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I 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 t
by hyperion2010 11y ago
I 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.