Fascinating! I had a few thoughts reading your post. Hopefully they’re worth the time it takes to read them.
I find money to be the most fascinating and pertinent social construct in our daily lives.
I think there’s many more examples of this. Money is a resource to be exploited, but so is trust, confidence, fame, and so on. Don’t you think that ones reputation looks a bit like a stock market? And that we invest in other people in the same way as we invest in stocks? I don’t know to what extent these are social constructs, but they’re similar in interesting ways.
We thus create the relevant laws, and then spend considerable resources to enforce them
Agreed, but I’d like to point out that the more effort you have to put into enforcing a law, the more unnatural said law is.
I think the reason for human freedom is a sort of equivalence relation. If one group of people claims that water is healthy, and another group claims that god has punished humanity with the constant need of water, then both groups will drink water in the end, which means that both groups survive. For an outside observer, the two groups of people are equivalent in that their behaviour is the same. It’s like comparing (2+4) and (3+3), they’re different and yet the same. My math education is lacking, so I don’t have a fitting word here.
But while we can’t ignore the laws of physics, we can diverge away from reality, living in delusion. But I think there’s a cost here, proportional to the gap between objective reality and subjective reality. The worse the coherence between your real self and your persona, the more effort it takes to “force” yourself to align with the latter.
I noticed that I haven’t made a claim for how subjective and objective reality follows different laws (likely because I don’t like disillusioning myself), but I have noticed that reality doesn’t allow for contraditions, whereas the brain does. Self-contradicting beliefs are even common in society, it allows people to have their cake and eat it too. The human brain can be 60% happy and 60% sad at the same time. The result is not evaluated to 0% happy and 0% sad. The differences seem to overlap without mutual destruction. As if the brain experiences a linear combination of conflicting things.
Finally, your post is just as much about human nature as it’s about objective things. I don’t think we can create a perfect, logical theory, since imperfect, illogical human beings are part of the very equation. A human being is trying to encode “formal system as it relates to human beings” in a formal system, in a way which can be communicated to human beings. It feels sort of like a set trying to put itself inside itself?
Yes, I’ve actually thought that human interactions may be well modeled as a stock-market… never actually looked into whether this has been done though. And yes, maybe such model could be framed using this network-type setup I described… could be interesting—what if different cliques have different ‘stock’ valuation?
″...the more unnatural said law is.”—the word ‘natural’ is a bit of a can of worms… I guess your statement could be viewed as an interesting definition of ‘natural’? E.g., in nonequilibrium stat mech you can quantify a lower-bound on energy expenditure to keep something away from the equilibrium distribution. E.g., I’ve thought of applying this to quantify minimum welfare spending needed to keep social inequality below some value. But here maybe you’re thinking more general? I just think ‘natural’ or ‘real self’ are really slippery notions to define. E.g., is all life inherently unnatural since it requires energy expenditure to exist?
“As if the brain experiences a linear combination of conflicting things.”—that’s precisely the sort of observations that Quantum Cognition models using quantum-like state-vectors. And precisely the sort of thing this framework I’m describing could help to explain perhaps.
“It feels sort of like a set trying to put itself inside itself?”—nice one! And there was a time when ancient Greek philosophers conclusively ‘proved’ to themselves the impossibility of ever fully understanding what matter is made of, and figured it’s better to spend time on moral philosophy. Now, the former is basically solved, and the latter is still very much open. So I don’t buy into no-go theorems much...
You can model it in your head. We like to befriend people with high social status, and we stay away from losers. This is because the former make for better investment. Success is a feedback-loop. But at times we get overconfident, in ourselves or others, leading to a bubble followed by a crash once evidence appears that you overextended. I like to think of mania and depression as the same. They’re like the bulls and bears of stock trading.
Perhaps this can generalize to beliefs as well. And our tendency to double down on bad beliefs, rather than changing out minds, would be the sunk cost fallacy bias of the brain.
By “unnatural” I mean “against human nature”. Taoists say to “let go” and to stop “fighting against the flow”. Similar advice would be “pick your battles” and “don’t worry about what you can’t change”. The main principle here is that whatever comes easy is favored by reality. So if a government needs a police state to enforce a said system, it’s “forced”, and thus a bad system. This ties into darwinism, I think, adaptivity (flexibility) is key. Inflexibility is trying to hold onto something which doesn’t work. People who are more true to themselves spend less energy socializing with others. Compare this to the socially anxious, and to those attempting to be perfect rather than themselves. Fighting reality takes energy.
