Born to Do Math 179 – Convergent Precision and Imprecision in the Perception
August 1, 2020
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: In the last couple of sessions, we have been pushing towards the idea of the universe as an association engine in which things cluster over time. Hydrogen atoms fuse into heavier elements. Hydrogen gas clusters into stars and galaxies. You start off, in a Big Bang sense, with a largely homogenous distribution of simple matter. Three-quarters Hydrogen, one-quarter Helium, with some anisotropy, some small irregularities leading to clusters forming over time. These clusters being galaxies and stars. In the stars, the stuff boils down further. Hydrogen into Helium into heavier elements. Everything gets tighter and tighter. These tighter things are, looked at informationally, information being made when things fuse. This thing connected to this thing. It releases a photon that, more or less, lets the entire universe lets this entire this happen. At the same time, the universe knows itself. There are precise things happening.
Jacobsen: There are imprecise things happening too.
Rosner: Yes, the universe knows what is going on in general about itself. Things are defined fairly precisely, locally, but the local information doesn’t make it to the rest of the universe. We were talking about how in a star. You’ve got 10^68th ‘atoms’ or what would be atoms if not ionized, so nuclei. They are bouncing around fusing. It doesn’t really matter in terms of the overall structure of the star which Hydrogen atom fuses with which other Hydrogen atom. Specific events happen, but the record is not permanent. Stuff is bouncing around everywhere. It is fusing down, fusing down. There is probably not an exact history detectable where it is learnable for all these nuclei; these 10^68th particles.
But you have a rough record, which says, “It’s a star. After 8,000,000,000 years, it has used 2/3rds of its Hydrogen.” That rough description is apparent to the rest of the galaxy and, to some extent, the universe. The universe is precise in its interactions, but not precise in its record-keeping and still manages to define itself, where the individual particles in the universe have a really tiny blur to them. They are precisely defined even if their histories are not precisely preserved. So, the universe defines itself and perceives the information it contains in a rough and flexible way, which is not unlike what happens in a computer.
All the calculations in a computer are precisely recorded. The computer can forget previous calculations. Maybe, there’s time machine in windows, where you can go back and find out what was happening at your computer at any given time. When you are playing a game, I don’t know if there is a precise recording of every game. I don’t know if that would have to be. Anyway, part of our precision is a preservation of every previous moment. The universe doesn’t work that way; it doesn’t have to work that way. It is part of the flexibility of the universe as an information processor and a place for us to live. If there was precise knowledge of everything all the time in the universe, I’m not sure there’d be enough flexibility for the two things to be happening at once: The universe processing information and being a material place in which stuff evolves.
Jacobsen: With the universe as an association engine, I want to take two views. One is the galaxy forming, stars and other materials are being sloughed off, all over the place, then being picked up by another galaxy or something. Other stuff is like higher-level elements being formed. There is a lot of waste in the formation of the elements. So, more energy goes into making them than is in them, as stuff is sloughed. What part there is less computer-like and more association-like? What is the appropriate, common way of representing this idea laid out?
Rosner: There’s a lot of information in the clustering and the way these determine the shape of space and the distribution of matter within space because, if the universe works the way our minds work, then you can pull up memories and other associations. You can throw stuff into a central awareness because this is efficient for finding new associations, which can be helpful for the mind figuring out what is going on and what to do next. So, the associative net needs to be able to efficiently pull up the best associations; the things that needs to understand stuff and know stuff to come to new conclusions, and not bad ones. The associative net must have a lot to do with the filaments, the large-scale structures, in the universe, which lets the universe pull strings and pull stuff back in when appropriate.
But that whole system has a lot of flexibility of sloppiness in it. In the way two people can have a similar of idea of what the colour “red” is, while having similar associative nets for the colour red based on culture, growing up, the century or decade, everyone has roughly the same idea – unless, they are colour blind – of what the colour “red” is. You can have a colour spectrum of the reddest reds. Everyone would cluster. It is the same more or less the same. But everyone’s association nets of the colour “red” are different. There is a difference with all leading to the same conclusion that this is the colour “red,” but having the same rough information content.
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Authors[1]
American Television Writer
(Updated July 25, 2019)
*High range testing (HRT) should be taken with honest skepticism grounded in the limited empirical development of the field at present, even in spite of honest and sincere efforts. If a higher general intelligence score, then the greater the variability in, and margin of error in, the general intelligence scores because of the greater rarity in the population.*
According to some semi-reputable sources gathered in a listing here, Rick G. Rosner may have among America’s, North America’s, and the world’s highest measured IQs at or above 190 (S.D. 15)/196 (S.D. 16) based on several high range test performances created by Christopher Harding, Jason Betts, Paul Cooijmans, and Ronald Hoeflin. He earned 12 years of college credit in less than a year and graduated with the equivalent of 8 majors. He has received 8 Writers Guild Awards and Emmy nominations, and was titled 2013 North American Genius of the Year by The World Genius Directory with the main “Genius” listing here.
He has written for Remote Control, Crank Yankers, The Man Show, The Emmys, The Grammys, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He worked as a bouncer, a nude art model, a roller-skating waiter, and a stripper. In a television commercial, Domino’s Pizza named him the “World’s Smartest Man.” The commercial was taken off the air after Subway sandwiches issued a cease-and-desist. He was named “Best Bouncer” in the Denver Area, Colorado, by Westwood Magazine.
Rosner spent much of the late Disco Era as an undercover high school student. In addition, he spent 25 years as a bar bouncer and American fake ID-catcher, and 25+ years as a stripper, and nearly 30 years as a writer for more than 2,500 hours of network television. Errol Morris featured Rosner in the interview series entitled First Person, where some of this history was covered by Morris. He came in second, or lost, on Jeopardy!, sued Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? over a flawed question and lost the lawsuit. He won one game and lost one game on Are You Smarter Than a Drunk Person? (He was drunk). Finally, he spent 37+ years working on a time-invariant variation of the Big Bang Theory.
Currently, Rosner sits tweeting in a bathrobe (winter) or a towel (summer). He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife, dog, and goldfish. He and his wife have a daughter. You can send him money or questions at LanceVersusRick@Gmail.Com, or a direct message via Twitter, or find him on LinkedIn, or see him on YouTube.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
Footnotes
[1] Four format points for the session article:
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- Humble, A. (n.d.). Guide to Transcribing. Retrieved from http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Transcription%20Guide.pdf.
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