Coping:  Math in the Alterlife?

A lot of people live two lives:  One in the waking state, the other on the dream side of sleep.  This is one of the most interesting tales I have ever “brought over” from the “other side.”

Don’t ask me exactly where the “other side” is; I couldn’t tell you.  But it’s a place I go in dream states and it seems to be as real as the nominal world we’re sharing here on the “waking side” of the veil.

Wherever “it” is, it taught me a profound lesson about my alt-life that is more than worth sharing…

(continues)

Let me begin with the dream itself.

It wasn’t particularly “heavy” in that there were no warnings, no seeming glances into the future, or anything like that.

Instead I was being instructed in some kind of mathematics.

The topic was a heretofore undocumented layer of math that would like between “normal” K-12 arithmetic, geometry, algebra, and on up through calculus on the one hand, but with a graceful, yet easy-to-estimate statistical layer.

I could go on about where this “new math” fits, but it’s not like Metamath…because that already exists.  Wikipedia sizes Metamath up this way:

“Metamath is a language for developing strictly formalized mathematical definitions and proofs accompanied by a proof checker for this language and a growing database of thousands of proved theorems covering conventional results in logic, set theory, number theory, group theory, algebra, analysis, and topology, as well as topics in Hilbert spaces and quantum logic…”

THIS math – the one in the dream  realm – was different in that it was almost like (pardon me for jumping into a programming analogy) a COM Layer in computing.

“The What?”

Oh…the COM layer…hmmm…how to describe it?  Probably this from the MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) will help:

“COM is a platform-independent, distributed, object-oriented system for creating binary software components that can interact. COM is the foundation technology for Microsoft’s OLE (compound documents) and ActiveX (Internet-enabled components) technologies.”

Thinking of it a different way, if you’re familiar with the OSI model, there are different layers to how computing really works (when you get under the hood some ways).

“The Open Systems Interconnection model (OSI model) is a conceptual model that characterizes and standardizes the communication functions of a telecommunication or computing system without regard to their underlying internal structure and technology. Its goal is the interoperability of diverse communication systems with standard protocols. The model partitions a communication system into abstraction layers. The original version of the model defined seven layers.”

This is waaay more than you need to know before breakfast, but the idea is (at least what followed me back over onto this side of the sleep line) that there is a new math waiting to be discovered and its purpose will be to vastly simplify how algorithms are written when dealing with complex statistical data.

You know:  The kind that pops up in SVR (speaker-independent voice recognition) systems.

All I was able to grasp was this new symbol that looked like an S.  Except it had a plus sign (+) over the top of the S and an ascending bar (/) on the lower part of the S.

I was compelled to draw it up in my drawing program.

Finally, Saturday morning when I had time to actually do the drawing I was shocked because in the dream space, the S didn’t look right.

Then there was a peel of thunder between the ears as I did a transform of the S so it would look “right” and would match the dream.

Ready?

It was a MIRROR IMAGE of the S shape on this side of the veil!

Now here’s the thing in my own head that wasn’t quite clear to me:  How could I walk around with a new math symbol in my head and NOT notice that the S was backwards?

This was a genuinely weirder than ska-ditch moment.

Once past the shock of seeing it was a mirrored S the rest of the symbol was easy to duplicate…

Honestly, I don’t know what to make of it.  I simply woke up knows that this symbol seemed to include a lot of information.

First, the S (mirrored) means (over there) that we’re dealing with a statistical data set.

The plus sign gives us the general sign of the data (it’s a positive series).

And the set is sorted in ascending order.  I somehow got the idea that it would be a normal (Gaussian)  distribution versus any other form such as Poisson or Bayesian inferences.

Where does it come from?  Darned in I know.  But my sense is this has something to do with artificial intelligence and that when multiple AI’s are eventually connected, they may evolve this kind of middleware as a shortcut to exciting new frontiers of knowledge.

Which may, or may not, include humans.

In the end it was all related to how AI’s could never be trusted to create unbounded languages or have access to unbounded sets.

For it they had these, their computational horsepower would put all 7-billion of us out to pasture, save the few needed to service the new machine masters.

Hell of a dream, huh?

Now if I could just understand why the S was backwards and I didn’t notice…maybe there’d be more to this.

The idea of a different math has been around for a long time.  There’s our world of base-10 math, but in programming the world is mostly hexadecimal.

But other formularies are possible.  Try working your way through Wolfram’s Mathematica sometime.  Yes, different ways, for sure.

And what happens when we grow artificial intelligence far enough?  Sometimes I wonder if Life isn’t like one of those text adventure programs where first you discover computers, then have to grow A.I. to get enough smarts to figure out the humans have math wrong.

This view brings the possibility that the right math WILL open new doors,.  It’s just that we don’t see it, yet.  Blinded by fractions, or some other equally serious blunder.

This little adventure left my head a little more open, but it raised many more questions than it answered.

Not the least of which was “How can I think about an “S” for several days and NOT notice it’s a mirror image?  If I can do that, maybe humans can miss base-x that would open all the doors of physics and allow for ventures – almost sci-fi like- to the realms next door…

Write when you wake up from the holiday weekend?

George@ure.net

George Ure

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