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That is not necessarily true. Just because you can serialize a set of ideas does not mean that they can be interpreted or understood in their serialized form al
by hyperion2010 11y ago
That is not necessarily true. Just because you can serialize a set of ideas does not mean that they can be interpreted or understood in their serialized form alone. You almost always require a parser that has some structure which will convert the serialized ideas into something with significantly higher dimensionality where it can actually be understood and operated on.
Just because I can write down a function (using only a single dimension) that operates on 10 dimensional data doesn't somehow imply that the data is suddenly one dimensional.
- javajosh 11y agoYour understanding of the non-serialized form is itself serialized, in the sense that something in your mind is stepping the simulation. You might not perceive it, but intellectually I'm sure you know that's what's happening (unless you subscribe to some non-physical description of the mind).
- hyperion2010 11y agoI would say that the physical processes that underlie our mental representations of concepts are fundamentally not serialized (part of why it is often so hard to put thoughts into words). They are non local in the sense that many different actors can operate on the data at the same time to create or modify some higher dimensional state and are not necessarily contingent on prior state in the way parsing is. You can't really parse a paper by reading every paragraph at the same time. Even if you could do it physically, some ordering would have to be applied to interpret subsequent parts based on statements in earlier parts. Representations in the brain have no such inherent limitation on ordering.
- javajosh 11y agoWhether or not the brain is "really" parallel, with a fast enough computer you can simulate parallelism. So our "understanding" is either one-dimensional, or isomorphic to a one-dimensional process.
- nitrogen 11y agoHow many variables are part of this simulation? Are those not dimensions?
- javajosh 11y agoYou can impose a one-dimensional ordering on a finite state of any size. Drawing a parabola, for instance, yields a 2-D figure. But the process that draws it (on a computer) is 1-D: Start at the origin Move right X Move up X*X Make a dot If X = Screen.Width Stop X=X+1 Repeat There you go: a 2-D thing from a discrete sequence of 1-D steps. I hope you can see that it generalizes to N-D things.
- hyperion2010 11y agoI think the question here, which has been raised in other parts of the comments here, is what the complexity of the operation to serialize/deserialize is and how one might think about translating between computational complexity and dimensionality.
- javajosh 11y agoMy contention is that all things are understood one step at a time, and I believe this is influencing theoretical physics in a way that the theoreticians themselves are not fully aware of. Especially Wolfram's theory.