The Universe as a Minified Bundle

Okay, let's start a new game where we try to guess the prompt that produced this text.

My guess would be "Write a 2000 words blog post based on the analogy between the difficulty of understanding the laws of physics and minified source code."

It's a cool analogy, no doubt, but reading the 2000 words of the article, I felt there was no substance or flesh around it. Okay there were some examples vaguely related to the analogy, and writing was smoothish, but what was the message in the end? What were the new ideas (beyond the analogy)?

Every time I read a LLM generated long form text I am reminded of the communication engineering: communication channels can only decrease the information content. For example, in the communication setup:

   Alice sends msg  --encode--> codeword --channel--> codeword' --decode--> msg' Bob received

The best we can hope for is that the message was transmitted faithfully, so msg' = msg, since the channel noise can only degrade the information content, specifically, the mutual information is a non-increasing function:

   I(msg;codeword') ≤ I(msg;codeword),

due to the monotonicity of information (a.k.a. data processing inequality).

Similarly, if Alice uses LLM to communicate to Bob, we have:

   Alice's idea --encode--> prompt --LLM--> generated text --decode--> idea' 

Monotonicity of information tells us

   I(idea;generated text) ≤ I(idea;prompt).

So I really don't get it, why do people believe that adding LLM generation step could improve the communication of their ideas? It seems directly analogous to passing a message through an additional noisy channel. Just show us the prompt.

>>The coordinate grid is executable.

As it is in the Functional Universe

https://voxleone.github.io/FunctionalUniverse/

The reason I thought of the bundle metaphor is last week at work I was reading:

https://support.cognex.com/en/resources/external-documents/h...

and the:

https://support.cognex.com/en/resources/hardware-tech-manual...

but neither could tell me how to get an image from the camera to my golang program. And yet, the little sample webui program that the firmware serves up on port 8080 has a nice javascript webapp that can get an image from the camera. But, yes, no source. So AI read the bundle and boom, I now had a way to get the image.

the content from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyJwr4O03Hc is what made me think of this:

"Dr. Donald Hoffman challenges the traditional scientific view that physical matter and spacetime are fundamental. Instead, he argues that consciousness is the foundational reality, while spacetime acts merely as a virtual reality headset that renders objects only when we perceive them. Hoffman introduces recursive trace logic, a mathematical framework suggesting that our physical existence is a low-probability, training wheels version of a much broader, disembodied conscious network."

This is a pretty essay, but it also reminds me of this meme[1]. To paraphrase:

    Wheel is invented...
    "bro, the whole world is a wheel!"
    Books are invented...
    "bro, the whole world is a book!"
    Gears are invented...
    "bro, the whole world is a mechanical clock!"
    Computers are invented...
    "bro, the whole world is a simulation!"

As a scientist, it definitely easy for our current context to seep into our perception of science. Maybe our perception of metascience too.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/PhilosophyMemes/comments/12clqm7/br...

This is worth the read.

Surprisingly low in the crackpot index TBH. But it looks like a remix of AdS/CFT, ER=EPR, and space-time as an emergent property of entanglement, so no new ideas.