6 ms·

Not just code bases, but it is useful to think of large planet scale systems in organic terms. https://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/6972614229/large-computer-syst

Not just code bases, but it is useful to think of large planet scale systems in organic terms. https://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/6972614229/large-computer-systems-are-organic https://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/6972614229/large-computer-...

goldenkey 7y ago
Might as well just ask the question: What is Life? And then realize that scale of space or time is irrelevant. A galaxy could be thinking like a brain, except thoughts travel light years, are mainly dictated by GR (Light and Gravity), and take eons to actually occur. I think it's clear that the only meaningful nature of scale in time and space for life is just the one we artificially put on it, because of our conscious experience. LOTR and other fantasy explore this with the idea of trees having much wisdom having lived so long.
- dwaltrip 7y ago
  I once saw a comment similar to yours on HN, and there was a very good reply that critiqued the idea. I'll do my best to replicate something along the same lines. If we look at the total potential lifetime "clock cycles" of a system, and compare that number to systems that we know are considered intelligent and capable of thinking, it might shed light on the plausibility. It takes information 100,000 years to cross the galaxy, and the universe is 14 billion years old (the galaxy is younger, but not enough to matter for this), so roughly a maximum number of 100,000 round trips could have possibly occurred in this "galactic brain". Let's use a very conservative metric, such as how long it takes a human to blink in response to stimuli (about 100 ms), for our "human clock cycle". If a human lives for 80 years, that is about 2.5 billion seconds, or 25 billion clock cycles. This is roughly 7 orders of magnitude (10s of millions) more than in the galactic brain. This gives the a very loose impression that a such system would probably have not have enough information flow or feedback loop cycles to "think" anything interesting. Of course, this a very rough heuristic, but I think it is interesting and useful. The idea of unexpected or strange "thinking systems" is very cool and we should continue to explore it, but there are certainly some hard constraints defining the space of such systems.
  - nikki93 7y ago
    Wouldn't this just mean that we happen to be in a young universe?
    - dwaltrip 7y ago
      Sure, it could be possible that unusual forms of thinking systems could form given much longer timespans. However, there are probably many other factors besides simply besides the number of "clock cycles" that constrain the circumstances under which such systems can form. For example: the computational and communicative capabilities of each node in the system. I can't imagine any "node" analogous to the human neuron that could form a thinking system spanning large regions of space. For example, stars don't seem to have any complex information processing or messaging capabilities.
  - eberkund 7y ago
    That assumes that for a "thought/cycle" to occur, information would have to traverse the system from corner to corner. It is possible, that most thoughts can come about in localized areas independently.
    - dwaltrip 7y ago
      But wouldn't that be more of a loosely connected and mostly independent set of localized "brains", as opposed to some sort of "galactic brain"?
  - goldenkey 7y ago
    That's a good point. I don't have time to double-check your numbers but I will assume they are correct. My only rebuttal (if I'm to take an opposing position), would be that different organisms have different clock-cycles, an example would be organic life, hummingbird metabolism versus elephant or whale metabolism. I don't know if their brains are also faster, but since their reaction speeds do seem to be connected to their metabolic rate, it's probably the case. Considering architecture, the way intelligence is being created through Machine Learning is through cellular units that carry large amounts of information digitally instead of oscillating analog signalling. In fact, I found that when building cellular automata, black-white automatas are elegant in theoretics, but when it comes to what will deliver the most complex/intelligent dynamics on a GPU, it is using each cell/pixel as a complex number, floating point, or vector of such types. The GPU can do so much with single units, so it makes sense to use its full potential. It's possible that the encoding/signalling of galaxies is similar. Clock speed only has to be as fast as things you _can_ react to. Can a galaxy move fast enough to dodge an asteroid? Likely not. It'd probably be enlightening to know more about how the brains of larger, slower animals such as elephants or whales operate. Their "clock speeds" might shed some light on what kind of parameter ranges life operates within. EDIT: one more thing I thought of is that it's very possible that the living stage of the larger structures of our universe is simply young, adolescent in nature. Perhaps we are living at a time when the intelligent behemoths among us, or rather, that we are apart of, are of their first generation. I agree though, it's more unlikely to be seeing the head or tail of a distribution than somewhere in the middle. But we should not rule out young, large intelligences.
- nikki93 7y ago
  This is now one of my favorite comments on hacker news. Thanks! I've been wondering -- how to recreate this feeling in an MMO? We can definitely have scale changes by letting people zoom in or out and changing their character avatar size and walk speed accordingly. But changing apparent time is hard. Unless you can "zoom in," program a bot, then zoom out and then it's running at a faster rate then you zoom in and see a new civilization it created, etc.
  - goldenkey 7y ago
    Thanks. I am flattered :-) That would be an awesome theme for a game. Be a cell, an insect, a tree/ent, a human, a planet, or a galaxy. Change the scale of time and space, watch civilizations rise and fall. It's an epic thought. Would probably be a very hard game to program though.
- crimsonalucard 7y ago
  There's no isomorphism between life and the galaxy. Life requires a mechanism for mutation replication in order to facilitate natural selection and the lowering of entropy in a local system. The galaxy overall doesn't exhibit a single one of these properties at a high level. Entropy is rising and there is no mechanism for mutation let alone replication.
  - goldenkey 7y ago
    There's an isomorphism between life and stable structures. Most stable structures seem to be plentiful, and it isn't obvious whether it is because of nucleation/replication or because of independent emergence. There are plenty of galactic objects that beget other galactic objects in a self-propagating chain. Just look at what stars produce, and what stars form out of. Similar mechanisms apply to galaxy clusters. Are you familiar with prions? Well, their form of reproduction _is_ nucleation.

