I have a lot of cats. They like playing laser. After a while the cats figure out a few things. Among these are: the red dot appears immediately following the clicky sound, usually in the late evening when the benevolent hairless ape that dispenses food and cleans up my poop is watching the glowing box […]
Tag: Entropism
Entropism: Defining Consciousness
Much like life, consciousness often eludes definition or even description. We have a tendency to create ambiguous definitions for consciousness that deify the category of whoever is doing the defining (ourselves) while at the same time locking down certain aspects of consciousness that lead us away from knowing anything useful about it. Learning from our […]
Entropism: Defining Life
Life is a concept with which we are all intuitively familiar but is difficult to pin down with a concrete definition. Let’s start with a definition up front and go from there. An Entropist definition of life is simple: A locally anti-entropic process that maintains or increases local order at the cost of an increase […]
Entropism: Defining Emergence
Defining emergence takes a moment to set up for the uninitiated, so let’s try this in two phases. First, a simple, formal definition: The appearance of novel properties, patterns or behaviors at a “higher level” of organization that are not obviously present and cannot be easily predicted from the properties of the individual parts of […]
Entropism: Defining Entropy
Oceans of ink, real and digital, have been spilled on this topic. It is simple to understand with an intuitive description, though, if we just ignore the pedantic urge to ruin it for everyone. Formally: Entropy is the measure of disorder in a system. In more practical terms, this is a measure of how spread […]
The Cannon Conjugate
Gather round children, and let Daddy tell you a story known in the world of computing as "the leftpad debacle". NPM is the computing equivalent of a gay bathhouse where programmers all gather to exchange diseases (the formal term in computer science is "bugchasing" if you want to look it up). Years ago, a programmer […]
Podcast: The Roman Rapist Mindset, measuring your goals and why Euclid’s parallel copy procedure breaks (answer: I did it incorrectly)
This started as one of my Euclid videos, and ended up being an interesting conversation over an entire range of topics. The Euclid parallel copy question got answered, at 01:37:34. The first two hours or so are about the Euclid series as a whole, explaining the idea and what my plans are with the series. […]
Virdism: why I’m racist
Imagine for a moment that you subscribe to an ideology called Virdism. Virdism is a complex and deep ideology. You probably should call it a religion, rather than an ideology. But that’s neither here nor there. I want to focus on a specific peculiar property of Virdism: Virdism insists as a matter of fact that […]
Interest = competency
Had an interesting insight in the shower just now Moldbug has a quote that goes something like “everyone is right-wing with respect to their domain of competency” (verbiage mine). The example he gave was a 25 year old female kindergarten teacher. (Let’s assume pre-woke kindergarten teacher…). She will have typical 25-year-old girl opinions on any […]
Entropism and the consciousness spectrum
Entropism (at least my version) is derived from the insights of Information Theory. The basic idea is that the physical laws of the universe place hard constraints on what sort of large-scale distributed computation is possible. If you imagine that a civilization as a very large distributed computer program, then these physical laws propagate into […]