Short post, high information density, high complexity. New to this blog? Start with the meta-post.
First post in months, and now I'm also planning to work on rewriting my main ideas from other posts more concisely as simply but complex if required to make it brief, and non-repetitive to the point. But I won't create new posts about the same ideas here. This blog shall remain the same for the foreseeable future; my stream of thoughts unfiltered un-researched unpolished with little to no editing flow of consciousness as if I'm having a conversation with a friend. The concise versions? Probably on Twitter or elsewhere. At least that's the plan for now. Will update the meta-post accordingly.
I have also been planning to turn these general abstract ways of thinking mostly related to decision science, rationality and empathy into some fictional stories inspired by my personal experiences which I admit I don't have too many of but do plan to have more off soon once I start university, and test my ideas and discover my inclinations and improve and fail and learn and grow and cultivate my values and realize my potential, capture them in words so no one has to reinvent the wheel knowing fully well that I'm myself reinventing many theories that I later discover already exist in psychology or neuroscience textbooks and so I need to focus more on information acquisition and less on processing and overanalyzing existing information, explore for now, but even before that I need to focus on university admissions right now as the timeline is near..
The text in this post originated on my Instagram stories where I've been trying to write despite being told that it's not the appropriate platform for it so I'm shifting to my notepads again, need to maintain some consistency writing too. So anyway this post is text I posted on my story at 4 AM one night with a nocturnal burst of motivation and existential dread and fear of not being able to achieve my goals and how I'd been procrastinating more than I'd liked to admit. I might create a separate post for that but without further ado here it is. I'm planning to create another blog post about philosophy of mathematics and it's unreasonable effectiveness and relation with our conscious perception of reality.
Extracting general abstract universal laws from specific observations. Manipulating different variables holding all others constant to get different equations and then stepping back trying to intuitively think what it means, not just plugging symbols, that's done in that 'what if' part, but trying to understand the principle, what it would mean for specific cases, visualizing it through different media and computational tools. That's what physicists and mathematicians have been doing all along. That's how I read Michael Faraday discovered his laws, just playing around, finding 'beautiful' equations, and having fun understanding what it all means. NOW with that in mind, I propose this..
I hate rote memorization, except for speedy communication and forming connections. I like gaining an intuitive instinctive understanding of a concept. Every field has such concepts. Biology, chemistry, philosophy, physics, computer science, linguistics. Of course they do, it all comes down to mathematics and philosophy eventually. So how about. We find some a-priori axioms from which we can derive all general concepts at a level of abstraction that connects all fields, as all subjects are just labels and neat little categories to study stuff in isolation for simplicity, but the universe is inherently interdisciplinary and we need more generalists or polymaths for this reason, Al can do better on narrow stuff, we can integrate and find analogies between latest breakthroughs and older concepts and observations. We express it in formal logic. We feed it to Al and manipulate variables turn into natural language to logic to mathematics to any visualization. So kind of like Wolfram language but at a higher level of abstraction.
I shared a similar idea with an mathematician-physicist and he said No, but he also admitted he's too much of an 'idealist'. Then I discovered Dr. Karl Friston, a genius neuroscientist whose free energy principle I created a post on, had a very similar idea in his childhood. And more recently I read about Hawking and saw some clips from his movie Theory of Everything and I realized oh I have one too, not exactly, but a framework to develop one. Funny thing is he was so smart he never had to think till his PhD, then one day he just wakes up like I wanna work on Time and comes up with this thing that baffles everyone. I might not be as smart but I am almost certainly as curious and driven and to make up for it I got the advantage of time! (See what I did there).
