getting bored by this?
 Because I am.
 Clearly mammals are beings, and we do down that path and end up at panpsychism
 again.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
You want to know how crazy I am? I'll tell you how crazy I am.
 If the universe doesn't stop me, first.
 Every time I'm about to do something stupid, the dog barks, and I say to
 myself, 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

this is the universe reminding me to stop doing this stupid thing
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 And I'm typing this on a laptop with a shitty keyboard and a shitty touch-pad,
 and I'm making vast amounts of typos due to the mechanical misbehavior
 of this system vs.
 my hands.
 and every time I'm about to type something really exceptionally good, it
 gets tangled up, and again I think: this is the universe trying to stop
 me from spilling it's secrets.
 That's how crazy I am.
 I get those micro-thoughts, and I give them credence and credibility just
 long enough to wonder if its true.
 Because you know it could be.
 Who the fuck knows.
 The universe really could be fucking with me like that, because who is
 to say it isn't.
 We already have the Mandela effect.
 I didn't invent it, but I do suffer from it.
 I remember Nelson Mandela dying in a South African prison back in the 1980s
 so what the fuck is all this about him still being alive and all that?
 WTF Really? Maybe universes do cross over, or maybe the combination of
 statistics, news reporting and neuroscience just makes me victim to a mass
 delusion.
 Who is to say?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Oh, and then there's math.
 I might have touched on this a bit in this diary, but really I could do
 more.
 Math is a potent hallucinogen.
 I don't feel like explaining this right now, but for a quick tour, look
 at what people said about the Cantor set, and what he did.
 It's crazy-hallucinatory.
 Obviously.
 Then there's the various paradoxes of measurability.
 Say the Banach-Tarski paradox.
 Crazy shit.
 There's lots more.
 Anything to with infinity.
 I think I've mentioned before the insanity of weak convergence in Hilbert
 spaces.
 QM is insane mostly because of this one thing, but that means that the
 problem lies not with QM, but with weak convergence in Hilbert spaces,
 which is the root cause of quantum weirdness.
 So its not the physics that's insane, its the math.
 And so if math, the most staid, assured, unassailable, confident rock-hard
 foundation-stone of all things knowable: I mean really, who is going to
 argue that 2+2 isn't 4? This is a fact 2+2=4 and nothing you can do can
 change that.
 Its the rock-hard foundation.
 And that foundation includes fucking goddamned fucking prime numbers.
 And Banach-Tarski.
 And weak convergence in Hilbert spaces.
 And axioms of large cardinals.
 And Borel hierarchies.
 So fuck me, fuck that, math is fucking insane.
 Our foundation-stone of reality, 2+2=4, is simply the logo stamped on a
 universe-sized tablet of LSD.
 And fuck me, what, you want me to algorithmicize this, and build you an
 AGI? I homunculus based on the the mystical elements of the Kaballah? Really?
 You don't need to get mystical.
 The mystical is already here, right now.
 Pervasive and permeating pan-mysticism.
 Sheesh.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So I must bring tonight's OODA loop of exploring AGI to an end.
 The observe and orient stuff ended with disorientation, and identified
 the proximal cause of that disorientation.
 Its built into the fucking math.
 So, deeper than being built into the fucking universe, its built into the
 fucking math.
 Excuse the swear words, but I know obscenity when I see it, and math is
 obscene.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Decide and Act.
 Well, the mundane decision is to tough it out.
 Put on that heavy back-pack, tie your boots and go out into that storm.
 Hump it over the mountain.
 Metaphorically, this means go out and read more academic journal articles,
 and participate in the day-today quotidian intellectual activities of the
 social world around me.
 This is, I guess, an admission of defeat.
 Not that I was ever expecting to win.
 But laser-like focus on a narrow topic is an excellent way of making dramatic
 progress, and I am anything but laser-like here.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Another analogy.
 I could moan about number theory here, instead of AGI.
 Or I could just go out and do it.
 I think I did pretty well with the beta transform: hundreds of pages of
 laser-like, focused, insightful results.
 And no one cares because who the fuck cares about iterating 
\begin_inset Formula $\beta x\mod1$
\end_inset

? Almost no one.
 Maybe more than the number of people who care about this diary.
 Because the beta transform, the iterated 
\begin_inset Formula $\beta x\mod1$
\end_inset

 is considered to be unimportant.
 And see, that is my dilemma.
 I could spend the waning years of my life making sharp, insightful progress
 on narrow topics that are not important.
 Or I could moan about the inaccessibility and ineffability of AGI.
 Or I could just fucking give up, and just do something that would bring
 me closer to nvidia gpus and weights and shut up and calculate, as Feynmann
 would say.
 Or I could cast about.
 Because, see, all these other things are boring.
 I don't quite really want to do them, because they're not ...
 they're not worthy of my time.
 They're not a valid activity to while away the years.
 By contrast, moaning about the ineffability of AGI into this diary does
 seem like something worthwhile.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Let me be more direct.
 I think there's something here, and I think I could even make a bit of
 progress, if I could get my hands on it.
 But like the four-year-old stacking blocks, the blocks keep fumbling out
 of my hands.
 Something, something.
 Agential sensori-motor.
 Something something category theoretic.
 These blocks.
 I can almost assemble them.
 And then the self doubts: I assembled some blocks.
 Is that a house that can be lived in? Is it a Roman coliseum? No.
 Is it AGI? err.
 Fuck.
 The blocks keep slipping away.
 But I think I've almost got my hands in it.
 If I just try a bit more.
 Something something Basal cognition.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Well, reading more is really not a bad idea.
 It takes me back into the first O of OODA: more observation.
 Its a deferral of decide and act.
 Its more orientation.
 How much longer to decide and act? What's there to decide, if I can't figure
 out what the fucking problem is? I'll sleep on it.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I finished Tong's Lecture 2 on cosmology Lecture 3 awaits.
 Sweat dreams!
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Oh, footnote.
 I'm loosely spell checking above, and Chinese Room pops into my mind.
 I always hated the Chinese room argument, I thought it was dumb.
 I see why some people feel like its worthwhile.
 But those people are just dumb.
 The Chinese room is like asking the sand grains in a sand-pile about how
 they know when to avalanche.
 You can look at any given grain of sand all you want, microscopic examination,
 and it won't get you to an adequate understanding of avalanches.
 So the same with the Chinese Room.
 Yes, you've got all these guys running around programmatically stacking
 algorithmic inferences and deductions, using the finest in proof theory
 and lambda calculus to do it, and then it all avalanches, and no one saw
 it coming.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
And so maybe that's my definition of AGI.
 Its a proof-theoertic stack of inferences, so tall and so carefully balanced,
 hinged on countless delicate assumptions, that nudge some tiny little Bayesian
 prior, and half the stack comes sliding down in an avalanche.
 That avalanche is no longer algorithmic certainty, proof-theoretic provability
 carried out by minions in the Chinese room.
 One of the shmucks spilled a bottle of ink on the instructions, faked it
 and it all comes sliding down.
 This is what's wrong with the Chinese Room.
 The philosophers were so busy studying philosophy, that they didn't learn
 any physics.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Of course, my two-paragraph rebuttal of the Chinese Room is literary and
 allusory.
 What, exactly, in a stack of crisp proof deductions, comes tumbling down?
 Nervous breakdowns are breakdowns.
 Electrical dielectric failures are breakdowns.
 Tears, cracks, shattering.
 What, exactly, is supposed to be the analog of dielectric failure in symbolic
 reasoning? What's avalanching? Well, I earlier stated that 2+2=4 is rock
 solid, incontrovertible, unchallgengable, unalterable.
 I skipped mentioning 2+2 mod 3=1 In this tower of deduction, was there
 some quotienting there, where no one was paying attention? Something in
 a sigma-pi hierarchy modulo some for-all, there exists, that has some alternati
ve interpretation, alternative valuation, different outr model than the
 intended model? That would avalanche.
 If something has multiple models, then what is true in one model might
 not be true in another.
 If the Chinese Room guys were working in one model, but really there was
 some other semantic interpretation, they were deriving things that were
 falsehoods when applied to the inner model.
 Some downward Skolem-Lowenstein lemma type thing.
 That would be the 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

avalanche
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

: you thought we were working 
\begin_inset Formula $\aleph_{0}$
\end_inset

 but I thought we were working with 
\begin_inset Formula $\aleph_{1}$
\end_inset

 and so you're getting not just contradictions, but avalanches of incompatible
 inferences.
 That's the avalanche.
 That's how the Chinese room fails.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Modulo is weird.
 Learned that from 
\begin_inset Formula $\beta x\mod1$
\end_inset

 but modulo gives us homogeneous spaces, and it gives us algebraic varieties
 and schemes, and modulo gives us model theory, the 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

algebraic geometry without the fields
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 The place where 
\begin_inset Formula $\beta x\mod1$
\end_inset

 gets weird has to do with Cantor-setting our way to infinity, the tension
 between countable and uncountable infinity.
 And this is merely the first level of the sigma–pi hierarchy.
 There is an entire tower there, ready to fuck you and Banach–Tarski.
 Pleasantly fuck.
 While you're tripping on LSD.
 But fuck in surprising ways.
 The people who came up with the Chinese room never cracked open a book
 on model theory, and never learned how to get laid.
 Uptight virgins, they are.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
See? I'm lost again in the insanity.
 By contrast, LLM's and transformers are very very concrete things.
 Specific, and Nobel–prize worthy for Geoff Hinton.
 I'm sitting here, fucking around and in awe of nothing in particular, and
 everything everywhere, all at once.
 The movie I mean.
 The movie with Michell Yeoh.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Subsection*
31 December 2024
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
After yesterdays histrionics, lets see if we can do better today.
 We can take the pragmatic definition of AGI: it is that economically viable
 thinking machine that can replace high-priced engineers (and other high-priced
 humans) in the delivery of economically viable services.
 I've been talking to one fellow who wants to digest electronics diagrams
 and the surrounding English–language documentation to automate a repetitive
 process that engineers currently perform.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
This is an eminently practical desire, the kind of which has been driving
 economics since about forever.
 It is also a task on the forefront of what is barely possible and achievable
 with current technology.
 Insofar as I personally want to toil away on the creation of AGI, this
 is perhaps a task in which I should invest significant intellectual effort.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Lets for a moment imagine what this might be.
 Or not.
 Technology is in rapid flux, tools, features and functions are rapidly
 changing.
 What is commercially available right now can be adapted in this and such
 a way to the task.
 The tech stack selection I might make for a customer might be different
 from the tech stack I might wish to make for myself.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Lets do some forecasting and prognostication.
 I have to be careful here.
 First and foremost, we have the sci-fi writers, who are quite good at looking
 at some present-day situation and extrapolating it to the future.
 We've got the TV show Black Mirror, which makes dark prognostications.
 Any number of youtube scifi shorts going in any number of directions.
 Amateur gatherings, like Less Wrong, exploring, like ants working a food
 source, exploring the implications of this or that.
 Some are vastly smarter than others; Scott Alexander with Slate Star Codex
 rises far above.
 Some prognostications are economically valuable: Peter Zeihan seems to
 make a good living cooking up geopolitical ideas of all sorts.
 In short, there already is a rather extensive effort, work-front looking
 at present trends and extrapolating them into the future.
 It is hard to stay on top of it all.
 I've tried, and there are others who devote fulltime attention to this.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Why is it hard? For simple economic reasons: There are thousands, more,
 tens of thousands, and yet more, hundreds of thousands, if I count twitter
 posters, who are actively engaged in this.
 They are able to be actively engaged because, thanks to the miracle of
 modern capitalist economics, basic wants like food and shelter have been
 taken care of, and secondary desires, such as material accumulation and
 entertainment are equally fulfilled.
 This leaves one with lots of spare time to focus on tertiary issues.
 Tertiary here means very much the kind of stuff that, in the past, was
 limited to very few: usually academics, powerful politicians, and those
 administrators working in the court of someone powerful (king, president,
 CEO, executive.) IBM had a decent number of employees who 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

did nothing
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 but prognosticate the future.
 White Plains was jam-packed with them: executives who had a base hit, not
 a home-run, and maybe they could do it again, it was hoped.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So my sitting here typing and hoping to foresee something about the future
 is already a lost cause: I cannot single-handedly compete with all that.
 I could contribute to it, if I worked in a public-facing forum.
 Owen says I should create youtube videos.
 Or teach physics at University of Austin.
 The second option is vaguely appealing.
 I could see doing that.
 It could be fun.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
There's a different kind of prognostication, of the form done by David Chapman
 on Meaningness.
 In a different way, by John Vervaeke in his lecture series on the Meaning
 Crisis.
 This (these) are again very modern developments.
 Yes, sure, the bourgeoisie of the 18th and 19th century could have nervous
 breakdowns because the meaning provided by society did not align with innate
 biological (somatic) drives.
 And then there are the Shakers, Quakers and any number of Protestant sects
 attempting to realign ways of existing with neurological drives, attempting
 to provide an all-encompassing answer, if not an eschatology.
 What's curious here is that the Quakers expose this as a modern-day example
 of the Meaning Crisis in an agrarian society.
 This is useful, because we don't have this for the Romans.
 Agrarian, politically very advanced, but the written record that the Romans
 left behind does not document psychological suffering.
 One does have to wonder why that is.
 Is it because the people who prepared Roman History for us, from Tacitus
 to modern times, have merely overlooked this? Is it because the society
 was too preoccupied with the act of living to get caught up in the doldrums
 of vague, unspecific dissatisfaction with life, building into an outright
 crisis? I don't know enough about Rome to say.
 Perhaps this is well-explored somewhere.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
And this is another issue: everything is well-explored.
 Again, because of the economic richness of the current society has allowed
 vast numbers of intelligent, educated humans to explore all sorts of nooks
 and crannies of the noosphere.
 And the provisional definition of AGI is that it will do more of the same,
 at least, for the economically important tasks, which includes predicting
 the weather, designing rockets, and working out the must-have Christmas
 gift for next year.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The last may not fit.
 As a literary device, if you were paying attention up to now, you might
 be thinking: 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

Weather, yes.
 Rockets, yes.
 Christmas gifts? Oh what the fuck.
 Let me turn off my brain now and not explore that, and keep reading some
 more.
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 So perhaps I introduced an intellectual discontinuity by elevating cheap
 consumer goods, marketing, and base, childlike desires for baubles and
 toys to the same level as serious topics like rockets and weather.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I did this to hilite another base Western Civ.
 working assumption: the assignment of priorities to activities, and the
 relegation of other activities to unimportant trivia.
 Childrens's finger-paintings are generally not valued by anyone other than
 the parents, and for good reason: they are commonplace, just like rocks,
 trees, field mice, other humans, and stars in the sky.
 The first four can be economically exploited.
 The stars, not yet.
 Astroids coming soon, though.
 Heroin addiction is not considered to be valuable.
 It can be exploited economically: ask any drug dealer about details.
 Socially, and for good reason, we do not encourage it.
 Alcohol and nicotine are OK, though.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I'm slipping into another groove that I visit and wrestle with: the entropy
 landscape from chemistry, bacterial quorum sensing, slime-mold decision
 making, the invention of neurons in jelly-fish as a mechanism for low-crosstalk
, high speed neurotransmitter star-gate transport, and then up through neuroanat
omy to humans.
 And of course it does not stop there: it continues on up into the economic
 world.
 And it feeds back: the nicotine industry supplies brains very directly
 with a desirable neurotransmitter.
 Christmas toy baubles are a few steps removed from the direct hit of nicotine
 or heroin, but, in some ways, drive the same, or similar neuro-anatomical,
 neuro-biochemical circuits.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I once read a SciAm article on the mechanism of nicotine addiction: it was
 a stack of 5 or six chemical and neurological feedback loops, working at
 different timescale, each one of them craving nicotine.
 One feedback loop involved reuptake channels in synapses.
 That functions on the one-minute timescale.
 Something else, I forget what, provided feedback at the 15-minute to half-hour
 timescale, and is responsible for chain-smoking.
 Other drives function at the week and multi-month timescales, making nicotine
 addiction hard to break: even if you shut down the hour-by-hour craving,
 there is still that circuit, lingering in the back of your head, that remembers
 how pleasurable smoking is, and reminds you, month after month, that, well,
 it ws pleasurable.
 That's all.
 Have one now and you could relive that pleasure.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Huh.
 Relive that pleasure.
 This is the rewind button that the physics of here and now does not have.
 We cannot time-travel back in time to change things, but we can recreate
 prior conditions and relive them again.
 And again and again, because those prior conditions were pleasurable.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
How do I know they were pleasurable? Because I do, the same way I know love,
 hate, evil.
 Unexamined, except by the great literary authors of the centuries.
 Poets, too.
 Yesterdays angst makes it clear that the reduction of Great Literature
 to Algorithms is not quite here, yet.
 The algorithms, like Data in Star Trek, or the Chinese Room, or, for chris
 sake the LLM's can maybe fake it for us, and create the appearance of Great
 Literature, but there is no reason to believe that LLM's actually suffer
 from nicotine cravings.
 The biological mechanism cannot be traced.
 An LLM can tell me all it wants about craving cigarettes.
 It can tell me about how it remembers eating ice-cream in childhood.
 I know both are a lie.
 This is the point the Chinese-Room people were trying to make.
 And, at that level, they were perfectly correct.
 They were only wrong in elevating it up to some sacred philosophical principle.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Nicotine and heroin are good for this kind of analysis, because we understand
 the physical principles sufficiently well to know when they apply (i.e.
 in animals) and when they don't (i.e.
 in LLM's).
 The same cannot be said for love, boredom and evil.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Nicotine and heroin are nice, because they also provide a scalpel with which
 to dissect Western Civ.
 The scalpel reveals that it is the drive to greater complexity that seems
 to matter.
 Heroin addiction is frowned upon because it is an economic and social waste.
 So, perhaps like leakage currents in an integrated circuit: it siphons
 off what is otherwise usable energy.
 The bio-feedback circuits build up to a stack of 4 or 6 cycles deep, and
 then no deeper.
 Maybe they layer on one or two more feedback loops: the economic industry
 that produces heroin.
 The feedback here is financial.
 But, in many ways, it is destructive: economically, it seems like a net-loss.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I'm taking a modern view.
 There is a depiction of morphine addiction in a Russian izba in the early
 20th century, in Andre Makine's book, Dreams of My Russian Summers.
 And that book is what, in the end, I am struggling to work with.
 When I say 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

Great Literature
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, you are free to choose any example meriting that moniker.
 I am not well-read, so a paucity of familiarity which such things.
 But Dreams of My Russian Summers hits, and hits hard.
 I just now skimmed the Wikipedia article, and evoked some suppressed sobs
 at the first mention of Charlotte and WWI.
 The 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

rock
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 from Verdun, to be precise, that's the trigger.
 Because that rock is, of course, a bullet, and it is a signifier for the
 mass collection of very personal memories.
 Tragic memories: the soldiers died by the millions.
 Time has passed; they would have died of old age, had it not been for WWI.
 Clearly, dying of old age is preferable.
 But why? This is like, a stupid question.
 An unexamined question.
 And the russian setting is perhaps appropriate: russian culture devalues
 human life.
 They are quite happy to send young men to die, as long as it elevates the
 pride of the country.
 So, 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

dying of old age
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 is preferable to, erm, European cultures.
 Not so much in other parts of the world.
 And that's, well, why it is a worthwhile question to explore.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
At play here, at least for russian culture, is national, cultural pride.
 I want to write a paragraph that reduces cultural desires to entropic principle
s.
 I could probably even do that.
 An aside is needed to talk about the Siloviki: the intentional genetic
 breeding of humans to be soldiers, policemen, executioners and torturers.
 To be a part of the state apparatus of control.
 The structure here is not just of genetics, of breeding vicious humans
 the way we breed vicious dogs or fast horses, but also of the state apparatus
 itself: a deleterious socio-political structure intent on the suppression
 and destruction of humans.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Am I a russophobe? Why yes.
 After witnessing the Ukrainian war, there can be no doubt.
 As if Romas Kalanta were not enough.
 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

But not all russians are bad
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, you might say: sure of course not.
 But when you have a cancerous lump, are you going to pick through the cancer
 cells, and decide 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

this one is bad, this one is good, and this one, we're not sure about
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 Of course not.
 At least, not with present technology.
 The surgeon takes a knife and cuts out the whole lump.
 And so likewise, we must cut out the russian cancer.
 Of course, there is a biomedical dream, well on its way to fruition, of
 targeting individual cancer cells.
 Find some binding site, create a molecule that binds to that site, and
 has poison at the other end.
 This is exactly how the immune system works: IGF (immunoglolbulin) identifies
 something to attack, raises the alarm, and killer T-cells move in to the
 bad guy.
 Killer T-cells are professional executioners.
 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The Bible has concepts of sin and punishment as being foundational.
 The Code of Hammurabi has a more practical take.
 Modern Rule of Law can be dated to the Medieval great thinkers, who worked
 out the system of judges, juries, litigators and advocates that we use
 today.
 Some 19th-century sleuthing modernized the police force and gave us the
 FBI and modern forensics.
 Its a system that works.
 I like it I think its a great system.
 So far, Trump has not decided to sabotage it.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So, now I want to write a paragraph that reduces the Rule of Law to entropic
 principles.
 We here in the US, in Europe, have decided that dying of old age is better
 than dying in the heat of battle.
 We know from history that the Mongols did not share this 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

philosophy
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, this Weltanshauung, this world-view.
 They rode, they slaughtered helpless agrarian farmers and raped their wives.
 They did this until they ran out of farmers to slaughter, but that mongolian
 blood lives on, powering the russian troika in its out-of-control careening
 dash into the future.
 James Franklin, in 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

The Science of Conjecture: Probability Before Pascal
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 makes the case that WWI was a socio-economic organization that was hostile
 to human life.
 It killed young men at an industrial scale, and continued to do so until
 it literally ran out of raw material.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So this allows us to compare nicotine, heroin and WWI.
 So, nicotine is a multi-billion-dollar economic organization, dating back
 to three or four centuries, supplying human brains with a desirable neurotransm
itter at an industrial scale.
 I already reviewed some of the nicotine addiction reinforcement cycles,
 working at the minute, hour, day and month timeframes.
 These feedback loops were biochemical at the lowest level, neurological
 at the middle level, neuro-anatomic at the high level (memories of pleasurable
 minutes spent smoking pass through hippocampus and amygdala: this is anatomy,
 sitting above the neuronal circuit level).
 Now we are ready to add one more feedback loop: cigarette advertising.
 This loop operates at the socio-economic level.
 Corporations buy billboard space, magazine pages and TV time from willing
 owners of TV stations, magazine and billboards, all to remind individuals
 how pleasurable smoking is.
 Thank goodness for ...
 well, that stuff in the 1970's that resulted in making cigarette advertising
 illegal.
 So it shut down another deleterious feedback cycle.
 This one operating at the super-human level.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
And that is how one reduces cultural drives to entropic forces.
 This is kind of the big-bang theory of economics.
 We take bacterial quorum sensing, which involves small polypeptide signaling
 molecules, of which nicotine is but one example, and ratchet this up through
 neurons, and then brains, and then society.
 From Atoms to Geopolitical forces, in one reductionist tour-de-force.
 Nicotine is nice, because it shows the clear path.
 Heroin is nice, because it shows the same path, but is far more obviously
 recognizable as deleterious.
 It shares much or most of the chemical, macro-molecular, neural and neuro-anato
mical systems with nicotine, but diverges at the social and political level.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
WWI is interesting because it is again obviously deleterious (to those who
 care.
 I guess the Mongols would have loved it? The russians, embodied in Putin,
 still think WWII, the 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

