💾 Archived View for gemini.ctrl-c.club › ~scotchsour › 2023-08-30-Probability_Fields.gmi captured on 2023-09-08 at 16:45:38. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I don’t know exactly what a probability field is, but I have a squishy mental model for it--and isn’t that good enough?
Okay. Here goes.
We can convert non-determinism into determinism by designing thresholds on a probabilistic system. Imagine all the possible states of a system to be a snow globe that contains the movements of random flakes. Anything inside can be considered “the thing itself” or “noise.” Anything outside this sphere is either a signal, or a separate thing entirely, according to our desire. The radius of the glass is the “threshold” we select.
It sounds complicated, but we already do this naturally. For example, if your buddy wants to be heard above a noisy machine, he shouts. His voice is at 60dB, maybe the machine is at 40dB. Then, you ignore all the stuff below 40dB, and you understand what he says.
In effect, he’s split the sound domain into two spaces
Your ear encapsulates anything below 10%, puts it in the snow globe, and tosses it away. Or maybe it’s the other way around: you hear only the loud stuff, and ignore the rest. Whatever the case, you’ve used a threshold to decide which is which.
Physically, the universe encapsulates itself naturally. The earth, moon and especially the sun have lots of nearby physical forces that move them. The sun in particular has huge nuclear explosions every second as a matter of course (9x10^10 megatons of it!).
But the massive size of the sun, and its distance from us, reduces the significance of these unfathomable explosions to mere noise. The “snow globe,” then, is the sun itself, so we can treat it as a simple hot and heavy ball, and predict its movements for a million years or so.
The point is, everything is a gamble, but it’s also not a gamble. Manipulating these thresholds that define a thing makes it manageable, predictable, and even constant if you so desire.
Casinos know this. They end up making money, forever, despite your sudden $10k win. Individual wins and losses make no difference in aggregate, because the general trajectory is always up. They've defined the thresholds this way.
Another example is your very own brain, where neurons depend on threshold triggering from random happenings from other neurons (and errant EMPs) in order to think.
It takes quite a lot of firepower to emulate this with a computer, though, because our modern computers have zero tolerance. You can only do “d == 4” not “d KINDA 4”. This means probability fields and their thresholds must be simulated.
Ironically, computers already physically ignore noise through thresholding. Higher voltage, filters, etc.. Also ironically, floating points will always be "snow globes" that approximate themselves beneath EPSILON. But these aren’t by choice, they are by necessity. If given the choice, I’m sure engineers would use precise real numbers and attovolts. They have no interest in stochastic domains, it feels too “squishy.”
But the universe _is_ squishy. That’s why it’s built with encapsulation properties such as gravity, distance, time and so on. These encapsulations make indeterminate behavior predictable at higher levels, such as with newtonian physics, crystallization, etc.
Encapsulation also lets us design our own thresholds for understanding anything. E.g. we can reduce the threshold to six meters and watch the waves of the ocean, instead of always thinking of Earth as a single rigid ball.
I kind of wish computers embraced this idea of programmable thresholds & probability innately, instead of using encapsulation only to “become digital” and that’s it. We could then put our focus spheres at any place we like and interrelate them inside the soup of the computer’s mind. I don’t really know what form it would take, but it would mimic reality more faithfully, and maybe even transform the idea of what a machine could be.
We don’t need quantum computers for this, by the way. It’s not a matter of technique, but of desire.
Anyhooo that’s what I’ve been fantasizing about today.