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comment by the gears to ascension (lahwran) · 2023-01-12T00:46:52.182Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

My review: this article has a very interesting list of references. Some of them are quite cool, and I certainly agree that an interesting article citing something close to this combination of citations could be written. However, the citations do not appear to me to support the article contents, which are lacking in rigor and insufficiently defined. Almost all of the steps of reasoning in the document appear to lose key formal structure of the referenced topics; I'd suggest that, to be a useful crackpot, it's helpful to make it clear when one knows ones' own reasoning is insufficiently formal. This article claims to be a general purpose theory, though, and because of the nonexistent formalisms as a basis, I don't see how I'd use it as a theory of the brain.

comment by the gears to ascension (lahwran) · 2023-01-12T10:24:55.290Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I don't want this to read like a diss. You're on a reasonable overall track of thinking here, in my view; I just have criticisms of the article as written. Perhaps it's even a good article that will come up in a few years time as having been useful; hard to know ahead of time, reviewers are often just wrong.

But, it seems to me that the three basis vectors {space, time, information} in the concept space are not clearly justified, aren't derived by construction in a way that makes them solid and useful concepts for me as a reader, and the writing is meandering; it's writing like I write, combining interesting concepts and gesturing that there's probably a formal grammar nearby that combines them in an even more interesting way. it doesn't seem like your understanding level is that far below being what I'd call a useful crackpot, which is also approximately where I am with a lot of this stuff. The culture part might be what I'm having issue with, especially sacred geometry, but I think I recognized its influence far before that; eg, in the fact that you connect your three basis types to RGB with unclear justification. One way to put it is, sure, geometry is sacred and we're made of it alright, but figuring out which geometry is sacred and why is the entire history of experimental and theoretical science; usually people who get excited about sacred geometry are connecting patterns overconfidently, with insufficient justification to warrant calling the connection a "proof". Eg, information geometry, a very interesting field, involves weird shapes like the pseudosphere.

You also simply misused a lot of words at the beginning. Within the stuff that is actually legitimate, you've gathered interesting things in one place and gestured at the fact that symbolically manipulating them in the ways implied by an unspecified series of ?python-ish? functions could be cool. But the difference between pseudocode and code is precise specification. what, exactly, does compile_to_atoms to, after all? I can certainly come up with some very plausible things, but note that a python function can't return atoms, only descriptions of them, which will then be simulated on one of many possible physical computers. You're not totally barking up an invalid tree or anything and I don't think your approach is unsalvageable, you're right that there's a lot of reasonable connection to see.

In general, approximate compression is what has been called "fake frameworks" on this site before; fake frameworks can be fine, I guess, but my preference is to recommend not overvaluing dimensionality reductions that turn out to not cut reality exactly. The interesting thing here is that it seems like it ought to be possible to understand perfectly, so giving up and settling for anything less than a true framework seems like a letdown to me.

That said, I think your post doesn't warrant -20, so I've reversed my downvote into a strong upvote back to -10. I don't think I'd upvote it past -5 as is with shaky grounding and type conversions. Fixing those type conversions to make them both elegant and understandable to more programmers is not a trivial request, and it's not a totally useless post. But I wouldn't recommend most folks on here read it.

comment by Slider · 2023-01-12T09:30:48.490Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

There are plenty of names known: triforce, trinity. The overall phrasing leans a lot on information side so this is very blue-heavy approach. Green is about context,purpose,role,experience and change. The "form" in information is a blue concept. The word "information" seems to miss the mark the most as a word for that color. The concept is about which letter is in that time and space, which programming language is emulator running, what kind of semantics are relayed. So consider "character" if not in the "personality" meaning then in the "symbol" meaning.

Unbalanced things as unethical is a bit iffy, you can form very unbalanced pieces into a group where the unbalancedness of the parts centers the whole. It also tends to be that making a similar arrangement out of balanced parts is less potent.

The type of graphs used can't really express well other kinds of relationships. If the meaning was to display high fit that doesn't really come across.