A Theory of Consciousness, Life and Computation

[SteveA]

Hope you're getting along better with the secretary now.

Well, I had a period there where I was flirting with most anyone I happened to bump into ... poor lady. I notice everytime I walk by now she starts touching her hair or fidgeting with her blouse. (I do nothing more than just a little window shopping though! I've already got a wife and 5 kids and adding more to the mix would surely end up cutting back my free time for existencial musings ... and that's a cost that would be hard to pay)

I still have fun admiring the scenery though ... and that might end up being good enough

[austintorn@aol.com]

You can only stare for 9 seconds max—at least that's the law in New York City.

Maybe show her some more pictures…

[greenbug]

Do you have the equations for some of those fractals? Its hard to imagine that atomic structures wouldn't have at least something to do(or at least correlate) with the shape of an underlining fractal structure of the universe.

Then again. We must consider the nature of how particles form in the first place. The forces that govern the existence of a particle are the same forces that govern any fractal underlining structure. I like that you were speaking dimensionally.. this is extremely pleasing to see..


The interactions even on a singular dimension are regulated by rules. As I said I think the rules are simple, relation. Sense the next and last point are the closest in relation in an single dimension,

*(n) -------*(a) ------ *(b) ------- *(c) ------- *(x)

(both 'n' and 'x' go off infinitely) the three (a,b,c) hold a stronger bond to each other then 'c' does to 'n' or 'a' does to 'x'. Perspectively (b,c,x) hold a bond but at some point the structure favors one over the other, I assume because of interactions between all other points or that the first three points (starting state) dictated the grouping to begin with. With a fractal perspective of this dimension growing outward_ waves, dynamics even particles will relate this structure. I'll have to run a program and snap a picture of the resulting fractal..

[labelwench]

Do you have the equations for some of those fractals? Its hard to imagine that atomic structures wouldn't have at least something to do(or at least correlate) with the shape of an underlining fractal structure of the universe.

Then again. We must consider the nature of how particles form in the first place. The forces that govern the existence of a particle are the same forces that govern any fractal underlining structure. I like that you were speaking dimensionally.. this is extremely pleasing to see..


The interactions even on a singular dimension are regulated by rules. As I said I think the rules are simple, relation. Sense the next and last point are the closest in relation in an single dimension,

*(n) -------*(a) ------ *(b) ------- *(c) ------- *(x)

(both 'n' and 'x' go off infinitely) the three (a,b,c) hold a stronger bond to each other then 'c' does to 'n' or 'a' does to 'x'. Perspectively (b,c,x) hold a bond but at some point the structure favors one over the other, I assume because of interactions between all other points or that the first three points (starting state) dictated the grouping to begin with. With a fractal perspective of this dimension growing outward_ waves, dynamics even particles will relate this structure. I'll have to run a program and snap a picture of the resulting fractal..

While I cannot discuss this topic in equation form, patterns, structures and interactions are always of interest, as nature seems to be built on such a foundation, with patterns to be observed at all levels.

Illustrations are always helpful to a topic, so will be watching for future postings and images.

Regards,

LW

[SteveA]

Do you have the equations for some of those fractals? Its hard to imagine that atomic structures wouldn't have at least something to do(or at least correlate) with the shape of an underlining fractal structure of the universe.

They do match characteristics of the GCD plot you showed.

Consider that if we fundamentally have quantities describe things then, for example, a helium atom should be describable as a number and if we can say that a helium atom is composed of subatomic particles and these are quantities as well then we should be able to also represent a helium atom as a number resulting from a mathematical function applied to a quantity of subatomic particles.

The greatest common divisor algorithm in many ways automatically does this.

For example, if we computed the greatest common divisor between 27 and 6, we'd find the sequence of computations to be as follows:

gcd(27,6)-> 27=6*4+3

Which could then be considered to become a computation of:

gcd(6,3) -> 6=2*3 (with no remainder)

Hence gcd(6,3)=3

So we have a conversion of gcd(27,6) -> (4)*6 + gcd(6,3) -> (2)*3

So it says we need common units of 3, for which the initial 27 is decomposed into 4 6s and an additional 3, and the 6 is decomposed into 2 3s.

In that case our "quanta" is 3, though we have additional "particles" that are 6s as well as the composite particle that is 27. This algorithm can be extended to describe decompositions of more "particles" as well and not just between 2.

Then again. We must consider the nature of how particles form in the first place. The forces that govern the existence of a particle are the same forces that govern any fractal underlining structure. I like that you were speaking dimensionally.. this is extremely pleasing to see..

Thank you for the gcd plot. Notice that it has all n-way symmetries embedded within it, so we could see it as arising from fractal structures composed of n-way symmetries but overlapping in space to appear quite chaotic.