However, just letting everything go as it must doesn’t seem like a good idea. For instance, we tend towards inequality. Some people think that we should let things go bad—that it’s merely the end of a cycle. This may be true. We let trees die so that they next generation of trees can grow. If we try to slow down aging of plants, we merely prolong the undesirable state. It’s possible that the same applies to society, that we should let it collapse so that we can start anew. Death requires less energy than repair. If you’re working with legacy code in programming, you should likely scrap it and start over with a modern programming language. Systems increase in entropy, and then they die. In humans it’s DNA damage, in governments its corruption. Can anything live forever? I don’t think so, at best you can renew parts of something so that the whole may live longer. A country might select a new king, and a person might get an organ transplant. Nietzsche valued suffering, as it makes people stronger. Capitalism values competition, as it keeps systems healthy and strong. The human body likes exercise and cold showers, for the same reasons. Therapy is also about killing bad aspects of ourselves so that the rest of us can live on. Is all this too abstract? “Every system tends towards chaos, and the only way to stop a system from dying is to let its parts die so that the speed of renewal surpasses the speed of decay”. The ship of theseus becomes a new ship, but you didn’t experience the death of a ship, only many deaths of its parts. This is the only form of immortality which is possible.
Edit: The connections fit, but this view is incomplete. Fitness isn’t the same as low entropy, for instance, it’s closer to adaptation as opposed to maladaptation. But the ability to adapt might go down as entropy increases.
You might very well have a good idea here, but I don’t know much about quantum mechanics. Don’t take my lack of compliments as arguments against your observations, I’m not qualified to speak about quantum mechanics. I’m out of my league but a little too fond of sharing my own thoughts, I suppose.
So I don’t buy into no-go theorems
I think that’s the correct mindset to have! I just think that it’s similar to formalize beauty in itself. This wouldn’t work, as beauty is a relation between objects and humans. I think the human viewpoints have to be part of the equation. I’m not saying that there’s no objective reality, but I think we need to apply a theory of relativity, so that we’re talking about relations rather than things-in-themselves. My intuition tells me that things only exist in relation to other things. Asking what something “really” is, as an isolated item, feels mistaken to me. A relative position asks for the absolute state of something, but this depends on itself? It’s hard to put into words.
Thanks for expanding on this stuff—really nice discussion!
Yeah that stock-market analogy is quite tantalizing—and I like the breadth that it could apply to.
For your discussion on “unnatural”—sure, I agree with the sentiment—but it’s the question of how to formalize this all so that it can produce a testable, falsifiable theory that I’m unclear on. Poetically it’s all great—and I enjoy reading philosophical treatise on this—but they always leave me wanting, as I don’t get something to hold onto at the end, something I can directly and tangeably apply to decision-making.
For your last paragraph, yeah that emphasis on “relational” perspective of reality is what I’m trying to build up and formalize in this post. And yes, it’s a bit hypocritical to say that “ultimately reality is relational” ;P
I do realize that philosophizing like this is much easier than shutting up and calculating.
There’s mathematical laws and principles hidden in my reply, like the path of least resistance, which I consider natural in some sense. It’s hard to formalize this in a way which relates to your main goal.
My intuition, like AI weights, is black-box.
I can try, though: Your N^2 system stores the information of every perspective. There’s no one value of “kind”, kind is a relation and not an atom. You can… Factor out? “kind”, so that you’re storing an objective definition of “kind” next to the graph. Now you have N values for “kind”. The reason people will agree on hair color is because this evaluation doesn’t depend on the individual. Well, it does, but it’s a shared property of the whole graph (unless perhaps one is colorblind), so it’s essentially already factored out. “Compression” here is essentially the same as rounding. Colors are areas on a 1 or 2D spectrum, but we clamp them to the nearest point. This is like mapping R to N, e.g. 4.7 → 5. If the number of unique answers (after the compression) is less than the area of nodes, then you need less than N^2 nodes to store it. But this is probably trivial to you? If we view it as interactions, we can consider the case that two people may never meet. In any case, I think this makes the order of interactions important. People match eachother, and calibrate themselves towards those they interact with, creating local realities. An idea which might be related here is the algorithms that social networks use to sync likes between distributed servers (and I don’t think the order matters here?). They seem to have solved a similar problem (though “number of likes” isn’t subjective). These aren’t quantum-interactions, but I don’t know how important this difference is. By the way, agents transfer information in a memetic manner, and if you focus on the agents rather than the meme, you may miss a part of the picture. Since social constructs are created rather than inherent in the universe, they might not exist in some nodes. And in real life, a node may interact with itself. But I’ll stop here as it’s very unlikely that I know more graph theory than you.
Finally, if my sentences about graphs is “100” on a difficulty scale, then a formalization of my previous comment would be a million. It’s like comparing a college text-book to an unsolved math problem. Take whats useful to you and discard the rest
Fascinating! I had a few thoughts reading your post. Hopefully they’re worth the time it takes to read them.
