I think I agree with you. Here’s what I think was going through my head at the time of writing:
“The universe is a state evolving over time according to a transition function. But sometimes I seem to confuse this with thinking I can only take one action at a time, where ‘action’ is defined much more narrowly. For example, I model myself as exclusively ‘sleeping’ or ‘riding the bus’ or ‘writing’, even though there are parts of me which I’m not consciously attending to doing other things. This seems bad.”
If the universe is indeed a state evolving over time according to a transition function, then in this sense physics is a one-channel process. It just so happens that the one channel is all the channels.
Is the universe perfectly describable by a state-transition model, though? I feel like this frame has been useful to me, and others have talked about it being useful to them, and physics seems to be largely done in this paradigm (speaking as an outsider who might be totally off). But this is a cop-out. “This frame has been useful to me” is itself being judged from within the state-transition paradigm.
Could you talk a bit about why you include physics as a one-channel process?
My intuition is the opposite; physics seems to be exactly all the channels, all the time.
I think I agree with you. Here’s what I think was going through my head at the time of writing:
“The universe is a state evolving over time according to a transition function. But sometimes I seem to confuse this with thinking I can only take one action at a time, where ‘action’ is defined much more narrowly. For example, I model myself as exclusively ‘sleeping’ or ‘riding the bus’ or ‘writing’, even though there are parts of me which I’m not consciously attending to doing other things. This seems bad.”
If the universe is indeed a state evolving over time according to a transition function, then in this sense physics is a one-channel process. It just so happens that the one channel is all the channels.
Is the universe perfectly describable by a state-transition model, though? I feel like this frame has been useful to me, and others have talked about it being useful to them, and physics seems to be largely done in this paradigm (speaking as an outsider who might be totally off). But this is a cop-out. “This frame has been useful to me” is itself being judged from within the state-transition paradigm.