[ExI] Why do the language model and the vision model align?

[John Clark]

On Mon, Feb 23, 2026 at 11:49 AM Jason Resch <jasonresch at gmail.com> wrote:

>
*> We must take care to disambiguate here. The string "mathematics" can be
> used in one sense to refer the human invented language, or it can be used
> to refer to the objects which mathematicians study. For you, who take a
> non-platonist position, you have no room in your ontology for this latter
> sense of the word.*
>

*No, that is not true, there will always be a difference between what we
know about mathematics and what is true about mathematics. Godel discovered
that some things are true but have no proof, that is to say there's no way
to produce those true statements in a finite number of steps from the
Zermelo–Fraenkel axioms plus the Axiom Of Choice. And then just a few years
later Turing discovered that in general there's no way to tell if a
mathematical statement is true but unprovable or is just false. If
Goldbach's Conjecture is one of these (and if it isn't there are infinite
number of similar conjectures that are) then a million years from now even
Mr. Jupiter Brain will be trying, unsuccessfully, to find a proof in order
to prove that it is correct, and will still be grinding through huge
numbers trying, unsuccessfully, to find a counterexample, an even number
that is not the sum of two prime numbers, to prove it is false. *

*So if you want to postulate some sort of platonic heaven where everything
that is true resides then you can, but it seems rather pointless because we
can never enter that heaven or have any contact with it. What's more it
cannot be what's responsible for computation because computation needs
change and everything that is true can not change. But our knowledge of
what is true can change, and so can a physical system.*


> *> You are a fan of Max Tegmark's definition of consciousness being "how
> information feels when it is being processed."*
>

*True.*

*> Have you read Tegmark's book "Our Mathematical Universe"?*
>

*Yes I have and it's a very good book well worth
reading, but near the end I think he goes one step too
far. Tegmark wrote an even better book 3 years later "Life 3.0: Being Human
in the Age of Artificial Intelligence"**.*


*>>> Have you ever stopped to ask what hardware computes how an electron
>>> behaves in any given situation?*
>>>
>>
>> *>>Yes I have because I'm a retired electrical engineer and that's how
>> they make their living. *
>>
>
> *> Did you ever find a satisfactory answer?*
>

*Yes I have and I've already mentioned it, perhaps you missed it so I'll
repeat it here: *
*"The answer is the laws of physics. For example the Pauli Exclusion
Principle says that an electron in an atom can be in any quantum state but
2 electrons can NOT be in the same quantum state, so physics recognizes a
difference between 1 and 2, and once that is done any integer can be
defined and computations are possible. Incidentally the Pauli Exclusion
Principle is the only reason that the chair you're sitting in right now
does not sink down to the center of the Earth." *



> *> how can a quantum computer (that could also fit on your desk) compute
> over 2^10,000 computational states, when there aren't even 2^100 particles
> in the entire observable universe?*
>

*N particles can be in far more than N states, for example chess pieces can
only be in 64 different places but there are about 10^120 different chess
games, assuming that in a game each player moves a piece about 40 times.
And yet way back in 1997 a conventional computer, that was very primitive
by today's standards, was able to beat the best human chess grandmaster in
the world at the game. *


> *> As Feynman wondered:*
> *"It always bothers me that, according to the laws as we understand them
> today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical
> operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of
> space, and no matter how tiny a region of time. How can all that be going
> on in that tiny space? Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to
> figure out what one tiny piece of space/time is going to do?"*
> -- Richard Feynman in “The Character of Physical Law” (1965)
>

*And Feynman was able to give a partial answer to his question:  *

* "Nature isn't classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of
nature, you'd better make it quantum mechanical, and by golly it's a
wonderful problem because it doesn't look so easy." *

*He was right, it wasn't easy, but quantum computers look a lot
easier now than they did in Feynman's day. *

*>> If mathematical structures can perform computations on their own then
>> why is Nvidia the most valuable company in the world?  Instead of spending
>> trillions of dollars on huge data centers why don't companies like OpenAI
>> and Anthropic just buy a book about those data structures and let the book
>> perform those computations? I'll tell you why, because that won't work. *
>>
>
> *> You believe this universe's "laws of physics" can compute on their own.
> You also believe in other universes, which also, presumably can compute on
> their own.*
>

*Yes.*


*> These other universes are mathematical structures that compute on their
> own. *
>

*No. Mathematical structures can't compute because mathematical structures
can't change, but physical structures can change and so they can compute. *


*>> Standish is a big fan of Marchal and I am VERY familiar with Marchal's
>> work, and I find it to be utterly worthless.*
>>
>
> > I don't think you ever understood either of them. You spend years
> arguing over what first-person and third-person meant, and never considered
> any of the meat of his argument.
>

*Marchal was the one who kept talking about the transcendental importance
of the difference between first person and third person not me, and in his
"proof" about the nature of personal identity he kept on using words like
"you" and "your" in thought experiments as if the meanings of those words
were already clear. But that's what he was trying to prove! He was stating
things in his "proof" that he was trying to prove, and that's why it was
worthless. It contained nothing that was profound so understanding it was
not difficult, but reading it without laughing was difficult.    *


