All the Questions You Wanted to Discuss as a Computer Science Student but Didn’t Because You Were Too Busy Solving Problems

If there is an equivalence between regular languages and finite automata, then what does that mean for the patterns you yourself recognize? Indeed, doesn't it mean that, whenever you recognize anything at all, all you ever witness are automata? Your friend is an automaton, your carpet is an automaton, each one of your thoughts is. So the interesting question isn't so much whether the brain is like a computer, after all. Rather, it's what is Turing-complete and what isn't; about what's context-free and what's context-sensitive. It's about what each language can do over time and over space.

The point being, even the most sophisticated cognitive process is effectively behaving like a finite automaton over a chunk of its input. Just realizing this simple thing already does wonders for the understanding; already makes plenty of academic disciplines very confusing to me personally. And it makes plenty of public discussions very strange, as though we weren't really living on the same planet after all.

And so, thinking like this, all that is known is actually a language, because the unifying principle is that it is known. You see that all these automata form natural hierarchies because of constraints. And the constraints are there because those are part of the patterns as they appear, "manifest themselves" I suppose you could say. So then, shouldn't you be interested in the question of whether all of this can arise through pure chance alone? Whether existence is a mathematical necessity.

And if it is a necessity, then which of all the possibilities you can think of, using your imagination, couldn't possibly exist, couldn't be absolutely and fully real?

I was contemplating the other day, staring at the wall of my apartment, and I had this very compelling flash of insight occur to me. I thought about information again. I thought about the self again.

Specifically, I thought about what is known about the self, and I understood that all that is known is that "I am experiencing this". Then, following along, I realized that all experiencing beings have this exact same experience about the self. And you know what they say about "looks like a duck, quacks like a duck". If everything you know about it matches exactly, then it is that – well, it is that for you anyway. But truth and your truth are one and the same, because you have to believe in it for you to think it's the truth, after all. Anything other than that is just pretend play.

And by the way, how could you have any other kind of a concept of identity? It's that all the visible data either matches perfectly or doesn't. And if you know all of it's not visible, then you simply don't know if it's a match. Don't you see there's no truth more global for you than that?

In other words, discernment. A and not B. Two symbols in a string. Two nodes in a graph. Two different numbers.

So for you, it is the same self everywhere. The universal self. Every being holds a reference, as it were, to that same object – that same number. The one that is nowhere to be found.

So, does reincarnation exist, for example? Sure it does. It has to. But does it not exist? That's also true. It does and it does not. Whether this is the kind of reality where it does not, that I do not know. But can you see how that's irrelevant to you?

It's irrelevant, because of the universal self. Whether you occupy one of those realities where reincarnation exists doesn't matter, because the same self experiences both kinds of realities anyway.

Win some, lose some, I suppose.

Another way to arrive at a similar conclusion is the following thread.

You take your brain and you realize that it's not the self, and you zoom in. Is it that region of the brain, or that? No. So you zoom in some more. Is it that cell? That atom? No. Well, okay, you take the other direction: you zoom out. You never find the self that way either, but you start to notice that however much you zoom in or out, you're always bound by the fact that you are experiencing it. So you are nowhere and everywhere. But you know it would be a logical contradiction to believe that you don't exist, because you know you do. Otherwise we wouldn't have this discussion (I wouldn't be rambling about anything on the internet). And the only other option is that you are everywhere. In every single experience. And, the only way to even grasp at the other is to realize that sometimes, you are surprised.

That's the good old "there's the things you know, things you don't know, and the things you don't know you don't know."

A disturbing realization. Almost like, *gasp*, like that freaky internet guy is some kind of nihilist! Or a solipsist, I don't know. Too long since I heard those words in high school and now I am at the mercies of those who call themselves philosophers, and priests.

Well, really I'm not. But there's no meaningful discussion, that's for certain.

And another thing.

Whether this is one of those kinds of realities where something retains a memory of the past, I do not know. It is difficult to tell apart what is a memory, and what is real. Nothing happens in the past anymore, as they say. So whether you merely have the experience of remembering something now of the past or whether you truly remember something as it happened, it couldn't make any difference, could it? You couldn't possibly fool yourself by believing something that is not actually real, right?

Well, if all you care about is achieving your goals, then it doesn't make a difference. Any claim about the past is fine, as long as it gets you there, to your goal. That's why approximation works.

You might disagree, but that's only in the event you have different goals to mine. That's what's so perverse about all of it: your goal needs to be "for the sake of true and accurate recollection alone, and for no other purpose at all". Otherwise you might delude yourself.

But hey, let's entertain that idea for a minute or two. Because that's actually quite disturbing too when you think about it. It means that, for there to be accurate recollection, something needs to be fully devoted to that purpose, and that purpose alone.

Imagine a being that is forever chained to memory. Like a ragged, starved slave dog, unable to escape. Just staring at the memories, looking at them intensely, trying not to forget. Drinking its own piss through a straw.