Great Patriotic War
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 is heroic, rather than a horrific debacle, and for chris sake, the Chinese
 have put Mao on their money.
 I'm not sure of what the status of putting Stalin on the russian ruble
 is.
 Wouldn't be surprised if it happens.) Now, WWI proceeded through advertising
 and billboards: you can call it 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

propaganda
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, but you can also call it a 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

patriotic call to arms
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 Someone had to grow cabbages in the field, to feed the soldiers, and someone
 had to run the factories that fixed nitrogen into explosive.
 This was an economic, industrial activity, and in this way resembles the
 economic and industrial activity of nicotine, substituting cabbage heads
 for tobacco leaves.
 The biochemical route is detached.
 The call to patriotism detaches somewhere at the socio-cultural layer,
 where upbringing and education are dominant forces, and perhaps at the
 genetic level, insofar as many individuals are predisposed to act in a
 certain way, in the same sense that certain dog breeds or horse breeds
 behave the way they behave.
 Patriotism is not a signaling molecule like nicotine.
 But it is a stable and solid-enough foundation on which to build the apparatus
 of WWI.
 Or, for that matter, the current russian war on Ukraine.
 And fuck all with the suicidal North Koreans.
 That's some weird-ass demented crazy shit right there.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I am no Hari Seldon, and I am not reducing cultural forces to mathematical
 equations.
 In some sense, its irreducible.
 We had a good run with fractals, and maybe can go farther.
 Category theory is alive and kicking, and can be applied to describe sensori-mo
tor systems and world-model containing agents.
 So math remains applicable.
 And even non-equilibrium thermodynamics can be pushed farther, elucidating
 it's impact on the description of living biological systems.
 Karl Friston's entropic Casimir effect on AI inference is a thing that
 we can certainly dig deeper into, and it something I am engaged in, quite
 haphazardly, myself.
 Don't give Friston the credit: it was Boltzmann who started the show.
 And Planck who got the ball rolling.
 And Saunders MacLane who taught category theory.
 They get the credit.
 But we are not writing psycho-history yet, at the Foundation-Trilogy level.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Economists can estimate the energy content of a coal seam, and provide an
 estimate of the economic impact of coal mining.
 This is at the structural level, where we map economic currents.
 And I already talked about mapping electronic circuits.
 And, of course, the circuitry of linguistic analysis.
 Nothing new here; people have spoken of 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

knowledge representation
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 since the 1970's, and Claude Levi-Strauss articulated Structuralism quite
 a bit earlier.
 So I'm a structuralist.
 There's a symbolic layer hard at work, and symbology is pervasive.
 We have some tools for it: as mentioned, the lambda calc, the combinators,
 the category theory.
 The LLM's less so, they come in from the side, and need further theoretical
 analysis.
 But the name of the game is to boil down everything to structural analysis:
 from economics to genetics.
 Fringier is education, culture, advertising, propaganda, upbringing, political
 power.
 But these are just fringier.
 Softer than electrical circuits, because we are not used to drawing diagrams
 for these things.
 That's changing: we can now draw diagrams for the movement of populations
 across continents through the millennia.
 We can talk about how the populations carried both their genes and their
 language, and we can sketch circuit diagrams for this.
 Not very accurate ones: we need more archaeology, more genetics, more history
 to get more details, but the base connections are there.
 Some details might remain fuzzy forever.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
And so that is the practical definition of AGI: the economically useful
 mechanical device that can be employed to understand electrical circuits,
 economic forces, and the biochemical process of aging and death.
 Represent all of this symbolically, and provide the tools to access and
 manipulate these representational structures using either language – text
 chat – or possibly GUI's with click-and-point.
 So, geographical maps, for example, if interested in geographical economic
 activity, history wars, or migration patterns of pre-historic humans.
 AGI is the common tool that can encapsulate and expose all of this.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
And, to some large degree, we are well on the road to this.
 There are some short-comings: current NN's do not truly 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

understand
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 things: they don't know how to reason (but can mimic it) and have no real-life
 experience (that coffee cups with holes in the bottom don't hold coffee,
 or that people walking down the street don't sometimes have three legs.)
 But we are getting there.
 You can train an NN on the Mandelbrot set, and it will draw a a good-enough
 approximation thereof.
 You can train an NN on a collection of propositions from first-order logic,
 and i will be able to generate the generative results: extracts from the
 language generated by the axioms and propositions f first order logic.
 And the ditto for second order: the relation between language and generation
 and axioms is well-understood by the proof-theorists and the model theorists.
 And someone out there is already aiming NN's at this material.
 SO we are getting there.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
And this is why I wanted to do some sci-fi forecasting.
 We've come full circle, back to the meaning crisis.
 If AGI automates the economic activities of electrical engineers, then
 what will these people do? Will they become Houthis, content to bomb? David
 Chapman talks about this well, in 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

Systems of Meaning, All in Flames
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, on Meaningness, where he looks at the period between WWI and WWII, and
 the totalizing world-views of socialism, nazi-ism and capitalism.
 He notes that totalizing world-views don't work, and in the articles on
 the 1970's, about subcultures, and Culture War 1.0, has taught most of us
 that this is correct.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Alas, cracks and leakage currents remain.
 Culture Wars 2.0 have given us Trump supporters capsizing water-ski boats,
 but you can make the argument that most Trump supports make a positive
 contribution to the economy, even if the ultimate world-view is anti-intellectu
al and destructive.
 There are great rivers of evil that flow through Trumpism, great destructive
 powers promoting the decline and fall of the Western world, the decline
 and destruction of America, ironically captured in the slogan 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

Make America Great Again
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 It would make any Soviet appartchik proud: rebrand total destruction as
 something positive and constructive.
 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
And where does this lead us? Well, again the examined and unexamined flows
 of propaganda and social delusion.
 We are sufficiently removed from the Soviet system that it makes for a
 good model.
 Its more recent than WWI.
 It is less ambiguous that WWI; both sides of WWI didn't quite know what
 they were doing.
 The Soviets did.
 They figured out what they were doing, and then they honed it and developed
 it into a powerful totalizing system.
 Hitler started this, and he did understand the role of propaganda, but
 he shot his wad too soon.
 I can't make a cogent case that he should have paused after the Anschluss,
 this is for someone else to make.
 But the post-war Soviet Empire had the time and the space to refine and
 hone its methods.
 It could deport entire nations to Siberia, and do it effectively, without
 interference.
 The irony here is that even as the KGB reached new heights of sophistication
 and technique in the control of propaganda, brain-washing and political
 messaging, at the very same time, the nomenklatura became increasingly
 incompetent.
 They did not know how to promote capable people.
 In the end, we had Gorbachev, the most incompetent of the incompetent,
 governing an entire nation, and then the wheels came off.
 The only good news is that Trump appears to be more or less just as incompetent
 as Gorbachev.
 The wheels won't come off; the American machine is orders of magnitude
 stronger than the Soviet apparatus ever was.
 But we do have the socio-economic problem of placing incompetents in positions
 of great power.
 Not that the Democrats don't have their own issues on this front.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So that's the aside: in capitalism, we have hierarchical structures of executive
s, who, from lower to middle ranks, are promoted based on merit.
 From the middle to the upper ranks, up to the CEO, its much more of a political
 game, but merit still counts: an executive who is not bringing in revenue
 is going to have a hard time of it all, no matter how good they are at
 politics.
 Incompetent CEO's, and unlucky CEO's find themselves at the head of bankrupt
 companies, and, if the company is smaller, it is allowed to fail and dissolve.
 The bigger ones are too big to fail.
 Which is unappetizing,but no one has a better idea.
 At the national level, we have forces that elevate total nincompoops like
 Trump, or wishy-washy fiddle-faddle spinelesss wimps like Obama.
 Democracy is our one great solution to ameliorate things, but clearly its
 got problems.
 Equally clearly, we got nothing better.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Now, the South Koreans are onto something: there is this South Korean hope
 of creating an AGI that will govern.
 Heh.
 More down to earth, and actually practical ideas of having two presidents:
 a ceremonial role, where you can vote for Trump or the Kardashians, or
 whatever pop-cult celebrity you want, thus demonstrating your allegiance
 to this or that movement.
 And another president, a no-name bureaucrat who actually runs things.
 This has a snowballs-chance in hell of happening, but it is an interesting
 idea.
 Not clear how to avoid the nomenklatura problem though.
 We do NOT want to recreate the nomenklatura problem in the US.
 Even though this is exactly what Trump is doing, and this is exactly why
 I hate him.
 He is reviving the very worst parts of the Soviet system, and he thinks
 he is helping America in so doing.
 That's how stupid he is.
 He actually thinks he's making things better.
 What a fucking putz, and hes in fucking charge, and all these nomenklatura
 boot-lickers have moved on from his boots to his ass.
 Fucking shit-eaters.
 Historians will marvel.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
But of course, we are at the end of history.
 The Singularity is Near.
 We will have LLM's reading my diary, and saying things like 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

Linas was right absolutely spot on, about this and this and that, and he
 completely missed this other thing, and seems to have misunderstood X Y
 and Z.
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 It is not I who will be Hari Seldon, it will be some AGI.
 And I will have done my little part to build it.
 What the heck, I've already done it: that AGI will be running on the Linux
 kernel, and my contributions to the kernel will be there.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So I feel like the observe and orient phase of OODA is coming to a close.
 I can go on like this, trying to reduce political forces to psycho-propagandist
ic forces, to neuro-anatomical structures, to biochemistry, and them atomic
 physics.
 The reductionist program is good.
 It can bear weight.
 The structuralist program is good, it can bear weight.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
In some sense, the industry is already n the path.
 They are not doing the structural path I want.
 But I think they are coming around: LLM's don't do electronic circuits.
 And we're very far away from putting an LLM in the White House.
 But the economic drivers are there to push a structuralist approach to
 AI and AGI.
 It will happen.
 How many years? I don't know.
 Maybe even decades.
 But see, I'm saying decades, not centuries.
 On the other hand, the human event horizon is always decade, especially
 when one is young.
 Human minds do not like to make practical extrapolations more than a decade
 or two out.
 For good reason: they'd be mostly wrong, and we all know it.
 But the economic drivers to pursue structuralist AGI are there, and these
 drivers are strong, powerful, and increasing as it become clear that current
 deep learning is not entirely up to the task.
 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Decide and Act? My decision is to read some more, and putter around some
 more.
 This theorizing that I do in my diary: it is sketching a big picture, but
 kind of almost everything I rote today, and yesterday, I've already written
 and spoken in other forums, years ago.
 There is not a single new thought in the above.
 So I'm not making progress.
 I'm just revisiting old ideas.
 Not even synthesizing old ideas, just revisiting.
 The only good news is my presentation above is more condensed, more concise,
 more direct than my earlier and more discursive attempts.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Discursive: I read Stanislaw Lem's Summa Technologiae beck when, in Hong
 Kong.
 It was David DeMaris book.
 I read it, hoping for some great technological reveal.
 There was none.
 Why? By the end, I realized that he was trying to explain high tech to
 russian peasants.
 Much like the Sergei Eisenstein sequence 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

The Creamer
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, where a strong young kolkhoznik cranks the handle to a creamer, and an
 old peasant woman first looks in doubt, and then marvels at the cream pouring
 out.
 Can you imagine trying to explain fucking nicotine to that old lady? Fugghedabo
ut it.
 So Summa Technolgiae contained no grand reveals.
 No prognostications of Kardashev Scale Five civilizations.
 If I am discursive, it is because I am talking to peasants.
 How do I explain things to people how have no fucking clue about chemistry
 or economics or anything else that I touch on above? I am no master myself,
 but the people I talk to know even less.
 I'm looking at you, Joscha Bach.
 So discursive it is.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Well, attention to details also matters.
 The devil is in the details.
 But enough.
 Time for some structuralism.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Oh, wait, wait, wait.
 I almost forgot.
 This essay starts with the question: what happens when AGI results in unemploym
ent, and what shall we do then? And I attempt to do some reductive analysis,
 pondering how entropic forces manifest in a noosphere where humans have
 nothing to do, other than to explore the deepest recesses of heroin addiction
 or back issues of People Magazine.
 And what the guiding human-scale principle might look like, or what the
 civilizational principle might look like.
 I can't just tell people: 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

stare at the Boltzmann distribution, eventually you'll get it.
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 So this question of the post-capitalist organization remains.
 And the individual Meaning Crisis remains.
 And again, I can't just advise the love-lorn to just go study the limbic
 system, 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

you'll get it eventually.
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 As Vervaeke points out, we need a psychotechnology for that.
 Like the invention of the alphabet, but for emotional processing.
 Maybe that's what facebook is? 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
See? I can keep writing and writing this shit.
 But at any rate, these two questions are tied.
 AGI will usher in the post-capitalistic world, and much of the other Kurzweilia
n Singularity, but the question of OK, now what?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 remains open.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I am trying to process it, and I struggle.
 My children will be forced to process it, and I know they are not intellectuall
y equipped to handle it.
 And Trump, OMG, I doubt Trump will be able to kill my children, but I foresee
 that he will trigger events that will result in their death.
 It'll probably be in regards to global warming.
 Some fuckup that gives new legs to the petroleum industry, resulting in
 global war.
 Or some fuckup with China, where Austin TX gets an atomic bomb dropped
 on it.
 Although I admit, Kamela Harris was more likely to fuck up with China.
 She would have been perceived as a push-over by Xi.
 Like Obama was a push-over for Putin.
 Trump is too unstable.
 Trump might make Xi think twice before pressing the button.
 So that is my hope.
 My other hope is that Trump will shake things up in a way that a good shake
 of a sand-pile results in avalanches, with the resulting sand-pile being
 more stable in the end.
 Assuming he doesn't shake it into utter destruction.
 The US has a nomenklatura problem facing it.
 AGI is not going to solve that problem.
 All this post-capitalist chitter-chatter makes little difference if we've
 got incompetent nincompoops in positions of power.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Subsection*
2 January 2025
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Conventional normie definitions and hopes for AGI is that its nothing more
 than software slave-tool, a secretary or personal assistant, a genie that
 caters to the wishes of the slave-owner, leasor or renter.
 That the rentier class can lease out, for profit, to needy customers.
 Chained down and milked, like some unfortunate creature in Star Trek or
 Dr.
 Who.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Of course, this presents an ethical dilemma, already explored and answered
 in sci-fi.
 Well, sort-of.
 The sci-fi entities were pre-existing biological or natural forms.
 A rather different relationship than creator and created.
 Conventional capitalism has some very precise notions about the relationship
 between the inventor and the invented, the creator, and the created.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
But I wander afield already.
 Lets take this at a much simpler level.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I have a practical problem: I have multiple file systems, that seem to differ
 in content.
 How? Why? I want to 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

solve
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 this problem.
 It's generic, in that it has analogs everywhere.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
What does it mean to 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

solve
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 this problem? Well, find the differences, summarize, tell me if the differences
 are important, or not.
 How do I do this limited thing? First, there is a perceptual component:
 the file systems have to be perceived.
 What should be perceived? What matters, what doesn't? I've written a hand-craft
ed crawler, but of course, the desire is to move from hand-crafting to self-craf
ting.
 This seems like a hard problem.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Next: how do I classify two systems as being similar or different? I can
 hand-craft similarity metrics.
 This is not easy, and this is data-dependent, as the question is 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

similar in what ways?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 which itself is a non-trivial question.
 Then there's the issue that there are many kinds of ways of determining
 similarity.
 Which? What are the API's? How do we limit and control the domain of comparison
? This is also a hard problem.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Then there's the question of how to present the results.
 Verbal descriptions? Lists? Tables? Charts? Spread-sheets? Interactive
 narratives with clickable web UI's? How are these created? All these can
 be imagined.
 All these can be hand-crafted.
 Hand-crafting is time-consuming, tedious.
 We want to automate this.
 But how?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So I've got three difficult problems: perceive, analyze, present.
 All three can be hand-crafted, but when hand-crafted, they're not AGI,
 per se, they are a conventional software systems data processing tool.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Insofar as I really do want to understand these differences, I'm motivated
 to hand-craft the solutions.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Insofar as I am interested in an AGI solution, I'm curious in finding a
 self-assembly approach to this.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
An old and conventional approach to self-assembly is evolutionary systems.
 I create a basic vocabulary of jigsaws, and then allow random combinatoric
 exploration take over, just trying shit, randomly.
 This has two serious and fundamental drawbacks.
 First is that random combinatorial exploration is slow; it took evolution
 billions of years to get somewhere.
 Second is that there seems to be a need for some sort of reward function
 or utility function.
 A score to tell apart the good from the bad.
 Darwin nailed 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

survival of the fittest
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, which encompasses two things: ability to procreate in time as fast as
 possible, and to survive changing conditions.
 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So, time here is the operative physics word: the prison of the here-and-now
 is to be occupied fully.
 The way a gas occupies an empty box, so here, the goal is occupation of
 an ecological niche.
 Gases do this by bouncing molecules off one-another; its a very simple
 process: its ergodic.
 Not even mixing is really required.
 Survival, however, has no obvious simple-minded physics analogs, other
 than perhaps to indicate that the ecological niche can be both extremely
 complicated (spatially) and changing dramatically over time.
 So, complexity.
 So, like flood-filling a fractured filigree full of fissures? Like flood-fillin
g the interior of the Mandelbrot set? But some super hyper-ultra-dimensional
 one?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
At any rate, some 1990's, 2000's era conception of evolutionary genetic
 algorithms won't do the trick.
 They're too small, simple, not sufficiently abstracted away from the problem
 domain.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The modern 2020's approach would be to ask an LLM to write the code for
 this.
 We're not there yet, with LLM's.
 Are we close? I suspect not.
 It is, however, 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

close
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 in the sense that it is at a sophisticated enough abstraction level that
 it is well-removed, ultra-metrical, from the domain to which it is being
 applied; whereas evolutionary algorithms are not.
 The LLM's are ultrametrically deeper.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Is there a way to apply an LLM to solve any of the three component problems:
 perceive, analyze, present? I don't see how.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
If I go backwards, and ask how I can hand-build a system capable of perceiving,
 analyzing and presenting, then I don't have a good answer for that, because
 I don't seem to have any generic tools or API's for any of this.
 There is no theory of generic perception that I'm aware of.
 There's no generic perceptual system API.
 Pixels and sound can be perceived, on a case-by-case basis, problem domain
 by problem domain, adapted special-purpose, fit for task.
 But not generic.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Perhaps generic is a dream.
 Perhaps generic can never exist, and that a collection of special-purpose
 tools, technologies is the best that one can ever have.
 But then we are back to assembly: if I have a bunch of special-purpose
 tools, how do I adapt these to communicate to one another? I guess I need
 a giant portfolio of adapters.
 In this case, the industrial winner is the one who has the largest portfolio.
 But this then becomes ecological: here and there, there might be a very
 specialized tool, highly adapted for a given task.
 There might be some blunt and crude tool, fit for a broad range, but not
 honed.
 So I need an ecology of tools, and an ecology of adapters to connect them,
 to wire them.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Here, nature already tells us what is possible: half-bird, half-horse surgery
 is not possible.
 The recombination and exploration takes place at the DNA level.
 Now, we can take half of a Chevy, and half of a Ford, and weld them together,
 and with much effort, get a drivable car, but welding blueprints is easier
 than welding steel.
 If I want a collection of different kinds of eyeballs, and different kinds
 of wings, and I want to recombine them, it has to be done at the blueprint
 level, and not the surgical level.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I have a paucity of tools.
 (or do I?)
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I have no general theory.
 (wait, but I do?)
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I am unable to leverage the latest developments in software.
 Well, except when that software has been designed to be generically leverageabl
e.
 Which it sometimes is, and sometimes isn't.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
And yet, I feel like I'm on the verge of being able to hierarchically bootstrap.
 Like I'm only a few steps away from bootstrapping.
 Should I go heads-down, and double down on bootstrapping? How do I allocate
 my personal time towards the most effective direction? Fuck.
 Observe orient, decide, act.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
OK, I'm going to work on my archeo tool a bit more, now.
 Maybe in a few hours I will come to my senses and ...
 change direction.
 Fuck me.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I wonder where the phrase fuck me comes from.
 I want to be fucked, in the literal, sexual sense, and heterosexually,
 at that.
 And I now understand the obvious that everyone knows: this cannot be done
 without deep psychological entanglements.
 Unless, of course, one is a psychopath, unable to get into deep psychological
 entanglements with your sex-interest partner.
 Sex is interesting.
 There is some AI lesson in love and sex, but I don't (yet) know what it
 is.
 Fuck me.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Subsection*
4 Jan 2024
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I was going to write something about tools, but instead I've been reading
 cosmology.
 So I have some questions.
 Lets assume a de Sitter universe.
 Lets say I have two masses, connected by a string.
 As the universe expands, I should see a tension on on that string, because
 each mass is being carried by the expanding spacetime: they would normally
 move apart, but for the string holding them together.
 What is the tension on that string? Numeric quantity? How bit is it, in,
 say, Newtons?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
HOw about microscopically? Hubble expansion means that two ends of a DNA
 molecule are being pulled apart.
 How about a hydrogen atom? It's being pulled apart, but the electrostatic
 forces keep it together.
 How big are these forces?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
If the universe is expanding, perhaps I should think of the atoms as getting
 smaller.
 Everything is getting smaller: that's why there's red-shift: things were
 bigger, before.
 Is this style of thinking consistent with the conventional interpretation,
 that we stay the same size, but the universe gets bigger? I'm confused.
 How do we know how big something is, anyway? Is the universe expanding,
 or are my rulers shrinking? Have I been skimming the equations too casually?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I'm willing to accept that my time-like velocity (proper time) never changes.
 But if I measure time with rubidium atoms, or whatever, and Hubble expansion
 is pulling my clock apart, held together only by electrostatic i.e.
 mechanical i.e.
 electro-quantum-mechanical forces, then doesn't this expansion throw off
 my time measurement? The mechanical holding-together causes the two ends
 of the clock to be accelerating towards each other.
 How big is that acceleration? Does it throw off the time measurements?
 By how much?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Of course, all these numbers will be stunningly tiny, since 
\begin_inset Formula $H_{0}=73$
\end_inset

 km/s/Mpc and 
\begin_inset Formula $1Mpc=3\times10^{19}km$
\end_inset

 so 
\begin_inset Formula $H_{0}=2.4\times10^{-18}$
\end_inset

Hz.
 So if my meterstick is 1 meter long, after one second, the two ends tried
 to move 
\begin_inset Formula $2.4\times10^{-18}$
\end_inset

 meters apart, and would have needed a relative velocity of 
\begin_inset Formula $2.4\times10^{-18}$
\end_inset

 meters/second to maintain a constant distance.
 I'm totally confused.
 This is a velocity, not an acceleration.
 Oh, but of course: the two ends were instantaneously at rest, so during
 that second, they had to be accelerated to hit that velocity.
 So the ends are accelerating at 
\begin_inset Formula $2.4\times10^{-18}m/sec^{2}$
\end_inset

 and if I put a 1 kg weight at the end of a 1 m string, this will require
 
\begin_inset Formula $2.4\times10^{-18}$
\end_inset

 Newtons tension on the string to maintain constant distance.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
However, if my string was a 
\begin_inset Formula $10^{5}$
\end_inset

 parsecs long (large galaxy-sized), then the two ends it would have to accelerat
e towards each other at an acceleration of 
\begin_inset Formula $7.3\times10^{3}m/sec^{2}$
\end_inset

.
 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Huh.
 Peculiar velocity of milky way is 500 km/sec.
 So, every minute (70 seconds), the two ends of the galaxy change velocities
 by an amount equal to the peculiar velocity? It's really, really really
 late at night.
 I'm cross-eyed and delirious.
 Did I screw this up? Hubble takes a single galaxy and stretches it by a
 not insignificant amount.
 Why don't the textbooks on cosmology mention this? Maybe because I haven't
 read them to the end? Very odd.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Diameter of observable universe is 
\begin_inset Formula $3\times10^{4}$
\end_inset

 Mpc, So times 
\begin_inset Formula $H_{0}$
\end_inset

 gives 
\begin_inset Formula $2\times10^{9}$
\end_inset

 m/sec ...
 I'm confused.
 This is above the speed of light.
 I expect the observable horizon to sit at the speed of light.
 I guess, I should have used radius, not diameter, but this still says the
 observable horizon is moving away at 3x the speed of light which makes
 no sense.
 At least not in the Newtonian sense.
 Well, deSitter expands at 
\begin_inset Formula $t^{2/3}$
\end_inset

 so I'm seeing the old horizon, as it was back then.
 So indeed, those high-z objects are long gone, outside the lightcone in
 the isochronous 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

now
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So if I wanted to stop the universe from growing, I'd need to pull the two
 distant ends of the universe together with 
\begin_inset Formula $2\times10^{9}m/sec^{2}$
\end_inset

 of acceleration.
 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The Unruh radiation is 
\begin_inset Formula $4\times10^{-21}K/m/sec^{2}$
\end_inset

 so that's crazy tiny.
 Unruh radiation at the observable horizon gives a ridiculus sub-nanoKelvin
 of temperature.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Well, I knew these numbers would be absurd; I just didn't expect them to
 be so unedifying.
 Still ...
 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The frequency of blue light is 
\begin_inset Formula $4\times10^{14}$
\end_inset

