Yet again, some ramblings from a night of less than perfect sleep a.k.a. weekend musings:
The real world, if such a thing exists (we’re not dogmatic Idealists nor attached Materialists), is halfway between fractalic chaotic/over-complex/beyond-complicated cybernetic models and fully unhinged statistical chaos on the other.
People think in linear relations; emergent properties are otherwise.
No single data point will tell you to which statistical distribution it belongs (or why it should).
Statistics ‘work’ on sets of otherwise unrelated (qua cause-effect / network connection) elements; the set definition is about sameness of the elements in respect to some quality under study, which is the opposite of difference – when difference isn’t ‘collected’ as quality, no causal relation can be established (because there’s no distinction in cause being present or not, i.e., the existence or not of an effect cannot be linked to a persistent cause or not, no (Boolean) If X Then Y (Y or not(X)) has value; by lack of X, Y is undetermined. Distributions are the opposite of particulars and point towards noise not characteristics. If you dive into (or upward toward) fractalic details (possibly, zooming in is the same as rising up into emergent-property space, similar to time reversibility in the math that underlies quantum theories), ‘distribution’ becomes meaningless.
In distributions, time doesn’t exist; ‘Everything happens at once’ [Einstein] is in there but leads to no further insights, since the distribution (spreading out) over time of things happening isn’t happening so there can be no causes.
*This to be checked in quantum physics, where Time has become a fundamentally unknowable (sic) dimension/variable but also it seems that time is, in the end, quantifiable – there appears to be some time quantum, very small but there. I’m unconvinced that this isn’t an anomaly or artefact created by making the mathematics consistent and ‘complete’ for / in quantum models; like Fourier frequency analysis allows negative frequencies, pointing at the existence of signal before a point-zero defining event has taken place / came into existence. Not zero latency like in lightspeed-beating entanglement, but real negativity – though a solution to that, is champagne since that’s always a solution, but maybe less useful here.
The mathematics of quantum theory may have created the quantification of Time to ‘solve’ some mathematical issue that might be similar to Gödelian incompleteness. Time as stitch-on solution to make some math model Complete but forgetting the universal validity of Big G will not work; the scar remains to inform us of the stich and through its existence, the inconsistency remains, too, tucked away in the total, similar to Loss of Parity which is unrepairable. Physics without Time might need a more fundamental reboot..?
… And this is why LLMs hallucinate, i.e., produce artifacts if not by (included in the mathematical foundation of statistics) spurious relations. They work with tokens, statistical ‘prediction’ of what should follow ‘next’. The Next part being not in time but in place. Statistically, hence without any ‘knowledge’/ info on cause-effect relations. Hence, LLMs cannot distinguish nonsense from actual (model’able) relations and must rely on the probabilities and the spurious probabilities that fundamentally must exist or the math is wrong that no cause-effect relations exist for. Tell me something.
And now for something completely the same…:
When Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Life, they gained knowledge but not insight / Understanding (in a Feymannian sense; “the map is not the territory”).
That came from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, their true undoing – being thrown out of Paradise / Eden into Samsara (which includes the realisation of a phenomenon called Time as part of the fall to Materialism where Enlightened Ones revert to absolutely-complete Idealism which cannot be expressed because that would take words, language, the existence of a sender and of a receiver which all are Materialism things thus destroying the effort). Good and Evil, in Hebrew, טוֹב וָרָע (tov wa-raʿ) literally translates as “good and evil” in one word, i.e., Everything. This includes time as a concept, still not understood by any living human, and “Robert Alter emphasizes the point that when God forbids the man to eat from that particular tree, he says that if he does so, he is “doomed to die.” The Hebrew behind this is in a form regularly used in the Hebrew Bible for issuing death sentences. [Wikipedia] — nice, nice, pointing to (my) ideas re Original Sin and Milton’s descriptions in Paradise Lost.
<End of the intermission>
Now, since humanity is somewhere in the Aristotelic-golden-mean-or-not middle void between a full-on, completely fractal world – that’s maybe veering more towards this end than previously thought – and a complex-bordering-on-chaotic non-linearly connected cybernetic world of statistical mathematics – where ‘control’ over the world is but a pipe dream but also still somewhat in the neighbourhood – the Good and the Evil may indeed be intertwined, quantum-entangled, one vast one-ness of Field where Time is an illusion, the first, the Original, Sin, existent only to be able to navigate in a Reality that is but a Hallucination.
I know, that’s not really a well-crafted connection of the bits and snippets above but give a guy a break.
Oh well, I’ll rest for now.
