Friday, August 07, 2009

The Arrow of Time --- Thesis Offense

No sane intelligent being would use a non-positional encoding of information when a positional one is available. Well, no intelligent being that can sense the passage of time.

Order is intimately tied to time. To think of a sequence you need an intuition of time.

Actually, imagining all the basic data structures of mathematics requires a certain such intuition.
To imagine a set, you need an intuition of difference between arbitrary objects --- the elements --- as in element A is different from element B. So, an intuition of individuality.
To imagine a multiset, you need an intuition of similarity between objects, so you can think of 2 objects of type A and 3 objects of type B, for instance. This could be called an intuition of plurality.
To imagine a sequence, you need an intuition of time, which is a dimension of the space-time continuum that we inhabit. This can be identified with an intuition of order.
To imagine a matrix, you need an intuition of dimension or co-ordinates.
Note that a matrix is also a (hyper)graph. A graph is a generalization of a sequence in the sense that if, in the case of a sequence when referring to an element you can think of its predecessor and successor, in a graph, for every vertex you can think of a set of predecessors and successors.

Seems interesting that all these intuitions seem less and less justifiable as we understand more about the "real world". They all seem to belong in Plato's world of Forms.

How can you even ask if A is different from B, when it's impossible to separate A from the not-A? Where does Something become Another? And then further more how can you pretend that A1 and A2 are of the same kind? About the intuition of dimension, current ideas suggest that there are actually 10 or more dimensions, but that the supplemental ones only manifest themselves at a very small scale. Even though time and its arrow do have some strong backing in physics, the conceptual symmetry alone make it tempting me to consider the possibility of the non-existence of time. There is also the tantalizing possibility of (intelligent) beings that do not perceive time, or the passage thereof. And no, I am not thinking of programmers with a deadline or PhD students, but of beings that do not make the cognitive compromise of "time" just so they can imagine they're making some more sense of the world.

All the intuitions required for imagining sets. multisets, sequences and so on, are, in this view, merely notions of limited usefulness or range of applicability that allow us not to despair in the face of the cold, limitless and ultimately incomprehensible reality.

How can we be sure that the behind that blank stare of the baby that never learns to speak and doesn't even seem to interact with the surrounding world there isn't an uncompromising mental process that refuses to ingest "chunks" of the reality, and instead incessantly looks for the continuation of the message? EEG might help, but does it always?