Sliding Doors, Alice's Rabbit Hole and Making Decisions
What you perceive to be true was only true half a second ago
In the movie ‘Sliding Doors’, the film alternates between two storylines, showing two paths the central character's life could take depending on whether she catches a train or not. The result of this seemingly benign choice, ripples outward and shifts the paths between what manifests and what doesn’t.
Pure fantasy. Alice in Wonderland stuff that is good for 90 minutes of entertainment and that’s it. Right?
Hold on there Cowboy, not so fast (or Cow-person, but that doesn’t resonate as well, so forgive me).
It is not. The world we live in isn’t what you think. Many are stuck in a tiny sliver of what is, which is on a tape delay and repeats itself over and over and over. Like the movie ‘Ground Hog Day’.
Roll your eyes. It’s ok. But the fact remains, the choices you make impact what happens next and how your reality shifts. (or can shift) Just like in the movies. Sort of. You just need to understand what lies beyond what your senses and then do something with what you feel. Because you will not directly see it.
Did you know that the sound and light waves,as well as other frequencies of energy we perceive, all reach us at different speeds?
“Yes, I did, thank you for that, Einstein. Light travels faster than sound. Everyone knows that. Why are you brining this up?" What does it have to do with this article?”
Stay with me.
While light and sound, and other forms of energy waves hit us at different speeds, our brains have to process and stitch it all together into a seamless story for us to understand—A terrible car crash that has an explosion that we see for example. But it takes our brains longer to process some of this data after it reaches us, which is all after it happened, and, which isn’t all done at the same time…or in the same sectors of our brains, for that matter.
Some of this data can take up to 500 milliseconds to process, then our brains need to collect it all and stitch together and register it into our consciousness as a single ‘data file’. That can be up to half a second from when we registered it. When this goes awry, we have memory issues, but this is another story for another time and place.
Anyway, you see, we all live in a world of illusion. Between what is actually happening and when we perceive it, there is an ever so slight tape delay and how that is recorded, played back and perceived isn’t what we think.
As you read this, what is, is warping and changing as it is registered and processed and then the output is different than the input. For all of us. It is different.
On top of this, we all live not in the now but in the past. There is no ‘real time’, there is ‘near real time’.
I know. It’s a lot.
For years I have had the great fortune to work with teams at Intel Corporation.
One of the things that that’s governed the work we’ve done is there is no such thing as ‘real time information’.
That’s a term we’ve all heard. ‘Real Time’, which doesn’t exist. There is only ‘near real time information.’
It seems how ones and zeros work, we work as well. We operate in ‘Near Real Time’ too.
I hold 13 USPTO Patents, and a handful of patents in other countries throughout the EU, Australia and Canada that cover Internet of Things and Machine Learning that informs decisions. I have spent my adult life in technology.
I don’t have a pedigree. I didn’t go to, or drop out of Harvard or Stanford. I’m a mutt. But I am smart. Plus, I have had the chance to work with people who are an order of magnitude smarter and across a number of disciplines. And, the more I encounter, the more I realize how little I actually know or even perceive.
I’ve had the good fortune to work on a lot of intractable problems over the course of my career, mostly centered around how to improve the fidelity and applicability which comes from refining raw, gappy and imbalanced data into organized intelligence.
For the past few years, I have been working more and more with data in large graph structures. Specifically, Graph Based Neural Network (GNN) knowledge engines. These are not LLM’s, like Chat GPT. They are more dynamic.
When you think data, you probably think numbers or ones and zeros. But data is everywhere and it, like the math that drives it, informs everything. It isn’t numbers, per se, that is simply an representation.
Data, like math, like us and the world we reside in, is soooooo much more than it seems.
For instance, you may have heard of the Fibonacci Sequence. Fibonacci numbers within nature, or in particular a Sunflower for this example, allows for the maximum number of seeds on a seed head, so the flower uses its space to optimal effect. As the individual seeds grow, the centre of the seed head is able to add new seeds, pushing those at the periphery outwards so the growth can continue indefinitely. The beauty and symmetry is a direct result of mathematical structure.
The sequence follows the rule that each number is equal to the sum of the preceding two numbers. The Fibonacci sequence begins with the following 14 integers: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233 and so on. Each number, starting with the third, adheres to the prescribed formula.
The n-dimensional graphs we work with also resemble nature with startling similarities and accuracy. Because this data is a representation of nature. When visualized, a neural knowledge graph could have a million or more dimensions (axis) and would look a little like a galaxy of stars.
In some of the structures, we are talking about tracking nodes of data to look for imbalances. As if those nodes are cells in the body and we are looking for the outliers. The mutated ones, or even the cancer.
Take a look at the below images. These are simplified images of data within graph structures.
The better we get at this, the more the structures and processes emulate what nature has already developed. Nothing is its own thing or is what it seems exactly. Not data, not life on earth, not the cosmos.
Let’s go further to see if the connections hold up. The below is a scale rendering of a large cosmological dataset-a map of the stars put into a graph. The image was taken from a research paper focusing on a visual representation based on a hierarchical quantization scheme for particle coordinates and rules for generating accurate particle distributions, by presenting visualizations of a particle-based cosmological and dark-matter simulation exceeding 10 billion elements.
And, as presented by the Max Planck institute, here is a representation of the universe as part of the The Millennium Run — a computer simulation that used more than 10 billion particles to trace the evolution of the matter distribution in a cubic region of the Universe over 2 billion light-years. You can see the video here.
See any similarities?
Here is the bottom line. For 99% of us, space isn’t what we think it is, in our limited per-view. For 99% of us, we don’t realize that a flower is infinitely more sophisticated than it appears to be, and is governed by invisible forces most don’t know exist and none of us can see with our naked eyes.
We are learning that data and emerging graph based AI systems are shockingly similar to the human brain as well. Data registration and processing in these graphs mirrors our own processing of information. These in turn align with mappings and structures of the cosmos.
Whether we know it or recognize it doesn’t stop it from being.
And we are just getting started on the weirdness-or profound beauty that lies beyond the seen and known. There is profoundly more to this world, and you, than you know (right now).
So, what does all of this mean? Why tee these concepts up here? Because if you are stuck or frustrated and feel your reality is too linear or one dimensional. If you feel your life isn’t turning out the way you want, you have to look deeper. Choose different.
You are not limited. You are not isolated. You are not alone. You are not insignificant. You are connected and an important (albeit very, very small part) of all of this. Everything I laid out. It impacts you and you it. There is more than Monday’s meeting and the frustrating commute on the Interstate.
Go back to where we started with the movie, Sliding Doors. Begin doing things differently. Change your pattern and habits. And, know that what you see and register each day isn’t reality. It is only a small, incredibly limited fascimile of reality. That actually happened a few milliseconds in the past.
You want to change? Look for what is hidden in plain sight and choose different. Your options are endless when you wake up and see what lies beyond the ordinary and mundane. Think bigger. Tie your intention to that of the universe and ask for clues….like Fibonacci’s sequence.
Do that, and the universe will conspire to work with you and profound change will slowly but surely begin.
So. Do I have the credentials to make definitive statements with authority?
No.
Have I seen the data models up close and personal, as well as, how they are evolving?
Yes.
Leading up to this event, I had profound experiences over the prior year, which I will document here, later. During that time I was not here, I had another.
I’ve seen first hand what lies beyond but influences the Sunflower. Trust me, you are only trapped by your own belief in what you see and the habits you’ve built.
Your prison is of your own making, so open the cell door and walk the fuck out.