No More Playing With “Building Blocks”

The realization that there are in fact no stable objects, no “things” to find anywhere you look, comes more gradually though. Like in my the example concering the rotating earth, the intensity of that experience has to do with our temporal perception — and wether you can detect a notion of change or not (it also helps to watch timelapses).

The perspective widens even more, if you zoom out and set the time of an average human’s lifespan in relation with the earth’s or the universe’s estimated age. You will realize there’s actually nothing intrinsically special about what we consider “vast” or “incredibly tiny”. Even 500 years old trees are wood fountains that blip up and perish like fireworks. Once you keep that in mind, you might assign much less significance to “objects”, or hold on to a static, stable and substantial understanding of reality.

Change can be frightening, and I think that’s because it is so un-intuitive. Change underlies the unknown, the unstable and uncertain. Humans likes “to break things down” into neat pieces: In order to create the object-illusion, cognition splits perception into discrete pieces, removes these pieces from context and augments the fragments with mind-borne constructs. It does it so well, so that it feels like entirely real, “out there”.

All objects should be regarded as epiphenomena – approximate and incomplete descriptions of underlying, ever-changing processes. “Things” are results of cognitive processes that provide a subjective, reductionist simplification that we commonly call “reality”. Using common terminology, it means that both “concrete objects” and “abstract objects” are actually abstract objects.

It doesn’t mean that the “object”-abstraction is bad or we shouldn’t use it – it’s not bad in the same sense a spoon is not bad for soup. But this cheaply available abstraction does not make them fundamental “building blocks” of reality, the universe and everything.

Wouldn’t it be quite a stretch to assume that a primitive cognitive pattern-recognition abstraction, evolved towards optimizing for survival and reproduction in a range of animals adapted to planet-bound environments, could be adequate to make sense of the universe and reality at all scales?

Of course that’s not the whole story: Certainly, humans are developing tools and methods like mathematics and technology to overcome their limitations. But a closer look reveals that most methods are built on the the same substance-materialist preconceptions.

A whole “universe” has been created around the idea of objects in various manifestations, e.g. ’person’, ’number’ or ’particle’, assuming that they must be somehow special, important or fundamental — just because they seem so intuitive — “I think, therefore they are”, no? Who in his right mind could deny that?

But our theories might be much more contingent on human intuition than we usually admit. There are numerous hints, that we long ago entered territory where our intuitive concept of a substance-based reality is a hindrance, has lost it’s use, or is falling apart entirely: when grappling with abstract concepts (like emotions, mathematics, software), emergent phenomena (like businesses or complex systems), and fields on the edge of human knowledge (such as neuroscience, quantum mechanics and consciousness).

The nasty habit to objectify everything may cause us to miss important subtleties, so that there will be subtly growing gaps in our understanding of ever-changing complex systems, as long as we fail to update our repertoire of intuitions.

Certain phenomena may appear overly complicated or even paradoxical only because we use inadequate abstractions to begin with. What about the particle zoo, the 1001 interpretations of quantum mechanics, particle-wave duality? What else?

We’ll need to consider a paradigm shift: a worldview constituted from process, relation and transformation, to finally get out of the stuffy theater where the particles dance to the beat of time on a stage of space.

Experience begins with something changing, and therefore registering of change. So what is even ’change’ itself? It seems that change is noticing ’difference’. Oscillation. Oh, and ’waves’ again. Yeah I mean it’s quite understandable.

In order to build back ’change’ from ’difference’, there’s something else involved. “Time?!” How bold of you to assume time exists a priori! Not so fast. If we think about difference, then there can’t be a singular. Difference arises only if there are at least 2 states; or put another way: 2 states come into existence because there’s differene.

But does that give us change? Well, not if these 2 states merely exist in juxtaposition, e.g. like 2 tiles next to each other. Even if these 2 tiles look the same, they are different alone by the fact that they are next to each other. Otherwise we couldn’t recognize difference at all. But we do it, because implicit ’space’ sneaked in here.