I think there’s many more examples of this. Money is a resource to be exploited, but so is trust, confidence, fame, and so on. Don’t you think that ones reputation looks a bit like a stock market? And that we invest in other people in the same way as we invest in stocks?
I don’t know to what extent these are social constructs, but they’re similar in interesting ways.
Agreed, but I’d like to point out that the more effort you have to put into enforcing a law, the more unnatural said law is.
I think the reason for human freedom is a sort of equivalence relation. If one group of people claims that water is healthy, and another group claims that god has punished humanity with the constant need of water, then both groups will drink water in the end, which means that both groups survive.
For an outside observer, the two groups of people are equivalent in that their behaviour is the same. It’s like comparing (2+4) and (3+3), they’re different and yet the same. My math education is lacking, so I don’t have a fitting word here.
But while we can’t ignore the laws of physics, we can diverge away from reality, living in delusion. But I think there’s a cost here, proportional to the gap between objective reality and subjective reality. The worse the coherence between your real self and your persona, the more effort it takes to “force” yourself to align with the latter.
I noticed that I haven’t made a claim for how subjective and objective reality follows different laws (likely because I don’t like disillusioning myself), but I have noticed that reality doesn’t allow for contraditions, whereas the brain does. Self-contradicting beliefs are even common in society, it allows people to have their cake and eat it too.
The human brain can be 60% happy and 60% sad at the same time. The result is not evaluated to 0% happy and 0% sad. The differences seem to overlap without mutual destruction. As if the brain experiences a linear combination of conflicting things.
Finally, your post is just as much about human nature as it’s about objective things. I don’t think we can create a perfect, logical theory, since imperfect, illogical human beings are part of the very equation. A human being is trying to encode “formal system as it relates to human beings” in a formal system, in a way which can be communicated to human beings. It feels sort of like a set trying to put itself inside itself?
Thanks for sharing your thoughts—cool ideas!
Yes, I’ve actually thought that human interactions may be well modeled as a stock-market… never actually looked into whether this has been done though. And yes, maybe such model could be framed using this network-type setup I described… could be interesting—what if different cliques have different ‘stock’ valuation?
″...the more unnatural said law is.”—the word ‘natural’ is a bit of a can of worms… I guess your statement could be viewed as an interesting definition of ‘natural’? E.g., in nonequilibrium stat mech you can quantify a lower-bound on energy expenditure to keep something away from the equilibrium distribution. E.g., I’ve thought of applying this to quantify minimum welfare spending needed to keep social inequality below some value. But here maybe you’re thinking more general? I just think ‘natural’ or ‘real self’ are really slippery notions to define. E.g., is all life inherently unnatural since it requires energy expenditure to exist?
“As if the brain experiences a linear combination of conflicting things.”—that’s precisely the sort of observations that Quantum Cognition models using quantum-like state-vectors. And precisely the sort of thing this framework I’m describing could help to explain perhaps.
“It feels sort of like a set trying to put itself inside itself?”—nice one! And there was a time when ancient Greek philosophers conclusively ‘proved’ to themselves the impossibility of ever fully understanding what matter is made of, and figured it’s better to spend time on moral philosophy. Now, the former is basically solved, and the latter is still very much open. So I don’t buy into no-go theorems much...
You can model it in your head. We like to befriend people with high social status, and we stay away from losers. This is because the former make for better investment. Success is a feedback-loop. But at times we get overconfident, in ourselves or others, leading to a bubble followed by a crash once evidence appears that you overextended. I like to think of mania and depression as the same. They’re like the bulls and bears of stock trading.
Perhaps this can generalize to beliefs as well. And our tendency to double down on bad beliefs, rather than changing out minds, would be the sunk cost fallacy bias of the brain.
By “unnatural” I mean “against human nature”. Taoists say to “let go” and to stop “fighting against the flow”. Similar advice would be “pick your battles” and “don’t worry about what you can’t change”. The main principle here is that whatever comes easy is favored by reality. So if a government needs a police state to enforce a said system, it’s “forced”, and thus a bad system. This ties into darwinism, I think, adaptivity (flexibility) is key. Inflexibility is trying to hold onto something which doesn’t work.
People who are more true to themselves spend less energy socializing with others. Compare this to the socially anxious, and to those attempting to be perfect rather than themselves. Fighting reality takes energy.