Isn't that life? The perfect life, where you remember the good and the bad. Whether it is a self-referential, reflexive, object is beside the point. However you paint the picture, it is there only for the recollecting. And it is a logical necessity, isn't it? That's the titillating, million-euro question.

Whether there has to be an object there, just so there can be any memory at all. But remember: it's not the self, is it?

Or, turn it around another way: whether the fact that there needs to exist some pattern for there to be anything meaningful at all gives rise to an object all on its own.

In other words, time might be an illusion, but you sure as hell need it just so you can make out some patterns. So is it there because you need it or are you here because of it? Or are you two one and the same thing?

Or is it that you wave your hands like magick and you say: nature itself works in this way that there's just gotta be some flow somewhere, and if it's got no place to go in space then it's gonna open itself a new fricken' dimension, which is time. A mathematical necessity, you see. One that hinges on there being a limit to the amount of information you can acquire.

And yet, I'm interested in asking: just how disturbed would I become, having learned the truth about it? Unhinged. Unreliable. Is that what thinking does to you, in the end? It just makes it more difficult to make munny.

I may be a weirdo – who knows – but when you read Plato in high school, did you understand it? Did Plato himself really understand what he was talking about, or was he merely recounting what he was told? Or did he say what he had to say to a naïve audience? I think I'll just crawl back to my cave and never ask these questions again. This was the last time.

They teach this stuff, sure, but are they prepared for the consequences? What if the necessary conclusion drawn from those neutered classics is that most everyone is delusional?

For a long time, the true mystery for me was whether it is a logical necessity for the self to be now this instead of that.

In other words I asked: why am I in this body? But that's not the universal self I was talking about. And yet, the self is universal, so there's no other self that I could have been talking about. A mistake of the mind to identify with the other.

I mean, don't you think it's funny how you can only ever receive the same amount of information over each dimension, over both time and space? In other words, how there's a tradeoff there to begin with?

Well, that's because we look for the shortest path and sometimes take a detour over either time or space, whenever we want to save on the other. But that's the thing now: if you couldn't access one or more of those realities you can think of – the ones that could all be absolutely real – over time or over space, then what route would you take? Just so that the self can exist. The one that is nowhere to be found.

Because you cannot have one without the other. That would be a logical inconsistency. Remember: "there's the things you know, things you don't know, and the things you don't know you don't know."

So what do you suppose would happen if the self didn't experience anything over time or space? Obviously, nothing. But how would you know? How would you know now? Careful of that logical inconsistency.

Moreover, putting it to one side whether any of this is true in whatever sense pleases you; once you realize this idea of the universal self, then, whenever you commit harm or you take pleasure in something, is it about you? Is it you that is exacting sweet vengeance, or biting into that delicious, sweet cupcake? Yes and no.

Rather, all that is happening there is that the universal self experiences all these things. All the pleasure is there, and all the pain too. You don't need to experience it in order to learn it. And you don't really need to learn it either.

But the body tells you: "I am mad, I want to kill". It tells you: "I deserve better than this wretched life". It tells you all kinds of nonsense, and some believe it.

But you know, there is indeed no sense in talking about these things, writing about them, in the first place. Most people would like to reject all of it, I presume, while some people understand it. And the only reason why I just wrote about any of it is that I'm writing this to no one at all, and for no reason at all. That's the only way to write. That's the only way to act.

Life is dancing on nothing. Like a faint shimmer. Leading up to nothing at all over and over again. Because it's all there already, an infinite supply. The context is not you. The bias is not you. The stuff that makes up a pattern for you to recognize is not you. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to look at these things, you see. Unless you were not that.

And why is it ultimately useless to talk about this? Because meaning is about distinction, too. About discernment.

If everyone would be able to compose symphonies and understand advanced physics, the act itself would become meaningless: paywalls on knowledge, degrees as gatekeepers, intellectual property rights, artificial complexity in bureaucratic systems.

And if discernment itself is modeled as a minimum cut, then the way to value is to make it minimal. That's when you become distinguished. You're minimizing cost while maximizing clarity. Too much differentiation means too much exclusivity. And if everything is equally accessible, then everything is equally valueless.

It's a weird idea, but it's all about connections. Some connections you can't really dispose with, so you need to find another context in which bottlenecks still thrive: if information becomes abundant, then make it all about attention instead. So then it's all about who decides what surfaces.

Moreover, it's about who decides whose knowledge is trusted or rewarded. You model it all with a graph, and you see it's all about finding the bottlenecks, no matter where they lie. And what's that about? It's about finding the simplest description from A to B. It's about compression, again. The simplest description you could find tends to be the one with the least connections between A and B. Edges, mappings, arrows, functions. Descriptions. Connections.

So that's weird. It's as though the act of discernment itself was dual to having a goal. And value is scarcity.

Perhaps meaning is in fact that moment when redundancy collapses and complexity becomes a pattern. So let's call it that. Let's presume all it is is compression. So is it lossless or lossy?

