Josh and I are obsessed with mapping the territory, with understanding what is reality. It's very easy to lose sight of what's real and enter a state of limerance, an infatuation with and filling in of a character or idea that exists in the mind as a kind of negative imprint, a stencil or form to be filled in.
Domain-agnostic abstractions
In trying to make sense, we discover primitives and use them to assemble structures and meaning that we can hang facts and experiences onto, or hallucinate and imagine experiences between our sensory input.
I was walking with a friend in the park and we realized that there are a handful of fundamental concepts or primitives that probably constitute a lot of those structures that we hang our experience on. I'll propose five of these, and I'll be curious to hear what folks think about the completeness these five (knowing full well that this is a futile exercise in reduction or simplification, map is not territory blah blah but hey it's fun to ponder...)
- Vector spaces -- objects have features and therefore live in a space, on a manifold
- The scientific method + bayes theorem --
- Dynamics and control theory -- time, feedback, influence, system boundaries, transduction, oscillations
- Evolution? selection, niches, pressures, cannulization, iterative design, random mutations,
- Information theory...? entropy, description length, communication channels...thermodynamics? computation, programs
- RL? bellman? optimization...? cost function, gradient descent,
- narrative, story, logic, language, debate, politics, indentity, etymology and philology
Not about explanatory power, it's about understanding, about grokking and pattern matching. Patterns of understanding.