Incremental learning mode…math as discovery tool instead of something you have to “get right”–maybe.
Adventures du jour!
I mostly just have weird little stubby half-thoughts to report for the last few days. No new big breakthroughs. Lots of inching forward, then getting stuck, then taking a slightly different approach or switching to something else and trying to figure out how to integrate all the incremental stuff I figure out.
It feels comforting to get back into “incremental learning” mode instead of sitting down, writing about traumatic stuff, crying, and feeling wrecked but relieved all day. But also weird. I’m trying to pack in study and practice time before I get derailed again.
Examples:
–Writing is moving forward but slowly, as I try to sort out new things I’ve learned on a type of scene I haven’t written before. Lots of “writing it badly” (here, mostly dialogue) then deleting and “writing it better” (mostly description), then eyeballing it for pacing. Another, more sophisticated iteration of the old tool “show don’t tell.” But I was able to hit something solid and real in the middle of characters being dumbasses.
–Found a new movement thing that looks goofy (I know because I recorded myself) but is a lot of fun and will probably force me to hit another level of control with balance in general. It’s weird. The more I learn, the more I have a working knowledge of 3D space that feeds over to a) drawing, and b) decision making, which probably sounds weird if you don’t think in terms of a 3D mental space where possibilities are laid out as kind of a mini-multiverse.
I’d love to get on a metaverse platform and design a 3D mental map program that you could dance through. “I need all the [swooping gesture symmetrical upward energy] types of thoughts to [fill up the space] and [condense down into a single point] so I can [examine] and [push them aside and see what remains].”
The new movement is [lower center of gravity] to [shift balance from one leg to another]. I suspect a bunch of martial arts use it, because it frees up balance for cool kicks that I look really goofy doing, because I don’t have the control or flexibility I need to get pretty lines with them. Still super fun.
–Picked apart how a game system worked to see what I liked/didn’t like about it, and what I might steal for writing fiction. It made me realize what it was like to love a genre, to love it and yet subvert it well.
–Get to a point of being able to mentally position faces better in 3D space and to communicate the person inside there (at least well enough for now). So I might switch to figure drawing earlier than I planned.
–Learn how to make (slightly) stronger choices in what photos to share/toss.
–Start using Midjourney to make art that I want to see, instead of just decrypting how to reverse-engineer other people’s work. Going verrrry slowly. Pretty is easy; meaningful is hard.
–Hit a little better understanding of math in general, working on a class and reading GEB, a passage quoted by the author that is actually from Are Quanta Real, a Gallilean Dialgoguy by J.M. Jauch, whom I now have to look up.
Salviati:
The relationship with abstraction is easy to see. The first sequence looks random unless one has developed through a process of abstraction a kind of filter which sees a simple structure behind the apparent randomness.
It is exactly in this manner that laws of nature are discovered. Nature presents us with a host of phenomena which appear mostly as chaotic randomness until we select some significant events, and abstract from their particular, irrelevant circumstances so that they become idealized. Only then can they exhibit their true structure in full splendor.
Sagredo:
This is a marvelous idea! It suggests that when we try to understand nature, we should look at the phenomena as if they were messages to be understood. Except that each message appears to be random until we establish a code to read it. This code takes the form of an abstraction, that is, we choose to ignore certain things as irrelevant and we thus partially select the content of the message by a free choice. These irrelevant signals form the “background noise,” which will limit the accuracy of our message.
But since the code is not absolute there may be several messages in the same raw material of the data, so changing the code will result in a message of equally deep significance in something that was merely noise before, and conversely: In a new code a former message may be devoid of meaning.
Thus a code presupposes a free choice among different, complementary aspects, each of which has equal claim to reality, if I may use this dubious word.
Some of these aspects may be completely unknown to us now but they may reveal themselves to an observer with a different system of abstractions.
But tell me, Salviati, how can we then still claim that we discover something out there in the objective real world? Does this not mean that we are merely creating things according to our own images and that reality is only within ourselves?
Salviati:
I don’t think that this is necessarily so, but it is a question that requires deeper reflection.
…
I’m *really* glad I ran into this, because I needed it for the WIP; there’s a technology twist I want to pull off but I think will get pushback and this should give me better language to offset that.
When I think of math as a pattern, I think of it as a set of rules that have to be followed: put in an input, run the math, get an accurate output. OR ELSE. Which is how I got taught to “do” math.
But if I look at math the way and AI uses an algorithm–as a discovery tool for searching for patterns–then it makes a lot more sense. “Did I find a pattern? Nope. Did I find a pattern? Yes, but not a great one. Did I find a pattern? I found another pattern but I’m not sure how to tell whether it’s better or worse than the first pattern.–Let’s come up with some math for that and see if that works and if not, we’ll come up with other math, while keeping in mind that no math is so strong that it can math itself perfectly.”
…which takes me to a place of ambiguity and doubt, and I’m no longer floundering around, looking for the “right” math or trying to understand complex notation as a rigid R U L E of how things must be done–just as a recipe that’s been working more or less okay and is reproducible.
I can grasp that.
Vaguely.
An ominous sign on this foggy morning’s walk.
Midjourney experiment in making art I wan to see.