I recently added a new antidepressant to my stack, it ended up giving me a bad case of serotonin poisoning.
The immediate consequence was an incredibly lurid case of hallucinations which involved dancing shapes everywhere. My visual perception of things was bombarded by platonic shapes being layered onto everything, coalescing into vague but animated silhouettes of faces and bodies. Rotating pink triangles, bouncing blue squares, pulsing green circles can make of the majority of most outlines surprisingly - you get the idea, linear transformations of basic shapes with random colors can approximate a good deal of objects at a distance. The "engine" here felt like a bunch of symmetric rotations (abstract algebra) coupled with linear transformations (linear algebra) through a stochastic process of selecting colors (stochastic clustering?). Brain's firing all on cylinders so I'm surprised to see not only one intensive heuristic at play, but that they're all subtly feeding into each other. If video game graphics can make up surprisingly realistic depictions using only triangle meshes, this is basically a strictly 2D representation that takes advantage of the fact that we have two cameras, and that circles can be approximated from points without having to compute anti-aliasing.
Not enough to be there, but enough to be perceived. Not very fun. Best way to describe it, I suspect my visual cortex processes information by layering geometric objects and softening them until it's able to perceive a kind of eigenrepresentation of the object, and overactive stimulation just amps up the process until maybe they're not so soft.
I ended up riding it out because it was more annoying than scary and my doctor prescribed me something different.
To draw attention to the content of the article:
Constructor theory is interesting. I've often wondered, okay sure there are these mathematical foundations of understanding the language of the universe. What at all allows them to interact with each other? Are they even separate at all? If you read about the history of math, you know that most of math is born from saying something's impossible, so then naturally how does the computational engine of the brain have these processes running around until we can eke out symbols to describe them?
Example: You can jump around in calculus to algebra to trigonometry and so on with a few identities and theorems, but to what extent is all of mathematics connected to each other, paradoxes aside. I suspect organisms and existences are living proofs, dynamic formal systems only capable of understanding what our foundations are capable of computing. Not only is life and reality necessary from a mathematical perspective, it went out of its way to prove it.
Math seems difficult because it takes time and energy. Many people don't experience sufficient time to "get" math lessons, and they fall behind as the teacher moves on. Many move on to study more complex concepts with a shaky foundation. We often end up with a weak structure that is doomed to collapse at some point.
It's interesting, because I've always found (personally) that I didn't really understand any mathematics until it became a foundational tool for another form of math I needed to use. Although I took courses with proofs, they never really helped (I'm more engineer than mathematician). Notation is a huge help (and can be a hindrance) in grasping the
So Addn<Multiply<Trig<Algebra<Calculus<ODE<PDE... unfortunately, I don't consider myself to have really learned PDEs although I can work with them. It's interesting to work with someone who CAN solve a novel PDE analytically, since their tool set is larger and they have real intuition.
It's true that people fall behind in math, but the bright side is that since knowledge isn't a physical structure, you can always go back and strengthen the foundations later.
Plenty of theories have been useful before mathematical foundations could be built for them. Newton and Leibniz developed calculus long before it could be given proper axiomatic foundations. If a theory turns out to be unsupportable, science abandons it and moves on, scavenging any useful ideas.
Maybe knowledge is more like a web than a building that strictly has to be built from the bottom up.
The immediate consequence was an incredibly lurid case of hallucinations which involved dancing shapes everywhere. My visual perception of things was bombarded by platonic shapes being layered onto everything, coalescing into vague but animated silhouettes of faces and bodies. Rotating pink triangles, bouncing blue squares, pulsing green circles can make of the majority of most outlines surprisingly - you get the idea, linear transformations of basic shapes with random colors can approximate a good deal of objects at a distance. The "engine" here felt like a bunch of symmetric rotations (abstract algebra) coupled with linear transformations (linear algebra) through a stochastic process of selecting colors (stochastic clustering?). Brain's firing all on cylinders so I'm surprised to see not only one intensive heuristic at play, but that they're all subtly feeding into each other. If video game graphics can make up surprisingly realistic depictions using only triangle meshes, this is basically a strictly 2D representation that takes advantage of the fact that we have two cameras, and that circles can be approximated from points without having to compute anti-aliasing.
Not enough to be there, but enough to be perceived. Not very fun. Best way to describe it, I suspect my visual cortex processes information by layering geometric objects and softening them until it's able to perceive a kind of eigenrepresentation of the object, and overactive stimulation just amps up the process until maybe they're not so soft.
I ended up riding it out because it was more annoying than scary and my doctor prescribed me something different.
To draw attention to the content of the article:
Constructor theory is interesting. I've often wondered, okay sure there are these mathematical foundations of understanding the language of the universe. What at all allows them to interact with each other? Are they even separate at all? If you read about the history of math, you know that most of math is born from saying something's impossible, so then naturally how does the computational engine of the brain have these processes running around until we can eke out symbols to describe them?
Example: You can jump around in calculus to algebra to trigonometry and so on with a few identities and theorems, but to what extent is all of mathematics connected to each other, paradoxes aside. I suspect organisms and existences are living proofs, dynamic formal systems only capable of understanding what our foundations are capable of computing. Not only is life and reality necessary from a mathematical perspective, it went out of its way to prove it.