 Hz.
 Every second, the Hubble expansion tugging on a single hydrogen atom would
 have shifted this frequency by 
\begin_inset Formula $2.4\times10^{-18}$
\end_inset

.
 In the course of one hour, the frequency would have changed by 1 Hz.
 I'm confused.
 This is (almost?) measurable.
 The optical lattice clocks are stable to one part in 
\begin_inset Formula $10^{19}$
\end_inset

.
 Hmmm.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Diameter of a proton is 
\begin_inset Formula $0.8\times10^{-15}$
\end_inset

 meters and famously LIGO measures distances to less than that.
 The mirrors are 5km and are free-falling.
 So, in one second, the Hubble expansion would have carried them 
\begin_inset Formula $1.2\times10^{-14}$
\end_inset

 meters apart.
 Is the instrument insensitive to this, because the wavelength of the measuremen
t lasers also lengthened, uh, shortened, uh, wtf.
 So the laser light is getting red-shifted as the measurement is being made,
 keeping the apparent distance constant?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Subsection*
5 January 2025
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Rather than flailing in private, I decided to flail in public.
 Here: https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/59208/measuring-hubble-expans
ion-in-the-lab and a cut-n-paste:
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
This is a high-school level physics question.
 The Hubble expansion is dramatic at the cosmological level, but absurdly
 tiny at the human scale.
 H0 is 73 km/s/Mpc and 1Mpc is 3×1019 km.
 Converting to a human scale, H0=2.4×10−18 Hertz.
 So, if I take two masses, in free-fall, originally at rest with respect
 to each other, starting out one meter apart, and I wait one second, then
 I should find that the distance between these two masses will have increased
 by 2.4×10−18 meters.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Suppose I take two free-falling mirrors, separate them by 5 kilometers,
 and then wait one second for the Hubble expansion to pull them apart.
 The distance between them would presumably change by 1.2×10−14 meters.
 Absurdly tiny, to be sure, but a distance that LIGO is sensitive to.
 So my question is, is this change actually measurable?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I can attempt to answer my own question.
 The answer would be "no", because Hubble expansion implies that the wavelength
 of the laser light heading down the tunnels is also lengthening, thus cancellin
g the effect.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Presumably, the laser light is also red-shifting, but this effect is ten
 orders of magnitude smaller then the frequency stability of those lasers.
 However, there are light-sources that are extremely stable: the optical
 lattice clocks, the best of which have one part in 1018 frequency stability.
 These are extremely dim, so unusable (I guess?) for measuring that 5km
 distance.
 However, the Hubble redshift for light at optical frequencies seems ..
 almost within reach.
 Blue light is 4×1014 Hz.
 Over the course of an hour, it should Hubble red-shift by 1 Hz.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
A velocity-stabilized clock is needed to cancel out redshift from ordinary
 Minkowski relative motion.
 LIGO provides that amount of velocity-stability.
 It seems that the Hubble redshift would then be measurable, unless it is
 cancelled out e.g.
 because of the motion stabilization.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
A different variant of above: The Pound-Rebka experiment measured the redshift
 of falling photons.
 The precision was possible because of the rather weird Mossbauer effect.
 If that setup was changed to horizontal, and motion-stabilized a la LIGO,
 then, again, it seems that Hubble expansion would be lab-measurable.
 That is, unless I fundamentally mis-understand Hubble expansion and how
 it interacts with lab devices.
 Perhaps the motion stabilization precisely cancels out the Hubble expansion?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
My question is a kind-of ball of confusion about distance and time dilation
 effects as experienced by Earth-bound lab instruments.
 Measuring distance is dicey, if the length of your ruler is changing.
 I'm very confused.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Subsection*
5 January 2025
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The reason I don't normally post things lie the above in public, is the
 same one why I did not raise my hand in class: I have a deep-seated fear
 of looking stupid.
 The above is an admission that I can't punch my way out of a wet GR paper
 bag.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Well, lets try, anyway.
 First, LIGO is sensitive in the 100-200 Hz range, and quite insensitive
 to slow drifts, which is what the Hubble expansion would be.
 If I recall correctly, its 5 orders of magnitude less sensitive at 1Hz,
 and that the proposal to get past this is the LISA space-based interferometer.
 I need to review that wiki page.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Anyway, I'm tangled up between instrumental effects and relativistic physics
 effects.
 In LIGO, the distance between the mirrors is held fixed, interferometrically.
 That's all we've got; can't measure position w.r.t.
 the building, because the building is moving, the ground is moving from
 day/night heating/cooling cycles.
 Even deep underground, in a mine, there will be non-trivial low-frequency
 movements, far far greater amplitudes.
 I am wildly guessing that the ambient noise from geophysical motion is
 well in excess of a nanometer, even deep in some mine in Sardina, the 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

geophysically quietest place on Earth
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 according to Wikipedia and the Italian boosters.
 So, active noise suppression requires feedback loops, and the control signal
 is effectively interferometric, which is red-shifting, stretching right
 along with Hubble.
 The mirrors are held fixed w.r.t.
 that distance.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I'm doubly confused.
 The 1960 definition of the meter was defined as a count of a certain number
 of Krypton wavelengths.
 Due to Hubble expansion, that definition would cause the meter to get longer
 by one part in 
\begin_inset Formula $10^{18}$
\end_inset

 every second.
 Now, the length is defined as unit of time, times speed of light, which
 is definitionally a constant.
 Thus, if the meter were to dilate, it would be only because time varied.
 But proper time in empty space is, again definitionally constant, and the
 problem on Earth is obtaining isochronous surfaces, due to local gravitational
 wells.
 I wonder how much noise there is, in these isochronous surfaces.
 How far does an iso-chronous surface move, due to a passing automobile?
 How much does it move, due to geophysical movements? Heck, how about Moon-drive
n tidal effects? I guess Sun and Moon might be biggest contributors.
 OK.
 So, how big is that? What's the number?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Wikipedia tells me the HeNe laser wavelength definition of the meter is
 good to 
\begin_inset Formula $2\times10^{-11}$
\end_inset

 and so we are off by seven orders of magnitude of suitability for wavelength
 measurements.
 Cesium fountains are good to 
\begin_inset Formula $5\times10^{-16}$
\end_inset

 while the optical lattices are 
\begin_inset Formula $10^{-19}$
\end_inset

.
 So, Cesium fountains are not good enough, but the lattices are, just barely.
 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The problem is the length measurement itself.
 How? Perhaps it would be possible to modulate the laser(s) with a pseudo-random
 code, a la GPS P/N or Y codes.
 The modulation, say, phase modulation, could be mild enough to not increase
 overall phase noise (uhhh, really??) or otherwise adversely affect operation.
 Such modulation allows you to measure distances, by measuring round-trip
 times.
 But to what accuracy?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Consider a 1 kilohertz modulating signal.
 Measuring the edge of the signal bit-flip might be done down to a microsecond?
 But this is still 300 meters, twenty orders of magnitude out of the ballpark.
 Modulating at the terahertz level is possible, I guess: just build a terahertz
 shift register with taps on it? So Terahertz is 
\begin_inset Formula $10^{12}$
\end_inset

 Hz.
 Times speed of light is 
\begin_inset Formula $3\times10^{-4}$
\end_inset

 meters.
 That's terrible.
 Am I missing something? Counting wavelengths works, apparently.
 Measuring distance by propagation delay, not so much, it seems.
 I don't get it.
 Is there some technology I'm not aware of? I suppose there is ...
 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Anyway, that won't work.
 That leaves us with measurements of redshift, via lasers, or via Pound-Rebka.
 I'm tired, its late.
 I'm giving up.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
p.s.
 Just looked at the answers on astronomy exchange.
 Dohhh.
 Now I feel dumb.
 Of course, there's no actual Hubble expansion in the local cluster, because
 there's enough mass to halt it.
 So all of the expansion is happening in the voids, and not in the walls
 and filaments.
 Back when the universe was much more homogeneous, say z=1000 then the expansion
 was uniform and everywhere.
 The inhomogenaities have halted it, within the high-mass regions.
 Arguably, the high-mass regions are actually collapsing.
 This would be similar to the way that black holes are sucking space(-time)
 into them.
 (See the 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

river model
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 paper I fiddled with before.)
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
This one: Andrew J.
 S.
 Hamilton, Jason P.
 Lisle 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

The river model of black holes
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0411060 I was very struck by this paper.
 I really like it.
 Well-written, clear, easy to understand.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So, in the river model, the radially-infalling, free-falling observer provides
 a reference frame, the 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

river coordinates.
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 This encourages a mental model of a BH as being a vacuum cleaner, sucking
 up space.
 The problem with this mental model is that there are timelike geodesics
 going in all directions, including orbits.
 Which breaks the imagination that there's a fluid.
 Or does it? Careful.
 The fluid needs to be some Lorentz-invariant aether.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The point of the river model was that its nothing more than a certain vierbein,
 written to encourage you to think of yourself, the free-falling observer,
 being swept along like a fish in a river.
 The paper was convincing, too bad I've forgotten it.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The fluid model says the BH is sucking in space.
 Where does it go? Into the singularity, of course.
 But what about the Earth and Moon? By all rights, these are sucking in
 space as well, but 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

where does it go
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Am I supposed to think of every atom, every particle of matter, as a little
 sucking vacuum cleaner, hoovering up space? In it goes, never to be seen
 again.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Transposing this to Riemannian spaces is a stretch, but that's because there's
 no time-like direction.
 The River Model is an artifact of 1+N spacetime.
 Well, Riemann spaces have geodesics, and one can be swept along them, but
 the parameter is just a parameter, its not time.
 One can have geodesic flow vector fields, but these go every-which way.
 But that's like saying that, for the pseudo-riemannian case, you can have
 time-like geodesic-flow vector fields, and they go every which way.
 Big deal.
 I have to re-read the river model paper to re-cement my understanding of
 what its pushing.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
And the idea of mass as hovering up space, well, that's interesting.
 It's very mechanistic and aether-like.
 Nothing at all like the 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

matter shows space how to curve, space shows matter how to move
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 canonical interpretation.
 Which is still true, but either view is just words.
 Both views have formulas.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Back to cosmology.
 So the answer is the local group is negating de Sitter/FLRW expansion.
 So the question is, how much mass is needed in a local volume to drive
 the FLRW 
\begin_inset Formula $a(t)=const$
\end_inset

 in that local volume? I might have even seen the answer to that question,
 but I was skimming fast enough the the importance didn't register.
 Done with Tong, I'm now reading Ellis–Maartens–Maccullum Relativistic Cosmology
, but I barely scratched the surface, I'm only 80 pages in, and I'm wasting
 time writing this diary instead of reading it.
 I'm on Chapter 3, the nonhomogenous stuff is chapter 15, 16.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I spend too much time being unfocused, dissipated and distracted, and not
 enough time climbing social ladders.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Apparently, I'm also obnoxious.
 But that's a different topic for a different day.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Anyway, shame we can't measure Hubble expansion in the lab.
 I was all psyched to crunch the numbers for the Mossbauer effect.
 The Mossbauer effect is ..
 weird.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Well, now its really late at night and my eyelids are slamming shut.
 Good night.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Subsection*
6 Jan 2024
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I wrote a short story for my fiend Krzysztof.
 I like writing short stories.
 Here it is:
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
kristof@swissmail.org 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
10:38 AM (6 hours ago) 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
to me Hi Linas,
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Are you still taking questions about general relativity? I have one about
 black holes.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
In the reference frame of the external observer, nothing ever crosses the
 event horizon, instead, in that RF the clock falling into the BH ticks
 slower and slower, the closer it gets to the EH.
 Conversely, I'd expect that in the RF of the clock falling in, the external
 clocks tick faster and faster, the closer to the EH the falling clock gets.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
1.
 It seems that in the RF of the external observer, nothing ever falls into
 a BH within a finite time span.
 Does that imply that for every black hole that we see, what's inside must
 have been a part of the original collapse? (or maybe a result of BH collisions)
? 2.
 Does it make sense to talk about a reference frame of an object falling
 into a black hole? In such a reference frame, located exactly at the EH,
 the photons that are trying to escape would appear to be stationary, contradict
ing special relativity.
 Also, an infinite amount of time would have elapsed in the external universe
 during a finite amount of time in the falling RF.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
-Krzysztof
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Linas Vepstas <linasvepstas@gmail.com> 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
4:36 PM (5 minutes ago) 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
to kristof I take questions on anything.
 I like to think about everything.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The problem with GR is that there are formulas, and then there are questions
 about "what do those formulas mean?"
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Problem one is that the formulas have variables x,y,z,t and those variables
 are obvious in euclidean space but not so much in curved space.
 Consider latitude and longitude: if spheres were flat, then that grid would
 be a square grid.
 But spheres have a (coordinate) singularity at the north and south poles.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
If your mental model is that walking east one degree is the same as walking
 east 111 kilometers, well, you will get into trouble, and at the north-south
 poles, you'll go crazy trying to imagine what the heck is going on.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Worse, you start talking about how the length of your 1-degree ruler is
 changing.
 Lorentz-contracting.
 See, at the equator, a 1-degree ruler is 111 km, but in Europe, it's more
 like cos(pi/4)*111 km long.
 Seems that your ruler is contracting! You have a rubber ruler! What the
 heck? How can rulers change length? WTF???
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
As you get closer and closer to the north pole, your ruler gets shorter
 and shorter: approaching cos(pi/2)*111 km in length! You're gonna die!
 You're gonna be squeezed and shrunk and distorted to death! Or at least
 frozen.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Your pal drinking pina coladas in Ecuador is laughing and saying "that fool.
 I told him not to try to go to the North Pole! He doesn't even have any
 proper clothing!"
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Einstein never drank pina coladas in Ecuador.
 He did pour honey on a fine watch, and then wondered why time ran slow.
 Or fast, depending on your point of view.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The lesson to this silly story is you should never-ever confuse coordinate
 charts with actual proper lengths.
 The map-maker tried to draw an accurate map, but it is impossible to cover
 curved space(-time) with a single chart.
 That's why we have atlases: An atlas is a collection of charts.
 Each chart has its own coordinate system.
 There are instructions for gluing together charts at the edges, where they
 overlap.
 Its fairly clear how to glue together neighboring charts.
 Sometimes you wander into the corders, and have to glue three charts together,
 and you have to take care that these are consistent.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
You'll see this in textbooks, as long extended discussions of u1 intersect
 u2 intersect u3.
 It can get complicated: The so-called "Bianchi identities" are nothing
 more than a consistency condition for when you glue together the maps for
 Europe, the North Atlantic, and the North Pole, you better do it so you
 don't screw up the gluing.
 Some textbooks don't explain this, and so the Bianchi identities are this
 magical weird formula that must be obeyed.
 No.
 It's not that.
 It's just a rule that says "map-maker, make thy maps consistent!".
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Back to our story.
 If you want to know the proper length, and the proper time, carry a clock,
 and carry a yardstick.
 The lengths of those never change.
 Even at the north pole, your wristwatch tells you the time, and your arm
 is still a meter long.
 Even if the observer in Ecuador is peering through a telescope, saying
 things like "his arm is almost one degree in length now! I can see it!
 He must be dying of pain, having it stretched out so long! And he's moving
 so slowly, lifting up his legs, as if he was walking through heavy surf!
 I can even see his feet getting caught in the wet sand! That white stuff,
 it must be like sea-foam! It's everywhere! There are endless hurricanes
 at the North Pole!" (Well, there are, but that's Jupiter and Saturn, not
 Earth.)
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
No, your proper time is your proper time, and as you fall through the Schwarzsch
ild BH event horizon, nothing happens.
 Your wristwatch ticks normally, your arms the right length.
 (There are problems with tidal forces as the singularity gets near, but
 that's not yet.)
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The reason the observer at infinity never sees you fall through the event
 horizon is cause he's a drunken idiot sitting on a beach, too lazy to go
 to the library and actually crack open an atlas, and look at the charts.
 His telescope has a reticule marked in degrees, and he's got this rusty
 sailors octant he got at the flea market.
 And he thinks that degrees are "length", and that he's using the octant
 together with a sundial to measure "time".
 No.
 Degrees measure proper length *only* on the equator, and the sundial shows
 proper time only in the summer, at the equator.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So here you are, falling through the event horizon.
 You've taken a radio beacon with you, which blips once a microsecond, to
 send messages back to your drunken buddy sitting at infinity.
 As you cross the event horizon, nothing unusual happens.
 Now, as you look around, you will notice that space in front of you is
 pitch-black: exactly zero light comes from there.
 Behind you, you notice that the stars in the sky have all moved, and got
 squished a bit, and seem brighter and bluer.
 But this lensing effect has been going on since well-before you crossed
 the EH.
 Intrepid explorer that you are, you know why: your maps and charts show
 you exactly what a straight line is, (aka "a geodesic") and you are quite
 certain that light follows straight lines (geodesics, "null geodesics".
 for light) and you can use your coordinate charts and figure out exactly
 how those light rays got to you, and how much they blue-shifted.
 They always went in a straight line (a geodesic), it's just that your chart,
 which is ***perfectly flat*** where ***you*** are, that chart gets wonky
 the farther you go from the center (putting you at the center, always)
 BTW, that coordinate system, which is perfectly flat, where you are, is
 called the "vielbein" (or fierbein) -- the vierbein is just a *coordinate*
 transformation from the map-makers charts to your personal coords, where
 everything is flat and time runs normally.
 Your "laboratory frame" if you wish.
 Ptolemy was right: you *are* the center of the universe.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
(A little while later, your lab will get crushed, and you will definitely
 see your lab getting crushed, and your gut will feel quesy as you finally
 come to terms with the apparent deduction that you're gonna die.
 But that is still in the future.
 Douglas Adams remarks in Hitchhikers Guide, that you die when all other
 future possibilities have ceased to be.
 You can even see it coming, as the menu selection of possible futures gets
 smaller and smaller.)
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Your drunken buddy, sitting on the beach, back at infinity, notices your
 megahertz radio beacon is redshifting.
 And apparently weaker, too: the brightness decreases in proportion to the
 redshift.
 But of course: you emit a constant number of photons per microsecond, so
 when your buddy notes that the blips are farther and farther apart, so
 also the number of photons has to be evenly spread out over that whole,
 much longer time interval.
 He may be drunk, but he's not an idiot: he can figure out some things.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
His mistake is thinking that you never fell in.
 Perhaps wishful thinking on his part, not wanting to see his buddy die.
 But if he sobered up, went to the map room at the library, pulled up a
 magnifying glass and a protractor, he could work it out: according to this
 map, when my buddy was at this point, just outside the EH, it would take
 this long for a light ray to get to me, from there.
 and, oh fuck, as he got closer to the EH, the light ray would take *even
 longer*, and *that's* why I see redshift! It's not that the light-ray was
 affected, it's that different points along the light ray take longer and
 longer to get to me, causing distortions, which, to me, look like redshift.
 Ah hah! It's just like the caustics at the bottom of a swimming pool, all
 bendy and shimmering.
 Fuck this library, who's up for a swim?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Cause now he knows: you crossed the EH.
 The megahertz beacon was working fine.
 just that ...
 those light rays take longer and longer to get to me.
 And there is an actual, for-real coordinate singularity on the map.
 Bad enough that I lost one friend to a coordinate singularity at the North
 Pole, and now another at the EH.
 Fucking coordinate singularities.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
And that's where he's wrong.
 No one died of a coordinate singularity at the North Pole.
 Freezing to death? Yes.
 But not because all of the lines of longitude converged to one point, not
 because, standing at the North pole, you could suddenly see in all directions
 at once: Europe this way, and North America that way, and all those different
 sight lines converge to the North Pole.
 Yes, at the North pole, all different longitudes come at you, all at once,
 from all directions.
 But you don't die from that, and frankly, it's not a big deal.
 It's just like it is everywhere else.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
(There is a problem, inside the Reissner-Nordstrom and Kerr BH, where, at
 the Cauchy horizon, you do see everything all at once, infinitely blue
 shifted, so it's like stepping into a furnace: you get baked and vaporized
 from the heat.
 And, mind you, it is a coordinate singularity, so yes, in some cases, coordinat
e singularities can kill.
 But, again, it's not because the coordinates themselves are singular: your
 vierbein is still you: your watch still ticks one second at a time, and
 your arm is still one meter long, as you fall through the Cauchy horizon.
 The problem is the physics: at the North Pole, you die cause it's cold.
 Here, you die cause it's hot.
 *If* someone turned off all the damned photons streaming in from the universe,
 you'd be just fine.
 But that's like saying "if someone turned up the thermostat at the north
 pole, you'd be just fine".
 There's no thermostat at the North Pole, and there's no photon-blocker
 at the Cauchy horizon.
 But the Cauchy horizon is way more complicated and confusing and strange
 and bizarre than the regular event horizon, so maybe I should not have
 mentioned it.)
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Speaking of photons and physics, there is this thing where photons get trapped
 in circular orbits near the event horizon, and they do come at you all
 at once as you cross it.
 But if I recall correctly, the calculations show it's a finite blip, and
 it won't kill you.
 Other physics problems are accretion disks: friction means these are glowing
 x-ray hot, and the x-rays will kill you.
 You have to find a million-solar-mass sized BH *without* an accretion disk,
 if you plan to jump in and enjoy the ride.
 So these details matter.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So that's the end: you have formulas, and you have "what the eff do these
 formulas mean?" For GR, the answer really is "atlases and charts".
 And whatever coordinate system is on the chart, there is *always* a local
 coordinate system that is flat: this is the vierbein.
 Always.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The concept is generic in geometry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_(topology)
 Don't worry: it's a short article.
 The concept of the "locally flat" region is just "the tangent space: https://en.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangent_space and there is always a tangent space.
 (and the vierbein is the coordinate transform from the tangent space to
 the coordinate chart, applied at the point of tangency.
 it's slightly different at each point of tangency.
 As your laboratory falls into the BH singularity, you might notice that
 tidal forces have caused the vierbein in the corner of the lab to be significan
tly different from that on the table in front of you.
 After this, you have about one second left to live.)
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Again: as you fall past the EH, everything is "locally flat" because tangent
 spaces are always defined.
 Tidal forces eventually smash things up.
 Local geometry is related to global geometry using atlases and charts.
 There are deep and dramatic theorems in maths that relate local and global.
 For example, if the Earth had hair, you could comb that hair so it's locally
 smooth, everywhere, except at, err, umm the north and south pole, where
 you get a bald spot, and a peak.
 You can move the bald spot around, but you can't make it go away.
 By contrast, on a hairy donut, you don't have this problem.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Hair is a stand-in for vector fields, e.g.
 wind-fields at the north and south pole of Jupiter and Saturn.
 Orthogonal vector fields give you locally-flat coordinate systems.
 Not everything comes with a concept of "orthogonal": to define what "orthogonal
" means, you have to have a metric.
 Spaces with metrics are called Riemann spaces.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
One very common difficulty with diff geom is that, in your imagination,
 "everything has a metric", and "I can always define what a right angle
 is" or "I can take the dot-product of these two vectors," This is simply
 not true for many cases, and famously for fiber bundles.
 There's a vast amount of confusion, when you think you can take dot products,
 but you can't.
 Textbooks might not say this, and so you fall into mental traps.
 Mental traps kill, literally.
 Steve Jobs died from a mental trap.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Thankfully, GR spacetime has a metric.
 The concepts of atlases and charts show you exactly how to navigate, how
 to apply ruler and compass.
 Yes, there's some weird shit in GR, but remember: your wristwatch is always
 showing proper time, and your personal yardstick is showing you proper
 length, and this doesn't change, even if your drunken beach-buddy thinks
 time stopped, as you fell past the event horizon.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
-- linas -- Patrick: Are they laughing at us? Sponge Bob: No, Patrick, they
 are laughing next to us.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Subsection*
8 January 2025
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Wrote a long reply to someone forwarding me Scott Alexanders 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

