Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Entropy and Categorization

The law of entropy is an amazing law that seems to be the only true law across all systems. The most brilliant part of it is that it does not matter what type of system we’re referring to, whether it is physical, social, etc the randomness in the system always tends to increase itself. In fact I believe that this very concept might be central to the discovery of the fundamental governing dynamics of the universe and everything within.

One of my major dreams has been to find a governing dynamic for human consciousness. I believe that one dynamic will be key to creating the true AI system which begins to learn like we do. I need to find out how to apply entropy to this.

Many thinkers do not agree to this fact of entropy being the governing law since they say that the largest counterexample is that of evolution. Evolution selects the most fit species from the population and hence the population becomes more and more specific and special with each generation. My answer to this is that the system is being looked at in the wrong way. The system in evolution is all of life. Life has definitely gotten more complex since the beginning of life. Pick any random living being and check if there’s an identical being. There’s not going to be one. Hence the randomness has increased in evolution too. The only reason we’re thinking specialization is because we have categorized every species for our understanding.

People tend to over categorize everything that they see, feel, hear, experience or learn. They do this to try and gain control. Anything that is categorized under an existing category makes it behaviour predictable and that eases their anxiety regarding that object. In fact they try to force some objects into some categories even if they don’t even come close to fitting there. This is only meant to reduce their individual anxieties regarding these objects. Predictability is key. People don’t like unpredictable objects or events.

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