Also, I think the 3 dimensional correlation to free will matches some of the other symbolic descriptions I gave. If all that could be detected was a single state, then no time or or change exists. If we add a second symbol, then the only visible transitions would be back and forth between two states ABABABAB..., these transitions could be seen similar to a fundamental duality describing both quantum units of time and space.

When we move to 3 symbols, we now can communicate arbitrary binary information. It's still not necessarily bidirectional though and 3 states alone is not enough to do much of anything interesting, but it appears a quite fundamental building block for time and information in communication.

So just as free will appearing to require a lack of visibility of a deterministic structure, which limits all 3 components of perception, temporal knowledge and action (relative to limited information), we could see these three units analogous to space (perception), time (in a sense this also related to memory) and energy (action/will) and these could easily correlation to the requirement for 3 distinct properties to allow the minimum form of communication in space (so these could also be the fundamental properties of space).

As a possible 4th dimension, consider that intelligence appears to provide a transformation between perception and action (perception and memory alone don't establish any coherent action based upon them, whereas intelligence appears to be what transforms perceptions and memory into actions as determined by desires). Anyway, these are potentially some links to higher dimensional structures involved.

The interactions even on a singular dimension are regulated by rules. As I said I think the rules are simple, relation. Sense the next and last point are the closest in relation in an single dimension,

Yes, and fundamentally there may be an unwitnessed version of things that is linear and predetermined ... though I've been wondering, especially considering the difficultly in determining an algorithmic way to encapsulate anything that might be considered creative - is there some algorithm that could describe all possible associations and extrapolations given some set of information - and it appears very open ended without a specific way to describe it as a linear structure, though that could also just be my own limits and ignorance ... but there could also be something fundamentally different about creativity that can't be described as something that's a deterministic and linear structure - I don't know. It's just an interesting possibility and realistically there may be no manner to prove this one way or another except to repeated show that every attempt to do so ends up failing.

*(n) -------*(a) ------ *(b) ------- *(c) ------- *(x)

(both 'n' and 'x' go off infinitely) the three (a,b,c) hold a stronger bond to each other then 'c' does to 'n' or 'a' does to 'x'. Perspectively (b,c,x) hold a bond but at some point the structure favors one over the other, I assume because of interactions between all other points or that the first three points (starting state) dictated the grouping to begin with. With a fractal perspective of this dimension growing outward_ waves, dynamics even particles will relate this structure. I'll have to run a program and snap a picture of the resulting fractal..

Here's something related. Consider the typical view of a wavefunction - we could expect some sequence to continually repeat once we've viewed some cycles of it and feel confident about the repetitions. Well if we, for example, said that a binary pattern that repeated for 3 cycles could be expected to repeat again and if we looked at the density of distributions of these repetitions over space, it's actually quite chaotic.

For example, if we had a single 1 repeating 111111.... and we applied this 3 cycles "rule" to it, we should expect after seeing:

111

That the remainder would be:

111111111...

And similarly after seeing:

010101

We should then expect

010101010101....

If we do this with the sequence 1,01,001,0001,00001,....

The our predictions would stack up at positions in space that are not prime numbers and these would prefer highly composite numbers like 24 or 32 etc.

This would appear to make more a fundamental representation of a generalized wavefunction potentially be something very chaotic.

Well, I've got to run for now but thank you for the comments.

[SteveA]

I've been messing around with some of these ideas and using som algorithms similar to computing the greatest common denominator, but with more than 2 terms and with different ways of showing the computations and here are a few examples of some of the structures these forms create (but really these are just a few samples of structures that are basically unlimited in the number of dimensions/parameters/algorithms that could be used ... I don't know how to automate more than a subset of these and I wonder if that could just be my own ignorance or if there may be something qualitatively different to creativity that can't be algorithmically described. Along similar lines, I don't think counting actually creates numbers or quantities - a number arises from a close set of objects. Counting in itself, never stops at a number and you need to add something to determine when/how/where to stop counting and that basically means the number or quantity preexisted the process of counting, and this affects mathematics from a very early stage - Peano's Axioms can't really be generalized upon to make references to unlimited sets of numbers. They're inherently finite and only a finite set of numbers exists at any moment and in any computation there should be the equivalent of a largest finite quantity)

Anyway, that's just more philosophical rambling, but here are a few images I've been generating (there's just a TON of different types that can be generated. This is just scratching the surface some ):

This one is actually part of an evolutionary sequence that looks a lot like a rapid explosion of particles that have interesting fractal oscillations to them and they slow down and grow into larger fractal structures (Big Bang anyone? ):



Larger prime numbers tend to generate qualitatively different chaotic structures and smaller ones or numbers with lots of common factors generate more ordered geometric structures, so there could even be correlations between phase transitions in matter under different circumstances and various prime symmetries.



