Comment by matheusmoreira
Comment by matheusmoreira 4 days ago
I don't think they're equivalent. I think invention and creation aren't actually real. There is no "making" or "creating" when it comes to intellectual work.
All computer files are sequences of bits. All sequences of bits are integers. All integers already exist in the infinite set of natural numbers. I can even calculate how big those numbers are given their bit count.
digits(bits) = ceil(bits * log10(2))
digits(32) = 10
digits(64) = 20
digits(128) = 39
digits(256) = 78
digits(512) = 155
digits(1024) = 309
digits(20 KiB) = 49,321
digits(2 GiB) = 5,171,655,946
Yes, I mean exactly this type of insight. Basically taking a digital photo with a camera technically also just picks out the "address" of your current environment within the space of all images. Any 4K 2-hour-length feature film in a digital format is also just an address in the space of all possible videos. The director, the actors, the whole crew did all that work in order to select that point from the space of possibilities, they didn't "create" anything. That movie already existed.
Of course this is silly, but interesting nonetheless. And we routinely speak about such high-dimensional spaces in research and engineering. Or we can imagine optimization as traversing a pre-existing search space. It may be structured as a graph or perhaps a Euclidean space. And in that space we can imagine a loss surface, that sits there in peace all along, with its global minimum somewhere. And instead of "constructing" a solution, we are simply hiking in this space and trying to spot that valley. But this is a bit fictional. We never physically "instantiate" this surface. It's an imagined abstraction. In reality we just have a vector and some rules as to how we change that vector. But we can imagine those changes to be movements in an imagined space.
It's like the idea that the sculptor doesn't create the sculpture, the sculpture was there all along, he just had to remove the superfluous matter to reveal what was already there (i.e. the atoms belonging to the final sculpture).
The most interesting thing is kind of on the border, between these absurdly large spaces and the more manageable ones that are feasible to enumerate.
Another similar mindblow thing was when I forgot the password to a file that I encrypted. It's a fascinating thing that the bit pattern on the disk is functionally random now, and cracking it would take longer than the age of the universe. But if only I knew the password, it would only take just a second. There is a definite sequence of keystrokes I can execute to bring the universe in a state where the content will appear on my screen, it's so close, yet it's so-so far if you don't remember the password. Just a little difference in your brain state and it flips from trivial to hopeless.
PS, if you like thinking about such things, I recommend Meta-Math by Gregory Chaitin, it's very fun (providing an address VS constructing the thing is basically the gist of algorithmic information theory).