One of the most interesting things I have noticed in biology is that the biologists is essentially a classifier. They name, identity, categorize, and move on.
This is very different from mathematics, where we seek to represent patterns nice and cleanly, relying on those for prediction. Just like SpaceX using physics to design the rockets and simulate them in a computer, or Figure’s simulated training environment to teach the robots skills in the computer.
If we took this same philosophy to the human body, what would an ideal representation look like, and what could we do with it?
One simple idea is that we represent the body as a state of trajectories- meaning small poles are pulled/pushed in various directions depending on some local maxima or minima, like when you take a drug and it causes these chain reactions around the site of where it comes in contact with some part of the body.
Though the picture isn’t perfect, you could imagine quintillions of these little vectors (most likely representing atoms) being twisted, turned, and other dynamic states, depending on environment, what the state of the inherited human is, and other inputs. These vectors represent “us” and our feelings, which are just a whole-body chemical snapshot at some time point.
When you are attracted to someone, these vectors start pointing in the direction of that person, kind of like magnets. When you have a sole mission, all of these vectors line up towards that objective.
The question is, how do you represent this in a computers memory today? A series of slices in matrices, like if you are imaging a brain and you have all the different slices on a 3D scan? Or do we just care about the inputs and outputs, like a deep learning model, where we predict what a specific section of the body will do based on some trigger, and accurately map the vectors to a particular state before the person has done whatever action will change the state of that particular part of the body.
And is this even the most efficient representation? Not sure, time will tell. But, representing the body as a state of vectors allows us to use all the mathematical tools on top of it, like algebra, calculus, statistics, optimization theory, and information theory. Which are all just used to figure out what to do when presented with some set of vectors as an input.