Sunday, July 15, 2007

Principle of abundance

Modern science laid the universal foundation for rational materialism. Though materialism might be incompatible with several religious beliefs true materialistic rationality can not mislead us in our search for understanding the universe. It is important that it should be true and rational materialism. In fact given the complex structure of the society our survival is currently based on, it is probably the optimal choice to take on. This is because we can then work on complexity of the universe since we can concretely measure (and hence share) our understanding of the universe in terms of "material". To efficiently study the complexity the asymptotic view of amount of resources needed and several "on average" analyses like amortized analysis have shown to be very useful for e.g. in understanding nature of computation which has contributed to understanding universe.

The key to be effective in studying complexity is to be smart enough to care about details and mature enough to have a macroscopic perspective. If a complexity theorist gets too involved in non-asymptotic details he might not be able to make any real contribution. If he is not careful enough with the details of his proofs and assumptions he will be wasteful of resources. Working on non-asymptotic details like creative engineering is an evolving profession like that of practicing law, medicine, programming where as more and more complexity is revealed it becomes more and more important. To work based on asymptotic behaviors it's important to have an abundance perception of the universe in terms of time, life, opportunities, possibilities etc. along with finiteness. If we do not work in finitistic set of assumptions things might turn out to be too abstract to be useful some times.

It is important to understand that the abundance is finitely measurable and is not free which makes the process interesting and safe.

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