dot theory, A way to better understand reality

In a somewhat different style from the rest of this website this post here is written as a blogpost.

At its simplest, Dot theory is a method for how to understand the world better. Not “how” to understand it, in the sense of a method that is right or wrong, but of a way that describes how to look at a situation with the expectation that the result will be that you’ll understand it better and can make better decisions from that understanding. The “how” in how to go through the logical process that results in the fact of probably understanding it better, so to speak.

In this sense you could think of it as the logic that explains why things appear to be logical and useful, and then from that make the most logical decision i.e. the one with the best alignment with your stated goals.

Most people might know that the debate on reality currently being fought in physics is that the question is whether, at its smallest sensible scale, the universe is made of particles or waves or something else altogether. Dot theory proposes that it is neither but fractals.

Wavefunctions, the idea of a particle and fractals are just different epistemic ideas wrapped into the language of physics. They are not physical objects but things that are written calculably in formulations to mean something or shape a landscape. The beauty of fractals is that they can be seen as either wave or particle and as a fractal, depending on how much information you have and the perspective you take. That can be described as a mathematical function, but current math says that you can’t put a function as an object at the smallest scale. With the current innovations in AI specifically, it is now possible to revisit that limitation and evaluate a landscape of functions to allow them to describe the pattern that emerges from them.

Changing the math so that we can usefully calculate fractals as objects rather than functions, is then basically what Dot theory tries to convince the reader of. It means that if we are made of stardust, stardust is made of fractals. It means there is a third state that can be usefully described, the fractal state but not represented as an independent object.

At its simplest that is saying: It is more useful to consider as much as you can know about something and then choose to make the best decision you can from that information than to not do that. Dot theory is basically a logical mathematical method written so that its meaning can be translated into philosophy of science, institutional law and computer code. Because that’s how computer code is made and written, and not everyone knows about that link.

You need the mathematical frameworks to create the math and the math to create the computer logics. Dot theory, as a speculative proposal is basically a paper consisting from a variety of papers (because it covers a lot of different grounds as a multidisciplinary approach) that collectively argue for a change in proposed mathematical framework to make predictive and cheaper predictive healthcare possible.

What changing the mathematical framework would allow us humans to do, is to create a computer network we can safely ask from what would be best for us when we are trying to make a decision. What would be the best treatment pathway? What would be the best time for me to take my supplements? With everything we know today about how data describes and prescribes life, interests and a significant part of our lived experience, it is easy to imagine this now.

However, there are two separate mathematical approaches you can take to achieve that. One is grabbing the data and comparing it like-for-like, and the other is to change the current mathematical framework and growing it to observe the recurring and emerging patterns. The grabbing is what the behemoths in Ai are doing with strong prescription and motive from the current mathematical model. Just imagine what you can sell alongside expert medical care if you deduce a person’s innermost experience of life? The good pieces of news are that a) this invasion is very hard to do because of privacy laws and that b) the “growing it” approach (mine) is relatively simple and cheap to do and doesn’t need quantum computers. It just hadn’t been thought of.

As an application, this would effectively and rapidly result in a cheap and very accessible healthcare platform that would be easily run by national health providers. As a system it also doesn’t compete on resources with the current stakeholders. It just asks the question as to whether, by taking additional factors into account, there is a way that in all probability would result in a better outcome than the ones already considered. It’s not a system that tells doctors what to execute, but rather one that refines or confirms the proposed care pathway. One that can be ignored or takn as inspiration for a renewed consideration. That’s the “free will” I go on about quite a bit if you’ve read other pages about physics and logic. A man called Bell wrote extensively on the mathematical formulations for this.

So, in short; dot theory is the logical argument for a cheap, practicable mathematical model of how to make better decisions, yet leaving us the choice to ignore the advice, if we want.

This may seem like strange thing to write into code, yet if you think about it, you can easily translate the individual functions of code for social media apps to a mathematical model of how to express yourself in certain ways, if you wanted. Making a decision based on more and meaningfully associated data, is just another way to express yourself, and you can translate that too into mathematical rules.

Now, you might say then; that’s all OK, and you might say that this wouldn’t need a theory on reality. Just write it out and you have a piece of code that would do that predicting thing. The issue lies in the way we currently do mathematics about these kinds of computer-code things. Just writing code in that way in today’s current computer frameworks would mean using your personal data to compare to that of others others. That is very high risk and could be used against you. This is why there is currently so much debate around Ai ethics and something called the Langlands landscape. That landscape is the framework you can compute this in.

My proposal, written out and simplified across this site as the Dot theory in formulations and logics across a scientific programme is a way to say: make a map of me from the data I share with you. Then keep that map under lock and key, bound by doctor-patient confidentiality key, GDPR/HIPAA as we already do today, but (using AI) analyse it locally for trends. That is what AI does really well and where it comes into doing all the grunt work for making better informed decisions.

Those trends that help us make better decisions are shared trends. What is medically true for me is more likely true for people most like me. They don’t identify who you are because they only identify trends that make them objectively more similar to you. And you, as an individual, are not a trend, you are uniquely you in this moment. Medicine taught us that. Dietary and exercise habits and cardiovascular or neurodegenerative disease make that clear every day. Your address, your name, your private self is in this sense not a trend, although it can be part of one. Those things are unique to you. This means that putting the data through this process only looks at things that have a repeating nature and there is only one of you living at your address so it doesn’t look at that. It doesn’t even take it into account.

To do that mathematically, you have to translate that and express in code that you can choose to look at the data that describes reality a certain way, or another. And again that only makes sense, that’s just what statistical scales tell us, but it in effect invites us to either make the more-informed decision, or not. Whether we ignore the more-informed decision is simply a matter of free-will.

So, in short, that’s what dot theory is: the logic for a change in the way we do mathematics so that we can write code to make better decisions safely and cheaply. From the individual healthcare and data-perspective, this has already been proven to be correct, but to make it real in computer terms, we need to make a slight change to the math we currently use to describe reality (like we do in physics). To do that, we need to make an optional change to the perspective we can take on the available data. It is effectively the difference between being in your head, or being in the moment.

This would already be possible in the current world of computing if certain laws were changed, but making those better decisions the current way could come at a significant cost. Both to our personal individual privacy and its potential use to modulate our free will. Yet this new idea called dot theory and plastered across this website into logics and other complex terms, is just a way to explain that this is a way to solve a problem you didn’t know you had in a way they didn’t know you could.

How significant it is to think of the world as a hologram instead of a collection of objects is debatable. It was one before you knew it to be. What is not debatable about it, is that we do make better, more valid decisions when we look at more information. That’s what science has been built on.

Call to action then; I don’t know you (maybe I do), but perhaps there is a way in which you can help. Financial support would be great, I’m currently unable to work due to the effects of cancer treatment so every little would help (I have a page on Patreon for that) but if you understand this and know people who don’t only understand this, like you, but also can do something with that information (technologists, scientists, investors, other people who like to think about stuff) then please share them this page or website.

As an idea, it is logical, and extremely simple whilst admittedly technically complex. Most importantly, it is perfectly feasible with today’s technology. The issue is that it’s simply not the way that the international data conglomerates are motivated to think.

So, thank you for any and all support given and take care!

S.