Ok, it seems that requires some dimension to make ’difference’ even possible. That sneaky little dimension is a carrier of relation. Well, that example is flawed from the beginning.

In order to make ’difference’ experiencable – and therefore for change to be neccessary at all – there must be an inability to comprehend more than 1 state at once? Don’t think so. The (n)one becomes – exhibits difference.

…..

For now, we should explore ways how a Process could recognize ’difference’ in the first place. What comes to mind is comparison with indifference. Hence, the concept of equality = seems to be a suitable path to recognize ’difference’, because it creates a counterart for comparison.

Difference/Equality form a dichotomy. We can look around for other pervasive dichotomies, but I couldn’t identify any that has such a fundamental appeal to it, because the principle of ’dichotomy’ itself hinges on ’difference’.

The question how to understand equality and how to implement it, is also fundamental in science, computer science, mathematics and logic – and treated quite differently in each.

Why? Well ultimately, it seems because true or absolute equality is impossible in our universe, not only because no observer (as a part within the system) could compare anything directly, but because even within our universe there cannot be anything truly equal to anything else. Let me explain:

While we might be able to fantasize absolute equality (within conceptual, abstract or formal systems), instantiating that equality in any way – even by computational means – will eventually run against the inherent uncertainties brought by quantum variability.

What we commonly resort to, is only a form of pseudo-equality (similarity) that usually relies on comparing properties.

But there’s a caveat: there could be potentially infinite properties assigned or realized “in” anything, so that a comprehensive list of properties is impossible due to the potentially inexhaustible amount of contexts and perspectives from which these properties could be drawn.

Hence, determining “properties” (a.k.a ’measuring) is always a matter of contextualization, not of uncovering inherent characteristics. The “properties” in question are being realized by the interacting Processes, as these build relations (or get “entangled”) — and these relations are the properties.

Properties are relational rather than inherent – there are no fixed “properties” per se “within” anything, that could be “universally agreed on” (by whom?). Hence, comparison should be a question of comparing relations, not “properties” themselves.

It could mean that “properties” as commonly understood, are not stable themselves. They might be immediately expiring snapshots of changing relations within the processual context. These snapshots could – deceptively – appear stable, but that’s just because one is in fact looking at another snapshot that has just the approximately same value.

The key question would be: Do the relationships between Processes last forever, once established? Which would lead to everlasting histories. Or can they be dissolved or transformed, e.g. (A -> B -> C) reduced to (A -> C)? Or shadowed? Under what neccessary and organically arising circumstances?

Mkay, let’s resort to a real-world-example! So, a human is a plethora of processes that are constituted by related processes all the way down. By establishing relations over and over, this higher-order process emerges.

But it doesn’t end here. The human process – let’s call it “Stephania” – constantly establishes more and more relations to other processes. And a plethora of “outside” processes mingle with this human process and the numerous processes that make up this human processes at various scales.

Interrelated Processes transcend the categorizations we lay up on them: There’s no fundamental difference wether if a human Process establishes certain relations and fosters Processes that entangle into a baby, or into a bestseller book about home-treating hemorrhoids that relieves millions from pain in the ass.

One sunny morning in June, Stephania is on the way to give a talk about her bestselling book. As she enters the grounds of the venue, she gets hit by a meteorite and Stephania evaporates in a split second. You may now ask yourself … How big was that meteorite???

That’s not the point here … focus, please. It seems obvious though, that higher-order Processes (Proscesses consisting of Processes) can perish – by what means, exactly? Does that happen by transformations or deletion – complete loss? Some Processes dissolve, others persist, and new ones establish at that moment. What will be left by this impact? How far through the scales of Processes reaches the impact? What about the primitive Processes?

To what degree could one Process re-instantiate another cheased high-level Processe, given that there would be traceable, intact relations (redundancy?) within the previously related Processes? How could they be captured?

