W. J. ZENG - Themes Appearing in Turn

| home |

"And every science, when we understand it not as an instrument of power and domination but as an adventure in knowledge pursued by our species across the ages, is nothing but this harmony, more or less vast, more or less rich from one epoch to another, which unfurls over the course of generations and centuries, by the delicate counterpoint of all the themes appearing in turn, as if summoned from the void."
- Alexandre Grothendieck, Récoltes et Semailles

Here are some themes that I have encountered. I'm almost certain to leave them unfinished. And there are certainly others that I don't even know myself.

But here's a short record of ones I know about. Your patience is appreciated.

I'm always interested in discussions on these topics @wjzeng. Here's some background reading.

Mathematics is the science of cognition. It is a testable model of what rules are cognitively universal (for humans and similar intelligences). It is less different from the other sciences than many think.

Mathematics is a large distributed artwork, crafted across generations. Increasingly it will be developed by software.

The physics of reality can be derived from information theoretic constructions, i.e. I subscribe to "It from Bit". Future theories of physics will be theories of information (like quantum mechanics already is). Quantum computers and derived technologies will play a key role in exploring these foundations.

The most important impact of quantum computers will be widespread understanding by users of how different reality is from classical/Newtonian models of the world. This will fundamentally change how humanity as a whole conceptualizes reality.

Whether the multiverse is real is the most important ethical question for humanity today.

Language made from concatenated symbols will eventually be superseeded by embodied languages. Expressive technologies will do more than our voice or our pens or our keyboards can do today. Emojii's and videochat are a precursor form. With VR/AR coupled to brain-computer interfaces, the "words" of our languages will become increasingly more complex. We will hyperlink between gestures.

This shift in language will eventually also cause a shift in our mathematics. Mathematics will remain formal but will become embodied in systems. We will gain advantages from mapping mathematical reasoning into the evolved human intuition for manipulating physical objects. String diagrams in monoidal categories are a precursor version of this.

Unification by an information theoretic foundation for the world will eventually lead to creative technologies that influence reality more profoundly then anything we can imagine today. Eventually this will collapse the distinction between thought and reality. But not by denying reality with a simulation! Instead by embracing and unifying the two. Fiction is the closest thing we have to such a technology today. From some point of view the eventual "it from bit" theory will be a more powerful tool for composing fiction than we have ever yet imagined.

Science has historically been a decentralized autonomous organization. In the coming years, adopting DAO tooling for science (DeSci), including new market mechanisms, will accelerate progress.

Aliens can be vastly more divergent beings from us than is often appreciated. Not just physically but cognitively. We need an understanding of cognition that is broad enough to grasp beings whose mathematics has vastly divergent axioms from our own. In the same way that the science of the natural world has different subfields, an alien's cognition could introduce us to a totally new field of mathematics. Perhaps our mathematics covers the cognitive version of thermodynamics and theirs covers general relativity.

The mass slaughter of animals for food is fundamentally unethical.

There is an optimistic future of programmable and synthetic biology that will make today's information technology look infantile.

Intelligence/cognition is a performative and context dependent behavior and not an innate property. One day the inanimate/animate distinctions that we hold so strongly to today will become unimportant prejudices .

Today's economics seems based on real-valued totally ordered preferences. What economics could we build out of other systems? This is an analogous question to the exploration of different formal logics.

A social evolution occurred when laws became written. Another evolution will occur when legal systems become computable.

Is teleportation of particles with mass possible? This question lies intersects "bits" (which we already can quantum teleport in limited ways) with "its" i.e. matter.

Why do so many of us live physically separated from kindred spirits? How can we build/rebuild community living in the future of the West?

How can we live regeneratively with nature?

Is consciousness a bug and not a feature?