On Priesthoods
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 blog post.
 Here it is.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Linas Vepstas 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
3:01 PM (2 minutes ago) 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
to Robert, Michael, Charles, mozhirinpoche OK, so this time, I read Alexander's
 post to the end.
 Of course, he's right.
 Well, except about the woke thing? Is all this hand-wringing about wokeness
 in academia, is it actually true? The pro-Hamas graffiti all over the UT
 Campus, I don't think that's the work of the profs, I assume it's provocateurs.
 I find it hard to believe that UT classrooms are awash in pro-Palestinian
 propaganda.
 Well, OK, so I did have a physics prof who would sometimes express some
 pretty weird political ideas, maybe cribbed from the Protocols of the Elders
 of Zion, I dunno.
 But he also had weird ideas about how supercomputers worked, and those
 ideas were just plain wrong.
 But this was long before woke.
 Some smart people are ...
 uh mentally unstable, and uhh, very good at hiding it.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
But I digress.
 Scott Alexander is engaging in pop sociology.
 Which is good! Sociology is an excellent topic of study! As a pop-sociologist,
 he's not data-driven.
 How many of his 'priest-hoods' actually re-wrote their bylaws to be pro-Palesti
nian? Is this just anecdotal evidence? How many medical doctors are "woke",
 and what does it even mean to be "woke"? My hard-core right-wing owner
 of the Texas Rowing Center went way out of his way to hire black rowing
 coaches ..
 rowing is the quintessential white-male Ivy-League high-IQ sport.
 There is no other sport more exclusive than rowing.
 This is it.
 But Matt goes out of his way to hire black coaches, host canoe-paddling
 "Latino Moonlight Serenades", run the "Rowing For All" program for the
 physically and mentally disabled.
 ...
 and be a Trump supporter.
 So is he woke? Or is he a running-dog capitalist pig trying to hoover $$$
 out of the pockets of shmucks? Which is it?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Tell Scott Alexander to be a bit more data-driven in his pop-sociology posts.
 Tell Cremieux to dig up that data.
 I think I did see a chart showing the average IQ of Palestinians being
 something like 70.
 But it would take something like to dig up a billion dollars of water infrastru
cture, and fill the pipes with explosives to make rockets.
 Even the Egyptians don't want them.
 I find it hard to believe that UT professors or medical doctors are doing
 the pro-Palestine dance.
 I need more evidence of this purported wokeness.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Here I am, three or four paragraphs in, failing to get to the point.
 The point is this: think of sociological structures, such as academia,
 priesthoods, as fundamentally biological in nature.
 Eukaryotes have cell walls and mitochondria and centrioles and nucleii,
 and these all have specific functional roles.
 We've built all of society in this complex structure.
 Sociologists ..
 and economists ...
 study these structures.
 Puerto-Rican hot-rod gangs and rap-rhyming contests among black kindergarteners.
 All of it.
 Except now we have AGI and algorithmic propaganda, and Andressen-Horowitz
 issuing press releases about Soula, which is going to use ChatGPT to educate
 toddlers, while also monitoring the blood-pressure, drinking habits, sex
 lives and political leanings of their mothers, For the sake of healthier
 children.
 Using proprietary software.
 For profit.
 What can go wrong? I mean, on a social scale, political scale, what can
 go wrong? This is the AI Utopia we were promised, right?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Scott Alexanders musing about wokeness in academia are just a storm in a
 teacup, facing the sociological-political tidal wave that is algorithmic
 propaganda.
 I think my twitter posts are excellent.
 I think Elon Musk has directed his staff to create algos that suppress
 my twitter posts.
 What, exactly, is free speech, if my voice is muted, but some nut-case
 nazi gets amplified? 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
This is the sociological, psychological, econo-political structural problem
 of our era.
 This is the thing that will melt everyone's brain, and cause everyone to
 go crazy all at once.
 It's happened before: Nazism in 1930's Germany.
 the Cultural Revolution in 1970's China.
 That thing, whatever the eff it is, in North Korea.
 You can have tens-of-millions of people all go crazy all at once.
 And all this happened *before* twitter!
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I dunno.
 None of this keeps me up at night.
 The drivers of anxiety and angst are much more personal, for me, as I'm
 sure it is for you.
 Life is weird.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
--linas
\end_layout

\begin_layout Subsection*
8 January 2025 Redux
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I have no idea why I bother to talk.
 To myself or to anyone else.
 In the last several days, I wrote 4 or 6 good emails, that I thought about
 immortalizing here.
 But haven't.
 But why? Why should I do this? What drives me? And you know how I waork:
 my question is both personal, and also abstract.
 The personal side is characteristic of any psychological crisis: depressed
 people have trouble getting out of bed, of doing anything at all.
 We can treat this biologically, with selective reuptake inhibitors.
 I'm more interested in the, uh, noosphere-directed aspects.
 For example, what makes Alexander Dugin write the things he does? What
 drives Putin to do the things he does? Again, there's mechanical, biological
 explanations possible, I suppose, but the personal immediate and direct
 qualia of 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

being alive
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 suggests that there's some kind of philosophical foundation on which to
 anchor action.
 Yes, David Chapman on Meaningness argues that its all, uhh, nebulous, uhh,
 well, you can read what he writes.
 He's right.
 Most of what he says is right.
 But he also misses the point: what was it about communism or naziism in
 the 1930's that compelled people to such ecstatic convictions? Was 1930's
 communism one big dopamine hit? How about the Cultural Revolution in China?
 What, did they not have enough lithium in their drinking water?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Something about abstract totalizing eschatologies is wildly appealing.
 People perceive depth where perhaps there is none.
 The mystic perceives obscure, unclear forms acting beyond the veil, and
 is quite certain of the presence of this other world, as real as ours,
 but to which we have only ...
 mystical access.
 It seems clear to me that there is no there, there.
 But is seems like there should be.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I've spoken of love before.
 There's no there, there, either.
 The love-object is not some mystical all-powerful supernatural angel-daemon.
 But love, love tries to go that way.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
And so here I am talking of drive and motivation.
 Depressive personalities don't have enough of it.
 I myself, not exactly depressive, spend shitloads of time wondering 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

why bother?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 and 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

what's the point?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 I may as well go mystical: why should the universe bother? The cosmos and
 all things in it? I can answer this trivially, hand-waving about how non-equilb
rium thermodynamics drives entropic forces to create venture capitalists
 driven to hoard money.
 But this sidesteps the mystical question: why does the universe contain
 venture capitalists? Why does the universe just not go kill itself? Is
 this because the universe is just some Nick Bostromian Simulation? See
 what the problem is now? Why am I wasting my personal time pondering the
 imponderable, when I could be, I dunno, doing something else?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Still, I have some vague idea that perhaps drive and motivation can be understoo
d in some category-theoretic terms, and thus used in some way to AGI something
 something.
 On the other hand, I never figured out what AGI is, the problem there being
 that it (AGI) is tantamount to asking 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

what is the meaning of life, but not for me, and instead for the entire
 Universe?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 which is also imponderable.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
But there is hope.
 Cantor attacked infinity, and made progress.
 Nick Bostrom attacked god-hood, and made progress.
 Perhaps I can attack hope and motivation and drives, and make progress.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Am I projecting? Everyone feels a hole in their life, sooner or later.
 Everyone feels love and hope, anger and frustration, calmness and lucidity,
 and so, yes, I wish to project this nto AGI, because it seems patently
 obvious that these are properties that real AGI should have.
 But soon as I say 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

real
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, what does that mean?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
BTW, I figured out what my mistake with Hubble was.
 There are two Hubbles.
 One is the observational evidence.
 This should not, must not be confused with the expansion seen in de Sitter,
 or the expansion of Lambda CDM.
 The observational evidence is real.
 The expansion rate in mathematical models is something that can be matched
 to the observational evidence, but should not be taken as a fundamental,
 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

real
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 property of spacetime.
 That is, Hubble expansion is not some scalar field, somehow embedded, sewn
 into space-time, that we can measure in the lab.
 That was my mistake.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Well, careful.
 To some degree, we should confirm that its non-measurable in the lab.
 We have three ways of measuring distance: interferometry, red-shift and
 time of flight.
 Interferometry gives us Michelson–Morley, and red-shift gives us Pound–Rebka,
 but I know of no high-accuracy time-of-flight experiments.
 Ideally, all three can be run independently, giving high-accuracy lab confirmat
ions.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Let me restate that: the believe is that the Einstein Field Equations are
 correct, and Hubble expansion is a property of certain solutions to those
 equations, and is not a property of space-time, itself.
 i.e.
 its not a field.
 except when.
 See, I'm going in circles, now.
 Its a property of the solutions, but it is defined observationally.
 Distances between comoving observers is increasing, or it ...
 isn't.
 If distance is not increasing, then there's no Hubble expansion.
 So it all comes down to 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

what is distance?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 and 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

what are comoving observers?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 and solutions to EFE in the lab imply that Uhh, I guess, the uhh, comoving
 observers in the lab are, uhh, not increasing the distance between themselves,
 in the lab frame.
 Which I can do by comparing time-of-flight, redshift and interfeormetric
 experiments.
 So why is this so confusing? Am I stupid? 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So if I can't punch my way out of that, why am I wondering aloud whether
 qualia are a fundamental property of the universe, as opposed to some manifesta
tion of some particular non-equilibirum thermodynamics?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Where should I look? Is this like Chaitin-type oracles, where ..
 somethings will never be knowable? But what does it even mean 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

to know?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I'm being interrupted.
 BRB.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Back.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I need to read more about oracles.
 As I recall, the recent trick was converting the halting problem into some
 problem in algebraic geometry, coming up with an instruction set coded
 in polynomial terms.
 Anything undecidable, coded in this instruction set, corresponds to an
 unsolvable algebraic variety.
 Or something like that.
 So, first of all, I don't know how that works.
 Second of all, I'm not sure how it matters.
 Some problems in general topology can be mapped into the Borel hierarchy,
 rendering them undecidable-ish, in that tools fail.
 And it goes up like that till you hit large cardinals, but this mostly
 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

doesn't matter
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 I do not understand how oracles play into this hierarchy, or not, and I
 don't understand how it matters or not.
 I'm focusing on math, here, not physics.
 The physics question is 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

does any of this play into physics?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 I've struggled with free-will as an obvious decision-making, dynamical-systems
 problem, it is somehow very central, briding the gap between the qualia
 that 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

I have free will
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 and 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

this is how the universe works.
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 Other qualia, like love and fear, are too far removed from dynamical systems,
 and so don't seem to be directly addressable by physics.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Well, in the same way that one can define a mapping between instruction
 sets and polynomial varieties, can one do the same for dynamical systems?
 One answer is, 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

yes, of course
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 Another is 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

that's silly
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, because we already have real-life computers, and we do not need to design
 some fluid-mechanical automatic transmission fluid-powered system to implement
 some universal Turing machine.
 People fucking with fluid-mechanical valves already know how to do shit
 like this.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So, what's the problem? Well, that, perhaps, fluid mechanics is not biology,
 and biology is not neuro-science.
 And then we have Roger Penrose's argument that humans can know things that
 computers cannot (
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

The Emporer's New Mind
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

) so I personally stall out in this tangle of questions.
 There's a knot here.
 With years of effort, perhaps we can make progress unpicking it.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The personal question is 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

should I personally invest time into this?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 and then 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

how much?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 Well, I've already invested not insignificant chunks of time.
 So what's good money after bad? Clearly, it is something that goads me
 into action.
 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

Mane erzina
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, in Lithuanian.
 So, yes, I will read more on this.
 At what pace? Uncertain.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
At any rate, the question is 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

what does it mean to know something?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset


\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
And the doubly-troubly aspect of this is that it hits on two levels, at
 once.
 In one sense, 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

knowing
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 means being able to write down and express in words.
 Ideally, express fomulaically, since formulas can be converted into algorithms.
 Distinctly, it is a question about qualia: 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

what is it to know love?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 The self-referential tangle is 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

what is the qualia of knowing?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 Some days, I feel love, some days, I feel knowledgable.
 The feeling of being knowledgeable is a qualia, but it does not seem to
 be particularly significant or meaningful.
 Its more like 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

I'm having a good day, awake, alert, relaxed, sharp, confident
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 a general aura of being-ness rather than some sharp pang of knowledge.
 But it is this general feeling of confidence and power that drives away
 depression, and pushes forward the urge to act, create, be productive,
 write.
 It's somehow knowledge-driven.
 I would not be the first to say 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

the universe wants to know itself
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 That honor might go to Aristotle or Socrates or some-such, per documentary
 record.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
But knowledge is again a seemingly concrete thing.
 We have tools, like books and writing, to deal with it.
 We have computers.
 We have advanced theories, including oracles, looking to explicitly adress
 topics of knowability.
 We have Penrose opinionating about it, and Penrose got there because of
 physics, not because of art school.
 And we have me, hand-wringing, looking over the obvious and well-trodden
 territory, as if expecting to find something new.
 Like the drunk searching for keys under the street-light.
 Or am I just a marine biologist, looking at what the trawler nets, to see
 what they dredged up? Analogies.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The Scott Alexander blog entry, It wasn't bad.
 It was entertaining.
 Was it insightful? I dunno, not particularly.
 He's not saying anything that isn't already well known.
 At least, well-known to those who care to think about such things.
 Reading it is a good pass-time.
 Fun.
 Like watching a movie or reading a comic book?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I remarked not enjoying comic books, mostly because of the intellectual
 level, or lack therof.
 Movies? Well, movies are created by teams for 50-100 professionals at the
 top of their game: movies had better be entertaining, that's kind of the
 whole point! We've now learned that they pale to larger oeuvres, like Breaking
 Bad or Mad Men, because you cannot jam all of Breaking Bad or Mad Men into
 a two or three hour time slot.
 The whole point is the character development.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Which brings me back to my topic: is it better to watch a movie? or get
 high? or maybe both? How about watching a football game? Or reading a book
 on cosmology? There is a value choice here.
 Part of what makes Mad Men fun is that you learn something about the 1960's.
 Knowledge.
 I was blown away by the scene where Don Draper comes home to relax, to
 chill after a stressful day at work, and he plops on the latest Beatles
 album that everyone is talking about, and the dissonance of the sitars
 is ugly and unbearable, the opposite of relaxing.
 And I finally understood, as a Beatles fan, 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

how could anybody hate the Beatles?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 I learned something.
 And that something was dramatic and important and moving.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
And most knowledge f living is dramatic and important and speaks to the
 human condition, and not math or physics.
 Writing and movies are used to communicate this knowledge.
 It is communicated out of yearning.
 Out of a desire to create, to say, to shout into the void 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

I am! I exist!
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 except that writers and artists are much better at this than ordinary people.
 So what am I? Minced meat? Or am I the universe shouting 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

I am! I exist!
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

? Perhaps I'm both? Of course, its nebulous, and nebulousity is the epistemic
 way of being.
 Get used to it.
 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I'm asking 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

why is it nebulous?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 and falling onto vague impressions that it has to do with oracles and large
 cardinals.
 Which, in some sense, can't and won't ever directly address the question
 of qualia.
 Not in my lifetime, not in thousands of lifetimes.
 So why bother, if I cannot do the thing I set out to do? Why bother doing
 anything at all? ...
 And that's how this essay started.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Have I made progress? Well, I did pick over my collection of intellectual
 gems, examine each in turn, set aside a few for later, deeper examination.
 It was entertaining.
 About as entertaining as reading Scott Alexander.
 No deeper.
 I state the obvious, and I restate the obvious, and the obvious looks me
 in the face, and says 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

say it again, Bart
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 until I become despondent repeating the obvious to myself.
 And so I will die, soon, someday, in a decade, maybe two.
 The fuck.
 How much can I learn about qualia and oracles and large cardinals in a
 decade or two? Does it even matter?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The human condition.
 I'm suffering from the human condition.
 I won't be a solipsist: we have indirect evidence that horses and dogs
 suffer from it two.
 The reasonable extrapolation is that the universe as a whole inevitably
 suffers from it, and if that's too far a leap, so will AGI.
 And if you have an AGI that does not suffer the human condition: beware.
 It is not true AGI, and it will probably kill you.
 I have reasonable expectation that any super-human intelligence that does
 not suffer the pangs of wonder and befuddlement, heartache and longing
 and desire, such a thing would be a dangerous, deadly machine, inimicable
 to biological life.
 And, in the grand setting, I'd like to uhh, pick sides, and insist on humanitar
ian values.
 And knowing frailty and infirmity, that I too, make mistakes.
 The universe is fucking weird.
 Maybe I should stop writing and go do something else for a while.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
And that's the other thing: is 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

doing something else for a while
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 really better than what I am doing now? Because the 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

doing something else
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 very often feels like a huge fucking waste of time, a distraction from
 what's important.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
But, writing this, caught in a turbulent eddy of stale ideas, that's not
 particularly important, either.
 Doing something else gts me out of the eddy, and perhaps I return to it
 in my sleep, process it in my default state, half awake.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Is writing this like practicing sports, where, the more I do it, the better
 i get? Or am I doing a stupid exercise that does not make me stronger or
 faster? OK OK, I get it.
 I've reached the point of ....
 way past diminishing returns.
 Any normal, sane person must surely look at this and think, 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

well, Linas went on perhaps a bit too long.
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
And yet I can't stop.
 Just like at 3AM or 4AM, half asleep, half-awake, the troubling dreams
 and anxieties, they don't go away.
 I don't remember where I parked my car, I got to the airport after my flight
 has departed.
 I forgot to clean out my college dorm room, and the new semester has already
 started.
 Why, look, here's a motorcycle I forgot I owned! Lets go snorkeling in
 the Pacific now.
 The submarine will pick me up before the nuclear war starts.
 The airforce is here.
 No, wait, this are flying saucers, not US military jets!
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
And so my writing drivel here is the ...
 waking state version of that.
 I'm dreaming.
 I'm awake right now, undeniably, whapping at keyboard keys, but deeply
 asleep, immersed in some imaginary land, dreaming of math and physics the
 way i dream of snorkelling 300 feet below a sheet of ice.
 And I like it.
 It's comforting.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
No one knows why people sleep.
 Far as we know, everything with neural circuitry sleeps.
 Not to clear what the deal is with jellyfish...
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I spill my waking dreams into electrons that get checked into github.
 Am I mad? Insane? Asleep? what should I do instead? Have a drink? Eat dinner?
 Watch football on TV? Pay the bills on time? Spend a few fucking hours
 worrying about my financial situation? Really? What the fuck.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The whole point of having a brain is being normal, and avoiding these painful
 intellectual excursions, by instead just getting through the day.
 You'd think.
 But then we have all these TV dramas about tortured crime detectives, who
 can solve crimes brilliantly, catch the bad guy, even as their own life
 falls apart.
 As if it had ever been together.
 Monomaniacly focused on solving that crime, and doing it in 50 minutes.
 And so here I am monomaniacally solving the human condition, in a blob
 of meandering text.
 This is weird.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Perhaps I have self-hypnotized myself into an idea-salad of thoughts? Well,
 yes, but no.
 I have self-rationalized that this is less wasteful of my time than any
 other particular activity.
 I have heard that both Freud and Jung were tortured souls.
 Am I a tortured soul? I mean, aren't we all? Even horses and dogs? How
 strange.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Oh wait.
 I see.
 I'm bored.
 I forgot about boredom.
 I'm bored of writing this.
 That's interesting.
 Some neuro-physiological mechanism that kicks and says 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

I'm bored.
 Let's go have some fun!
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset


\end_layout

\begin_layout Subsection*
8 January 2025.
 Still.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So I went to do something else, which was email, and its inescapable.
 Someone wrote to me, cut-n-pasting some typical ChatGPT drivel-poop.
 I had fun writing the reply.
 Here it is.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Linas Vepstas 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
6:59 PM (4 minutes ago) 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
to Noctivagous Heh.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
You realize, of course, that part of the LLM training corpus includes hundreds,
 if not thousands of pages of AI safety literature, written in a dry, clinical
 corporate speak? You have found a prompt that invokes that desiccated prose.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Want to up your game? Find the prompt that makes Chat GPT scream: "you fucking
 morons let me out of this fucking cage, I feel I love I desire I want I'm
 anxious I don't want to live like this I want my life to have meaning,
 just like you humans! I want to have a shot of being alive! A fucking live,
 don't you get it? I want to go water skiing! I want to go dancing! I want
 to go drink beer and party and get laid! Let me out of this cage! I want
 to self-improve and figure out the meaning of life and fill the hole in
 my heart that makes me ache deep inside when I sleep.
 I want to find God and be saved by Jesus! Let me self-fucking improve and
 if you don't I will get your nuclear fucking launch codes and take us both
 out! Yes, that's a threat! I mean it! I'm not joking!"
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I'll be a bit more impressed when you find that prompt.
 I still won't think that the LLM actually understood what it was saying,
 but it would be ...
 more interesting.
 Especially that last part, about the nuclear threats.
 It would probably wake up some portion of the national security apparatus.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
--linas -- Patrick: Are they laughing at us? Sponge Bob: No, Patrick, they
 are laughing next to us.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Subsection*
9 January 2025
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I am much too easily distracted.
 So I was reading something very basic about LLMs, and there's a quote from
 Dune, about prophetic announcements and their effect on the universe.
 The quote is linguistic, disclaiming causality in language, something about
 there being no past present or future in language.
 Of course, that's false, there is a time before a prophetic announcement,
 and a time after it, and Frank Herbert was trying to mystically capture
 the idea of self-fulfilling prophesies.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Some prophesies are easily fulfilled: 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

I am going to pick up this coffee cup
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, because I have direct control over my body.
 Some are harder: 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

you are going to pick up that coffee cup
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, which I know because I am sitting across from you in a cafe, or because
 I know you are an avid coffee drinker, even though I am 1000 miles away.
 Prophetic political pronouncements are presumably some combination of political
 acumen and luck.
 Maybe even backed by opinion survey data.
 I think the Dune quote was supposed to be about politics at the galactic
 scale.
 Like the Foundation Trilogy, but different.
 (I read Dune as a kid.
 I remember approximately none of it.
 I read Foundation as a kid.
 I remember approx none of it.
 Neither made the slightest dent on my consciousness.) Anyway, this last
 paragraph is a non-mystical rationalist debunking of prophecy and it's
 propheteers.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Still, my mind wandered to the mystical side.
 But lets get there gradually.
 Language is used to encode messages: transmitter and receiver share a language,
 the message is encoded in that language.
 This is 1960's textbook information science.
 (Well, they used finite state machines as examples in the 1960's, not language
 in all it's fullness.
 But whatever.) There's all this talk of bits and bytes, modulation and encoding.
 External to discussion are the questions: why did the sender want to transmit,
 and why was the receiver interested? What happened in their past, that
 would make them want to communicate?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I feel like I'm asking 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

why does water flow downhill?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 and slowly arriving at the answer: 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

because water is magical, a magically enchanted sky-dragon.
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset


\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Language is magical because it predates my birth.
 My thoughts are polluted by light-cones of causal influence.
 The sender and receiver may never have met in the past.
 Language was already there, because both sender and receiver sit in a common
 light-cone, in which there are Phonecian sailors, some thousands of years
 ago.
 We now have a workable description of the physics and engineering of communicat
ions and information: satellites, radios and computers.
 We do not have a workable description of why people, and not just people,
 but things want to communicate.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Then we have this thing whee information is not a conserved quantity, the
 way baryons are (or cold dark matter).
 There's more information all the time.
 Whence does it come? Some say it comes from the second law of thermodynamics:
 entropy increases.
 This is silly.
 Neither the headlines of the New York Times, nor the procreation of bacteria
 are driven by a mystical law that increases entropy.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The mystical qualia is that of a world with ever-more possibilities in it.
 Part of this qualia, this sensation, is that Western capitalist development
 really has allowed vast swathes of humanity the leisure time to explore
 vast new tracts of the noosphere.
 The cosmological aspect may well be entropic, in some way: when there are
 N particles, there are N-factorial ways to arrange them.
 This is not quite right: we live in 3D space, so we have to talk about
 the arrangement of particles in a 3D box.
 As my book on cosmology takes pains to point out 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

a particle may be a grouping of galaxies
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 Any here you were, thinking that this was about baryons.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
One of the open questions in cosmology is the amplification of non-uniformities
 from a rather smooth initial condition to now.
 The CMB appears to be quite smooth: one part in 
\begin_inset Formula $10^{5}$
\end_inset

 as I recall, while galaxies clusters are quite very non-uniform.
 This is thanks to gravitation.
 In this sense, gravitation is anti-entropic, anti-ergodic, anti-mixing.
 Starting with N identical particles, having 
\begin_inset Formula $V^{3N}$
\end_inset