Due to the lack of an objective reference, the nearest reasonable candidate for a baseline seems to use the notion of ’self’. In this view, the deviation from ’self’ could become the reference for registering change [better ideas?].

’Self’ must be built from a continuous Process then, which is influenced by Experiences, requiring self-identity to be an ongoing, dynamic process rather than a fixed, unchanging property. So how could we create an abstract notion of ’self’ at a very low level?

A model of ’self’ could be built from a loop by making Processes fundamentally recursive. That paves the way for preserving past states in a continually updated fashion. Recursion can enable feedback, self-adjusting behaviors, keeping state and even various degrees of ’learning’. Recursion could also be a preliminary step towards increasingly complex models of ’self’ and its interactions with other Processes.

Further, it could make sense to introduce a notion of ’decay’ into the recursion, so that the impact of recursive input decreases the further down the recursion chain. This is alike to what we recognize in certain biological and in psychological processes – e.g. when remembrance often favors more recent experiences over older ones when guiding future behavior (recency bias).

Not only may the influence of previous Experience decrease as per the decay principle, but also the precision of those past experiences might be degraded — they may become less orderly and more uncertain. It touches in some aspects the concept of entropy.

However, the idea of decay smells very bolted-on, and I’m not happy with this ad-hoc implementation “let there be decay!”. As I will have to think really hard about entropy sooner than later, that particular idea of decay for no other than practical reasons may not the be-all and end-all of wisdom.

What does all that mean for the Protoverse model?

The concept of “equality” (necessary to register difference), is fundamentally an approximation (I just found out that Nietzsche discovered that too), and therefore introduces uncertainty. This may be a way how the Protoverse could give rise to ontic uncertainty at its lowest level — within the primitive interactions that are primarily concerned about registering difference.

This uncertainty makes the entire system fundamentally non-deterministic. From that follows that all kinds of things that we might like to describe as discrete entities (“objects” or “particles”) are naturally approximations.

It further implies that there’s would be no need to include explicit, bolted-on randomness in the Protoverse model. Redefining the meaning of Equality itself would have to happen on the level of logic, and that also means a departure from classical logic.

I don’t know if it’s neccessary or sensible to augment (or even replace) classical logic in order to build this quantum-like, probablistic resp. non-deterministic system. There are propability theory and the paradigms propablistic programming and non-deterministic programming (I’m entirely unfamiliar with both), and these seem to work without touching the underlying logic.

However, it feels more intuitive to me (haha!) to operate on the logic level – maybe it make sense to adopt fuzzy logic. And while we’re at it, we could also ditch the “Law of the excluded middle”! I’ve always been suspicious of it and could never accept it.

I don’t object Planck’s idea of the quantization in quantum mechanics, but that apparent quantization might be a phenomenon that appears due to discretization (for whatever reason) as an effect of the approximation that I mentioned before – well, if this actually happens in our universe. Could this unsharpness then provide an understanding of quantum uncertainty?

Ok, I’m probably mistaken – but even if that’s just bullshit, it leaves the impression that quantum uncertainty may be not that weird actually (and could be understood intuitively, instead of accepting it at face value); and secondly, this concept might actually work as a computational substrate that shares some commonalities with quantum mechanics.

Approximation (and uncertainty) within our universe might be a broadly misunderstood part of nature, rooted in the mistaken assumption that “precision” must be somehow “prior”, “superior” or “perfect” (looking at you, Plato and Descartes). Does it come from forcing the object-abstraction onto everything, just because the cognitive heuristic that builds objects form observed patterns feels so intuitive?

Maybe we could intuitively understand quamtum mechanics (things like the uncertainty principle and particle-wave “duality’”) and not merely accept it at face value, if we shift our perspective from a substantial-materialist (objects, particles, inherent properties) to process-relational worldview (processes, relations, participatory)?

