One Tiny Step

If data in the universe always deteriorates over time, how come modern human society seems to know more now than before? Society and life itself seems to get more complex over time not less, somehow gaining information from somewhere.

Lets consider a thought experiment. Two things, a black ball and a white ball exist in the universe. Black and white then exist as colours. Does this also mean that grey also exists? This depends on the meaning of black and white. If it is established that black is that same "sort of thing" as white and that the blackness and whiteness of the thing can be quantified numerically (as "darkness", for example) then the possibility of changing the quantity also exists, and thus greyness could exist.

Once any factor can be quantified numerically then any other possibility of variation could exist, as least imaginarily. Once a ball is established as size four-hundred, then a ball of size four could be imagined. This is important because a new type of ball has been created. The creation need not be a physical one, or one that is physically possible (the universe might limit balls to ten or larger, for example) but the imagination has created new data. It is not possible to imagine something beyond what is observed, or modified by the variation of quantifiable factors. But is that true? Does something need a quantifiable factor to be creatable?

I have a ball that is coloured slurb. Slurb is a new imaginary colour beyond the range of the normal spectrum and different from any other colour that has ever existed. What colour is the ball then? Well, slurb. What can you tell me about slurb? Nothing, except that it is not like any other colour. It fits into the class "colours". It has a name: slurb. That is all. Its actual hue, what it looks like, doesn't exist and can't even be imagined because it is by definition different from any existing colour.

The extant aspects of slurb are its name (and the sound of the name and all of the images that conjours up) and that it is a colour. We might not be able to picture it but we can accept that a slurb coloured telephone is a rational item. The name and label "colour" tie slurb to reality and it is relationships to observed reality that create new items, even imagined or theoretical ones.

But does an imagined item exist? This is a deep question! It depends on what is meant by "exist". If something is created in the mind, it exists in the mind. That's what the word created means. Does that help establish if an imagined thing exists? It depends if the word "imagines" means "brought into existence". How you feel about the answer to that question states whether imagining something creates it. These arguments might be more about the semantics of language than anything else, but this is a written essay, so language rules. Hurrah!

Let's set aside the deep questions of existence and go back to what is imaginable. We have two ways to create new items: The variation of quantifiable factors, and fitting something into an existing class. What about connecting desperate different information?

You have a giraffe. You have a donkey. Cross the two, in your imagination, and you have create a new item that has characteristics of both. Perhaps this is an advanced way of utilising the two existing options; both fit into the class of an animal and interpolate the characteristics of both (the neck might be of medium length, rather than long or short for example). Has something new been found?

Sometimes it seems that new data can appear from nowhere by making connections between new and undiscovered data. Until the twentieth century one could argue that the subatomic particle the neutrino did not exist. Nobody had ever seen one or detected one or even thought of one until a theory of their existence was postulated. After that, a machine to detect them was built and for the first time in the long history of life on earth a being (humans) detected neutrinos. The neutrinos might have always been there but this new information was found by a string of connections that led to their discovery and observation.

The ability to make connections can create data be interpolation and it is this ability that can explode the quantity of possibilities from a small number to a vast one; thus the total possible data in the universe is dependent not on the mere storage capacity but the interpolation and extrapolation capacity too. If the number one exists and the number two exists then one point five must exist, and three, and every other number. Can that be definitively proven?

One curious thing bothers me; that whenever science is on the brink of discovering or explaining "everything" a new niggling unknown appears and creates a whole new area of uncertainty. This seems to constantly happen: Just one more tiny step until we get there. It's almost as if the proportion of what is unknown to what is known is constant, and that with every new discovery and each certainty an uncertainty must be introduced to counteract it. If this is so, then perhaps the discovery of dark matter, of its concept, was created, amazingly, by the explanation of gravity; the laws that defined one certainty simultaneously created an uncertainty. This might continue forever, creating a universe always one tiny step away from being explained.

Mark Sheeky, 9 April 2013