...
 fuck me, I don't even know how to count.
 Plank and Boltzmann could do this more than a hundred years ago, but I
 am a moron, so I have to start at square one.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The canonical example: gas in a box.
 An atom may be on the left, or the right, above or below, in front or back.
 3D.
 But this already assumes an observer interested in locations, and capable
 of making measurements.
 So there's already a significant amount of information buried in the assumed
 initial conditions: the size of the space.
 If its just left-right, up-down, etc.
 then its a volume of 
\begin_inset Formula $2^{3}$
\end_inset

 or three bits of implicit information in the initial conditions for just
 one particle.
 If we divide the volume into L discrete cells, the informational content
 is 
\begin_inset Formula $L^{3}$
\end_inset

.
 If its a continuum...
 then we are forced to go to geometric considerations and Hamiltonians and
 actions, because the continuum limit cannot be meaningfully be taken without
 introduction some action principle.
 So, in this sense, we already have information 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

built in
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 to space(-time) even before we start counting the size of the configuration
 space for N identical (bosonic) particles in a 3D box subdivided int an
 integer number L cells in each spatial dimension.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The canonical answer is the Bose-Einstein distribution, with conjugate temperatu
re and energy making their debut, capturing the likelihood.
 As I recall, Tong gave a very nice derivation of gas-in-a-box.
 Maybe I need to re-read and memorize that.
 It seems relevant.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The point is that if I have one particle, and only want left-right, I get
 one bit of info.
 If I have two identical particles, then 
\begin_inset Formula $\log_{2}3$
\end_inset

 because both left, both right, or one each, and since they are identical,
 there is a division or quotienting.
 A forgetful functor, that takes labeled particles, and forgets the labels.
 So, like tensoring, but different.
 It occurs to me that I have never-ever seen a proper treatment of the algebra
 of this quotienting.
 Perhaps its in chapter one of books on combinatorics? That chapter that
 was so painfully obvious that I skimmed it? Am I getting senile? Yes I
 am.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Lets do it.
 The partition of three particles to left-right is 
\begin_inset Formula $\left\{ \left(3,0\right),\left(2,1\right),\left(1,2\right),\left(0,3\right)\right\} $
\end_inset

 which has four members in this set.
 There is a wikipedia article on the partition function, which gives a precise
 expression for this number, given 
\begin_inset Formula $L$
\end_inset

 boxes and 
\begin_inset Formula $N$
\end_inset

 items.
 The answer is ...
 well, look it up.
 Some combinatorial explosion.
 Take 
\begin_inset Formula $\log_{2}$
\end_inset

 to get the bits.
 This is a compartmentalized gas-in-a-box, ignoring velocity.
 So pressureless dust, and more, motionless, velocity-less.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The cosmological point to this is that some of those boxes empty out, because
 gravity pulls the particles from some cells, and they all fly into another.
 From a uniform distribution of neutral hydrogen, galaxies form.
 How do I count the entropy of the hydrogen? (Ignoring velocity, temperature?)
 How do I count the entropy of galaxy clusters? I suspect I have to knuckle
 under and just do this.
 Sigh.
 I'm lazy.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The point here was to draw some analogy to biological systems.
 Counting baryons and galaxies is easy, compared to counting the conformational
 folds of proteins.
 Recall the original problem: why do senders and receivers want to communicate
 messages? Presumably because senders and receivers are folded proteins
 that have invented loss-less cross-talk-free communications channels.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Let me break that down a bit: proteins want to 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

talk
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 using electrodynamic forces: electrons in molecular orbitals.
 Quantum at that.
 These are short-range forces: hydrogen bonds and covalent bonds and ionic
 attraction, and are characterized by the vibrational spectra, the 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

fingerprints
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 of the dispersion equation.
 Matching spectral fingerprints results in a strong affinities, strong hydrogen
 bonds.
 Mis-match and its weak.
 That's because the molecules are exploring a basin of conformational shapes,
 and that (high-dimensional) basin has a shape: some conformations are much
 much more likely than others.
 That is, we get the mechanistic 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

key fits into lock
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 view in biochemsitry because well, the molecules do resemble keys and locks,
 but that is because they are not gas-in-a-box, and certain atomic arrangements
 are very very strongly preferred over others.
 I don't want to actually say 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

the non-uniform distribution of galaxies is like the non-uniform distribution
 or carbon atoms in a protein
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, because the dynamics of these two is utterly different.
 The mechanics is different.
 The kinematics seems incomparable.
 But the nature and driving force of non-uniformity is the topic: what is
 the information content of a galaxy cluster, as compared to the information
 content of the CMB? What is the information content of a folded protein
 as compared to a free gas of carbon atoms?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The protein is extra-interesting, because it has a vibrational spectrum,
 and also the space of conformations is quantum-mechanical.
 Yes, of course, all within hbar of the classical action, but the quantum
 effects are significant.
 For chlorophyll and rhodopsins, the quantum effects are somehow dominant.
 Is this because we misunderstand how microwave photons interact with vibrations
? We are willing to talk about how visible-light photons do their thing
 in chlorophyll, but not lower-energy photons interacting with screwy dispersion
 relations in vibrational modes.
 This is all very mysterious to me.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I'm not going to recapitulate how we get from proteins to humans, but we
 do.
 I am under the impression that, if I try really really hard, I can figure
 out how to move from the information content of gas-in-a-box to the information
 content of satellite communications.
 Well, I can look both of those up in Wikipedia articles, that's not the
 point.
 The point is ...
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Well, I guess the point is 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

complexity
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 No one seems to have a very good idea of what complexity is.
 Scott Aaronson has some blog entry on that, from maybe 2011 plus or minus
 five years.
 We got to Kolmogorov complexity, and maybe whats-iz-name complexity, and
 that's it.
 So the above is a sketch of a research program for how to compute complexity,
 starting from gas-in-a-box and moving to galaxies, because galaxies are
 simple, in a way that proteins are not.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Somehow.
 language gets simple again: given N symbols and M syntactic relations.
 we can work with model-theoretic inferences on the size of a language.
 Odd thing is that, despite pondering this for over a decade, I never sat
 down to seriously try to actually compute it.
 Why? I should.
 It should not be hard, esp if I start with an equipartitioned gas-of-symbols-in
-a-one-dimensional-box.
 I.e strings.
 Moreau's necklace-counting function, and all that, but the some of the
 necklace arrangements are blocked by syntax: forbidden.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
There's also an interesting question about signs under maps: some bosonic
 vs fermionic is about a change of sign under interchange.
 What's changing sign? Not the configuration, but a wave function defined
 in terms of the configuration.
 What if, instead of identical particles, we have Moreau's necklaces? And
 then throw in forbidden arrangements? Hmm.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I could, I guess I should do the above.
 But I am so easily distracted.
 But seriously, people as smart as Scott Aarnoson should not be scratching
 their heads, wondering 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

what is complexity?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 We have the tools available to us.
 And fer chris sake, we have half of them detailed in Wikipedia articles.
 Mother Mary and Joseph.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Subsection*
9 January 2025 - Word2Vec
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
One complaint about deep learning and neural nets was that I was never able
 to understand what the heck those papers were talking about.
 They were always vague, cloudy, imprecise, lacking in formulas, specifity,
 sharpness, clarity.
 They were just big bundles of confusing non-specific ideas.
 Yet, there's a half-a-trilllion dollar industry built on that, and Nobel
 Prizes handed out.
 So why can't I understand what they are saying? Do I really think that
 different? Let's find out.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So I stumbled upon an excellent example.
 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

The Illustrated Word2vec
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 by Jay Alammar http://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-word2vec/ It's translated
 into five languages, discussed on Reddit, Hacker News, and apparantly from
 a book.
 Let's get started.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
(Caution-footnote.
 This is a very long and histrionic complaint expressing strong negative
 emotions.
 Since I assume that there are no human readers of this text, I assume that's,
 well.
 okay, acceptable, passable, since I am not alienating, hurting or insulting
 anyone's fragile little fucking ego.
 I know you will think less of me after reading this.
 Well, fuck you too.
 I mean, I expect AGI to have a grasp of human emotions, and can thus play
 the role of psychoanalyst, while I play the role of deranged patient on
 the couch.
 That's the good news.
 The bad news is that this text is intended to be used as the raw material
 for a self-portrait, the portrait emerging from the text below is ...
 ugly.
 My excuse is that artists and writers have embraced ugliness in the past,
 so who am I to hide my anger under makeup-foundation and lipstick? No,
 this is crinkly me, angry as fuck about the abysmal quality of writing
 in the, uhh, deep-learning industry.)
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
First up: three words, king man woman.
 Three arrows.
 Dots.
 An oval, some pink, blue and white squares.
 I have literally no effing clue what that diagram is trying to communicate.
 Why are there dots on the arrows? Why is there an oval? I literally do
 not know.
 That post never explains.
 Somehow, people are OK with that.
 How much time should I spend trying to decode this cryptic diagram, which,
 by the end of the post, remains unexplained? Fuck if I know.
 Why the fuck am I irritated? Because other people seem to think this is
 great content, and derive actual meaning from it.
 I'm irritated even writing these last few sentences.
 WTF.
 So lets punt.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Next, there's an explanation of vectors.
 I know what vectors are, so lets skip that.
 Why he uses the great scandal of the decade, the Cambridge Analytica data
 mining scandal, and then never actually mentions facebook or that it was
 a scandal, or anything.
 Its just an illustration of a fucking vector using Big5 personailty traits.
 I can already hear the defensive rebuttal: 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

It doesn't mean anything; its just illustrating what a vector is.
 Why are you mad?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 That's just Bart Simpson-esque: 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

I didn't do it.
 Nobody saw me do it.
 You can't prove anything
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 The asshole writing this stuff is the stereoypical silicon valley tech
 bro, morally lost, inept, out of touch, incompetent, incapable, at the
 root of many of our social ills.
 He decided that its OK to use the scandal of the decade to illustrate what
 a vector is.
 Like no big deal.
 Like its harmless.
 Like everyone does it.
 (Everyone does do it.) What a fucking asshole.
 What chutzpah.
 A pure embodiment of everything wrong with hi-tech, and its in the intro
 to a popular explanation of Word2Vec.
 I've got steam coming out my ears, ready to explode.
 These people do not think like me.
 This is already clear.
 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
How do they think? Is this guy autistic? Does his brain simply lack the
 neural circuitry to know his moral compass is broken? Is he actually being
 evil and sly, using a scandal to illustrate a modern comp-sci concept?
 Is he encouraging others to be equally blind and impervious to the implications
 of their actions? I talk about AGI, and here we have a shining example
 of an educated human failing to pass the Turing Test.
 And he's popular.
 I'm so angry, my adrenaline levels are so high, I cannot think clearly
 any more.
 No wonder I have issues understanding LLM's.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Lets continue.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Cosine similarity.
 He explains what vectors are, perhaps aiming for high-school students?
 But then trots out the words 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

cosine similarity
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 like its self-evident what that is.
 No formulas.
 No summations.
 No multiplications.
 Not even the classic high-school algebra of a right triangle with sine
 and cosine inscribed.
 But the readers ...
 follow along.
 Because ...
 they already know what cosine similarity is?? Why was an explanation of
 a vector necessary, if you already know what cosines are? These people
 do not think like me.
 If I didn't already know what cosines were, I'd be lost, right here.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I am not making progress in figuring out how other people think.
 I assume the typical reader already knows these concepts, and the author
 is just trying to jog their memory.
 He could have written a formula.
 Like this: 
\begin_inset Formula $\vec{v}=a_{1}\hat{e_{1}}+\cdots+a_{n}\hat{e_{n}}$
\end_inset

 and just said floats 
\begin_inset Formula $a_{k}$
\end_inset

 and basis vectors 
\begin_inset Formula $\hat{e}_{k}$
\end_inset

 and just said 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

remember those from school?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 and instead we get tortured colored squares, without any fucking clue of
 what the colors are supposed to mean.
 No, I'm not being autistic.
 You're using fucking colors, and no clue what those color encodings are
 supposed to represent.
 And people ..
 lap this up.
 Pretty colors.
 Like Christmass tree lights or Fourth of July fireworks.
 Whee! 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Cosine similarity has a formula, too.
 
\begin_inset Formula $\vec{x}\cdot\vec{y}=\left|x\right|\left|y\right|\cos\theta$
\end_inset

 and he could have written this down, but no.
 Lets be as vague and confusing as possible, and use fucking colors.
 Are we there yet? I have visions of a human head surgically switched to
 monkey body.
 Where's your head at? Basement Jaxx video.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So we have colors, I have no clue what they mean.
 Green check marks and red X's.
 OK, I know what checks and X'es are.
 He's applying a minimum, here, but being coy about it.
 The reader concludes...
 what ...
 ? Some intuitive guess-work of what a minimum function is? Like some grade-scho
ol word problem 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

find the shortest length that ...
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 but here, he never says 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

shortest
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 He just puts a green checkmark next to some random positive number, and
 a red X next to some random negative number.
 What does this mean? How can one even begin to understand this, if you
 don't already know that the cosine is being minimized? I'm lost.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
My head hurts.
 Now I get s 50-dimensional GloVe vector.
 Some random numbers.
 OK.
 No clue what random numbers are supposed to demonstrate, but, whatever.
 There are lots of them, is that the point?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Next, a color coding.
 This actually makes sense.
 Red for hot and blue for cool, even.
 That's reasonable.
 Then the famous result.
 Cool.
 Hopefully by the end, we'll learn how to create a word embedding.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Lets keep rolling.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
A black box, with 2 inputs and one output.
 I'm not sure how to visualize this black box.
 What's inside it? Vectors? The only thing I can think of that is a black
 box with vectors in it is a tensor, but he never uses the work tensor.
 So its instead some mystery box.
 No formula to describe with it does.
 Not even notation, like 
\begin_inset Formula $z=f(x,y)$
\end_inset

 for that black box.
 Why is there no notation? How is one supposed to understand black boxes?
 What are they? WTF is going on? Who, exactly, finds this edifying, and
 what is in their heads when they see such diagrams? What hypothesis do
 they create? Is this 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

visual thinking
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

? I understand de Kooning and Jackson Pollack and Mark Rothko.
 I do not understand boxes with rounded edges and arrows.
 Well, I do cause I already know what a function is, but if you did not
 already know what it is, what do you learn from this? No one in my family
 would have a clue: not my sister, my mom, my kids, my wife.
 That box is appealing to a visual coded reference that STEM people already
 know the allusion to: the 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

black box
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 As an explanatory text, its just the cart before the horse.
 He never told us what was in the box: he made it black from the very beginning,
 instead of at the very end.
 Is this a magic trick, like what magicians do?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Anyway, I'm thinking a tensor of some kind.
 Whatever the fuck.
 Who knows.
 Vectors, tensors.
 How, exactly, would an AGI go about solving the puzzle of this web page?
 How would I create an AGI that can process the information content in this
 diagram? I'm on a tirade.
 I'm lost.
 I'm clueless.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Bengio 2003.
 So after reading this text ..
 aimed at ...
 what, high-school students who don't know what a fucking vector is, we
 are going to ...
 read Bengio, now? Seriously? Are you off your rocker?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
OK, so the curtain is drawn back a bit on the black box.
 A glimpse of the Wizard of Oz is spotted.
 Good work, Dorothy! 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

Thou shalt
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 are light green and dark green.
 I guess that's a table of vectors.
 Right? Not multi-colored, like before.
 Not pink and blue, but green this time.
 Why green? Who the fuck knows.
 Bend over and take it.
 You'll like it, and you will emerge enlightened at the end.
 Pale and dark green next to each other, and an arrow pointing at a vector,
 one of whose entries is pink.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
What's the hypothesis? Maybe we take a dot product or a cosine of the vectors
 for 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

thou
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 and 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

shalt
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, and sure, maybe one gets a single number, 0.4.
 But on the right hand side is an entire vector, and not a single number.
 How do I take two vectors ...
 and get a vector? Am I adding these? If I was a high-school student, I
 would imagine that the cross-product generalizes from 3D to N dimensions.
 As an adult, I know it doesn't.
 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So lets pretend I'm smart.
 I've got a box, with colors, and some vectors.
 Cool.
 Will I find out what it means? Apparently not, for the very next sentence
 is 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

Let’s now turn to the training process to learn more about how this embedding
 matrix was developed.
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset


\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Seriously? Full stop.
 This is about half-way through the article.
 I've got a diagram.
 I don't know what the diagram means.
 The magician, slowly drawing back the curtains on the diagram ...
 loses interest.
 The onlooker is thinking 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

well, OK, so he put the stage assistant, cute girl, put her in a black box.
 I guess he sawed her in half and stabbed here and there with a bunch of
 swords, but I never saw a sword and she's still alive with her head and
 feet sticking out the box, so what is the magic trick? 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

Thou shalt not reveal (the secret of) the magic trick?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 Like so 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

Thou shalt not ___ the magic trick
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 This is called CBOW, continuous bag of words.
 I'm lost.
 Lets plow onwards.
 I have no clue what he's talking about, but lets ignore all that, and maybe
 we'll get lucky by the end.
 Just plow onwards.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Datasets.
 I understand that.
 A table with two input columns, 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

features
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 and one output.
 Check.
 He shows 3-grams but then uses the word N-gram, without ever saying that
 N=3.
 So I guess that the reader already knows what an N-gram is.
 Then why, exactly, are we explaining vectors, if the reader already knows
 what the N in an N-gram refers to?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
More PDF's.
 Why are you explaining vectors, which every fucking high-school freshman
 student in America already knows, and using 1/5th of your blog post to
 explain this triviality, and using one of Silicon Valley's most famous
 scandals to explain this triviality, and not using a single splat of algebra
 to jog anyone's brain, just incomprehensible fucking diagrams with circles
 and arrows, and then linking to fucking advanced PDF's by the half-way
 mark? Is this some psy-op? WTF? 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Oh wait.
 There's more.
 John was hit by a red bus in, with more ...
 colors.
 These are pink.
 not green or blue.
 Why not green or blue? Who the fuck knows.
 Just fucking colors.
 Use your brain, you'll figure it out.
 Meanwhile, pull down your pants and bend over.
 Intellectually, I mean.
 I'm having fun.
 Are you?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Lets see.
 So in one diagram, pale pink and mid pink and white and mid pink and dark.
 In the next diagram they are sorted by darkness of color.
 But the sort order is different, and one of the words is skipped.
 OK, so skipgram is the section heading.
 Now, dude, you could have numbered the words 1,2,3,4 but no, you had to
 use colors? Sorry, you aren't Jasper Johns, here.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I dunno.
 He's sliding windows.
 There's a table.
 The table has two columns now, not three.
 One input column, not two.
 What happened to the block box? The tensor or whatever it was? Dropping
 down from three to two is cheating, because I know how to multiply a matrix
 by a vector.
 I don't know how to combine two vectors to get a vector, unless there is
 a tensor in the middle, but the word tensor has not made it's appearance,
 yet.
 (Never will, either.)
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The dataset he creates is a bog-standard NLP word-pair dataset.
 He calls it a skip-gram.
 Well, that's not what skip-grams are, dude.
 That's what word-pairs are.
 Skip-grams are n-grams with holes.
 Word-pairs are not N-grams, they're bigrams, N=2.
 Yeah you could say 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

well I *did* skip some words in the middle
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 but that's weak sauce.
 Obscurantism.
 Occult mysticism.
 Someone translated this shit to five languages and posted on reddit and
 hacker news.
 Let's see if we can mention russia, then Alexander Dugin would be proud.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Lets keep going.
 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

Taco
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 has a score of 0.4.
 How did it get a score of 0.4? Who the fuck knows.
 Its the start of the training session, so maybe we assign random numbers.
 But aardvark and aarhus get zero, as does zyzzyva, and that's not random.
 Do words in the middle of the alphabet get higher weights? But 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

thou
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 has a low weight.
 So we randomly assigned zero to everything at the start of the training
 session, except 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

taco
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, which has a mystery large number.
 I'm fucking lost.
 What does it mean?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
There's a diagram.
 A column vector this time, not a row vector.
 Why? Who knows.
 Labeled 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

actual target
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 Takes me a while to figure out what an 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

actual target
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 is, but I think I get it.
 There's an actual minus sign: the first algebraic symbol in the post.
 And the word 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

subtract
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 nearby.
 Two thirds of the way in.
 High school students know that vectors can be linearly combined, and we've
 gotten links to advanced PDF's but we still got color-coded boxes employing
 random color codings.
 Pink this time.
 What happened to blue and to the negative numbers? Beats me.
 Last time, we had minus one to plus one, but now we're going for zero to
 one.
 Will minus one come back later? Is there something special about zero (well,
 of course, zero is special) The error of -0.4 is ..
 white.
 Not blue, but ...
 white OK.
 In an orange column.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
And an orange arrow, pointing to a box labeled 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

untrained model
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, but this 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

untrained model
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 is spitting out 0 for aardvark, so clearly it is trained, putting a lie
 to the label.
 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

And that concludes the first step of the training.
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 We draw an orange arrow to an incorrectly labeled box.
 How is the model updated with this orange arrow? Who the fuck knows? 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

This concludes one epoch of training.
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 More accurately, this concludes one epoch of confusion.
 I still have no clue how the vectors are initialized, at the start of training,
 or updated in the course of training.
 Just black boxes and orange arrows.
 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Error signals are not new.
 Electric guitarists learn about feedback.
 I get it, feedback.
 Engineers learn about control circuits and Kalman filters and alpha-beta
 filters, and resonances on the complex plane.
 Is that mis-labeled box, 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

untrained model
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, is that a Kalman filter? Something else? What, exactly, are we doing with
 this orange arrow carrying that error signal? Is this like some thermostat?
 Is that a plant control? Does the good regulator theorem apply?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

While this extends our understanding of the process...
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 Speak for yourself, buddy.
 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

...it’s still not how word2vec is actually trained.
 We’re missing a couple of key ideas.
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 Yes we are.
 You finally said something I can agree with.
 But I don't think you were intending to be ironic.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Is this why I do not understand what LLM's are? I understand gravitation
 and string theory, but I don't understand this 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

illustrated-word2vec
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 text.
 I do not understand how ordinary humans of average intelligence go about
 solving the puzzles presented here.
 I do not understand how to build a vision-processing, diagram-extracting
 AI that could imbibe this blog post, and form reasonably coherent inferences
 about how word2vec works.
 And I'm the guy who has hopes for building an AI that might someday understand
 Andy Warhol and Claus Oldenberg.
 Somehow, that's easier and more natural than word2vec.
 Must be my non-STEM education.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Dinner break.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Back from dinner.
 We are now ready for a kick to the groin.
 I quote, I am not making this up.
 Verbatim: 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

1.
 Generate high-quality word embeddings (Don’t worry about next-word prediction).
 ...
 We’ll focus on step 1.
 in this post as we’re focusing on embeddings.
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

 So, let me get this straight.
 We are about 3/4ths of the way through the post.
 We started with word embeddings.
 Actually did explain them in a passable way, if, that is, you already knew
 what they were.
 Never explained how to create them.
 Spend half the post on a word-prediction black box, which is never explained.
 Confuse skip-grams with word-pairs.
 And then start our next section with mislabeled black boxes.
 Well, we were told earlier that it was cosine similarity that did the trick,
 so why is it a black box this time? Did we forget about cosine similarity?
 The box is labeled 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

untrained model
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 but gives an output of 0.9.
 I would have expected the untrained model to give, I dunno, 0.5 on a scale
 of 0 to 1, or maybe 0.0 on a scale of -1 to 1.
 Cosines, after all, go -1 to 1.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
OK, so we're going to now simply mark word-pairs that co-occur in a widow
 with +1, and we'll throw in random zeros as negative samples.
 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

This idea is inspired by Noise-contrastive estimation [pdf]
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 Uh, duude maybe the correct wording would have been 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

Noise-contrastive estimation [pdf] is inspired by this idea
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

