Supermodelling

It seems to me that Mind and the Universe are tightly connected (beyond the obvious point that Mind is part of the Universe!):  minds predict the universe, manipulate it to achieve goals, reason about the universe in ways that are not quite the same as “prediction”, and so on.  Summed together these roughly cover what we mean by “understanding”.

Another way to put this is that mind models aspects of the universe, and that is the way I normally think about it.  This rather trivial starting point is already extremely vague.  I am not trying to define mind, model, reasoning, and so on with any sort of rigor that could lead to a formalization.  For now just know that I consider such formal methods to be rather limited in their usefulness (although exteremely powerful when applicable) — and I will explain why in due course.

If a mind models the universe and we want to build a mind, it’s useful to know what the universe is like.  Without a viewpoint on that issue, it is difficult to invent appropriate modelling techniques.

There are many possible ways of looking at such a broad question as “What is the nature of the universe?”  The most obvious (to a guy like me living in my culture) is to say that the universe is a bunch of “atomic” entities that behave according to concise mathematical rules.  This physical reductionist program has been very effective for scientists.

That’s not the way I want to attack the issue, though — at least not as a starting point.  I’ll save discussion on why until later, but basically this approach is inapplicable to many things that minds care about, and intractable for most things to which it could theoretically be applied.

Instead, I’d like to start with the really obvious points.  The blazingly obvious interests and amuses me because I do not really understand very much.

What I mean by universe includes more than physical objects and processes (for example, it includes mathematics).  However, as a starting point I’ll limit myself to the physical aspects of the universe.

So:  There is stuff in the universe, and that stuff is often non-uniform.  The non-uniformities are in fact quite peculiar.  Most astonishingly, localized globs of stuff often have radically different properties.

Definition:  A localized glob of universe-stuff with statistically highly nonuniform (with respect to surrounding stuff), non-random properties will be called a thing.

I suppose this must seem like the most brain-dead sentence ever written, but I find it astonishing that the universe has things in it!  I’m completely blown away by this fact.  When I go out running and look around at the scenery, the thinginess of the universe just amazes me.

I don’t want to attack the issue of why the universe has things in it.  There are many fascinating aspects to that question (the Anthropic Principle for example).  For my purposes, the universe is accepted as is.

Here are some things:

Having focused on things, I am immediately tempted to come up with a formal definition of thinginess, but again this does not serve my goals here.  What I am really interested in is the relationship between minds and things — they way things may be apprehended by minds.  Before I can come up with an approach for that project, though, I need to think about more types of things.