much ado about nothing
Blog post, readership medium, logic, pure mathematics, AI
A new way of thinking about everything, is all a paradigm shift really is.
For those new here, this wider website shares and discusses an idea for one of those shifts (there have been many before) called the Dot theory. At its simplest, it is a theory (a way of saying things) that proposes a different way of thinking about how we could see all things. How we can observe and interpret them. Admittedly, that is not exactly the same as a way of thinking about everything, but rather a way of seeing everything differently. Therefore it is firstly a sub-paradigmatic shift, but the case I make across the site is that it then cannot but be paradigmatic too. A rationale for a metacognitive shift on all scales.
The point the wider website makes as a philosophical thought object, is that when we look at everything in a different way, we automatically, and inevitably, think about them in a different way too. In that sense, this writing is all “a bit strange” in that it both is, and isn’t, “a biggy”. It is both a paradigm- and subparadigmatic shift, simultaneously negligibly meta-cognitive and absolute. The former the inevitable but radical result of the latter. And that can be rather ephemeral for traditional and more linear tastes. Yet, it is in some sense oddly familiar too in that they represent the ideas of “superimposition”, “free will” and Quantum computation, and therefore all the topic right now in Quantum and AI conversations. That’s my specialist cross-website audience really. They might prefer other posts, but this specific post is for everyone with a more passing technical interest, yet who would like to make sense of this proposal and what it means.
This website is dedicated to sharing a more or less well-curated collection of my (flawed and limited) understanding of that theory’s, albeit odd, perfectly logical implications. I try to do that by demonstrating its validity through the simplest ways (with the fewest assumptions) I could use to discuss the most complex expressions (institutionally coherent) of the simplest (the most absolute) rationales. All that while trying to at the same time to scale to good quality evidence for each logic.
It can seem heavy. It after all represents (hopefully valid) formulas and arguments to absolutely say something that is very oddly unfamiliarly in fundamental terms. Some mathematical, some physical, some practical, and some redundant, all to make the same point: If this is a valid way of looking at reality, it is in agreement with, yet under certain conditions superior to (and therefore valuable), our current way of seeing it. It proposes a route for modifying our concept of how we understand the idea of improvement, and therefore could become a more widely adopted paradigm by consensus-building for a better understanding of reality. That’s what makes it, I feel, relevant and hopefully worth your attention in a transactional world.
The poetic irony of new ways of thinking about things is that every new day, or even every time we humans see or learn something new, our individual, personal paradigm shifts. Our reality is now, not what it was a moment ago. Similar, but not the same. For us humans, this is obvious, yet in physics and mathematics, things move a little differently, and how we think about reality has another meaning there.
There, we don’t just need personal agreement that things are something or have somehow changed, but also the interpersonal agreement from people busy checking the agreement of when and how it has changed. This level of meta-agreement is inevitably acquired over longer periods of time, but for it delays returns the useful stability longstanding institutions can offer us. They work on a different standard of realism, and shifting paradigms there, inevitably means reinterpreting everything that had previously been agreed to be true. There, it is “a biggy” and needs to stand up to a lot of scrutiny.
One way to think about this particular paradigm shift is that what something as odd as M_{ij} = ⨁_{k=1}ⁿ Hᵏ(U(n)) ⊗ R(eᵢ, eⱼ | dₖ) actually means is that, for physics too, reality now changes, depending on how we choose to look at it. In a very specific way that was already hinted at by the double slit experiment of course, but this formulation from the discipline of Pure Mathematics, suggests that it is also more pervasively true, and in more absolute terms than previously accepted and represented in physics. Oh, and it also means that we should think of reality as made of data rather than objects. This itself has a rather odd effect and turns the idea, institution and content of the institution of Physics itself, into the set that defines the body of the data that describes it, and to pragmatically being a computable representation of calculable reality. In other, but too simplistic words: Physics=Reality
That’s the change this strange equation brings with it. It means the same thing as 𝐸 = 𝑚⊙ 𝑐³ / (𝑘 𝑇), previously discussed on this site, but more importantly for this specific post: it means deep and meaningful ideas. That, we humans, bend/modify reality in absolute terms, not just with our actions but also with our computational perspective on reality. The way we look at things. Now, again, that may seem obvious to most of us, but in physics that also means that the individual experimenter themselves influences the experimental outcome.
Not just the experimental method, but the individual being. And that is odd for physicists, assumes too much that is not familiar enough for comfort. It rings true, but means that whatever the observer “is”, during the experiment, influences the outcome of the experiment, and thereby includes the observer into the experiment as a variable. Again, at some level obvious to us humans, but on the other not currently established fact, just suspicion, without formulation. This Dot theory is my collection of various, different ways of making such formulations.
So this brief post is just here to demystify the overall meaning of the idea of paradigm shifts, and their horribly confusing-looking equations. They’re just a language. Code for explaining reality down to the agreed absolutes of meaning. All a paradigm shift is, is a convincing statement, written in the right language needed to convincingly make the argument for something that was already suspected, but not known.
Why do we do it? Why bother? Because it is about optimising the meaning of life. Without meaning, you can have as much life as you like, but it doesn’t contain anything other than what others attribute to it, while looking at it from the outside, without real connection.
Thank you for reading this post, evaluating the website and sharing your thoughts,
Stefaan
