More on Kurzweil's article

I finished reading the Kurzweil article. Highlights for me:

However, cellular automata on their own do not evolve sufficiently. They quickly reach a limited asymptote in their order of complexity. An evolutionary process involving conflict and competition is needed.

I would add that this needs to go beyond simple Darwinian rules and add specialization and cooperation, to build higher-level entities or "patterns" (see below).

The following piques my interest, echoing as it does my hunch that information theory is important to a fundamental understanding of How It All Works:

Wolfram is hypothesizing that there is a digital basis to the apparently analog phenomena and formulas in physics, and that we can model our understanding of physics as the simple transformations of a cellular automaton.

Others have postulated this possibility. Richard Feynman wondered about it in considering the relationship of information to matter and energy. Norbert Weiner heralded a fundamental change in focus from energy to information in his 1948 book Cybernetics, and suggested that the transformation of information, not energy, was the fundamental building block for the Universe.

My question remains: what is it in us that recognizes certain patterns as information ("order" in Kurzweil's nice distinction) as distinct from everything else? If our particular instantiation of Order recognizes only certain kinds of order, naming it "information" or "complexity" or "intelligence", are there other forms (necessarily outside our ability to recognize them) that recognize other kinds of order? Pattern recognizes pattern. See the 14-Nov-2000 entry in DeepThoughts.

Kurzweil follows with an extended quote of Robert Wright talking about Edward Fredkin, from the not-very-aptly-titled Did the Universe Just Happen? by Robert Wright. Sounds like Fredkin (and Wright's article first) needs to be on my to-read list. [added later: Wright's 1988 article reveals, in the midst of breezy narrative and exposition about Fredkin's theory, the personality quirks that distinguish Wolfram from him. He apparently couldn't stick to a project very long or apply the necessary academic rigor. Wolfram spent 10 years on his book.]

These paragraphs near the end fired a bunch of epiphany neurons for me, in particular the stream-pattern analogy:

There is a philosophical perspective to Wolfram's treatise that I do find powerful. My own philosophy is that of a "patternist," which one might consider appropriate for a pattern recognition scientist. In my view, the fundamental reality in the world is not stuff, but patterns.

If I ask the question, 'Who am I?' I could conclude that, perhaps I am this stuff here, i.e., the ordered and chaotic collection of molecules that comprise my body and brain.
...
So I am a completely different set of stuff than I was a month ago. All that persists is the pattern of organization of that stuff. The pattern changes also, but slowly and in a continuum from my past self. From this perspective I am rather like the pattern that water makes in a stream as it rushes past the rocks in its path. The actual molecules (of water) change every millisecond, but the pattern persists for hours or even years.

This is strongly reminiscent of the ant-colony study outlined in Emergence, but that's not the only reason this shows up in green glowing letters in my brain.

May 22, 2002 01:47 PM