What will the future look like?

I’d like to get a full-stack understanding of biology, but I feel as though it is necessary to invent or create new concepts in biology to have the kind of understanding I desire. A vision for biology?

What is this similar to? Physics can feel satisfying, presumably, because you can build a large structure in your head with which you can make inferences about and reason about what the world will do, and in the building of which one might become friends with some nice structures. Do we expect this to still be an activity (this kind of understanding, coupled to the uncovering of important laws) in the future? I’d assume it would be, as presumably we’d want to compress predictive power as much as possible (are there any ways in which this is obviously wrong?) and this would be a good way to do that. What, then, is beauty - just the most compressed, the most simple version of a thing? But what about human preference, chaos - Madonna Inn-style delights. What is ‘good’ about arbitrary choice - its existence, and the way in which it is expressed?

Are these two different values - oh, I see, one can compress some predictive model of the world a lot, and this is different from experiencing that compressed predictive model. What do I care about the experiencing though - why is it important for a human to be playing with this compressed predictive model?

Maybe I just personally want to have a lot of fun with biology, and fuck it, that’s all the justification I need?

But it does feel as though - what if the world looks very different, and there are other things to do?

What feels fun or nice or interesting? The cell picture, certainly. Truths or constraints that pop out of biology - like passive diffusion - when you look at it. I wonder how many there are, there. They feel satisfying in a different way than the former - the former feels more akin to literally whirling through a universe, the latter feels like an ‘a-ha’ that is - I’m not sure exactly why it’s satisfying and don’t feel the need to unpack it heremore. What else could be satisfying? Really just loading an object into mind and looking over it, fiddling with it, building a version of it that is play-able. Why don’t I just do a lot of math if that’s what I like? Maybe because those objects feel too abstract - I like physics-y things that bounce around in the real world, I just really like biology in particular. I just feel as though biology is playing by rules I don’t understand and, goddamnit, I want to understand those rules! So I can finally look around and say ‘ah, so that’s why that is’.

I just feel as though it’s so obvious that there are some rules we’re close to understanding. For example, the whole ‘what’s going on with communication as a core principle of life’ thing. Why is this important?

• Communication is pretty widespread throughout life (even bacteria communicate in 3 or more different engineered ways)

• We only recently realized how widespread it was (did we think bacteria talked to each other before we discovered quorum sensing?)

• Something that widespread…needs to be explained? At least, it would be fair to explain it (why does it show up so often when life shows up) if we are going to explain replication

A ‘why’ could be analogous to that for replication - that the property gives rise to a process (evolution by natural selection) which can create the complex things which then wonder about how they got there. So, what process is communication contributing to?

Well, it seems like it’s contributing to the process of figuring things out. But what does that mean?

What feels beautiful and true here?

Communication is possible between entities which can communicate - replication makes lots of those

Communication involves some exchange of information, some concept of bandwith

Something about complexity growing as the group grows due to the increasing number of potential pairwise interactions - I really wish I understood distributed computing well enough to understand if there’s some core principle here I ought to know

In a sense, one could view sexual reproduction (which is not necessary for evolution) as a kind of communication - so, sexual selection as a widespread example of this (two entities sharing information - how adaptive to strands of information were - together and creating something new together). I guess I’m confused if one should care about the creating something new part.

I’m curious what kinds of things distributed systems can do really well - like markets?

What does message passing mean, generally? Where is it in its most abstract form? Could one see everything as some form of message passing (i.e. thinking about special relativity through the lens of two people trying to talk).

Distributed systems - difference between having a shared goal and all working together to serve individual goals

How does topology factor into a distributed system?

How could I play w/ a distributed system?

Is there a form of chaos computing, like parallel computing but chaos with agents that want to do their own thing, or distributed computing a subset thereof

Like peer to peer distributed computing

The protocol is king in peer to peer? So whoever makes the best protocol

What is a protocol? Something that a bunch of agents agree to abide by and communicate with respect to?

The protocol by which a group communicates - how then does the group know ‘what to do’ if there is such a thing

Bio through the lens of protocols

A protocol is not the information itself - its sort of like a program? You can use it again and again and change it, but it’s fundamentally about how something is processing some information? How then do protocols change - that feels tricky and interesting - you can accidentally make new ones but what if - you can use a protocol to communicate protocols to others. Watching a group update - using communication to update norms? So protocols lead to protocol updates - and how do they do that? By building on each other? What is a protocol - is a protocol like a compiled program, like it is compiled…..well, from other protocols? A protocol determines how a set of agents will interact with each other (as in, given an input for each agent, what the output will be) - so, biology as the evolution of these? What kinds of protocols could exist between entities? What rules govern what protocols arise? How does evolution….relate to this? Traditionally it was looking at the individual entities, not the protocols that they were following as a group (or was it also looking at those as properties of individual entities which could be selected for)? The point though is that the fitness benefit of such groups might only arise in the context of a group of agents abiding by such a protocol.

So, perhaps it’s best not to think of fitness benefits from communication as being contradictory to evolution by natural selection, rather though, these are the subset of traits which are beneficial in a group. But aren’t all traits selected for in the context of a group?

What are groups doing - and how does it relate to life?

Are companies, then, like living things - honestly grouping things into what ‘is a living thing’ and what isn’t feels super uninteresting to me, I wonder why - kind of like it’s not the right idea, the right idea is to look at protocols and what they will do. Like what protocols will come next -but is that interesting, like with neurons, is it interesting to talk about what protocols they are following? What is an idea in the context of an neuron? So, living things talk via protocols and then…ideas emerge at a layer above?

I feel mildly worried that this writing will not be comprehensible later, and wonder what I could do differently with it. How could my writing be more clear? Could I define terms better? Structure arguments? I wonder how one structures arguments well.

What the hell is going on with self referential systems and complexity, that’s not quite right, I am very curious though.

Learn to love toys?

Thank you

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What are the scaling laws for communication? How does communication allow for computation to happen at larger scales?