initial conditions

Reading Permutation City and Anathem has me thinking about initial conditions and how, if deterministic, they evolve.

Permutation City plays off cellular automata. The Autoverse is a simulated world, with simplified chemistry, that can, through careful initial conditions, spawn a biome (I always think of Minecraft worlds).

Both books make me think I should read and learn more about chemistry and biology. Before it had seemed pointless (too harsh a word) to me in the sense that I'd never do any work in those fields that impacted things. Now, I think mostly under the influence of Anathem (also maybe some of the Waking Up guided meditations?) I think that knowledge could enrich my understanding of the world around me - that that could be a worthy goal in itself.

And maybe also advances in AI mean nearly everything I learn will be to learn for my own understanding, rather than with the goal to move the ball forward. But also understanding can be something beautiful and interesting in its own right. It is a loss maybe - but i think I'm coming closer to seeing it as a refocusing that could be correct in itself - maybe focusing more on my own understanding and subjective experience and the world around me, including tying that in to more theoretical understanding, was always the right way to approach things. And the idea of coming up with some novel human-computer interaction to contribute was always a distraction.

One thing I appreciate in Anathem is the focus on the value of getting to the truth - not the instrumental value but just because knowing the truth in itself is good, or right, or something. I always think of "stable ground" that is the feeling when I have a comprehensive and confident understanding of a piece - that I'm on stable ground and can look around and examine for my next move.

And searching for stable ground is a search for the right primitives (kind of? could be more interesting distinctions made here). Are initial conditions primitives? Not really - but connected. In Anathem the primitives of life (physics, chemistry) grow out of the initial conditions that come through the big bang. Those are like seed values of a world. It's fun how both Permutation and Anathem have video game influences in how they think about the world - specifically in how games simulate the world - with ticks.

I still think about the ambition of Permutation's autoverse being beyond anything we're trying to do in terms of AI. On a computation basis.

Oh! And that is another common point between them, Permutation has this configuration of dust idea, where everything could be superimposed on each other (because computation can be spread out, I think? I never made it to stable ground on that concept). So Permutation City is an idea that gets run and then cut off - but because it's rules our deterministically expanding it continues to grow - I think it's something like the quantum event stuff in Anathem. That there is a universe where the simulation stops means there's another one, superimposed on that, where it doesn't?

In Anathem (so far) the multiple worlds is based on the idea that they can only proceed with plausible events - that the paths are limited by something like primitives or initial conditions. The laws of physics can't be broken. That still leaves an unfathomable amount of branching, but not not as many if implausible events had to be included. And it also means you can roll things back to where they converge in a sensible way. Our histories are sensical. I get the feeling this will be played with by the end of the book. Still, fun.

In relation to thinking about computers (including the Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces book) is how unintuitively efficiency can behave in a computer compared to the metaphors we place on it from real life. This is a fascinating thread to follow - i want to do more thinking. Because computers are of course built in, and follow, the laws of physics as electrical signals, but they get abstracted away - but they still hold traces, too. And the world and rules that govern them are alien but not alien as completely separate - alien as grown out of our own - the world we interact with today and have naive knowledge of our interactions that can interact and match with our theoretical understanding.

And where does this leave us with AI? Probably for another writing session. But I have been thinking in my programming lately - which has moved to prompting an AI to generate code for me - that I am thinking in primitives - maybe even more in primitives - about what primitives the agent needs to succeed. And what primitives it needs that we could also have a joint view over - maybe the same view or more likely a similar view - so that we feel like we understand what the agent is up to - and is that then so we can reason about further steps to take? Instrumental? Or does it just make us feel better/right? And complicating that is that agents are mostly trained to be a simulation of us - but that raises the question, from Permutation, of at what level they're simulating us - the language level, right? Not the cellular level. But then the question is how much of our world is embedded in the way we have written about it - and also in how we go about getting things done.