
The varieties of material existence - mathgenius
http://cognitivemedium.com/vme
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ArtWomb
Well-written overview of the excitement generating around quantum and
topological physics. Databases of candidate materials numbering in the
thousands are currently being compiled.

Superconductivity. Memory and computation embedded in braiding of world lines.
Valleytronic stability in bi-layer graphene that scales to infinite dimension
in the transverse dimension and could scale quantum computation to arbitrary
numbers of qubits.

It's worth remarking that the highly dendritic structure of neurons in the
brain and its exponential efficiency above what modern silicon photo-
lithography based supercomputers are capable of today is no coincidence.

We are still very much at the experimental and early prototype stage for any
topological devices. And it will take a massive re-tooling of current
manufacturing. But somewhere in this space is room for the next Intel to
emerge.

What is required is a ten-fold or more increase in current levels of funding
for quantum initiatives. And not just computing, but quantum biology as well.

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evrydayhustling
Those who enjoyed this should check out Roger Lewin's "Complexity: Life at the
Edge of Chaos". It's a bit dated now but covers the founding of the Santa Fe
Institute, which was more or less founded to answer an even more fundamental
question: what are the varieties of persisting configurations of _information_
that we can describe (ideally, mathematically).

(Any persisting state of matter we can recognize must also be a state of
information... But we can race ahead in discovering data configurations before
we identify physical phenomena that embody then!)

One of the more compelling insights in that book are parallel discoveries by
Wolfram and others about ways of categorizing systems into high entropy and
low entropy states -- plus a thin membrane of stable configurations in between
that admit both constant change and useful summary.

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stallmanite
Seconding this recomendation. This book really had a large influence on me /
led me in a lot of other interesting directions.

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svilen_dobrev
reminded me of this (old?pfff) film:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powers_of_Ten_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powers_of_Ten_\(film\))

and, dont remember who of science-fiction or phylosophy writer said, "matter
is an encoding of information". Might be Pirsig? not sure

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yters
If material existence is all there is, why qualify existence?

~~~
antidesitter
Does the author say material existence is all there is?

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yters
He think life and consciousness are states of matter.

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short_sells_poo
You make the assumption that material existence is somehow less than other
(religious/spiritual). It doesn't need to be. For what it's worth, my takeaway
was that there is so much mystery, wonder and complexity in the material
existence that it's just as deep and exciting as any spiritual worldview.

~~~
yters
Normally life and consciousness were considered to be spiritual things. By
claiming they are states of matter, the author seems to be stating matter is
all there is to existence. This is a huge assumption. It's very speculative to
claim life and consciousness can be reduced to matter, with no evidence to
back it up to date.

~~~
UnFleshedOne
Shouldn't that be the other way around? There seem to be no evidence for life
and consciousness being something other than complex states of matter.

~~~
yters
No, exactly the opposite. All scientific evidence we have is filtered through
the first person perspective. The most directly evident view is that
consciousness is primary and matter is secondary.

