The Meaning of Life and Other Vegetables

Hello everyone. I hope you are feeling refreshed.

One of the reasons I like RSU so much is that in that framework really difficult questions get resolved almost effortlessly. Either the difficulty just goes away, as if it never existed, or a ready answer is there, if we are willing to spend 5 minutes thinking about the issue.

I’ll give three examples.

1. Looking down, looking up, and the nature of the subconscious

As speculated, the One is an infinite (and infinitely complex) structure of layered CA. Each one of us, as a CCA, is “located” at a certain level of complexity – Far above the elemental one (ECA), but not too high overall. I have no reason to think that we are somewhere very high in the structure; do you?…

Anyway, there are many levels of complexity “below” and “above” us (reminder: in RSU there is no space, and hence no location; these are symbolic references, related to levels of complexity).

If you think about it, it’s no different to the physical universe. As humans, we can relate to distinct entities with lower complexity than ours (both within, like organs or cells, and without, like other organisms or simple external objects), as well as to ones with higher complexity, like a planet with everything on it, or a community which we are a part of, or an alien creature that is more evolved (it doesn’t matter right now if you believe they exist or not; it’s only an example for discussion’s sake).

In the physical universe, entities are opaque, or semi-opaque, by default. It means they can’t be easily looked into (as in understood in detail), and arguably sometimes they can’t be looked into at all. By default, entities can’t look “down” (into lower complexity levels) or “up” (into higher complexity); at least not without great effort. As a human, you can’t directly “look” into your liver, intuit all it’s intricate internal workings, understand its molecular makeup, what each enzyme is doing and why, et cetera (I wish people stopped saying “excetera”, it’s not a thing!). Similarly, your liver can’t look up and think “Great, I’m a part of the human called Ronen, and my role is X, and I participate by doing Y.”

The same principle could apply in RSU. I don’t see any reason why not, and it’s actually very helpful to assume it does. It also makes sense technically, if we consider the basic structure and function of the ECA. “Looking up” would mean “sensing something through the outputs”, and “looking down” would similarly relate to the inputs. However, the inputs and output don’t have such “long range” capacities. All the do (or are) is matching with the single input/output they are each connected with. That’s it. An input has the same “value” (0/Quiet or 1/Live) as the output it’s connected with, and vice versa. Whatever happens beyond the decision-making facility (probability function, as speculated) is a mystery to it (it’s helpful to recall the black box representation here).

Using the number of inputs/outputs each CA has as a measure of its relative complexity (also correlated with the total number of ECA in it), I claim that on average, a CA can directly communicate, and “comprehend”, another CA that is at about the same level of complexity as itself. “About the same complexity” = “About the same number of inputs/outputs/ECA”. This does not imply a need to limit the model to such direct connection or direct communication. There is room in the theory for almost infinite complexity / intricacy in connections, CA containment, back-looping, branching and so on. More generally speaking, we, and any other CCA, can indirectly communicate, influence and be influenced by other CA of any complexity, including the One – the latter is your experience of the entire world. All I’m arguing is that direct “peering into” significantly-different levels of complexity is not possible, for mere incompatibility in overall channel sizing.

One nice consequence of that approach (at least nice for me) is a view of the subconscious. I speculate that “the subconscious” is our internal CA makeup, all the way down to ECA level. There is a lot going on in there, but it’s not accessible to us. All we “see” is what floats to the surface, right before emerging outside; in other words, the totality of values in our outputs, as intricately arranged (a graphic illustration would help here, but currently I only have it in my head; maybe sometime later). These are our “conscious thoughts”. They are generated internally, by mechanisms we can not fathom, and are only accessible to us on the very outer layer. Perfect; the subconscious is vast and inaccessible, and the conscious is that thin layer on top.

Okay, that actually took longer than I expected… I have two other examples in mind, but I will defer continuing to another post. Before concluding for today, I’ll just note them here:

2. No more need to understand everything

3. Death

I hope you are still with me, and interested enough to stick around until I elaborate on these two.

Peace to all.