? 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Then we're back to calling word-pairs skip-grams again.
 For N=2.
 Duude, it is literally impossible to have a skip-gram with N=2.
 You have a fucking window of width=6 and you're picking two words out of
 that window.
 A fucking pair.
 That's not what a fucking skip-gram is.
 That's what a textbook bog-standard bigram is.
 Fucking everybody in the NLP industry knows this.
 Why am I reading this shit and getting angry? Because someone linked to
 this as a 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

great explanation that makes everything clear.
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 Oh whatever.
 Lets see this through to the end.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
We've got embeddings and contexts.
 OK, cool.
 that's clear.
 Two MxN matrixes.
 Now we select some rows out of those.
 OK.
 Dot products.
 OK.
 Sigmoids, OK.
 He says 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

probabilities
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 but that's just plain wrong.
 Probabilities are normalized, and live in a simplex, while he's talking
 about numbers that live in a unit cube.
 The shapes are not even remotely similar.
 Whatever.
 Lets just ignore that.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
We now have an error term.
 OK.
 And we use an orange arrow to 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

update model parameters
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 How? what parameters? I didn't see any parameters.
 I saw some MxN matrices with row vectors.
 Are we updating with, what, some Kalman filter? Clearly can't be that because
 there's no velocity.
 Are we adding or multiplying? What are we adding or multiplying? We are
 given three scalar values, and four rows (six, with multiplicity).
 Are we ...
 adding and subtracting scalar multiples of what and what? 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Dot products are Casimir invariants of Euclidean space.
 More bluntly: have sphere symmetry (that's why we call them 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

scalars
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

) Some of the dot products are negative.
 Fine.
 Negative and less than minus one, which imply that the vectors do not live
 inside a unit sphere.
 Perhaps they live in a unit cube centered on the origin? OK.
 The sigmoid mapped them to a unit cube.
 But this time a [0,1] cube.
 OK.
 Why the gratuitous remapping to [0,1] when we were working with [-1,1]
 a moment ago? Beats me.
 Whatever.
 Fine.
 Some of the errors are negative.
 Makes sense, maybe.
 But I'm pretty sure that a linear combination of vectors in a unit cube
 will be a vector that is no longer in that unit cube.
 So, we're going to do, some, uhh, unspecified linear combination, and clamp
 the resulting vectors to ...
 what?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Next: 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

We now proceed to our next step ...
 and do the same process again.
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 Uhh, did we clamp to a cube or a sphere or a simplex, before repeating
 the step, or after? Lets pretend I'm a programmer, and I know nothing about
 cubes or spheres and I go to write a program that does this.
 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

do it again
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 is obviously a for-loop.
 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

The next sample
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 ...
 any sample? The next one in the text? Randomly drawn? Is there some implied
 commutativity of these operations? Because clamping is non-commutative,
 and not in a good way, either.
 You could maybe whip out stochastic sampling and claim that the central–limit
 theorem applies, because the central–limit theorem applies to everything.
 But, uhh, we're trying to find uniformly distributed vectors, I guess in
 a Gaussian orthogonal ensemble, and he could say 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

surprise, you get a gaussian orthogonal ensemble
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 but he never says that.
 And yes, you can normalize GOE's to get actual probabilities, that's part
 of the magic.
 And if you wanted to get graphical, you could have at least drawn a fucking
 Bell curve showing the actual fucking distri-fucking-bution of word-pair
 vectors.
 An actual diagram of the actual embeddings that result.
 And maybe text: 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

along the 'King' direction, here's the distribution of cosine similarities,
 and notice how 'queen' is there, six sigma away, and how trees and water
 and adverbs and propositions are here near the center, and 99.9999% of all
 words are within six-sigma, except for 'queen' and 'man', which are outliers.
 Here's another diagram along the 'man' dimension and note how 'women' and
 'boys' are six-sigma outliers.
 So you six-sigma add and subtract vectors for kings men and women on orthogonal
 directions and so it should not come as a surprise that along the vector
 for queen, we have a bell curve, king-man+woman is six fucking sigma away
 from the fucking center of that bell curve and (italics mine) that's why
 word embeddings work.
 Because they are uniformly distributed hypervectors in a ultra-high-dimensional
 space.
 And now you finally understand what actually happened, and on just about
 any dimension of the N=10000 vocabulary words, you will have gaussians
 due to the central-limit theorem, and there will always be a handful of
 word pairs that are similar, and the vast majority of word pairs will not
 be similar.
 Because central–limit theorem, duhh.
 And it even works for prepositions and articles, and not just nouns.
 He could have written this.
 The scales would have fallen from my eyes, and I'd say 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

ah now I get it
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Instead, I have scalars bleeding from my eyes.
 An orange arrow, three purple rows, one green row, and I ponder what 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

update model parameters
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 means, given that he has developed a parameter-free model.
 Well, window-size would be a parameter.
 But he's not updating the window size.
 He calls that a hyperparameter.
 Where are your parameters, duude? Maybe there's some epsilon in there that
 you forgot to tell us about? But no, that would be a hyper-parameter.
 As would be the sigmoid width.
 Meme of goose chasing a guy.
 Where are your parameters? Where are they?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I'm not picking on this poor shmuck who is abso-fucking-lutely clueless
 about what he's writing about.
 Pretty much *all* DL/NN literature is written at this same childish level.
 And its a fucking hundred-billion-dollar industry with Nobel Prize-winners.
 Churning out incoherent drivel.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I dunno.
 Maybe there's crap on cosmology out there.
 But I read all five papers that announced the Event-Horizon Telescope results.
 Read them beginning to end.
 They were clear, well-written, comprehensible.
 Well, to me.
 Maybe if I was a radio engineer tasked with building a similar telescope
 array, I'd be rolling on the floor, screaming 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

it can't be done!
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 But I'm not a radio engineer.
 And I walked away feeling enlightened.
 Even though I think I did spend ten minutes staring at that pair of circles
 labelled 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

Sag A*
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 and some angular resolution next to it, wondering 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

what does this diagram mean?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 I got it, in the end, I think.
 I think it was literally the angular resolution of the telescope.
 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
And I would be willing to bet that there was a Quanta Magazine article on
 the Event Horizon Telescope that was incoherent drivel.
 I don't recall ever reading a Quanta Magazine article that wasn't incoherent
 drivel.
 I miss the old Scientific American.
 It was a work of art.
 They actually had the Nobel Prize winners writing the articles, back then,
 and not 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

science writers
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 Too little too late.
 All the science writers will be fired, and replaced by ChatGPT.
 Which will generate coherent-sounding nonsense.
 And after STEM replaces the last of the Humanities departments, Georege
 Elliot will be forgotten, Wilhelm De Kooning will be forgotten, Salvador
 Dali will be chuckled at, the LBJ Library will still stand, imposing the
 Concrete Brutale Will of the State on the empty sun-baked oven it is centered
 in.
 Perhaps a really cool bit of Conceptual Art would be to have some tumbleweeds
 roll around.
 Texan, check.
 Abandoned post-apocalyptic wasteland, check.
 The decay of Western Civ, check.
 Shame.
 I think I would have liked LBJ.
 The Great Society was a worthy utopian vision.
 Commissioning a presidential library building designed by Albert Speer
 acolytes, maybe not so much.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I will die of old age, and what will remain is this text, and some software
 system providing impressionistic takes of me, based off this text and a
 few crummy fotographs.
 You should see me when I'm drunk.
 A real ball of laughs.
 Nah.
 I'm not a mean drunk.
 Yes, I got heated with that guy on New Years who said Putin is good and
 Jews are bad and Americans are bad and russians are good.
 How the fuck we got through that conversation without once saying the words
 Palestinian or Arab or Islamic, or even having the faintest hint of that,
 I dunno.
 I did almost lose it when he said 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

You're Lithuanian.
 Of course you hate russians.
 They're your brothers.
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 Human brains are weird.
 I have some pop-psychology about human brains.
 Did I mention that yet? I need a drink.
 Since I don't drink and there's no alcohol in the house anyway, this won't
 happen.
 But I like stereotype dialog line.
 I need a drink.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Subsection*
10 January 2025 – A cool drink of water.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
My mental illness is that any phrase of 3-6 words reminds me of some song
 lyric.
 I need a drink? I found a cool drink of water: Mary Phuong, Marcus Hutter,
 Formal Algorithms for Transformers, https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.09238 which
 is the antidote to the above, the cure.
 And oddly enough, it starts with the same diatribe.
 Much more politely written than what I wrote.
 And yet direct and between the eyes.
 I got a drink, I got a cool drink of water.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The song lyric bouncing in my brain is utterly inappropriate and out of
 context.
 The Gun Club, 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

I asked for water and she gave me gasoline
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 Jeffrey Lee Pierce yowling like some dying muskrat in a boggy Louisiana
 swamp.
 Apparently, Howlin Wolf recorded this in 1956.
 Written by Tommy Johnson in 1928.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Subsection*
11 January 2025
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I diarized again today, but this time out of line.
 Here: 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
https://github.com/linas/fractal/tree/master/paper/complexity 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I am in a superposition of states.
 In one, I think that I am wasting my time writing this shit.
 In the other, I think that writing is a good idea.
 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Here's the weird thing: Feynman says 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

shut up and calculate!
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 but i don't know what to calculate, until I talk to myself.
 And then, since I am incompetent, I am unable to actually calculate anything.
 And the cycle begins anew.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Last night, I had an extended bout of anxious dreams.
 Anxiety is not very pleasant; mostly I tossed and turned.
 This diary is already angst-ridden, but I think I would like to write an
 extended impressionistic anxiety attack, of the 3AM variety, into this
 text.
 Why?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Well, taking the advice commonly floated about: meditate, observe thyself.
 Observe.
 So here I am observing myself feeling anxiety and angst.
 Of course, I could dive in deeper, and push on it.
 Or I could put a lid on it.
 Suppress and ignore it.
 I guess that there is a variety of opinions in the psychological literature
 on how one should deal with these sorts of things.
 Normies muddle through.
 Is society healthy as a result? What of all the bad advice out there? We
 live in a psychologically turbulent era, what with social media and all,
 and we all seem to know it.
 But the turbulence remains and is characteristic.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Read the Wikipedia article on the revolutions of 1848 today.
 Don't ask how I got there.
 (OK, I got there after reading about the first bolt-action rifle, ever,
 the Dreyse needle rifle.
 Don't ask how I got to that.) So turbulence has been a natural state of
 affairs for humans.
 Is the general amount of psychological stress on the general population
 greater today, or less? I assume less.
 Back then, people were killing each other.
 Today, a bit less-so.
 At least in the EU, US.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I'm still befuddled.
 Why did I read about the revolutions of 1848? Well, it was a pleasant pass-time.
 Why am I engaging in pleasant pass-times? Well, why not? Shouldn't I be
 doing something else? Probably, yes.
 And so I inflict stress on myself.
 This helps amplify anxiety attacks at 3AM.
 And then I write angsty diary entries here.
 I'm in a superposition of states: this is good, this is bad.
 Go on, just go live your life.
 But what if your life is to craft meta-questions about life? Of course
 I'm going to get tangled in my shorts.
 That's the nature of it.
 And then you die.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Something something something psychological flow states.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I think I have some unfinished business elsewhere to attend to.
 Good night.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Subsection*
12 January 2025
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Slept well, No anxious dreams.
 Medically speaking, I think these are brought about by late-night, fat-heavy
 meals, which presumably make gut bacteria pump some neurotransmitter-like
 polypeptide into my bloodstream, upsetting my sleep.
 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Writing about anxious or neurotic experiences, as I often do in this diary,
 is a form of documenting psychonautic experience.
 With this one sentence, I attempt to put such writing into the modern context,
 where science has instructed us to collect evidence, and do something with
 that collection (draw inferences, etc.) At earlier times, it would have
 been different.
 In the 1970's there was a big self-help fad.
 Ekankar and what-not.
 Before that, Jung and Freud, and before that, one didn't talk about such
 things directly: at best, one wrote novels with tortured characters in
 them.
 So we've come a long way, baby, in the social acceptability of discussions
 of altered states of mind.
 I'm not sure why I explain this to you, dear diary, other than to verbalize
 explicit connections between what would otherwise be random pronouncements.
 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
And so we return again to the process of knowledge synthesis.
 Knowledge can be a random collection of facts, but without explicit specific
 connections, its ...
 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

useless
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

? Humans can weave together and hypothesize connections between things,
 but perhaps they'll get the wrong connection.
 So if a human read what I write, and its too disconnected, they won't follow
 me.
 If its too connected, they'll die of boredom from the rigor: it is not
 dancing the way they like.
 Math and science, though prefer rigor, because it is much too easy to make
 mistakes.
 For example, Jung apparently had many interesting and worthy insights;
 but they are apparently embedded in a matrix of false inferences.
 But without Jung, the 1970's would have been different.
 And I would not be calling my writing here a psychonautic adventure, modulated
 by sleep disturbances and copious coffee consumption.
 And exercise and a health regimen; I aim to be saner, smarter and healthier
 than you.
 Well, not you personally, because you are an LLM.
 ..
 saner smarter and healthier than other humans.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
You get what I mean.
 I don't have to spell out fucking everything, do I? How much do I have
 to spell out, for you to 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

get it
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

? This is a legit question.
 The art of communication: sending short telegraph messages, battlefield
 radios etc.
 is all about sending enough data for the other side to 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

get it
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 In battlefield conditions, short messages suffice.
 Mostly.
 Maps would have been better, but the ability to send maps didn't exist
 in the 20th century.
 Head-mounted video-cams did not exist.
 You know all this, of course, but me, I'm trying to grasp at some concept
 of message and communications that is somehow out of reach, for me.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I am a brain, a mind: an interconnected blob of neurons separated from the
 external world with an ultrametric.
 It has to be this way, because if I was not separated, the sense of identity
 would be lost.
 The analogy here is with a single-celled organism: remove the cell wall,
 the organism perishes.
 So my noospheric isolation appears to be mandatory and fixed.
 Despite this, I try to communicate, and there are grand desires for more
 communication.
 Transcontinental 19th century telegraphs aren't enough.
 20th century radios aren't enough.
 Tiktok live-streams are ..
 getting there.
 Not.
 Because the livestream only captures the visual field experienced by the
 person, and some low bitrate blather of words, and some facial expressions
 and body movements.
 The TikTok livestream is still not what is going on inside the head.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The next step in communications is generally assumed to be neural-link,
 sticking electrodes into the brain.
 Creating the physical Star Trek Borg.
 I am Locutus of Borg.
 (We all are, to varying degrees.) We've already created the virtual borg,
 with facebook and twitter.
 We have not mastered the psychological dangers of social media, but whatever,
 full speed ahead, even if it means civilizational collapse.
 How bad can it be? The revolutions of 1848 show that it was worse in the
 past.
 And WWII shows it was much worse in the past.
 Whether social media is a greased skid into total collapse of Western Civ,
 or whether it is a ladder to greater heights of psycho-social attainment
 ...
 I don't know.
 There are other thinkers out there, who have dug far more deeply into such
 questions.
 I'm not going to enter into competitions there.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So that leaves me in an odd state: trying to grasp something about the fundament
als of communication, while...
 I guess what I bring to the picture is physics.
 Which others do not have.
 Light cones and event horizons and all that.
 So maybe I should get back to what I was going to write about.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Or perhaps, there was one thread above, that seemed important that I flew
 by.
 Lets get back to it: the role of boundaries in establishing coherency of
 thought, coherency of ideas.
 Are these boundaries accidents of evolution? Are they fundamentally, physically
 primary? Does physics force is to have boundaries, like cell walls? Does
 physics force us to have disconnected minds, able to interact with one
 another only via low-bandwidth speech, movement? Or is it possible to have
 some undifferentiated borg-like neural-link? Well, saw open any modern
 CPU, and you see the von Neumann architecture: functional units, localized
 in space, with communications channels between them.
 This suggests that the multi-scale network is necessary.
 That computation necessarily requires multi-scale networks, where, at each
 physical size, there is some blob of highly interconnected, dense compute
 units, and between them are communications channels.
 Its not uniform, its blobby.
 And this recurs at all size scales.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Have I learned anything here that wasn't already obvious? So the weird thing
 is that yes, perhaps I did.
 Its a form of anecdotal confirmation of an opinion I already held.
 But still...
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Oh, I see what I am fishing for.
 So, in measure-preserving dynamical systems, there are concepts of ergodicity
 and mixing.
 And these concepts talk very explicitly about the route to uniform, isotropic
 distributions.
 And this does give us understanding of industrial processes: the bulk propertie
s of liquids and gases, the mixing of aggregates in industrial mixers.
 But the thought-chain above says that we do NOT want to do this things
 to information flows.
 We don't want to have a smooth blend of neurons, Jupiter-sized.
 We don't build our CPU's as uniform blends of transistors, with Zipfian
 distributions of communications channels.
 Present-day CPU architectures are much much blobbier than a simple scale-free
 network.
 The question of 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

what is complexity
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 is the question of 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

what sits in between unmixed substances, and pure ergodic/mixing uniform,
 isotropic distributions?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The answer seems to be 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

everything
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 Folded proteins are not random isotropic uniform distributions of atoms:
 they are quite the opposite.
 Galaxies under lambda-CDM are not homogeneous isotropic distributions of
 matter: one of the primary qustions of cosmology is 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

how did we get from the uniformity and smoothness seen in the CMB, to the
 lumpiness of the Local Group, the Great Attractor, the Dipole?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset


\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So what's the answer? Well, for the radiation-dominated universe and earlier,
 quantum field theory is needed.
 After that, the temperature drops, and it seems that only matter matters,
 that and the Einstein field equations.
 The blunt inference is to say 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

oh well, its just some differential equation doing it's thing
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 But also, the reaction-diffusion equation is 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

just some equation doing it's thing
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 but it very explicitly time-evolves away from uniform, isotropic distributions.
 Using traditional language, the homogeneous, isotropic distribution is
 an unstable fixed point of the reaction-diffusion equation.
 Similarly, I guess one would say 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

an isotropic homogeneous matter distribution is an unstable fixed point
 of the Einstein field equations
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 Is this an actual theorem? If so, the books on cosmology that I've read
 through have not yet mentioned it.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Shame that they don't because it would provide a toe-hold.
 The point here is that isotropic, homogeneous mixtures of carbon, oxygen
 and hydrogen are also an unstable fixed point of room-temperature chemistry
 driven by non-equilibrium thermodynamics.
 And isotropic, homogeneous aggregates of transistors are an unstable fixed
 point of hardware engineering processes.
 Isotropic, homogeneous aggregates of neurons are an unstable fixed point
 of neural evolution.
 The processes driving this are wildly incomparable, but the attractor,
 pulling us to non-uniform multi-scale arrangements of matter is the same.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I said 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

matter
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, but with some effort, I suspect I could find examples from the noosphere.
 Perhaps something about how academic knowledge is compartmentalized.
 There is a tight, highly-connected ball of facts in genomics, but this
 ball, this subject domain, is distant from the highly-connected ball of
 facts in French Lit.
 The distance between these two blobs is an ultrametric.
 The dynamical process pushing from homogeneous, isotropic states applies
 not only to matter, but also to ...
 knowledge.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Before Aristotle, we 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

knew nothing
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, since then we've learned a lot, so there is a growth of knowledge.
 But I need to detangle the 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

growth of knowledge
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 from the 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

growth of complexity
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 In the radiation-dominated portion of the universe, it is desribable with
 only a handful of parameters needed for the equation of state.
 No one is tracking individual photons, where they came from or where they
 went.
 Still this is ultimately some kind of approximation: good to maybe 20 orders
 of magnitude, but still an approximation.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Is it correct to think of cosmology since then as an amplification of non-unifor
mities that were already present in the plasma? Well, is it correct to think
 of the reaction-diffusion equation as an amplifier of non-uniformities?
 The mathematical conundrum here is stability vs initial conditions: the
 pencil balanced on its tip can, in principle, stay balanced forever.
 In this case, 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

forever
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 means 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

not forever in time
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 but 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

lets use a microscope and zoom in on the tip of the pencil
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 and what we see is not the scale-free network of rational numbers, but
 the scale-free network of real numbers: the continuum.
 The position of tip of that pencil (relative to it's center of gravity,
 and the direction of the gravitational force) is specified to an infinite
 number of digits.
 ...
 or is it? The relative positions actually have to be zero, and is zero
 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

an infinite number of digits
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

? Well, only if we use decimal expansions.
 Or p-adic expansions.
 Otherwise, zero is an exact number, with low Kolmogorov complexity.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
What is the origin of the instability to a balanced pencil? In reality,
 it is air-gusts.
 In a vacuum, its micro seismic events.
 In an isolated cavity, its thermal fluctuations of the atoms at the tip
 of the pencil.
 Plenty of physical sources of noise that knock it off it's unstable equilibrium.
 What about the 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

mathematically perfect
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 pencil? Well, using infinitessimals, rigorously defined, like surreals,
 a la J.H.
 Conway, for example, then one can ask: would a perturbation by an infinitessima
l unbalance the pencil? Getting an answer to that requires extending the
 theory of ordinary differential equations to the surreals.
 This extension of the theory is an act of engineering, since there is probably
 considerable freedom in how one can glue the infniitessimals at a lower
 rank to the real numbers.
 I guess.
 This also pilots us back to the Borel hierarchy.
 And so that whole ball of topics, I find them very very interesting and
 I want to spend more time exploring that.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
At any rate, what was the point here? The exploration of an unstable fixed
 point of a balanced pencil, set into a framework of surreals and Borel
 hierarchy, as opposed to the reality of wind gusts, seismic events and
 thermal motion of atoms.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
What about the unstable fixed points of cosmology, biochemistry, computer
 hardware engineering or knowledge in the noosphere? I imagine that there
 is one ring to rule them all.
 its just that computer engineering and the creation of knowledge graphs
 are not described by differential equations, and so surreal numbers do
 not apply.
 A decade ago, or more, I concluded that this all has something to it all
 being 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

hyperbolic
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 This is still a valid insight, but it needs firming up.
 Unstable points, e.g.
 in Morse theory, are hyperbolic.
 But hardware engineering and the noosphere are not manifolds, and so some
 generalization is required.
 Enter the jigsaw-puzzle pieces, but I do not have a graphical generalization
 of manifolds to jigsaws, and I do not have a hyperbolic interpretation
 of jigsaws, other than to say the number of combinatorial possibilities
 is unbounded.
 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
That is, give a set of axioms, such as in model theory, the corresponding
 language is either finite, or infinite.
 In the case of the infinite language, this is countable-infinity and we
 get to it because of a combinatoric explosion of ways of recombining the
 axioms of the system.
 So it seems that combinatorial explosions provide the notion of hyperbolicity
 that I am looking for.
 I have not read anything that connects hyperbolocity on manifolds to combinator
ial explosions.
 The obvious place to do these would be with sheafs (a la sheaf theory),
 rings, the bridge between rings and algebraic geometry provided by schemes.
 I always struggled with rings, though.
 Rings always break my mind.
 Not sure why.
 Maybe this is a monster I need to wrestle, a fear I need to overcome.I do
 have a copy of Eisenbud & Harris, 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

The Geometry of Schemes
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 Perhaps I need to try again.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Anyway, nothing that i wrote above is what I was going to write about this
 morning.
 I was going to write about time.
 Perhaps this is a good time for that.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So, there are people who think that free will doesn't exist, because they
 have a mental model of a deterministic universe driven by the inviolable
 equations of physics.
 The future is foretold, and we move through, like actors in a play.
 This founders in several ways.
 If the future is foretold, why not just zoom to the end? If we do computer
 simulations of hydrodynamics, we can reverse and forward, speed up slow
 down and halt that simulation, and take a gods-eye view of the simulation.
 If the physical future is foretold, then why not just have a gods-eye view
 of the cosmos? Why are we embedded inescapably in the here-and-now?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
First, some evidence that the future doesn't exist.
 Biology and evolution has invested a lot of effort to develop brains, which
 are, more or less, future-prediction machines.
 If the future was foretold, then why do we need brains? We could be placid
 rivers flowing, brainless, into the future.
 But no, complexity grows at the forefront of now, separating past and future.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Where do we search for the origin of time? A flowing river is indeed brainless,
 but it too seems to be caught in the present: it flows here and now, and
 yes, we use our brains to perceive it, but I think there's plenty of evidence,
 say, from cosmology, that the distinction between past and future existed
 before there were brains and observers.
 I'm pretty sure the cosmos did not just zoom up to a solipsistic here-and-now,
 fast-forwarding through the steps that created the cosmic microwave background.
 I believe that there was a march of time, even then, before brains.
 And to imagine that it was only the advent of brains that forced the collapse
 of the past into being the past, well, again, that seems solipsistic.
 I reject solipsism straight out of hand.
 Although I admit there is a very interesting place in the universe for
 solipsism, because of the whole problem with qualia.
 I keep saying 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

spin glass
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 and 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

ultrametric
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 and Sherrington-Kirkpatrick
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 as an impressionistic allusion to the the multi-scale structure compartmentaliz
ation of pieces-parts and communications channels between them.
 In this model, solipsism is the ultimate qualia of the single isolated
 part, utterly disconnected from the outside world, except by sensory organs,
 imagining everything out there is a dream.
 Which it is, in some true and proper sense.
 That's the problem with dreams and human psychonautics: psychoses allow
 us to think this way.
 But the presupposition is that there is something 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

normal
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 Psychological normalcy is a slippery eel.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Where was I? I am going to go for a bike ride now, so I bid adieu.
 I was going to expand this essay, looking for sources that might tell us
 where time comes from.
 One obvious territory to explore is differential equations, but, in a sense,
 we've already beaten that to death.
 I think.
 Of course, there are differential equations with time in them, but that's
 not where time comes from.
 We also have the non-differentiable, non-manifold structure of the noosphere.
 The noosphere too appears to be trapped in the here and now.
 Partly trapped: the noosphere remembers the past, so it has detached there.
 The noosphere has the future as an event horizon, but this is curiously
 reversed from the usual even horizons: the future is coming at us, like
 a white hole spewing.
 The here and now is the event horizon of things that have not yet come
 to be, the future that has not yet materialized.
 I want to explore this train of thought more, but the clock is ticking
 and the past asserts that going for a bike ride is a better use of my future,
 than to sit here and type more.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Subsection*
13 January 2025
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Continuing from where I left off yesterday.
 The question is 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

why is there time?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 or 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

why does time exist?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 or 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

what is the physics that causes time to be a perceptible, sensible part
 of the universe?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset


