Proteus disease is a multidimensional visitor

I am imagining a re-imagining of the Elephant Man's 'John Merrick' as, in fact, a hyperdimensional object visiting the three-dimensional beings here upon earth in some Victorian England. And the tragedy of his treatment leads to some trippy scene back in this hyperplane from where these visitors came showing their 'soft-pot' breathing and beating erratically, substantiating the sadness and sobbing of a hyperdimensional being who has failed to make meaningful contact with these Victorian working class people. 

deep sea vents and sort algorithms

I have this suspicion after nibbling at the buffet of popular science literature for the last few decades about the origins of living things on this planet. Some of our modeling software and our algorithms may be the best models of what a biomolecular soup bathed in solar radiation or living on some temperature, pressure, and chemosynthetic gradient deep in the ocean may have produced. The short and skinny of it is that in the case of deep-sea vents, a continuous warm jet of chemicals was being belched from within the earth's mantle. Under the pressure of earth and the ocean, this hot jet churned the relatively cold water of the ocean, causing the kinds of heat and chemical dynamic mixtures that various mixing experiments on the street or at the lab bench could produce. Adding in the constant pull of a magnetic field the molecules forming in this churn have a chronic spooky action interface, which would tend to sort the kinds of molecules that form with a self-similar chronic feature of this interface: polarity. This 'chiral precondition' establishes a lingua franca for all consequent molecular bonding under the varying conditions inherent around these vents. 

Now here's a complete pull-it-out-of-your-ass kind of assumption that as the various available chemicals churning from these vents over millions of years accumulated, so did the various chemical bonds made available. More specifically, the temperature gradient extending from the mouth of this undersea geyser to some theoretical outer space establishes the zones that favor certain kinds of molecules to form, reform, and proliferate, all using the concentration of specific molecules and temperatures as the catalyzing foreground for a semi-stable equilibrium. This creates a kind of layered onion, or in chemistry terms, a loosely colloidal sphere extending out from this deep-sea vent. At the limens of these discrete molecular regions interactions occur, causing novel pairings to 'precipitate out of solution.' What that suggests in this colloidal sphere model proposes that a kind of super-saturation of self-similar molecules were existing at different regions and that under the right bumping into the optimal companion molecules could create something novel and discreet against its environs, something which had a energy state that made it even more stable than that of its environs as well. 

I'm drawn to a description of an experiment run by Michael Levin's lab with sort algorithms. In it his lab showed that when each number cell was assigned a specific sorting algorithm (n = 2), moments of clustering occurred among similar algorithms, all while still achieving the same result in the end: sortedness. What is the teleology of life? That life has a form, maintains order, and transcends to populations or communities of its kind points to some of this. But all of that rests upon some of the conditions set up in this theoretical chemistry experiment happening along the temperature gradient retreating from the deep-sea vent. My hasty conclusion will be that the energy costs of the sortedness of life are its delimiting feature, and that which essentially defines it. As we also know from grade school science the principle of the conservation of energy—nothing is lost; it simply changes form, dissipates out into the environment, or becomes a semi-stable, unreactive oxidated component clinging to the system. If energy is saved, why does it want to coalesce into the kinds of things that live, if only briefly among its kind, and pass back out into a local universe of possibilities? 

These are hokey thought exercises. The writing is coarse and high-school level at best. But sometimes a feller just has to give things a think, and cobble together his prototype as kludgy as possible. 

Reality, allegory

Reality wears a petticoat of ignorance.

consciousness, yet again

I think in the opening bit where he talks about Hofstadter claiming that "some integers are conscious" he's placing a bar upon consciousness, and thus, perhaps, dismissing the discriminatory affordances (being systematic) of math symbols as having a way of dividing the things they touch or approach them and thus conduct some element of computation as a result. Now, that 'touch or approach them' quip leans heavy on analogues of movement, space, and refraction (in my mind), but if we take how we use our symbolic vocabulary seriously, that's perhaps what gives them use value to begin with—being analogues to sensory experience and the systematic nature we see in that. What this unravels isn't much other than the consistency of the interface, and Godel's argument shows that computation is bounded, and more seriously it cannot prove itself with consistency. That's where Penrose leaves space for consciousness, which is above and beyond mere integral or mathematical systems, but we are finding that much of the world around us, including the cells that make us do simple discriminatory computation and future-oriented planning all the time, something that can happen in the merest of molecules and the chemical interactions they afford And here's the rub for me, electromagnetics is the domain and coding space of consciousness. Regardless of if that emergent/transcendent entity, which emerges from so many coordinated, goal-oriented cells, is merely a space for something even bigger to find purchase is for the pantheistic argument, nevertheless, the complexity of cellular architecture, its attendant systematic set of chemistry, and the achievement of orchestrated, conformal electromagnetics is the stuff of what makes the conscious entities, which emerge in this world.

The big question racing toward the big answer is AI

The history of communication is wrangling with an interface with god. That we're racing toward a natural language wishing well super AI encompasses the value and the consequence of how we both construct that and what we do with it. The big question and the big answer are being developed simultaneously in the theoretical AI as infrastructure and interface.

Is vision a metaphor?

I was listening to NPR while making dinner tonight and heard about plant-insect signaling, which focused on a specific rainforest species of plant that has existed for countless millennia and is now being threated with extinction. Apparently, this plant heats up its fruiting body to signal to a specific beetle that uses its antenna to 'see' this heat spike against its background as the thing it is looking for: the pollen of this plant. 

I draw this conclusion because of a book I read by Donald Hoffman, who deconstructed space-time as an evolutionary adaptation, which is, itself, a fiction. From that we can draw how we reconstruct our perception of photons by our eyes as doing just this—reconstructing within the three-dimensional environment the point-source for this photon. The same can be said for this beetle's 'seeing' of the plant's heat in the infrared range. And the same thing can be said for dolphins echo-mapping their environment both at its surface and its depth, determining whether a reflected object is coral, food, or foe—a metaphor for seeing. 

Something to chew on. 

Beings of light

We are beings of light marooned upon the rocky shores of a rocky planet. Slowly we pick up the implements of our reconnection to that primordial world. At the heart of this is the spark. 

Our evolution is both an exemplar and explanation of the process. It is both the process of path optimization as it is, at the bleeding edge, of optimizing its own path. Evolution is evolving but along a specific trajectory to more and more momentum along this path. As we ramp up our speed we harness more and more energy until we have reconnected with our primordial past, as beings of light.