TL;DR
There are no particles, because they would be still (abstract) objects, which are merely approximations (unsharp, uncertain), resulting from a heuristic (applied by an “observer”) that builds the abstractions ’object’ (and other fluff) which are incomplete and distorted descriptions of the underlying processes and relations. Give up on “building blocks”!

’Idenity’ within this context means the self-relation as in philosophy, not the concept of ’Identity’ as in logic (that one I call ’Equality’ with capital ’E’, because it’s a technical term and works differently from classic logic).

With ’identity’ being nothing prior or special, everything that applies to generic properties also applies to ’identity’. What I particularly want to emphasize at this point, is that ’idenity’, would not be stable or static at all.

In fact, there is no inherent or pre-defined concept of ’identity’ within the Protoverse, nor is it required in any way. But ’identity’ could be realized as a self-relation, which is possible even at the lowest level. That doesn’t rule out richer, more nuanced and even quite different implementations of ’identity’ emerging at higher-order scales of complexity.

Processes in the Protoverse are not distinct from the reality they experience; instead, they’re active participants creating and shaping it. The characteristics of experiencing reality will corelate with the intricacies of the immediate environment – the predominantly relevant nested scales with which certain Processes have co-evolved.

Which patterns Processes may experience, how, and to make sense of them, will eventually depend on co-evolving factors – they could be described analogous terms as “perspective”, “zoom-factor” or “ability”.

The scope and the kind of interface exposed by a Process can evolve, affecting how the specific Process interacts within the Protoverse. The possibility of gradual escalation of scope, as well as gradual restriction therefore seems quite important.

A given system (which is a bunch of interrelated Processes) can be re-constructed by another Process to a certain degree; just not “perfectly”: to what extend such a re-construction is possible, depends on:

• The epistemic scope of the Process;
  
• The interfaces (and therefore the possible interactions) of the system to be re-constructed;
  
• That there cannot be two Processes absolutely equal;
  

Re-constructing of a system of processes gives naturally rise to a new Nested Scale Of Complexity – it’s like if we develop and describe a model of something we’ve discovered in nature. For a model to be either regarded as “static” or “dynamic” is merely a matter of description.

Such a new scale in turn becomes a fully legit part of reality, independent of (our made-up) “classic” categorizations such as “abstract” or “concrete”, because these categories don’t apply per se.

I believe this skepticism primarily arises from mistaking the implementation details of Darwinian evolutionary processes for the processes themselves. This is understandable, as the implementation details of evolutionary processes are vastly diverse across various domains and are themselves subject to evolution. However, if we would treat these processes as homomorphisms and describe them by their algorithmic commonalities and efficacy, we could apply these principles across diverse domains while respecting the unique features of each domain.

The second major issue is the absence of an integrative framework. When contemplating the dynamic structures in our universe, we often categorize and assign hierarchies —- such as physical domain, biological organisms, the mind, society, informational ecosystems, and so on. These categories appear significant to us, but all these distinctions are somewhat arbitrary because they are based on intuitive perception, what seems obvious and meaningful, and pragmatic considerations, leading to inconsitent hierarchies.

Overcoming these two main issues could help in better applying and accepting Universal Darwinism across various non-biological systems. Let’s consider both in detail:

What are the necessary principles of Darwinian Evolution? I’m using generic terms to minimize substrate-specific connotations (e.g., replacing “inheritance” with “Retention”):

Processes as the primary abstraction (monism) ensure compatibility for interaction and influence at all Scales, but only at the level of primitive Processes. In other words, there are no closed systems, but gradually open systems.

Higher-order Processes emerge various dynamics that lead to higher-order forms of connectivity, but also prevent higher-order connectivity in other cases, leading to encapsulation or compartmentalization. It follows that all Scales could interact with all other Scales in principle, but not to the same effect.

During which evolutionary processes create or become their immediate environment (co-evolve their substrate/environment), Catalytic Transitions mark either gradual events or apparent leaps where evolutionary Processes emerge new Nested Scales of Complexity.

