Our universe is “local”—things only interact directly with nearby things, and only so many things can be nearby at once.
After reading this sentence, I had a short moment of illumination, that this is actually backwards: perhaps what our brains perceive as locality, is the property of “being influenced by/related to”. Perhaps childs brain learns which “pixels” of retina are near each other, by observing they often have correlated colors, and similarly which places in space are nearby because you can move things or itself between them etc. So, whatever high-dimensional structure the real universe would have, we would still evolve to notice which nodes in the graph are connected and declare them “local”. This doesn’t mean, that the observation from the quoted sentence is a tautology: it wouldn’t be true in a universe with much higher connectivity—we’re lucky to live in a universe with a low [Treewidth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treewidth), and thus can hope to grasp it.
I don’t know enough about neurology to make a statement on whether this is something human children learn, or whether it comes evolutionarily preprogrammed, so to speak. But in a universe where physics wasn’t at least approximately local, I would expect there’d indeed be little point in holding the notion that points in space and time have given “distances” from one another.
The ~300MB of genetic code we have is a very small amount of space to work with if you have to start specifying the function of individual cells. Whatever unpacking a functioning human from genes involves, it has to include a substantial amount of “figuring it out at runtime”.
And indeed, we find a lot of techniques that look an awful lot like something you’d expect to find in the Demoscene.
Zebra stripes aren’t directly encoded in the genome. Instead it’s more like “make stripes every 400um at X point into development, then allow them to grow with everything else”. (With X varying across species.)
(Although I am not a biochemist, so take this with a grain of salt.)
This is an awful lot like the sorts of fake-a-complex-world-by-using-an-rng-and-procedural-generation approaches often found in size-constrained demos.
I’m not sure whether it’s the standard view in physics, but Sean Carroll has suggested that we should think of locality in space as deriving from entanglement. (With space itself as basically an emergent phenomenon.) And I believe he considers this a driving principle in his quantum gravity work.
When we zoom out, does the graph take on the geometry of a smooth, flat space with a fixed number of dimensions? (Answer: yes, when we put in the right kind of state to start with.)
I don’t understand the article enough to decode what “the right kind of state” means, but this feels like circular explanation. The three-dimentional space can “emerge” from a graph, but only assuming it is the right kind of graph. Okay, so what caused the graph to be exactly the kind of graph that generates a three-dimensional space?
Well, possibly exactly the right kind of graph to be a mostly 3 dimensional space that curves in complicated ways based on the contents of that space as specified by General Releativity. The GR view of space is considerably less compact and simple than just R3 and making GR fall out of a graph like that with any kind of rigor would be impressive and maybe useful.
After reading this sentence, I had a short moment of illumination, that this is actually backwards: perhaps what our brains perceive as locality, is the property of “being influenced by/related to”. Perhaps childs brain learns which “pixels” of retina are near each other, by observing they often have correlated colors, and similarly which places in space are nearby because you can move things or itself between them etc. So, whatever high-dimensional structure the real universe would have, we would still evolve to notice which nodes in the graph are connected and declare them “local”. This doesn’t mean, that the observation from the quoted sentence is a tautology: it wouldn’t be true in a universe with much higher connectivity—we’re lucky to live in a universe with a low [Treewidth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treewidth), and thus can hope to grasp it.
I believe this is exactly correct. Good explanation, too.
I don’t know enough about neurology to make a statement on whether this is something human children learn, or whether it comes evolutionarily preprogrammed, so to speak. But in a universe where physics wasn’t at least approximately local, I would expect there’d indeed be little point in holding the notion that points in space and time have given “distances” from one another.
The ~300MB of genetic code we have is a very small amount of space to work with if you have to start specifying the function of individual cells. Whatever unpacking a functioning human from genes involves, it has to include a substantial amount of “figuring it out at runtime”.
And indeed, we find a lot of techniques that look an awful lot like something you’d expect to find in the Demoscene.
Zebra stripes aren’t directly encoded in the genome. Instead it’s more like “make stripes every 400um at X point into development, then allow them to grow with everything else”. (With X varying across species.)
(Although I am not a biochemist, so take this with a grain of salt.)
This is an awful lot like the sorts of fake-a-complex-world-by-using-an-rng-and-procedural-generation approaches often found in size-constrained demos.
I’m not sure whether it’s the standard view in physics, but Sean Carroll has suggested that we should think of locality in space as deriving from entanglement. (With space itself as basically an emergent phenomenon.) And I believe he considers this a driving principle in his quantum gravity work.
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2016/07/18/space-emerging-from-quantum-mechanics/
I don’t understand the article enough to decode what “the right kind of state” means, but this feels like circular explanation. The three-dimentional space can “emerge” from a graph, but only assuming it is the right kind of graph. Okay, so what caused the graph to be exactly the kind of graph that generates a three-dimensional space?
Well, possibly exactly the right kind of graph to be a mostly 3 dimensional space that curves in complicated ways based on the contents of that space as specified by General Releativity. The GR view of space is considerably less compact and simple than just R3 and making GR fall out of a graph like that with any kind of rigor would be impressive and maybe useful.