Comment by narag
3 years ago
I don't know, but let me point the obvious: it feels very weird that fundamental things are so complicated.
Somehow I want to think that there's a much simpler layer underneath and all this imperfection comes as a second order side effect.
Plato's cave seems the relevant meme. But is it really complexity a side effect or, as you suggest, is simplicity a side effect of our minds' pattern matching preferences?
I can sympathize with this. I love discovering some generalization that subsumes all the complexity. But what if we follow this to its extreme? Suppose we find the one perfect symbol that precipitates all other concepts? What then does that symbol even do but just reflect or perturb its environment? Isn't that just like moving the goalposts? Makes me think of the concept of Kolmogorov complexity. That's the idea that the informational content of some signal is equivalent to the length of the shortest computer program that can produce it. But what interprets the program? And how complex is that thing? It's all circular. And I'm not sure there's really a way out of that. It's just an inherent feature of looking at the universe conceptually.
This evokes thoughts of 3-LISP and what is, to me, one of the most compellingly titled papers in CS: "The Mystery of the Tower Revealed"[0]
[0]https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/319838.319871
> is simplicity a side effect of our minds' pattern matching preferences?
That's a good point and I tend to think so. Think about this: pretty much everything (any object or property we observe) is an abstraction. People talk about people who are bad at abstracting and we know what they mean, but actually everyone is abstracting everything. Our actual experience without abstraction is just a bunch of unassociated colors and sensations and whatnot.