goldenkey 7y ago

Might as well just ask the question: What is Life? And then realize that scale of space or time is irrelevant. A galaxy could be thinking like a brain, except thoughts travel light years, are mainly dictated by GR (Light and Gravity), and take eons to actually occur. I think it's clear that the only meaningful nature of scale in time and space for life is just the one we artificially put on it, because of our conscious experience. LOTR and other fantasy explore this with the idea of trees having much wisdom having lived so long.

dwaltrip 7y ago
I once saw a comment similar to yours on HN, and there was a very good reply that critiqued the idea. I'll do my best to replicate something along the same lines. If we look at the total potential lifetime "clock cycles" of a system, and compare that number to systems that we know are considered intelligent and capable of thinking, it might shed light on the plausibility. It takes information 100,000 years to cross the galaxy, and the universe is 14 billion years old (the galaxy is younger, but not enough to matter for this), so roughly a maximum number of 100,000 round trips could have possibly occurred in this "galactic brain". Let's use a very conservative metric, such as how long it takes a human to blink in response to stimuli (about 100 ms), for our "human clock cycle". If a human lives for 80 years, that is about 2.5 billion seconds, or 25 billion clock cycles. This is roughly 7 orders of magnitude (10s of millions) more than in the galactic brain. This gives the a very loose impression that a such system would probably have not have enough information flow or feedback loop cycles to "think" anything interesting. Of course, this a very rough heuristic, but I think it is interesting and useful. The idea of unexpected or strange "thinking systems" is very cool and we should continue to explore it, but there are certainly some hard constraints defining the space of such systems.
- nikki93 7y ago
  Wouldn't this just mean that we happen to be in a young universe?
  - dwaltrip 7y ago
    Sure, it could be possible that unusual forms of thinking systems could form given much longer timespans. However, there are probably many other factors besides simply besides the number of "clock cycles" that constrain the circumstances under which such systems can form. For example: the computational and communicative capabilities of each node in the system. I can't imagine any "node" analogous to the human neuron that could form a thinking system spanning large regions of space. For example, stars don't seem to have any complex information processing or messaging capabilities.
- eberkund 7y ago
  That assumes that for a "thought/cycle" to occur, information would have to traverse the system from corner to corner. It is possible, that most thoughts can come about in localized areas independently.
  - dwaltrip 7y ago
    But wouldn't that be more of a loosely connected and mostly independent set of localized "brains", as opposed to some sort of "galactic brain"?
- goldenkey 7y ago
  That's a good point. I don't have time to double-check your numbers but I will assume they are correct. My only rebuttal (if I'm to take an opposing position), would be that different organisms have different clock-cycles, an example would be organic life, hummingbird metabolism versus elephant or whale metabolism. I don't know if their brains are also faster, but since their reaction speeds do seem to be connected to their metabolic rate, it's probably the case. Considering architecture, the way intelligence is being created through Machine Learning is through cellular units that carry large amounts of information digitally instead of oscillating analog signalling. In fact, I found that when building cellular automata, black-white automatas are elegant in theoretics, but when it comes to what will deliver the most complex/intelligent dynamics on a GPU, it is using each cell/pixel as a complex number, floating point, or vector of such types. The GPU can do so much with single units, so it makes sense to use its full potential. It's possible that the encoding/signalling of galaxies is similar. Clock speed only has to be as fast as things you _can_ react to. Can a galaxy move fast enough to dodge an asteroid? Likely not. It'd probably be enlightening to know more about how the brains of larger, slower animals such as elephants or whales operate. Their "clock speeds" might shed some light on what kind of parameter ranges life operates within. EDIT: one more thing I thought of is that it's very possible that the living stage of the larger structures of our universe is simply young, adolescent in nature. Perhaps we are living at a time when the intelligent behemoths among us, or rather, that we are apart of, are of their first generation. I agree though, it's more unlikely to be seeing the head or tail of a distribution than somewhere in the middle. But we should not rule out young, large intelligences.
nikki93 7y ago
This is now one of my favorite comments on hacker news. Thanks! I've been wondering -- how to recreate this feeling in an MMO? We can definitely have scale changes by letting people zoom in or out and changing their character avatar size and walk speed accordingly. But changing apparent time is hard. Unless you can "zoom in," program a bot, then zoom out and then it's running at a faster rate then you zoom in and see a new civilization it created, etc.
- goldenkey 7y ago
  Thanks. I am flattered :-) That would be an awesome theme for a game. Be a cell, an insect, a tree/ent, a human, a planet, or a galaxy. Change the scale of time and space, watch civilizations rise and fall. It's an epic thought. Would probably be a very hard game to program though.
crimsonalucard 7y ago
There's no isomorphism between life and the galaxy. Life requires a mechanism for mutation replication in order to facilitate natural selection and the lowering of entropy in a local system. The galaxy overall doesn't exhibit a single one of these properties at a high level. Entropy is rising and there is no mechanism for mutation let alone replication.
- goldenkey 7y ago
  There's an isomorphism between life and stable structures. Most stable structures seem to be plentiful, and it isn't obvious whether it is because of nucleation/replication or because of independent emergence. There are plenty of galactic objects that beget other galactic objects in a self-propagating chain. Just look at what stars produce, and what stars form out of. Similar mechanisms apply to galaxy clusters. Are you familiar with prions? Well, their form of reproduction _is_ nucleation.