> *>> I don't know Mueller but I have read a few books by Wolfram and
>> although I don't agree with everything he said I certainly wouldn't say his
>> ideas are worthless. *
>>
>
> *> I am glad you think Wolfram's ideas are not worthless.*
> *Here is a quick introduction to Mueller's work in a presentation
> form: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm3h_6UU2jY
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm3h_6UU2jY>*
> *Or if you prefer reading, this article covers the main
> basis: https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01826 <https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01826>*
>

*Apparently Mueller is as silly as Marchal, like him the man believes that
it is of profound significance that physics cannot give even a
probabilistic answer to the question " if 2 perfect copies of you are made
and one goes to Washington and one goes to Moscow  which city will you find
yourself in?". Well of course physics can't give an answer to that because
not every string of words that happens to have a question mark at the end
is a question, sometimes it's just gibberish. How do I know this thought
experiment is ridiculous? Because even after the experiment has been
completed nobody can say what the correct answer should have been. It's
amazing how good personal pronouns are at hiding nonsense, if instead of
asking which city will you see Mueller and Marchal had asked which city
will John Clark see then that would NOT have been nonsense, it would've had
an answer, and the answer would have been "both". *



> *>  In his 2004 paper and 2006 book, Russell Standish showed he could
> derive theree postulates of quantum mechanics, including the Schrödinger
> equation, purely from basic assumptions about observation*
>


*Standish demonstrates a keen grasp of the obvious!  Of course
Schrödinger's equation can be deduced from observation, historically that
is exactly how it was found. But nobody would have proposed such a crazy
thing if the results of experiments hadn't demanded it. Yes it can be
derived from pure mathematics, that is to say it has no mathematical
errors, but an infinite number of equations can be derived from pure
mathematics that contain no mathematical errors however very few of them
have anything to do with physics and many of them have been experimentally
proven to be wrong. *

> *>>> But can these 3 energy states for half-spin particles be removed
>>> without making the laws themselves more complex?*
>>>
>>
>> *>>The answer is probably yes. It is a fact that the laws of physics were
>> simpler before the muon and the tau were discovered, we had to make them
>> more complex to account for these extremely rare things, and as far as we
>> know the universe could've gotten along just fine without them.    *
>>
>
> *> The universe could have, but could life? *
>

*Probably. Maybe things will change tomorrow but nobody has yet provided a
compelling reason why it could not.  *



*>>  it's easy to understand why tomorrow the universe will be in a higher
>> entropy state than it is today, it's because tomorrow will be in
>> a different  state than it is today (otherwise "today" and "tomorrow" would
>> mean the same thing) and there are vastly more ways something can be
>> disordered than ways than can be ordered.  **But by using the exact same
>> logic you must conclude that yesterday the universe was in a higher entropy
>> state than it is today, and that is not true. You need to add another
>> axiom to explain why there is an arrow of time, one that cannot be deduced
>> from pure mathematics, and it is "the universe started out in a low entropy
>> state, lower than anything that has occurred since".*
>>
>
> *> the early universe could have begun in a maximum entropy state, where
> everything was at thermal equilibrium. However, due to the expansion of the
> universe *[...]
>

*That is impossible. The universe couldn't have been born in a maximum
entropy state because the expansion would cause the entropy to become even
larger. The reason comes down to gravity, for a gas high entropy means that
the gas is spread out evenly, but when gravity comes into the picture high
entropy means that matter is clumped together, like in a Black Hole. In the
early universe matter was spread out very evenly so it had very low
gravitational entropy. If the universe had been born at maximum entropy, it
would have started as a collection of black holes, not a smooth plasma.*


> *> All that is needed to support an arrow of time is for the maximum
> possible entropy for a given volume of the universe, to increase faster
> than equilibrium can catch up.*
>

*Well yeah, the entropy of the universe has been increasing ever since the
Big Bang but it has never caught up to the maximum possible limit. The gap
between the actual entropy and the maximum possible entropy is what allows
for complex structures like life to exist. *



> *>> Quantum Mechanics wasn't discovered by somebody deriving it from pure
>> mathematics, everybody was satisfied with Newtonian physics and Maxwell's
>> equations until technology improved enough that we could perform
>> experiments that we were unable to do before and we started to get some
>> very weird results.  Max Planck, the guy who invented the quantum in 1900,
>> said he did it in an act of desperation because it was the only thing that
>> enabled him to make predictions, and even then he thought it was just a
>> mathematical trick and did not indicate anything physical; it wasn't until
>> Einstein's 1905 paper on the Photoelectric Effect (the thing that got him
>> the Nobel prize) did it become clear that the quantum was physical and not
>> just a mathematical artifact. *
>>
>
> *> What you describe above is an accident of history. Had computer science
> progressed in Babbage's time rather than in Turing's time, it's possible
> that the equivalent Marchal, Standish, Meuller, or Wolfram of their time
> could have anticipated a quantum mechanical reality before Planck's and
> Einstein found experimental evidence of it.*
>

*Even if Hugh Everett turns out to be right there is not a snowball's
chance in hell of that occurring in any universe.  *


*John K Clark*
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