Here's a single frame from a sequence that actually looks a lot like a pyramid with wind and clouds blowing past (I clipped this out for Fredrick ):



And a few others that are particularly beautiful:

Still messing around. Here are a couple more:

[SteveA]

How about an ocean view?

I've gone up to a 5 dimensional algorithm for this one and it's amazing that there appear to even be some correlations between the "sky" and the "reflections" in the "water". It might look like it's two separate functions for the "sky" and "ocean", but it's actually the same algorithm that generates the entire image. I'm still working on it and think I've got some more interesting improvements to test out ... I'll probably have some more images tonight.

(I wish I would have saved the parameters for this one - there might have even been a parameter to construct moving waves or clouds, like the blowing wind for the pyramid one above, which does have such a component)

[greenbug]

wow that truly is nice looking.. I cant say my program is looking as nice ..

Any how here is a snap of the action in motion.. The sizes of the spheres represent differences in rate, the closeness represents relation between each 'point' in the dimension. It still isn't finished as I need to add more programing to correlate the information better.. This is rendered with 200 points, min distance apart is 0.1f also with a limit on slowest rate at 0.1f.. The main problem is they were too small to see if I dropped the limit, I could increase the size if I added more points but rendering takes longer. Again this is a single dimensional representation.. I plan on making it 3d as each of the closest three sphere would represent an x,y, and z.. you might see the grouping in this pic already starting to work its self out.

[SteveA]

That looks like a good informative way to model things.

I'm curious - if you alter the min distance to be something other than 0.1f, for example from 1/11f (a prime) to 1/12f (a composite ratio), does it alter the display very significantly?

(P.S. I admit intentionally adding a bit of complexity and tweaking things a bit artistically and adjusting some colors schemes by hand to generate the above images. Most of how those images generated are too complex for me to follow through by hand and understand by it's kind of neat to begin to see how something like a reflection of wavelengths off the "water" in that last image is possible and there's likely the equivalent of quantized photons involved as well, and though the "reflections" are partly incidental, they aren't entirely as they're related to the X component in the image which is common for both the sky and the water ... anyway, still working on it but I do tend to think that consciously we don't necessarily detect a lot of information, but that our perceptions are highly fractal and generate a lot of detail on larger scales from a small amount of information - for example, it's not very difficult to mentally imagine a few points in space, but trying to imagine 8 points in space moving around in some asymmetrical manner is about impossible for me. On the other hand, the general characteristics of a tree aren't that difficult to imagine and yet that contains a lot more than 8 points, though that image can't be arbitrarily altered in detail. Hence, I assume the 'hardware' generating these appears to be using a form of fractal construction)

[greenbug]

Yeah I can alter the rate minimum or the relational minimum and get different results.. Yet this whole thing is in motion,as of now its not entirely functioning like it should, due to my lack of understanding of programing. What you don't see in the above image is that they are all changing sizes and moving away from each other. When I adjust the minimums it looks the same as the movement thats going on now, except you might see more spheres and their sizes might vary down to just a pixel, up to the whole screen.

In several models that I've already done, the conservation of energy has been ignored (error in math)as well as entropy setting in (explained next). Yet as long as there are an infinite number of points coming in, such as would be with time continuously going on, or an alteration of rates set by an infinite center or first rate(as would be if all other things are half of the last or in image of the first), then the whole thing keeps working like it should.

However, I'm not seeing enough interaction between them like predicted and thats why I'm still working on it. The number one reason why is because I haven't got the speed of light barrier, in which information or rates between them become hindered and so rejected reflected or slowly displaced, right just yet. So far I have tried to represent it by 1/3 rate exchange due to relative closeness and a regular exchange of 0.3f. But I think it is more of an internal mechanism, the same process, just done (n)th levels lower. So I could run the same process for each of the points, you wouldn't see that part of the process displayed, but it would govern the interactions of the level that you would see. But I haven't come to that yet and I think it will work on its own, with out the infinite levels, once I find a good representation for how those lower levels affect each point. I think it will affect each levels relation of rates by 1/3, I just might not be doing it right. example of my code...

if(Point[i-1].rate > Point[i].rate && i >0) //relating rate
{
if(Point[i-1].rate > 0.01f) // the limit in rate
{
Point[i-1].rate -= 0.03; // a representation of speed of light..
Point[i].rate += 0.03;
}
}

As you can see here 0.03f is a fixed amount being exchange and its not free to exchange at any level lower.. It has more to do with the relational distance, which I call Point[i].Rx, not to be confused with spacial distance but more with how the points around a point influence a point. Kind of like gravity, if the sun has more pull on earth then an asteroid, then an asteroid isn't going to up set the earths relation with the sun too much.

In the image above what should be happening is the rates should be exchanging left to right (and visa versa) more frequently then they are. You can't see that but it would affect how their grouping is.