Catalytic transitions appear when a new implementation detail emerges that significantly increases velocity of search space exploration, diversity, resilence, information retention, information transfer bandwidth, or other parameters.

Catalytic Transitions don’t necessarily lead to higher complexity in newly emerging Scales – often quite the opposite. On the other side, Scales with less complexity will likely inform the creation of further Scales.

New Scales emerge from the interplay between Processes across several Nested Scales of Complexity. Applied to our universe as a whole there’s no reason for an end to Nested Scales of Complexity – what means there can be vastly more wonderous things than the human mind – either already existing, or yet to emerge. Watch out for new catalysators!

I’ve been curiously looking around which theories and frameworks employ concepts similar to the Nested Scales of Complexity. The general idea of nested systems are used throughout various areas of research, here’s what I found:

Open-endedness pertains to the continual generation of novelty and complexity without an end-goal or a limit on the diversity of forms that evolution can explore, acknowledging practical constraints.

I believe that evolutionary dynamics arise intrinsically in certain kinds of complex systems, because the constutients – variety, repetition, selection, retention – are already present in complex systems.

In the Protoverse, the aim of evolution could be seen as a drive for novelty, exploration, understanding, creativity and sophistication rather than survival. In a post-scarcity environment (it might be the case), the challenge isn’t to secure resources, but to make sense of information.

Numbers are commonly recognized as quintessential examples of abstract objects. But “numbers” is a broad term: the idea/concept of numbers, a particular number, a bunch of numbers. Let’s think a bit about numbers, and what they might be.

Various animal species grasp relative quantities. Throughout our animal kingom, numerical cognition majors on relational aspects (such as ’more’, ’less’, ’equal’, ’numerous’, ’few’). Only a few species exhibit a concept of “exact” numbers: crows do, squirrels seemingly not; the concept of exact numbers may not be a universal necessity for “functioning” in the world – at least no at all scales. So what we have until yet, is a recognition of difference within a certain dimension – that could be the momentary or temporal (before/after) occupation of the field of vision, for instance – the recognition of difference and a means to describe that difference.

“Exact” numbers though, do seem to require a form of counting or a underpinning counting-like process. Hence, the concept of numbers in the most general sense may be defined as “units in a sequence established by the repeated application of a certain rule”, which leads to a regular sequence. This gives us a means of “relating relations” by giving them names according to a derivative rule.

The most straightforward algorithm to construct the sequence of the “natural” numbers is by incrementally adding 1 discrete unit at a time (n + 1) to a previously accumulated pile of units. Interestingly, it could be argued that the more “natural” way to count is by doubling. Doubling (n + n) is much more prevalent in nature (e.g. cell division and most biological systems) than linear incrementing by 1 (n + 1). Doubling is even conceptionally simpler than incrementing by 1 – because it requires less preconceptions (you may realize that when you shovel aside the anthropocentric bias. Fellow wanderer, do you accept the side quest?).

At this point we may contend that the “more natural” counting method by doubling is utter rubbish – this number sequence does not provide direct access to “all” numbers, because aren’t there a lot of numbers missing? There’s no 3, 6, 7, 9 …? Well no, these numbers are not missing, it’s just bias – because we are used to the linear progression of “natural” numbers. Picture it this way: neither does the usual (n + 1) number sequence give you “all” numbers – for instance it gives you no 9¾, which would cause you to miss the train.

Ok, so numbers are also sequences built on arbritrary, regular relations. Our “natural” numbers are just as arbritary, because any number only acquires meaning in relation to the particularly defined sequence it happens to be part of by definition. Hence, seemingly inherent properties of numbers are relational to the encompassing system that implies these properties; and properties are either axioms or theorems. It makes no sense to think of properties as inherent of particular numbers (or of anything else, even physical matter).

