Thursday, October 10, 2019

Reduction to Formal Language Doesn't Work in Reverse

Quite a bit of science and engineering involves creating models that simplify some aspect of reality to a mathematical expression, or to a formal language model like a computer program.

That process is like a form of lossy compression. Information is discarded as the "essentials" of a natural object are modeled.

Actual nature works the opposite way, as one zooms in on any element of a "scene", there's more and more information. The bandwidth required to "read out" and so represent it in a model seems to expand. Also, any natural object is connected with every other natural object, so the state of one thing contains some portion of the state of other things. For example, the electrons in the antenna on the smartphone move in reaction to the motion of the electrons in the cell tower antenna.

The elaboration of a formal language model of nature probably can't ever recover the "original" in any fidelity.

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