A mind, or a culture, or a model, can't store the whole world, so it builds a compressed representation that throws away details judged "irrelevant". So every finite being has an ignorance rule that decides which distinctions to collapse. So it's like this: C(f) = L(f) + λE(f), where L is the description length, E is the residual surprise, and λ encodes how much ignorance you can stand. Isn't that funny? Such a funny pseudo-formalism. Oh, and high λ means: you care about accuracy, which means longer and more detailed theories, while low λ means: you prefer elegance, leading to more ignorance, and more abstraction.

Different cultures have different ignorance priors; they mark which approximations count as legitimate. And so, perfect knowledge never arrives. Any finite agent must choose some level of ignorance to stay finite. Knowing everything would literally destroy discernment.

So what does that mean for an AI algorithm? It means its bias is shaped by its architecture and training data. It's what you learned in your Introduction to Machine Learning class. It means humans choose whichever bias they like, merely resulting in a more or less complex data generation mechanism. So which kinda data would you like? Would you like "pretty girl"-data or the "really smart knowledge"-kinda data? Cuz that's how smart we are as humans.

And so, once you understand the process, maybe you're like me and the hunger for that data disappears. I guess the scarcity isn't there anymore. But you see: what is data anyway? What is information anyway? Is Nirvana for fucking real?

Yes, well, notice too that there is at least one object with that infinite context. Or, as infinite as it gets anyway. Just to recap, it's: "the things you know, things you don't know, and the things you don't know you don't know."

Oh my God. Perfect, infinite, Turing-complete... Is that why they killed him for being gay?

Anyhoo. Don't do drugs. Don't do harm. Don't commit violence.

Now, I've places to be.

Epilogue, Insert, Whatchamacallit

I've received tons of obvious scam messages lately, whereas it used to be I received none. I'm guessing that's either because some bitch has my email that shouldn't, or it just comes down to random chance, and their number has increased tremendously in the last few years. Thanks, AI. Thanks, computers. I'm so into someone just because of their pretty picture.

But it's interesting, you know. I sometimes entertain myself by engaging in discussion with these people. Just to gauge how far they'll go, and what angles they got. Not much, it turns out. It's usually "click this link" or "give us your creds so we can check whether the same password works on every other site". I've yet to have anyone directly ask me for money for that plane ticket, so they can come see me or their dying uncle or whatever. But here's hoping I might experience that some day too.

Once, I had this relatively long and strange discussion with one I presumed to be a hoaxster. She, or at least, that's what was in the picture, claimed to be an economics major. I think she said she was an Oxford graduate, ironically enough. So, having relatively recently pondered about God, the universe, right and wrong and all that jazz, I wanted to ask her about whether she considered making money by any means necessary a moral act.

Again, very ironically, she dismissed my question. Which is ironic because that act of dismissal so doesn't tell me whether it was a real person or not.

Nonetheless, the discussion then veered towards religion, and she proclaimed to be a Buddhist. That was incredibly interesting, because I was curious about how she could possibly tie Buddhism together with both her presumed vocation as well as what she was actually doing, which was trying to scam me.

And you know, I got just what I deserved: she told me I was a fucking clown for expressing my belief in that I could be a Buddhist and a Christian both at the same time.

Now that's a sin I won't be committing again any time soon.

I remember that interaction precisely because it just very aptly reminded me there's Buddhism, and then there's cultural Buddhism. You see, Finland isn't a traditionally Buddhist country at all. It's all about Christianity over here. And the oh-so-very-obnoxious question of whether some Muslims or Muslim-looking dudes should be allowed to do whatever they damn well please or not, and how to draw that line. I mean, it's a puzzler, to be sure. And the same questions could very well be asked about all the other groups, nazis, political parties and whatnot. All probably paid for by some globalist stooge – the questions and the groups both. The irony there being that if no one's paying for it, it dies, all right?

It's all so uncivilized. And in truth, I don't think anyone even cares, but you gotta sell stuff to make ends meet. You gotta have some angle to politics. You apparently gotta have that "disruption", cuz that's what makes for a better story.

Or whatever the kids are talking about. You know, the environment, the immigration, the horrible, horrible economy, the rampant drugs, the murders, murders everywhere, the secret police operations and the leaks and the corruption and the sex parties, oh! The wild, wild sexxx parties (proceeding to drool)...

But I digress; I suppose that very interaction also made me feel somewhat sad, and lamenting over the fact that there's no sense in trying to connect the dots or trying to understand anything. You blend in, that's how you make the babies. That's how you make more taxpayers, and all that culture¹ stuff is really just decoration, isn't it? Just some overly sweet sentimentality. You merely find the context that kinda works, so you can say "I did what I could", riding off into the sunset. I mean, it sure looks like that's what people generally think, doesn't it? And it's seductive to think that's the only way to save yourself. Meanwhile, I'm still kinda hoping that wouldn't be the case.

And so the scam very blatantly failed, and I didn't fall in love with the Oxford graduate. The end.

1. Culture: The set of shared beliefs, values, norms, customs, practices, knowledge, symbols, and material artifacts that characterize a group of people and are transmitted across generations.