However, just letting everything go as it must doesn’t seem like a good idea. For instance, we tend towards inequality. Some people think that we should let things go bad—that it’s merely the end of a cycle. This may be true. We let trees die so that they next generation of trees can grow. If we try to slow down aging of plants, we merely prolong the undesirable state. It’s possible that the same applies to society, that we should let it collapse so that we can start anew. Death requires less energy than repair. If you’re working with legacy code in programming, you should likely scrap it and start over with a modern programming language. Systems increase in entropy, and then they die. In humans it’s DNA damage, in governments its corruption. Can anything live forever? I don’t think so, at best you can renew parts of something so that the whole may live longer. A country might select a new king, and a person might get an organ transplant.
Nietzsche valued suffering, as it makes people stronger. Capitalism values competition, as it keeps systems healthy and strong. The human body likes exercise and cold showers, for the same reasons. Therapy is also about killing bad aspects of ourselves so that the rest of us can live on.
Is all this too abstract? “Every system tends towards chaos, and the only way to stop a system from dying is to let its parts die so that the speed of renewal surpasses the speed of decay”. The ship of theseus becomes a new ship, but you didn’t experience the death of a ship, only many deaths of its parts. This is the only form of immortality which is possible.
Edit: The connections fit, but this view is incomplete. Fitness isn’t the same as low entropy, for instance, it’s closer to adaptation as opposed to maladaptation. But the ability to adapt might go down as entropy increases.
You might very well have a good idea here, but I don’t know much about quantum mechanics. Don’t take my lack of compliments as arguments against your observations, I’m not qualified to speak about quantum mechanics. I’m out of my league but a little too fond of sharing my own thoughts, I suppose.
I think that’s the correct mindset to have! I just think that it’s similar to formalize beauty in itself. This wouldn’t work, as beauty is a relation between objects and humans. I think the human viewpoints have to be part of the equation. I’m not saying that there’s no objective reality, but I think we need to apply a theory of relativity, so that we’re talking about relations rather than things-in-themselves. My intuition tells me that things only exist in relation to other things. Asking what something “really” is, as an isolated item, feels mistaken to me. A relative position asks for the absolute state of something, but this depends on itself? It’s hard to put into words.
Thanks for expanding on this stuff—really nice discussion!
Yeah that stock-market analogy is quite tantalizing—and I like the breadth that it could apply to.
For your discussion on “unnatural”—sure, I agree with the sentiment—but it’s the question of how to formalize this all so that it can produce a testable, falsifiable theory that I’m unclear on. Poetically it’s all great—and I enjoy reading philosophical treatise on this—but they always leave me wanting, as I don’t get something to hold onto at the end, something I can directly and tangeably apply to decision-making.
For your last paragraph, yeah that emphasis on “relational” perspective of reality is what I’m trying to build up and formalize in this post. And yes, it’s a bit hypocritical to say that “ultimately reality is relational” ;P
Thank you!
I do realize that philosophizing like this is much easier than shutting up and calculating.
There’s mathematical laws and principles hidden in my reply, like the path of least resistance, which I consider natural in some sense. It’s hard to formalize this in a way which relates to your main goal.
My intuition, like AI weights, is black-box.
I can try, though: Your N^2 system stores the information of every perspective. There’s no one value of “kind”, kind is a relation and not an atom. You can… Factor out? “kind”, so that you’re storing an objective definition of “kind” next to the graph. Now you have N values for “kind”.
The reason people will agree on hair color is because this evaluation doesn’t depend on the individual. Well, it does, but it’s a shared property of the whole graph (unless perhaps one is colorblind), so it’s essentially already factored out. “Compression” here is essentially the same as rounding. Colors are areas on a 1 or 2D spectrum, but we clamp them to the nearest point. This is like mapping R to N, e.g. 4.7 → 5. If the number of unique answers (after the compression) is less than the area of nodes, then you need less than N^2 nodes to store it. But this is probably trivial to you?
If we view it as interactions, we can consider the case that two people may never meet. In any case, I think this makes the order of interactions important. People match eachother, and calibrate themselves towards those they interact with, creating local realities. An idea which might be related here is the algorithms that social networks use to sync likes between distributed servers (and I don’t think the order matters here?). They seem to have solved a similar problem (though “number of likes” isn’t subjective). These aren’t quantum-interactions, but I don’t know how important this difference is. By the way, agents transfer information in a memetic manner, and if you focus on the agents rather than the meme, you may miss a part of the picture. Since social constructs are created rather than inherent in the universe, they might not exist in some nodes. And in real life, a node may interact with itself. But I’ll stop here as it’s very unlikely that I know more graph theory than you.
Finally, if my sentences about graphs is “100” on a difficulty scale, then a formalization of my previous comment would be a million. It’s like comparing a college text-book to an unsolved math problem. Take whats useful to you and discard the rest