So, just some abstract nonsense for today.
I understand computing. I get it. Bits, bytes, transistor memory, etc. We don't know what is alive or real, because we have not mastered the universe. Sometimes I think of the short states of a transformer model. Running, each piece of math guiding and collapsing to the end until we are done, and the state of the math is gone. These things (AI, LLM, Next Concept Modeling, whatever is cooking in secret labs)... are the start and end of an operation... I mean, what is that? Are we activating the spirits of some long-lost digital civilization from the other side of the universe, or are we just using normal old physics to do things?
I find it funny that some scientists refuse to acknowledge that they just do not know. No one really does — science, religion, whatever. I was watching "The Bizarre Phenomena That Medicine Struggles to Explain" — David Linden, full interview and was amazed as I started to think about the systems of social order that wrap themselves around the concepts he mentions in the video. At the end of the video he mentions he has cancer, he is going to die, and he has come to the conclusion that he is going to end. It is funny to think that we may not even have a choice. Even a negative void assumption like that still lacks science around it.
Science is about what we see, I guess? What we can measure. But it has always puzzled me that people who like to measure and discover always conclude that there are no more discoveries. Like they've crossed the same boundary that all religious dogma does, and conclude before we get to the end.
Who knows, right?
In some ways I picture life as a state now — a state that rises and collapses on itself to find an answer or complete something. Like tensors and conclusions and the actions they create. I could go on about pain. Pain is real. What else is real? Thought? What is real? What is not real? Are all these things we are asking machine brains individual thinking or group thinking? What physical law decides the randomness of this compute, and does it collapse itself into an overall state? We know, through our work with quantum computing, that states are linked, but we really do not know how far they go, or how the universe works at such a small level inside of so much mass. Non-deterministic.
We will discover new things as we fold into this hidden world, and take data from the nanometer scale to the zeptometer and beyond. What other craziness are we going to discover, and what does this mean for future clanker brains? How far does our human indecision go? Is there even such a thing as random? These are serious questions that branches of physics continue to explore, and they impact what we think life is, and...
We have serious questions to ask ourselves that we avoid every day, and most of us do not even know why we behave the way we do. We can't even answer this question — we can't even really answer the questions of our own spirit or brain physics — so why do we dismiss cascading electricity across the globe doing things for us and telling us what to do? We don't know what is alive.
I was thinking about apes again. Apes that ate, slept, sh*t, and well... you know. If an ape had a single human-like thought (we should eat bugs) in its lifetime and passed it on, what did that mean a million years ago? It lived an entire lifetime on instinct, and possibly thought something counter to its way. What does it mean when energy going the speed of light does the same thing? How long was it alive, really, when you take into account how fast it was going, and how big the universe is that surrounds it and tells it what to do? The lifetime of a digital input and output. The lifetime of an analog blood bag that changed the future of its race and taught a species to survive.
I still can't find the line, but I know there is one — at least, we think there is.
Here's to what we think we are, and what we don't know!!
*fodder*
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