It involves logical reasoning too like my brain generated this statement-It is more likely for me to be perceived as interesting by autistic people than it is for me to be perceived as annoying by allistic people. Or, autistic people are more likely to find me interesting than allistic people are to find me annoying. I thought what's that even mean? And with a minute of thinking I realized yes it's true, just as true as the statement that autistic people are less likely to find me annoying than allistic people are likely to find me interesting. Same thing, different symbols, and we can manipulate variables to generate different insights, what's left to intuition we can capture with algorithms and automate to make more accessible and speed up progress in all domains. Or the statement- autistic people are more likely to find me interesting than allistic people are to find me interesting. This is also true, different by just one variable but the only thing is that it's semantic value true is same though syntax is so similar. I don't know if I used the technical terminology correctly because I know nothing about linguistics and formal logic so maybe it's wrong but it's interesting I need to develop further. Let's automate Sherlock. Sorry Sherlock you're out of job Al is better than you hahaha.
Someone asked me: I don't see why the fields would necessarily be connectable, since they all go to the same root, correct, but they've still gone in different directions. If you want to connect linguistics to physics I don't see how it could be done except for if you reduce them both down to whatever they have in common (perhaps the physics of the connections in a human brain) unless you use creativity to draw analogies between them but that wouldn't have been something fundamental to the fields, that would be your own understanding you are putting on top of it. Let me know if I'm missing something.
I'll take your example. Linguistics and physics. We don't even need to go to the brain, that's neuroscience. Did you consider the physics of sound, applied linguistics, and how the way we speak, our tone, inflection, pitch, has an observable scientifically testable effect on the air molecules through the vibrations or- well, you know physics is already much more fundamental than linguistics here. So maybe you are asking how linguistics can be connected to physics without reducing it to mathematics or neuroscience, in which case I agree, again if you re-read my story, I mentioned this myself, something like: the universe is inherently interdisciplinary but we assign labels to simplify and study some topics in isolation, but we can bring them all together in a process, because when you have a problem, you can analyze it from the perspective or lens of any discipline, finding analogies or connections or correlations or causations between seemingly unrelated fields.
That was not my point. That's a different idea. My point is, you do agree that linguistics can be reduced to some certain more fundamental axioms from which we can derive it right? of course we can derive all of chemistry from physics and mathematics but it's so energy and time intensive that we don't, and it's a separate field of it's own, but my idea is.. to be honest I'm struggling a bit to capture it in words and this is making myself doubt it's credibility but I think there is merit in at least trying to express it in words--
linguistics has general principles that hold true universally. It's not just a bunch of random obscure meaningless academic terminology put together for no reason. Same goes for every single discipline out there, most of the fundamental ones anyway, which don't require rote memorization solely and also need you to gain a deep instinctive intuitive understanding so your brain can automatically detect those principles in novel real world situations (like how you practice lots of mathematics problems of the same type and when you see a question that fits the same general logical structure or pattern it just clicks and the problem solving is more intuitive than not even though you have to pay attention and think, most of it is the concepts you internalized by repeated practice, observation, trying stuff, genuine understanding) and now we go a step ahead.
We only focus on these abstract concepts, and try to express them in the language of logic using a-priori axioms that you can just reproduce from scratch like 1+1=2. So you have this general principle in linguistics or social psychology or astrobiology or epidemics.. and you try to reduce it to it's logical general structure, the process, in formal symbolic logic, and you do it with all disciplines and find analogies and solve problems and you manipulate variables like we do in mathematics and we turn the logic into as clear accurate precise simple natural language so we can have an intuitive English explanation but also the mathematical, logical, graphical, visual, musical and also real world phenomena and your own experiences and we unify everything this way..
There's more but I'll come back to it later when I have more time and preferably it's not almost 3 AM at night so less sleep deprived but like seriously why do we need to sleep we got all eternity for non-existence and I am jealous of the people who have genetic mutations that allow them to be more productive on less amount of sleep and those with superior information processing speeds but I know that I can only try my best and make the best out of what I have just trying to be aware of these factors that influence my behaviour and make it more difficult for me to live according to my inclinations or compel me to act irrationally in ways that makes it more difficulty or less likely for me to achieve my goals; go with the flow while being aware of it until you can control it not getting emotionally attached to outcomes but also being aware of biases such as learned helplessness. Let's stop before this post turns into another late-night incoherent ramblings that is usually reserved for my notepads.
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