Of course then, from the common substantial-materialist point of view, properties seem “external” of the “object” in question, which may feel wrong (actually just counter-intuitive). But that’s only because a substantial-materialist point of view presupposes “standalone entities”, and common sense implies that “properties” can only be “within”. This is related to our deeply rooted habit of drawing borders ad-hoc and arbitrarily, and several other biases.

The sequence of natural numbers is not inherently special or “natural”. It only appears so, largely due to the cognitive context of discrete objects, and because we just consider it useful for certain purposes. But we also quite often see the need to use other number systems, like the rational numbers. And we’ll need to break out of several schemas in order to float freely in the continuum or “number universe” (real numbers) where we could directly “access”, “construct” or “manifest” all numbers. What got it into the cage in the first place - intuition?

What if we would treat the real numbers as fundamental, instead of the natural numbers? That way leads to much more straightforward methods: for instance, it’s much less involved to derive the natural numbers from the real numbers, than the usual way from natural number to the reals (which feels very much like reverse-engineering).

Treating the continuum as fundamental also seems to align much more with how perception may work - from a cognitive standpoint, humans and other animals interpret continuous sensory data (like vision or sound) and extract patterns from it, in order to construct discrete objects in their minds.

The widely accepted invention of ’completed infinity’ (masked by the euphemism ’actual infinity’) literally means “the finished unfinished” and is a contradiction in itself, quite analogous to the “square circle”.

It’s an attempt to force the concept of potential infinity (an endless process) into the object-centric paradigm, aligning it with the dominant thought and human bias to portray things as “concluded”, “finished”, “discrete” or “precise”, out of mere common sense.

Is ’completed infinity’ bad?

I would like to encourage to embrace the infinite and the incomplete as the drivers of “reality, the universe and everything”: That there can be – and that there are – processes that cannot be completed by any means (and even better: cannot be proved if they complete or not) may be the most probable reason for anything to happen and therefore to exist at all.

The traditional metaphysical “Problem of universals” concerns the nature of properties, classes, or relations that different “particular” things can all share in common: Are these universals real entities that exist independently of particular instances, or are they simply names we give to common features we observe?

Within this framework, universals would be expected to emerge convergently from the interactions and recurrent behaviors by interacting Processes. “Universals” are not static entities that exist in an abstract scale apart from “concrete instances”, nor are they mere linguistic constructs.

Within this framework, the “Problem of universals” transcends its historical status as an ontological dilemma, because the appearance of “universals” could be an indicator of shared reality amongst Processes; although there’s no clear method for identification and measurement as of now – likely something along the lines of repeated appearance of universal patterns that carry specific semantic payloads in losely related contexts, recognized by certain Processes.

Let’s acknowledge that there can be several different, but nevertheless entirely valid descriptions to construct anything. Does the “essence”, “abstract idea” or whatever spirit dwell in the commonality distilled from all possible, valid descriptions?

“Intrinsic properties” to the rescue"? What about hierarchies of properties and declaring some as more special and more important than others? Well, all of that turns out to circle back so that we arrive at the beginning, looking at one descriptions, which happens to be just one amongst all the others.

Can we unify multiple descriptions into one ultimate description? How?

We can try to find a “translation” from one description to another description. The point is – there wouldn’t be just one single ultimate translation between all the descriptions (what would count as “essence”), but there would be many, and there could be more than one translation between two single descriptions, and maybe there are descriptions we can’t find any translation for.

But couldn’t we merge these translations into one? What if we put the descriptions aside, and instead pick only the tranlations between them, and then figure out translations between the original translations? Oh, and what if we play this game over and over again – will we eventually arrive at the ultimate essence of ’triangle’?

What we would likely end up with, may be extremely generalized principles that describe not just ’triangle’, but dissolve into a network of relations and transformations that apply across many mathematical structures, quite the contrary of distilling an ’essence’ of ’triangleness’ – but maybe that’s exactly the point: It not just offers an escape from the “essences” drag, but reminds that meaning arises not from isolated “things in themselves” or “inherent properties”, but from relational context.