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From 2013-12-10: Commentary on the book by David Deutsch

This commentary provided the root of what later became my "streaming" model for reality.

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Comments on: The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch

Huge agreement on a lot of things in this book, and one of the best books I've yet read. It is certainly a top-shelfer with lots of very succinct true stuff in it.

Ideas to explore further:

• Deep derivation - An important mode of creation especially as contrasted with "design". Living things are deeply derived, while wristwatches, computers, and software are designed.
  • Deeply derived things develop ever greater degrees of intrinsic purpose as they evolve, whereas designed things can only ever have the extrinsic purpose of their designer or user.
  • Designed things can be repurposed, but only to their reduced intended value. Can we formalize what is meant by this? Designed things are brittle. Small variations in their structure can cause total system failure. Much detailed analysis and control are employed to construct designed things in order to rule out structural anomalies. Designed things are testable against their asserted functional purpose.
  • Designed things are designed in abstraction, not in reality, ie. they are imagined first. They are then fabricated or implemented in reality. Note that the reality of software is in a different creation domain than the computer it runs on. The computer is fabricated by rearranging matter to meet the design. The software rearranges bits to meet the design. The loaded memory of computers is a different creation domain than the universe. They represent different meanings of reality, but both can be seen as real.
  • Deeply derived things are not imagined first. They emerge from a series of implementations which result from "experience encoded".
• Implications of Design-at-the-Root - Design-at-the-root is synonymous with the idea that Plato espoused, the idea that there are perfect forms of everything to which all of existence seeks to attain. It's synonymous with the idea of a creator-by-design, a God who in full knowledge of the full detail of all of existence, implemented his design in the form of the universe. The experience of being from design is very different from the experience of being from derivation:
  • In a design paradigm, existence is a struggle against the law of entropy, which itself becomes a synonym for evil. Life in this paradigm is experienced as either a continual failure to attain, or a forced and embattled retreat from perfection into dissolution, decay, and eventual death. In this latter sense, it's a losing cause, and provides every reason to be "conservative" in every important meaning of the term. It also sets up a sense of hope for becoming perfect, but achieving the kind of perfection which cannot be corrupted by existence implies a being must actually become free of existence itself, thereby to take on a state of pure form without the messy implications of actual being.
    • The basic flaws in this perspective have been much written of, and include the clear fact that a person cannot be him or herself independent of his or her deeply derived context.
  • Some people are worried about being here under some reason other than their own. But then others feel very nervous about being without a purpose held in charge by an ultimate authority (God). This may be a great practical and undetected test of the person's base paradigm. Can any libertarian be a Platonist?
  • In a derived paradigm, synthesis is known to win the war, even if a single battle might be one ending in dissolution. The future is open and positive. It is the infinite view...
  • In the sense of Finite and Infinite Games (book by Carse), the design paradigm is analogous in many important ways with the finite paradigm. Design is like training in that its results are brittle and with limited application. Design is entirely focused on a defined end-game or goal. Design's implementation is something like achieving a title.
  • In the same sense, the derivation paradigm is like the infinite paradigm. Education (presented as representing the infinite paradigm) is a way to establish contact with the depth of one's derivation of context, and as such is a preparation for an open future of further derivation. There is no end-game or identified goal in the derivation paradigm, it is never complete and therefore infinite. Laurels and titles are hard to come by when you're participating in the derivation process.
• Design vs Depth, and the Path of Entanglement in Time - Something which is designed remains fungible with all which has been made by the same design. Consider two iPads, identically designed and constructed, each representing a very high degree of complexity as perfectly replicated as possible, each instantiating a very detailed design. Despite their complexity, they are fungible, designed to be so, and yet they are intentionally "universal", or at least as much so as their designers could enable. And so they each have the potential to evolve their identities. Yet it is only when they become used in the separate courses of their existence in the world that they cease to be interchangeable. An example of paths considered:
  • Early on each iPad receives a separate serial number; no big deal, but the first form of divergence. They are real after all, and they are identical only by design and class.
  • They are packaged up in their separate but indistinguishable packages (except for the SN stickers on the box), and sent to the same store.
  • Then each is bought by a separate owner. The owners open the boxes and the iPads remain fungible.
  • Then the owners load separate apps and make separate configurations and we begin to see important forms of divergence. Now neither owner would swap readily with the other for fear of losing the work they'd put in to configuring and installing apps on those machines to their liking. They have lost their fungibility.
  • As data is recorded on those iPads, pictures taken, high scores achieved, files viewed, browser histories laid down, etc. these iPads become increasingly divergent from each other, and meaningful as individuals separate and apart from each other. Now if you steal one of these iPads, the iPad's value as a device is far less than its value as a tool in the hands of its owner. Note that as a tool in the hands of anyone else, it has not gained much value, perhaps none at all or even a small depreciation vs. its value as a new device. Thus the iPad's entanglement with the owner, its most important mode of entanglement, is the root of its value.
