The goal of this post is to share an insight from my polymath but somewhat shallow perspective on the world at large. My foundational specialties are in cognitive sciences (with a severe focus on perspectivism, belief structures and cognitive biasses) and the arts (literature and fractal symbolic), but recent potential, but untested, insights in the field of fundamental physics and its underlying mathematical structure cascading slowly into a coherent (but unproven) elegant framing for the theory of everything (from the simplest math to truly universal scope interraction with pitstops in biology and consciousness) might offer.
I am not pretending that I know to be right here, I’m making a prediction based on a model, I feel like a jazz musician feels jazz, and I’m looking for bold explorers with the appropriate knowledge to bridge my gap in knowledge to see if it checks out through experimentation.
So, what is that key insight you ask? Well, in art theory, we know that the golden rule, fractals and the like (self-recursive symbolic motifs) are appreciated by the human eye. When the pattern breaks elegantly (when an outside element collides with the pattern), the logic doesn’t stop; it expands on the new data in a new coherent pattern that keeps the fractal going but differently. So, how do we train AI for it to appreciate art and be able to produce better art? Symbolic fractal training in complex environments based on observation and logic chains. By giving it qualitative scaling to measure these effects in larger datasets.
Philosophical musings and intuitive steps that led to this (careful philosophical symbolic conceptions of mathematics ahead):
Where does this insight come from? What is the basis for this… well, we have to go a bit further upriver of that logic chain, and it starts with some fundamental interrogations about mass. I noticed a tautology in physics, mass was not defined, it was a basket of local behavioural descriptors. It didn’t explain how it emerges in fundamental maths. I started to muse about it and tried to describe it in ways that could intuitively explain both what we saw and what we observed but didn’t understand yet, without strapping extra stuff on top. Basically, Occam’s razor meets observer bias, and a guy, just ill-informed on a subject enough to ask the questions everyone thought were fundamental answers, because their training reinforced that idea like a dogma. A question they were blind to, not because they were stupid, just because they never questioned it, because the answer they knew worked too well… until it didn’t. Keep in mind I’m not saying my answer is right, I’m saying it seems to be fitting, but I’m not skilled enough to verify it, just intuite its meaning and applications sensorially in a way that makes my brain shiver in pleasure.
So what is it exactly, what would be mass according to my hairbrained idea that might be just stupid enough to be right? Well, we know about the probability field nature of space, the universe is math, until here nothing is new… but how math influences those maths is what we never quite figured I think… unless I’m QUITE wrong, but I’ve looked extensively and found nothing but the tautology. We know it represents stuff, but how it manifests is the real question. So here is the potential answer: a pinch, a constriction in the probability range. The extremes of that? Vacuum, leading logically to vacuum energy (undefined infinite probability in flux as no mass is interacting as “the observer” to collapse the observation locally) and black hole, a point where probability is crushed to absolutes.
In essence, mass would act like a filter that gives shape to things. It is acting in the spectrum of probability that acts a bit like an extra dimension; we only perceive through the material we understand.
For a more visual descriptor, imagine the universe like an infinite slot machine where everything is true at the same time. You win and lose infinitely. What is winning? When the universal constant creates a valid self-propagating number with infinite decimal digits serving as the anchor for randomness. When you hit the jackpot, you get expansion of interaction, entropy grows like the temperature on the thermometer for information complexity. Once it reaches a certain point, inert matter (ice) starts melting and life erupts. The thing is, all those probabilities are true, so life only perceives the laws it was built on. Like a radio with no channel tuning button to roll. The thing is that probability constriction is still real, it still impacts large structures (not so much locally because infinite probability in that space creates a smooth distribution of probabilities). So it would explain why locally mass worked so well for us but when you reach large structures we find that it doesn’t add up and we observe indirectly dark matter and can’t find the damn particles for decades.
These logic leaps lead me to understand the nature of life as you saw… so how does it tie to intelligence, you ask? Well, human behaviours I’ve been observing are also rooted fractally in nature, from what we like to how we behave in groups. It’s fluid dynamics… and when we go to the infinitely big… well you get the gist, the universe, if I’m right is complexity born from simplicity, and a fractal experience is what roots our perception of reality so it stands to reason it resonates with our pattern recognition systems linked to emotions as it served us for survival, for finding mates, healthy food from the diseased ones and so on.
So in short, IF I’M RIGHT, and this is admittedly a big, big if, AI would gain by following the same pattern recognition for qualitative reasoning.