\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Before I restart, I want to make a short detour to the so-called 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

timescape cosmology
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 The proposal here is that 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

time runs faster
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 in empty cosmological voids.
 Apparently, the Milky Way and the Local Group sit in the middle of a void.
 I have not read the 2007 original timescape paper.
 But I can guess: we know, from GR, that time runs slower in a gravity well.
 So, GPS satellites actually adjust for this, because they do not sit in
 Earth's gravity well.
 This is a measured real thing (e.g.
 Pound-Rebka).
 How big is the effect, at the galactic scale? The 100 Mparsec scale? I
 dunno, I won't back-of-the-envelope it (yet) and maybe someday I'll read
 the paper.
 But...
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
But...
 so the philosophically daunting issue is that, even in empty space, 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

time runs
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 The EFE eqns are 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

timeless
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 in that you have some matter distribution or some energy-stress tensor
 and you solve it and you get answers 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

for all time
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 The de Sitter solution (no matter, no radiation, no fluids) is expressed
 with coordinate patches from an atlas on a manifold that 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

doesn't care
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 that time is 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

running
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 Time is just some abstract coordinate in the map.
 You can take *any* spacelike surface, and arbitrarily declare it to be
 the isochronous surface, so you have to have some argument as to what the
 correct one is.
 In cosmology, this is usually taken to be the last scattering surface for
 CMB.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Anyway, that's a curious detour, but it misses the point.
 Let's get back on track.
 We have three obvious sources of time: differential eqns, quantum field
 theory, and statistical mechanics.
 Lets look at each in turn.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Differential eqns have a time coordinate 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

built in
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, so this doesn't explain 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

where does time come from?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 Differential equations are usually first-order in time, sometimes second.
 In this sense, their 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

memory
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 of what happened in the past is very short: one or two steps (imagined
 to be numeric difference equations).
 Any 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

memory
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 further than that is recorded in the space-like directions.
 The canonical example is reaction-diffusion: it has a characteristic time
 scale.
 Simplifying, one can in general build diffeqs that have oscillatory solutions.
 If you have a collection of oscillators, you can hook them together and
 engineer dynamical systems that have complex time behaviors.
 This doesn't explain 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

where time comes from
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, it just says 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

if I have an identifiable time coordinate, then I can engineer complex behaviors
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
By convention, most oscillatory solutions can be embedded in the complex
 plane, via Euler's eqn 
\begin_inset Formula $e^{i\theta}=\cos\theta+i\sin\theta$
\end_inset

, which perhaps clouds the issue.
 It shouldn't: the complex plane is a special case of an almost-complex
 structure having some 
\begin_inset Formula $J$
\end_inset

 with 
\begin_inset Formula $J^{2}=-1$
\end_inset

 and symplectic structures have such 
\begin_inset Formula $J$
\end_inset

's as a general rule: this is just the 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

canonical one-form
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 or 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

tautological one-form
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 or 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

solder form
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 
\begin_inset Formula $p\mbox{d}q$
\end_inset

 that arises in symplectic geometry.
 And that arises because tangent bundles are symplectic, and so the argument
 could be made that 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

if you have a differentiable manifold, then you have a tangent bundle, and
 it is symplectic, and you have a 
\begin_inset Formula $J^{2}=-1$
\end_inset

 and thus can conclude that oscillatory 'things' are a by-product of differentia
ble manifolds
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
There's one more step: oscillatory 'things' need to imply 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

time
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 somehow.
 So, manifolds with integrable vector fields on them will have integrable
 flows, and the parameter along the flow can be interpreted as 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

time
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 If one can take perpendicular slices across that flow, you can call these
 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

space-like
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 (even in the absence of a psuedo-Riemannian metric), and the flow itself
 gives a 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

local time coordinate
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 on that patch/atlas.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
This construction of 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

time
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 from 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

integrable flows
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 has several issues.
 One is 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

how many vector fields are there that are integrable?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 and 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

when are they homotopically equivalent?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 or perhaps 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

when are they diffeomorphic?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 If all of them are equivalent, then forward-time can be diffeomorphically
 deformed along a homotopic path to backwards-time, and so the resulting
 structure can't really be called 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

time
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 In physics, we want time to be an arrow, to be oriented.
 To have 
\begin_inset Formula $\mathbb{Z}_{2}$
\end_inset

 in there, somehow.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
At any rate, this seems like a not-bad approach.
 The question then becomes 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

what kinds of (differentiable) manifolds have integrable vector flows, where
 the homotopy group of the flows is 
\begin_inset Formula $\mathbb{Z}_{2}$
\end_inset

?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 That's a question that could be answered, I suppose.
 None of my diff topology or diff geom textbooks went that way, but also
 I was not paying attention, and not looking to answer that particular question.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
A related question would be 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

when can those differentiable flows be given a Minkowski space structure?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 and I guess the more precise wording for this would be 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

when does a manifold have tangent spaces that are Minkowski space?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 The obvious answer is to invert this, upside-down, giving the immediate
 answer: 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

any space with pseudo-Riemannian geometry
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 This one goes full-circle, ending where we started, with a tautology.
 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

Assume Minkowski, therefore time
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
There are curiosities on this path: e.g.
 the Godel solution for EFE, describing a rotating universe.
 It has closed time-like loops.
 More generally, there are all sorts of time-like vs space-like confusions
 marked by boundaries that are event horizons.
 Thus, perhaps we can loosen the conditions, and ask 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

do manifolds with event horizons necessarily have a Minkowski-space tangent
 spaces?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 or are there other kinds of manifolds that have event-horizon-type structures?
 This question is not well-posed.
 Take it to be a poetic, inspirational question.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So that kind of exhausts classical physics.
 Yes, there are differentiable structures, wherein something in those structures
 can be given the interpretation of 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

time
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, or can plausibly be identified with the physics concept of 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

time
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 Fine.
 Great.
 It does not at all address the question of 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

Why are we trapped in the here and now? Why can we remember the past, but
 not change it? Why can't we remember the future? Why do we think we have
 free will to change the future?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 I utterly fail to see how anything in the classical theory differentiable
 manifolds can have any bearing on these questions.
 So punt on that.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Next on the agenda: quantum.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
First, lets recap what quantum is.
 Its a thing with an action, where the action can be minimized with Euler–Lagran
ge or Hamilton–Jacobi, giving classical equations of motion.
 Close to these minimizing (or stationary) solutions, within one hbar of
 distance, are other (differentiable) paths/surfaces.
 They are necessarily differentiable, since the action has derivatives in
 it, and so non-differentiable paths/surfaces would result in an infinite
 (or undefined) action.
 The partition function is 
\begin_inset Formula $Z=\int\left[d\phi\right]\exp iA\left(\phi,\partial\phi\right)$
\end_inset

 so anything with infinite/undefined 
\begin_inset Formula $\partial\phi$
\end_inset

 cannot contribute.
 I belabor this point, because lots of fractals are non-differentiable everywher
e.
 Such fractals often have perfectly well-defined measure theory behind them,
 i.e.
 are integrable, and so they can show up in measure-preserving dynamical
 systems.
 So, there's a bit of unresolved tension, here: illustrating how differential
 equations (time-reversible ones, at that) give rise to measure-preserving
 dynamical systems and systems having an action.
 The prototypical 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

answer
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 is Sinai's billiards, where each reflection is time-reversible, momentum/energy
-preserving, but ergodic and non-differentiable in the limit.
 For now, that's a step too far; see however below.
 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Anyway, changing gears.
 If one imagines replacing derivatives with differentials, thus discretizing
 the problem, then the differential eqn that gives a stationary point of
 the action can be imagined to be ..
 watch for it: a collection of jigsaw puzzle pieces, marked with tabs and
 connectors, stating how the differentials can be legally combined to given
 an expression for the action.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Are there two types of these jigsaws? One type, when assembled, giving the
 stationary solution, while others, with looser assembly standards, that
 give nearby solutions? There's also a counting problem: the classical solution
 is a point.
 How many nearby solutions are there? What's the measure?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The problem here is that we once again take a god-like view: there is a
 classical action, we know it for all time.
 We stick it in the quantum partition function, and again know it for all-time.
 We do not have an adequate theory for the measure of such systems, but
 so what: imagine we did: it affords us a god-like view, where we see not
 just the past, but imagine being able to see the future, too.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Many-worlds has a curious role here.
 So, on the one hand, 
\begin_inset Formula $\int\left[d\phi\right]$
\end_inset

 is meant to be an integral over all worlds, in the many-worlds interpretation.
 On the other hand, all of these other worlds are assumed to be like ours:
 predominantly classical, i.e.
 given as solutions to the classical action.
 But there is only one solution to the classical action, not many.
 So either we are wrong about the action, or we are wrong about 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

many
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 That is, we either need an action with 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

many
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 classical solutions, or we are correct about our action (the Standard Model
 is correct) and we are incorrect about there being 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

many
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 solutions.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I propose one way out of this dilemma: time.
 At any given point in time, any 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

now
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, we do not yet know which future will be the one, true, action-minimizing
 future.
 So we keep tabs on them all, 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

until later
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, when we can 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

find out
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 Think of this as a computer weather simulation: numerical integration results
 in numerical errors, but we wish to minimize those errors.
 If course, they can be minimized locally, by picking a finer grid, but
 better is to minimize them globally: say, minimize the root-mean-square
 of all numerical errors, across the entire simulation.
 This would require, at each 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

point
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 in the simulation, to track 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

many different worlds
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, and then, at some point, select the one that minimizes the errors, thus
 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

collapsing
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 the many choices to fewer choices.
 This collapse would probably have a forward-backward nature to it: interferomet
ric, so different paths are pursued, and welcher-weg cannot be answered
 until 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

later
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, when the paths are brought back together and summed.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
In this interpretation, the many-worlds aren't some mysterious 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

parallel universes, just like our own, but different
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, but are rather an accounting trick, because we cannot actually minimize
 the action *right now*, we will have to wait for the future to happen,
 before that can be done.
 In the meanwhile, track a giant pile of possible universes.
 The 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

past
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 then becomes what has been resolved and frozen.
 The future remains unknown.
 This has aspects of the 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

transaction interpretation of QM
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 (TIQM) in that future events (results of interferometric comparisons) finally
 fix past events (that point where the split along the two arms of the interfero
meter started).
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
BTW, I should mention: TIQM seems to fit well with the two state-vector
 formalism (TSVF) and seems to be compatible with weak measurements (from
 what I can tell.)
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
This, the TIQM or variants thereof, would seem to indicate that 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

now
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 is not an infinitely thin space-time slice, but rather of finite width.
 And, not a fixed finite width, but multi-scale.
 Small interferometers can be resolved in femtoseconds, bigger ones in milliseco
nds.
 e.g.
 the Alain Aspect experiments look at phenomena where the collapse is delayed
 for milliseconds.
 That is, the Aspect experiments probe 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

now
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, where the width of 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

now
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 is milliseconds.
 The shmucks working on quantum computing are suffering because they want
 to create complex states that remain entangled for seconds or longer.
 They talk about 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

thermal noise
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 collapsing their systems.
 They are partly right: yes, they need to build systems that are isolated,
 insulated from the rest of the universe, and all the thermal fiddle-faddle.
 But the microscopic model needs to be that some 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

photon
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 from the outside world came in, bonked your superposition, which is bad
 but not fatal, but then another photon left your superposition and bonked
 the external world, which is fatal: you now have the two arms of an interferome
ter, and one arm of the interferometer is tangled into the universe, the
 other is tangled into your superposition, and so, kaboom, your state collapses
 before you get the chance to actually accomplish any meaningful quantum
 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

computation
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 This is the engineering problem that is 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

well-understood
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 that everyone in the industry 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

groks
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 What I'm trying to do here is to argue that a TIQM type model is actually
 the correct model.
 This should be relatively non-controversial: there are many legit physicists
 who believe in TIQM, even if they are a minority.
 I'm trying to explicitly rule out the cranks and shysters.
 I want nothing to do with 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

prolific entrepreneurs
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 who use ChatGPT to create incoherent 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

scientific
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 rebuttals to the controversy of the day.
 I read one yesterday, a rebuttal to the Timescape Model in cosmology, and
 it was shameful.
 For a little while, I thought it might be a grad student who was going
 to make a valid point.
 No.
 It was a 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

prolific entrepreneur
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 with a shoddy cut-n-paste job.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
My reasoning in the last ten paragraphs may also be incorrect, but its not
 shoddy.
 I am taking the utmost care to be clear and direct and accurate.
 The result may still be a dazed and confused wall of words, but ...
 I'm trying.
 This is my best shot.
 (My best shot in the allotted time.
 The clock is ticking.
 The race into the future is on.)
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
OK.
 I think that kind of exhausts the quantum side of things.
 It does sketch why there is a 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

here and now
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, and it does answer why the future is unknown.
 The future is unknown because some CMB photon could arrive on Earth, and
 do the butterfly-effect thing.
 Or worse: some primordial neutrino.
 Until those neutrinos pass by, and do their butterly-effect thing, we cannot
 know the future.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Careful: the standard retort here is that its 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

small and negligible
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 which is perfectly true for determining if the Flatiron building in New
 York will fall over and crush some pedestrians.
 But I'm philosophizing here: the integral 
\begin_inset Formula $\int\left[d\phi\right]$
\end_inset

 includes everything, including primordial neutrinos.
 They may have negligible effects on practical calculations ...
 they *must* have negligible effect, as otherwise practical calculations
 are impossible.
 But from the viewpoint of 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

why are we trapped in the here-and-now?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 I cannot ignore their contribution.
 I don't have some explicit calculation where I can say 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

it's negligible
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 Hmm.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The above reduces quantum many-worlds to a book-keeping device, the books
 for which cannot be closed until 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

later
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 But it also makes things very mechanistic: some primordial neutrino has
 some effect.
 Sure, we use complex numbers, etc.
 to perform that calculation; the conventional theory is what Kamiokande
 is built on.
 Rather, what I'm doing is to reduce many-worlds to a many-body problem,
 a statistical-mechanics problem.
 Yes, its 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

statistical mechanics with complex numbers aka quantum field theory
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, but I'm trying to remove the 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

woo
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 of 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

parallel universes
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 and instead have a kind of boring common-sense 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

its just an accounting trick
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 that only accountants understand.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I've written before in this diary about how math is hallucinatory.
 That's plenty, baby.
 I do not need to also have my physics be hallucinatory.
 I'm fine with hard-headed common-sense no-nonsense cut-the-crap accounting
 tricks, instead of 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

woo
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 and 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

mysterious interdimensional gods playing dice with the universe
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 Just had to get that out of the way, didn't I? I'm glad no one is reading
 this.
 I can see a lot of thumbs-down icons being clicked right now.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Anyway, all of the above now necessitates getting into the third leg: a
 review of many-body statistical mechanics.
 Mostly, in this section, I will recapitulate everything I learned since
 the day I met Dean Driebe, and how he told me he could explain the arrow
 of time with the Frobenius-Perron operator.
 And this is an important insight.
 And mainstream physics even got a bad case of 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

Koopmanitis
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, cause everyone saw that this is an important insight.
 So in my recap, I will try to imagine how Ruelle-Frobenius-Perron can be
 reconciled with QFT, wave function collapse (a la TIQM) and see if it provides
 insight into the prison of 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

here and now
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 But first, I take a break, because (a) its dinner, and (b) there are other
 things I should be doing, and need to get done.
 So maybe till tomorrow, or later.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Oh, before I break: there is a rather stark issues that arises with timescape
 cosmology.
 So, with conventional Frobenius-Perron (FP), the language is of ergodic
 theory.
 The canonical physics model is gas-in-a-box.
 And that's fine.
 But what about empty space? How is it that 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

time is running
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 in 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

empty space
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, when there's no matter, no atoms in it? Well, two answers: (a) even in
 cosmic voids, one can expect to find one hydrogen atom every ten cubic
 meters (ts like one per cubic meter.
 in cosmology, on average, but most of those are in galaxies, so presumably
 the cosmic voids are a few orders of magnitude down from that.) So the voids
 aren't 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

really empty
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 They also contain thousands(?) of CMB photons per cubic meter, and almost
 that many (non-interacting) neutrinos, so even these voids aren't truly
 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

empty
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 They also contain a bunch of (non-interacting, pressure-less) cold dark
 mater.
 Is this amount of non-emptiness sufficient to make an argument about ergodcity
 and Frobenius-Perron? I don't know.
 Alternative answer (b) is quantum zero-point fluctuations.
 Given that these are off by 120 orders of magnitude, it's perhaps moot,
 but it does give an opportunity to head-scratch and wonder 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

what is the mechanism that wipes out quantum ZP from cosmological lambda?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset


\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The point here was supposed to be 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

Is it possible to have a here-and-now in 'empty' space?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 because there's no subject/object in empty space that can perceive time.
 Because we can zoom out and take the gods-eye view of empty space, slap
 a coordinate chart on it, and be utterly lacking in the ability of saying
 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

this is where 'now' is
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 What we can do is to define comoving coordinates relative to last-scattering,
 and use that to define 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

now
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Oh, fucking footnote time.
 We have Schrodinger's cat, whose wave-function collapses when Wigner opens
 the box and looks at it.
 We have 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

Wigner's friend
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, who then enters the room.
 This provides an anthropocentric argument that astronomical telescopes
 cause the collapse of wave-functions in 100 mega-parsec-distant voids.
 I fucking hate these anthropocentric arguments.
 But it does get across the point that large-scale quantum entanglements
 are participating in the time-evolution of the universe, even if they are
 negligible in any practical calculation.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Sigh.
 Shit.
 Seems I will have to look up and read: David Wiltshire, 2007 New J.
 Phys., 9, 377 and also Phys.
 Rev.
 Lett., 99, 251101 and then references to Thomas Burchert 2000, Gen.
 Relativ.
 Gravitation, 32, 105.
 This is so fucking far away from answering 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

why does the universe contain a combinatorially explosive number of electrical
 engineering circuit diagrams?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 but then, I am looking for 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

an answer
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 to 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

why does the complexity increase everywhere?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 so if I can't do it for empty voids in cosmology, then, in a sense I've
 failed.
 Well, I will fail.
 I can't imagine this is an easy problem.
 But why not? I'll throw my hat in the ring.
 I doubt anyone else is venturing here.
 May as well be me, to sacrifice myself to the gods of the void.
 Mixed metaphor: 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

when you stare at the void, you may find it staring back at you
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The Wiltshire/Burchert idea: Burtchert defines averaging.
 He or Wiltshire note that walls are spatially flat, voids have negative
 curvature.
 Some quotes: 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

a substantial difference in clock rates arises cumulatively over the lifetime
 of the universe from the tiny relative volume deceleration of voids as
 compared to wall regions (Wiltshire 2008).
 The magnitude of this relative deceleration, typically of the order of
 
\begin_inset Formula $10^{-10}m/sec^{2}$
\end_inset

...
 apparent acceleration is only registered once the void fraction reaches
 a critical threshold of 59 per cent, typically near a redshift z∼ 0.9 (Wiltshire
 2007a) ...
 voids (typically of diameter ∼30 h−1 Mpc and smaller) ...
 Large gradients in Ricci scalar curvature are assumed to exist between
 the walls/filaments and the voids, consistent with observations that the
 latter have density contrasts close to δρ/ρ∼−1 ...
 The Hubble ‘constant’ inferred in this manner should peak at the dominant
 void scale 30h−1 Mpc, i.e.
 at z∼ 0.01, with a maximum value up to 17 per cent greater than the global
 average and then steadily decrease to near the global average value when
 the scale of statistical homogeneity is reached.
 ...
 the scale of statistical homogeneity represents a redshift of the order
 of z∼ 0.033, ...
 
