Saturday, April 19, 2008

Is the world binary?

I have one more theory about the knowledge and information. It rests on the axiom that information is constant and knowledge is our perception of it. But this theory rests on the binary number system and probability.

In probability (maths), 1 stands for 100% possible and 0 for 100% impossible. (This is for comp students) And when you convert from binary 0 and 1 to boolean, you get

0 = false
1 = true

So the question that I had was, can knowledge be expressed as bunch of 0's and 1's? I hope that everyone agree with me, when I say that each piece of information in this universe has multiple parameters to it. That is, we humans classify objects into various categories. For example, a cow can be classified as an animal, or a farm asset. And we can break up everything into those parameters, and assign a true tag or a false tag to it.

For example, a man has just seen a mobile phone. So he can start classifying by the most basic question, Is it alive? The answer is no. So all the parameters that are there for only living objects are then set to 0. The next question could be, does it move? For which the answer is no again. So all the parameters for moving, non-living objects are set to 0. Likewise he can classify it till everything left is true. By doing so, he has just assigned some characteristics to the object. The next time he sees and object which has similar characteristics, he will conclude that it is a mobile phone (he might not name it the same way).

Thus our brain is always creating hierarchies of objects from the most tangible to the most abstract, and interlinking various hierarchies. For example, a cow, can be linked to a mammal, then to animal, then to ecosystem, then to biosphere (each more abstract than the previous). But it can also be linked to on cow named Bessie (just an example). This is going downwards in abstractness. Similarly, a cow can be linked to farm assets, then to wealth, then to economy. In this case, the two hierarchies meet at "cow". Similarly, the brain categorizes each new element of the world that it perceives and interlinks it with other elements which have something in common with it.

Where this connects to the theory on 1's and 0's is that the brain creates groups of objects, depending on what parameters are set to 1. That being the case, can we say that the entire world is binary to us??? Does each element satisfy one part of the function which returns values of 1's and 0's for the different parameters? Please comment.

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