@hyp

Hofstadter's thinking has been reinforced since this time by the likes of Stephen Wolfram, author of New Kind of Science and Eric Hoel, who's theory of causal emergence has been getting some traction. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.13395 Hard to summarize all this quickly, but that is in fact what this is about: we have to summarize to do sense making at certain levels of awareness. It wouldn't do us much good to talk about the velocity of each air molecule outside or we'd never get out of the house. It's much easier to say, "it's 47 deg F, bring a jacket." Long story short, this is the nature of thermodynamics, and of sensory perception, of language, of my quick summary of these ideas here. We summarize, we abstract so that we can make decisions at higher levels of awareness, in different timeframes. 2/5

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