  • A curious thing about iPads is that they can be backed up and wiped and restored. Thus there is a means to capture the entire uniqueness of an iPad and then reset the device to its fungible state.
• Time as Entanglement Vector - In some other writing we talked about the few ways time can be perceived by an observer. Perhaps a generalization of those methods would be depth or persistence of entanglement. Exploring this further, consider that derivation is a process of the furtherance of entanglement into higher and higher emergent levels of new order. This is exactly what we mean by "creation" through derivation. Quantum dynamics become entangled into stable atoms or molecules. Those become reassembled into more complex compounds. Those then assemble into structural components which have a role in cells. The cells are entwined into organs and organisms. The organisms develop brains, which entangle massive numbers of connections built on the smaller components. Those brains then generate wave patterns to encode models of experience, and these patterns become building blocks, further entangled with others, to become ideas, imaginations, theories. The point here is that these things take time. Each level of assembly of complex organization depends on the steady establishment of its components, sometimes through synthesis in a top-down system context, sometimes in blind affinitive scenarios.
• Creation domains - The material universe is the creation domain of deeply derived biological beings, as well as the creation domain of the wristwatch. Another creation domain is that of abstract thought; it provides the domain for the creation of things like mathematics and theology. Another creation domain is where computer software runs. Hypothetically, suitable creation domains (what makes them suitable?) could support deep derivation, but what are the limits and potentials of such deeply derived creations and how are these affected by the domain's properties? Would something like "language capacity of humans" be a creation domain in which languages are deeply derived? It's worth exploring just what constitutes a creation domain and how one can evaluate its fecundity or ability to support deep derivation. We can assume that any creation domain (however we can define it) supports design-mode creation. Perhaps that in itself is nearly a working definition for a creation domain.
• Intentional Creation as real - Consider "intended creation" as contrasted with 1) unvalidated imagination and 2) unintended consequences. Can a being deeply derived enough to become an apparent creator choose to create one thing or another? What do we mean by "an apparent creator"? Let's say creation as we do it only occurs in our imaginations, which seems correct. Can creation within an immaterial domain be "real" creation? What about when that immaterial domain is deeply derived to model the universal domain and it is hard wired to deeply derived "peripherals" which are quite functional within that universal domain? We got us sentient, creative, primate, fallible creators, aka Humans. But by no means would humans be the only ones. One really wonders about just what choice is, because it's clear that choice is intentional creation, and it calls into question the idea of purposes in a whole new way.
• Fungible entities and Quantum mysteries - So, quantum particles are non-local as long as they are fungible. If they lose their fungibility they can gain their identity. In other words, they become entangled and committed to a mode of material existence, and in so doing take on depth as well as position and momentum and such. What they lose in the process is their one-ness with the source. This is an important hint about how I resolve the "paradox" of the non-locality of a photon traversing a 2-path quantum differentiated course and ending up in the detected state of being where it could not have been without the other path having also been traversed. There is no such thing as a "single photon". Instead there is an advancing field of EM energy. It also provides a strong hint about the nature of all creation, and the issue of "a separated aspect of one-ness" "enfolded in mystery". It is important to notice the fallacy in the assumption that embedded within an aggregation of fungible quantum particles there are any particles or quanta at all. In fact, until entangled, it would seem there are NO PARTICLES AT ALL! In other words, it's not correct to think of a quantum field or potential as a collection of fungible particles. That fallacy is, I think, at the root of the silly need to assert a multiversal explanation. As the quantum world presents its fields and potentials, they aren't discrete particles, but rather potentials for interaction. Only when the interactions occur do the quantizations become meaningful. All it means is that entanglements/interactions between these quantum fields and real matter happen in discrete quanta which we then identify as particles.

Where we differ

I think the areas in which we differ are only because he's still thinking about some of the things I've already been looking into. Had I written the book he'd be able to correct mine in similar ways.

In Chapter 4 Creation, he talks about how there's a watch vs a rock found in a field. The watch's existence gives clear evidence of its having been created by a creator for a purpose. He talks of its design being hard to vary. Later on he seems to advocate that in some parallel universe or somewhere in our own infinite universe there must be the exact same watch but lacking one of its gears. This silly talk about how there could be every configuration of the universe, including one which varies from this one only in that the cog is missing in the watch. That's because that watch's

designed

configuration is deeply derived (note here we mean the designer and his or her purposes are deeply derived, as is the design, while the watch itself is not deeply derived, but rather designed), and as such NO random mutation of the universe is going to produce everything the same except for just that. That's because there's an awful lot about that watch which loses all meaning if it weren't surrounded by all the other parts of the watch in their appropriate form. It's the same crap when they talk about a universe containing only one physicist's brain

and nothing else at all

. That kind of stuff is ridiculous because all structure, including actively and passively designed structure, necessarily exists in a full context. It's in this sense that we recognize the

deep derivation

of certain types of things.