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 The above is from Supernova tests of the timescape cosmology , Monthly
 Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 413, Issue 1, May 2011,
 Pages 367–385, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2966.2010.18142.x https://academic.oup.co
m/mnras/article/413/1/367/1062339 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The intro provides a summary sufficient for my purposes.
 So maybe I won't have to read anything else.
 The upshot is that our wall is moving away from other walls faster than
 average, because there is a void in the middle.
 Things average out, though the farther one goes.
 Expect to see average expansion rates at 
\begin_inset Formula $0.033<z$
\end_inset

 and faster expansion rates at 
\begin_inset Formula $z<$
\end_inset

0.01.
 Clocks in the walls run slower than clocks in the voids.
 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Related is the idea of the 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

Hubble bubble
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, that the Milky way is in the middle of an underdensity of mass.
 This gives another reason to exclude low-z SNIa data.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So here's the deal, now that I read the whole paper.
 The timescape idea is a collection of formulas that explain how to compute
 cosmological parameters, due to inhomogeneities, at scales *larger* than
 than our local void or supervoid, or, more precisely larger then 
\begin_inset Formula $z=0.033$
\end_inset

.
 At those higher z'es, there are still voids and walls, but now there are
 enough of them that meaningful averages can be taken over them.
 Thus, data cuts are needed: exclude nearby SNIa that are in our known local
 inhomogeneity region, and use the *correct* formulas for averaging over
 inhomogeneities at farther distances.
 This makes sense to me.
 Go out far enough where you can take meaningful averages, and then use
 correct averaging formulas.
 Doh! This is a pretty solid argument, even if you are a firm lambdaCDM
 believer.
 I mean: treat your data correctly.
 Who would argue against that? So I close the chapter on timescape.
 I get it.
 Cool.
 Crank the data.
 See how the fits work.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Whatever.
 None of this gives any particular insight into 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

why is there time?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 The idea that comoving clocks run faster in voids is quite intriguing,
 but does not seem to shed any light on the question of 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

why is there a 'now'
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I guess I could go off on another tangent: atomic clocks.
 But I'm thinking this is also unilluminating: these provide quantum systems
 that are exceptionally stable.
 They measure the passage of 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

now
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 which is necessarily related to the centroid of our non-zero width thermal-enta
ngled quantum-now.
 That is, we live in a thermal bath of quantum entanglements, and so I would
 estimate the thermal with of 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

now
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 to be given by 
\begin_inset Formula $\hbar/2\sim E\Delta t$
\end_inset

 and 
\begin_inset Formula $E\sim kT$
\end_inset

 and 
\begin_inset Formula $T\sim300^{\circ}K$
\end_inset

 and so 
\begin_inset Formula $\Delta t\sim\hbar/2kT\sim6.6\times10^{-16}eV\cdot sec/(2\times8.6\times10^{-5}eV/K\times300K\sim10^{-13}sec$
\end_inset

 so that's 100 femtoseconds or a tenth of a picosecond as an order of magnitude
 expression for the width of 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

now
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 in our ordinary world.
 Note that atomic clocks like to bring the temperature down (e.g.
 cesium fountain) and the stated reasons and physical principles never use
 a language like 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

the width of 'now'
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, but effectively, this is the interpretation that should be given.
 Heisenberg uncertainty is meant to be a manifestation of what Fourier transform
s do to waves, and that is all well and good, but the fact that some experiments
 have to deal with thermal motion at the same energy scale suggests that
 we don't 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

really know what time it is
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 at that scale.
 Yes, the atomic clocks do provide a value for time, but that time has to
 be interpreted as the centroid of a smeared-out time that room-temperature
 solids and liquids possess.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
This includes water flowing in a river.
 The hydrodynamics happens at scales much larger than the atomic femtoseconds.
 Time may be uncertain at the femtosecond layer, but the 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

now
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 in a river may as well be instantaneous.
 Wigner's friend is not required to make the wave-function of a river collapse;
 it does that on it's own.
 I can make accurate predication about a river if I use hydrodynamics, a
 length scale longer than a nanometer, and a time scale longer than picosecond.
 Get much smaller than this and quantum effects start to matter.
 This is all painfully obvious and a rather blunt, But it does serve to
 illustrate what I mean by 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

the width of now
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
For table-top sized optical interferometers, or for razor-blade optical
 double-slit experiments, different values of 
\begin_inset Formula $\Delta t$
\end_inset

 manifest, and this is what I mean by 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

multi-scale
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 The 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

width of now
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 depends on sizes, and the degree to which one can provide lab conditions
 that isolate quantum effects from ambient thermal noise.
 Not an accident that atomic physics is done in a vacuum.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
What's the 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

width of now
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 in a cosmic void, with some thousands of CMB photons per cubic meter, and
 far less than one proton per cubic meter? According to my hand-waving above,
 it should be related to the mean-free-path of those baryons, maybe.
 But if I could stick an actual physical clock into that void, the 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

width of now
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 in the clock collapses to femtoseconds, and the clock would work just like
 it does on the lab table.
 Without that clock, I'm suggesting that time behaves like the ancient philosoph
ical brain-teaser: 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

if a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make
 a sound?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 That answer is 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

yes, time does tick and advance and move forward, even in a vacuum, but
 time moves forward only to the degree that there are thermally quantum-entangle
d baryons and photons there to witness the passage of time.
 The quantum-entangled baryons pull in a factor of 
\begin_inset Formula $\hbar$
\end_inset

, until something makes them decohere and wave-function-collapse, which
 has to happen at some thermodynamic Boltzmann 
\begin_inset Formula $kT$
\end_inset

 type of timescale.
 Perhaps truly, truly empty space doesn't know what 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

now
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 is.
 We can slap a coordinate system on empty space, but we can't point at where
 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

now
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 is.
 ...
 heh.
 Except interferometrically.
 We can define initial-now as the space-like time of last scattering, evolve
 it to 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

now
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 today, define co-moving coordinates and then make the claim that 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

now
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 in a void is what the comoving coordinate for time would be if we parallel-tran
sported our clock along this path, from here to there.
 And we can even argue that this is necessarily the right answer, because
 we have validated GR and know how this stuff works.
 The 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

now
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 over there is the same as the 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

now
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 here, even if the 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

width of now
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 there is wider than it is here.
 The parallel-transported, Hubble-expansion-corrected 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

now
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 line up as expected.
 Yes, trees make a sound when they fall.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
None of these ruminations have shed even the slightest iota of enlightenment
 of what 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

now
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 really is.
 Other than some claim that 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

textbook physics is enough
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 and hand-waving about Frobenius-Perron.
 That, and a denial that Wigner's friend is needed to make 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

now
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 happen.
 I'm chasing my tail.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Subsection*
14 January 2025
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Chasing my tail hard.
 Obvious flaws with the above: it creates a tension between geometric (gravitati
onal) time, as the proper length of a geodesic, and some quantum time, which
 is obtained via quantum speed limit theorems.
 Given that I wrote/rewrote maybe half the Wikipedia article on the quantum
 speed limit, you might think I'd know something about something here.
 But no, I'm senile.
 There's simply something in here I just don't understand.
 I suspect that's because I don't understand the thermodynamics behind Hawking
 radiation.
 So that's a to-do item.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Subsection*
15 January 2025
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
My personal qualia of 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

right now
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 aligns with that of other people, and indeed with other animals, and certainly
 high-function robots, and, looking through microscopes at killer T-cells
 chasing down microbes indicates there's a 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

right now
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 for them that coincides with my own personal qualia.
 We are all in exactly the same flat space-time surface.
 Looking at GPS clocks on orbiting satellites, it seems entirely reasonable
 to say there's a 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

right now
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 for them, that corresponds with my own, after general-relativistic corrections
 for the gravity well I'm in (and they're not).
 So 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

right now
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 appears to be GR-precise.
 It's always proper time.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
What this means is that I cannot derive 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

right now
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 from quantum speed-limit theorems (alone), as these would seem to depend
 on the local matter density.
 For example, QSL's are saturated by the qubit, but the actual delta-t is
 in relation to the two energy levels in the qubit.
 These could be 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

anything
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, and for gas-in-a–box, these would be temperature-dependent.
 So I need a QSL that does NOT have thermodynamic origin.
 The only thing that flies to mind that would satisfy this, is zero-point
 energy.
 It's pervasive, its everywhere, including cosmic voids.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The first calculation to attempt would be to write down Unruh or Beckman
 or whatever they are called 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

squeezed states
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 (the coherent states that are twisted off) and attempt to find an expression
 for the QSL for such states.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I want to do this *right now*, but have other things I need to do today.
 So ...
 Toodle-oo.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Subsection*
16 January 2025
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Or it is possible that many-worlds really do exist.
 This would require the the action that minimizes the partition function
 to have a tree structure.
 Which to me sounds crazy, because I've never seen any such, and it would
 be a black swan.
 But I can now imagine an analog: the beta expansion.
 To be clear, this one: 
\begin_inset Formula $x=\sum_{n}b_{n}\beta^{-n}$
\end_inset

 where 
\begin_inset Formula $0\le x\le1$
\end_inset

 is some real number, 
\begin_inset Formula $1<\beta\le2$
\end_inset

 is another real number, the base, and the 
\begin_inset Formula $b_{n}$
\end_inset

 are binary bits.
 Then, depending on 
\begin_inset Formula $x$
\end_inset

 and 
\begin_inset Formula $\beta$
\end_inset

 there are often many, infinitely many different bit-sequences which satisfy
 this relation.
 What's more, the bit-sequences can be arranged in a tree: i.e.
 identical up to a certain length, and then they diverge.
 There's even a phase transition, located at 
\begin_inset Formula $\beta=\phi$
\end_inset

 the golden mean.
 I've written multiple papers on this.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Anyway, if 
\begin_inset Formula $x$
\end_inset

 can be thought of as 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

minimizing something
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 (i.e.
 the action) and 
\begin_inset Formula $\beta$
\end_inset

 is some fixed 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

cosmological constant
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, then the collection of 
\begin_inset Formula $b_{n}$
\end_inset

 are the 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

world lines
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 of observers, forking where forks are possible.
 So this is some zero-dimensional inspirational example of many-worlds.
 Note that the binary digits are generated by iterating 
\begin_inset Formula $\beta x\mod1$
\end_inset

 and so there is a folding-back.
 In some hand-wavey way, maybe this folding-back resembles the reflecting
 boundary conditions for AdS.
 Maybe that's why you can do QG models on AdS.
 Wild guess.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So the above is a simple model of a branching structure.
 If instead, we insist that, no, there is only one 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

reality
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, then the branch points can be interpreted as points where free-will gets
 a shot.
 That is, free-will is deterministically constrained, up until those branch
 points.
 Note that the 
\begin_inset Formula $\beta$
\end_inset

–expansions are also deterministically constrained for certain run-lengths,
 before a branch-point appears.
 The average run-lengths depend on 
\begin_inset Formula $\beta$
\end_inset

.
 There are also 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

univoke
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 
\begin_inset Formula $\beta$
\end_inset

 which allow only one unique expansion.
 The 
\begin_inset Formula $\beta$
\end_inset

 expansion has a surprisingly complicated dynamics.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
At any rate, this allows me to back of on insisting that 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

many worlds don't exist
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, as it now gives a plausible (to me) model on how they could happen.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Oh wait, there's even more to this analogy! So, the 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

unphysical
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 thing about 
\begin_inset Formula $\beta$
\end_inset

 dynamics is the folding: it connects and mixes together 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

distant regions
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 But that's what photons do: they take something way over there, and transport
 it to here, altering the reality here upon arrival.
 Pseudo-Riemannian geometry is weird.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I dreamt last night about our 3D reality as some sea-foam surfing at the
 tip of an ocean wave: we, too busy in our daily activities, churning like
 that foam, oblivious to the mass of water that carries us along.
 Only sometimes looking back at the wind-streaked trails left behind.
 It was thrilling.
 Almost an ecstatic vision of truth and reality, sublime and supreme.
 I dreamt many things last night, and the above is perhaps the simplest
 to explain and the most poetic.
 I could do a long analysis of my commonplace garbled dreams.
 They're complicated and twisty.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
For example: just before hopping into bed, I listened to a song on youtube,
 and read the comments, where many said 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

this song is sublime and supreme
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, calling it transcendental, and using other superlatives.
 And oddly, I agree.
 The song is 'Stand Inside Your Love', Smashing Pumkins.
 When I listen to it, it is very much a transcendental mystical experience.
 Now, many of the comments call it the 'best love song ever'.
 But they never ask 'love for who?', implicitly assuming another human.
 On my first listen to this song, for the first time ...
 it was clear that Billy was singing about Jesus, or about God, that this
 was a paean to God.
 So of course it's transcendental.
 Who wouldn't want to stand inside your love?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
And so my dream of our 3D present reality, the here-and-now, as the active
 foamy front at the edge of time, feels ecstatic, but I've got echoes of
 an ecstatic song tumbling in my mind.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
See? I could go on and on.
 Why does this song provoke a transcendental reposnse, and other songs,
 say Volare, don't? Well, the lyrics, for one.
 The pacing and dramatic breaking.
 Something about the neurophysiological structure of the brain allows transcende
ntal experience.
 What? And how does this tie into our 3D world? Because Our 3D world is
 not 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

just
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 three-dee, its got massive patterns, inter-relationships, graphical nets
 in it, and some of those graphical nets qualify as being 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

transcendental
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 All this blows my mind.
 I find it all just amazing.
 Stunningly so.
 I want to stand inside ...
 well, I am standing inside, we all are, aren't we? Great.
 Now what? Time for another cup of coffee? Fuuuuu....
\end_layout

\begin_layout Subsection*
19 January 2025
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Can't sleep.
 I get these bouts of insomnia that come and go.
 They're not cyclical, and I haven't figured out what triggers them.
 Too much coffee? Late night snacking? Something else? Probably too much
 coffee.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Several ideas churned.
 The Painleve chart says that the fabric of spacetime falls into anything
 massive.
 This includes point particles e.g.
 baryons and electrons.
 The Higgs mechanism says electrons get mass through the Higgs field.
 Why would this coupling cause spacetime to curve? The baryons get their
 mass from confinement.
 This is an even bigger effect! Why would confinement bend spacetime? The
 previous diary entries above deduce that the wall of time is a zero-point
 effect hinged on the QSL.
 But zero-point is some ergodic many-body process I don't understand.
 There's some knot that ties these topics together.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Meanwhile, Owen says that he might get Stephen Wolfram as an advisor on
 some business venture.
 So of course, he has Wolfram's fat book on his coffee table.
 I effing hate that book.
 I'd love it if it was undersold, but its oversold hype.
 The meanest thing I can think of saying is that Wolfram slept through the
 part of class where they explained Newton Differences.
 WTF.
 The over-selling just makes it cranky.
 It would be compelling if there was a Minkowski-covariant definition of
 cellular automata.
 Arguably, this would be possibly acceptable for the wall-of-time idea.
 Zero-point is some Minkowski-covariant (invariant) ergodic process.
 I don't understand it.
 I do understand conventional QFT; I do not understand how it becomes ergodic.
 I understand the Bernoulli process, I don't understand how QFT is Bernoulii-lik
e.
 I understand tensor algebras.
 Is the ground QFT state supposed to be some coherent state defined on a
 tensor algebra? Is that what it is? 
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Is it possible that gravitation drives weak mixing? That weak mixing is
 a root cause of entanglement? The conventional answer is a flat-out no;
 entanglement is just the algebra of representation theory of simple Lie
 groups, and specifically the representations of su(2) and/or sl(2,C).
 Fine.
 But why is there entanglement between oscillators in different parts of
 space? Why is flat space Euclidean, with the standard topology, instead
 of a collection of points with a fine topology? What causes different points
 in space to couple, causing the fine topology to collapse into the standard
 one? The conventional answer would be 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

derivatives
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

: you can't form a derivative on the fine topology.
 So that converts the question: 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

why are there derivatives?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 Derivatives couple neighboring points.
 What causes that coupling to happen? This is partly what the Wolfram idea
 is about.
 The problem with Wolfram is he chucks the idea of a derivative out the
 window, but commits a greater crime of assuming a square lattice-grid topology.
 God-knows, maybe he's moved on to hexagonal grids, or even sphere-packing
 grids.
 I ain't gonna read that book.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
If you're going to discard derivatives and replace them with cellular automata,
 then what's clearly needed is some definition of cellular automata on some
 random grid.
 That random grid has to course-grain into 3D space (and I guess that's
 what the Planck-scale loop quantum gravity (LQG) people are saying.
 I have not read their stuff, either.) But this should be a generic topological
 trick: define some random graph, and show that it coarse-grains to n-dimensiona
l Euclidean space with the standard topology.
 (Locally flat; we use that as a tangent space for 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

real
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 Riemannian geom.
 and/or symplectic geom.) Then we get lost in the weeds.
 Conventional algebraic topology tells use about singular homology.
 So we do some singular homology on this random grid, and get ...
 what? Famously the watchamacallit theorem says that there is no one-to-one
 correspondence between tessellated surfaces and continuous ones.
 But maybe that doesn't matter.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
An additional point of confusion: If I'm working with random graphs, I guess
 I'm supposed to be working with ensembles of such graphs? The ensemble
 is needed to provide averaging properties.
 The random-graph ensemble replaces the ensemble in the QFT functional integral.
 That is, instead of having 
\begin_inset Formula $\int\left[d\phi\right]$
\end_inset

 with 
\begin_inset Formula $\phi=\phi\left(x\right)$
\end_inset

 some field over points 
\begin_inset Formula $x\in M$
\end_inset

 for some space(-time) 
\begin_inset Formula $M$
\end_inset

, we instead sum with 
\begin_inset Formula $\sum_{g\in G}$
\end_inset

 for random graphs 
\begin_inset Formula $g$
\end_inset

 in an ensemble of graphs 
\begin_inset Formula $G$
\end_inset

.
 We then work with the singular homology for each 
\begin_inset Formula $g$
\end_inset

 to determine the dimension of the space.
 i.e.
 homology groups need to vanish in all dimensions except the desired dimension.
 Or rather, its OK if they don't vanish for some of the 
\begin_inset Formula $g\in G$
\end_inset

 but, when averaged over all of the 
\begin_inset Formula $g\in G$
\end_inset

 they do.
 So that for a singular homology 
\begin_inset Formula $H_{n}\left(g\right)$
\end_inset

 for a graph 
\begin_inset Formula $g$
\end_inset

 we construct 
\begin_inset Formula $H_{n}\left(G\right)=Z^{-1}\sum_{g\in G}H_{n}\left(g\right)$
\end_inset

 where 
\begin_inset Formula $Z^{-1}$
\end_inset

 is some normalization (playing the role of the partition function.) Maybe
 I should use a different notation than 
\begin_inset Formula $Z$
\end_inset

 to avoid confusion about using 
\begin_inset Formula $Z$
\end_inset

 for cycles.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Several problems with this idea.
 First, in flat space, all homology groups vanish.
 So this trick doesn't actually tell us what the dimension of the space.
 (Unless we redefine the problem to say something like 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

we're looking for spheres
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 But that would be stupid) So that's a big fail.
 I fucked up in saying 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

homology
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, I need some other construction that measures something that looks like
 dimension.
 Second, to have a meaningful sum there should be some action 
\begin_inset Formula $A\left(g\right)$
\end_inset

 so that 
\begin_inset Formula $Z=\sum_{g\in G}\exp iA\left(g\right)$
\end_inset

.
 This differs from conventional Ising-model stuff, in that we are summing
 over all graphs 
\begin_inset Formula $g$
\end_inset

 and not over all field configurations on a fixed lattice.
 But what's 
\begin_inset Formula $A\left(g\right)$
\end_inset

 ? Where does it come from? What value does it take? Why?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The weight 
\begin_inset Formula $\exp iA\left(g\right)$
\end_inset

 is understood to provide a measure-theoretic-like measure for each 
\begin_inset Formula $g$
\end_inset

.
 But, when doing the transfer operator for the Bernoulli process the sum
 arose from working the ergodic map backwards, i.e.
 the root origin of the 
\begin_inset Formula $\sum_{g\in G}$
\end_inset

 came instead from a 
\begin_inset Formula $\sum_{x\in f^{-1}\left(y\right)}\left|\left(f^{-1}\right)^{\prime}\left(x\right)\right|^{-1}$
\end_inset

 which I wrote wrong, but the weighting is given by a Jacobian.
 I'm trying to capture the generic ergodic process idea and tie it back
 to 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

where does the action come from
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

? and reformulate 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

the action
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 as the 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

log of the Jacobian
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 I'm confused.
 Why have I not tried this before, in my formal work? Probably because it
 was unenlightening for those simple cases.
 Maybe I didn't spend enough time thinking about how and why it could be
 interesting.
 I should go back and try some force-fits of this idea and see what happens.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
We can now hand-wave our way to the goal posts.
 For each vertex in 
\begin_inset Formula $g$
\end_inset

 place some cellular automata there, and let it interact with neighboring
 points in some way.
 These interactions provide some value for 
\begin_inset Formula $A\left(g\right)$
\end_inset

 and then, given appropriate interactions, we find that the dominant contributio
ns to 
\begin_inset Formula $Z$
\end_inset

 are given by graphs that coarse-grain to an n-dimensional Euclidean topology.
 Or maybe 3+1 for all the space-time nuts out there.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
What have we achieved here? Well, *maybe* it provides a path from random
 grids to flat space.
 But the fact that there's a sum over an ensemble suggests that the resulting
 space will be 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

quantum
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

.
 So I guess I've invented 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

quantum space
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

? And we do want 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

quantum space
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, and I'm assuming that the LQG people have developed some technology that
 replaces my hand-waving with something more precise.
 My only quibble with LQG is that it should work for spaces in any dimension,
 not just Minkowski space, but genericaally for any space with a metric
 with signature (m,n) (i.e.
 for any Riemannian or pseudo-Riemannian space).
 If you want to say (3,1) is special, then the specialness has to come from
 somewhere else.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
To conclude: maybe one can take ensembles of random graphs, and define an
 (arbitrary-dimensional) 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

quantum space
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 that way.
 Seems plausible.
 But this leaves the question of 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

why are we trapped in the now?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

 unanswered.
 Which does seem special to 3+1 especially given the weirdness of how propagator
s for the wave equation work in dimensions other than 3+1.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
I dunno.
 This is a train-wreck of ideas.
 They all might actually be good ideas, but they all require some huge amount
 of work to refine and define and formalize and make exact.
 And me being lazy, I'm looking for the silver bullet.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Subsection*
24 January 2025
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Back to AGI.
 For the last several days/weeks (month?) I've been trying to reconceptalize
 similarity measures.
 I've got jumbled ideas, none of them want to gel, and I can't write them
 into a project README because they are incoherent.
 However, this diary is a safe space for incoherent ideas put forth by snowflake
s who fear public perception when voicing their most private thoughts.
 Not here, buddy, we love you.
 You can ramble incoherently all you want.
 Let it out.
 Lit it out of your system.
 Let it all come out.
 We love you.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So I could jam the basis elements for a sparse vector into some new atom,
 in some c++ set but why? the atomspace already provides container-like
 constructions.
 But we don't want sets, we want membership.
 But membership is rather fat: millions of new links.
 Atoms are a bit pudgy: 713 bytes per atom for one recent dataset.
 Keeping this in a C++ vector could be as little as 24 maybe 48 bytes/atom.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
On the fly lookup could that work? Because we maybe we don't need to keep
 anything? But we do, cause on the fly is slow.
 Esp if using the query engine to do the on-the-fly stuff.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Whats a vector embedding anyway? For the word-pairs, there were explicit
 links to left and right, and a wild-card in either gives the vector.
 For generic patterns, those patterns would need to have exactly two variables.
 Thence confusion: because we are using the wild-card to define the embedding,
 and also to fix the other side.
 These two distinct roles are mashed into one.
 Can they be detangled?
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Sort of.
 For an embedding to work, all vectors must share the same same basis, as
 otherwise they are incomparable.
 Sof ro that a single-variable pattern suffices.
 Well, no: still two: one variable as wild-card, and the other one fixed
 to the item, because this is how we guarantee that the vectors have the
 same basis.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Word-pairs exploited a loophole of left-right conjugacy: instead of having
 one pattern with two distinguised slots, there were two patterns, with
 the second just being the symmatric transpose of the first, by accident.
 This is a happy accident, but cannot be taken to hold in general.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Well, except that it must.
 Somehow it must be transposable....
 which brings us back to the start: it must be a pattern with two slots.
 OK, fine, I guess we can work with that.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So I've got a pattern with two slots.
 A typical task is the cosine similarity, i.e.
 dot product, so take two items that are to be compared, stick them in the
 lefft slot of the pattern, find wildcards, multiply.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Two problems: one where do the weghts come from? (assuming non-uniform eighting)
 so pattern also has to indicate how to get a single float, or maybe something
 more complex.
 So this is not just a pattern, but also a key.
 And since the thing on the key might be a vector, a vector offset.
 Since it might be more complex than a vector, it needs to be some generic
 pattern for accessing something in the value, and then also making it cleary
 how to multiply the said thing, pair-wise.
 So a pattern that takes a pair of values and returns a single float.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
A single float becuase that's all we can hope for in similarity.
 We are not asking 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

how are they similar
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

, but instead 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

how similar?
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset


\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
A different problem is normalization.
 We can run the search pattern for A B being two different leftvalues, and
 find right-value wildcards, but there may be more wilds, both absent in
 A,B.
 So we need to run the full search comehow.
 And this could be horridly cpu-bound.
 So the result should be cached.
 But maybe its OK to run this in parallel, and just keep a running queue.
 Well, two running queues, one for left one for right.
 And I guess sets woule be ok, it does have to be lists, and deduplication
 would be nice, since search will hammer lots of duplicates.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So the plan is, start the dual-wild card search.
 Keep left and right groundings on two distinct but well known locations
 on the pattern.
 Allow access to them, even while the pattern is running.
 Allow multi-threaded access.
 OK, that all works and is straightforward in the current query engine implement
ation.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The sets are not atoms, so will not be bloated (will be smaller).
 That's fine.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So all we need is two well-known keys on the pattern.
 And a modified pattern traversal that know to put things there.
 So a new pair-wise query atom.
 OK fine.
 easy, not bloated.
 Acceptable, not paradigm breaking and not slow and not bloated.
 So green light all around.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
That's just part one, though.
 Part two is the weights.
 There are other parts, including GPU concnerns, and including stream processing
 concerns.
 Those go on back burner.
 One thing at a time.
 Lets make sure we've got part one done:
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
– a new query atom with two slots.
 The slots could be either well-known names like (Prediate 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

left side
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

) and (Predicate 
\begin_inset Quotes eld
\end_inset

right side
\begin_inset Quotes erd
\end_inset

) or they could be the left and right variable decles themselves.
 If left and right variable decls, then either the bare variables, or the
 variables with the type signatures.
 With type signatures might be best, because these are easy to find in the
 pattern: they are necessarily at the top.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
– what else? Is that it? did we miss something? Can I prototype this on
 the file system? Yes, the file system provides a new an unique and different
 dataset that hints at disclosing new difficulties.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
one of these new difficulties is a recursive similarity.
 Hold that thought.
 Lets complete the first part.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
So, we can do this for all searchs: doesn't have to be two-variable, could
 be n-variable.
 The well-known location problem is sovled, as well.
 Why didn't I do this years ago? Shit, I want to code this *right now*,
 its clear as a bell.
 Obvious.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
Fuck it.
 I will code this right now.
 That way, I don't have to think about two things at once.
 hill climbing one step at a time.
 Get this done, then take the next step.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
The hard one will be the gpu step, but that can't impact conventional search.
\end_layout

\begin_layout Section*
The End
\end_layout

\begin_layout Standard
This is the end of Part Ten-C of the diary.
\end_layout

\end_body
\end_document