Thought Vomit 3: Blankets, structural dynamics, and you.

OK so here's a big ol' dark matter simulation of the universe. 
Compare its structure to the images below.

So on the left here you have an infant motor cortex gray matter composition compared to an adult motor cortex on the right. Many of the dendrites myelinate or break down depending on what priorities are taken.

Alrighty and here's how a slime mold mapped the railways in Tokyo (the core of the mold was at the main station and food was placed where the stations were, using light at different intensities to simulate terrain (which the slime mold is more sensitive to)). It was more energy-efficient by distance than the design the engineering team made. Obviously the human-made one was also for time considerations and not just energy considerations, that's what makes the difference.

Now what am I vomiting forward here in succinct?

Firstly, our executive functions emerge out of a cellular network that in its base form is making pure energy efficiency/survival considerations. In tandem with the rest of the cells, they are able to learn to respond to greater and greater amounts of stimuli in continuation of that process. Before that was possible, nature itself by means of gravity has ordered the universe in a way that created dozens of stable elements from single protons, neutrons, and electrons (each being a combo of quarks), which then formed planets and biospheres. 

Okay, enter Maxwell's demon. The idea is basically that we can exert energy to move a medium, say a gas, from equilibrium (maximum entropy) to a state of high potential (low entropy, i.e. putting all the hot gas molecules on one side of a chamber instead of them being evenly mixed throughout as they would tend to naturally, for instance, give or take some turbulence). You can be as efficient as possible by solving for the minimum amount of energy required to do that, but that is generally very difficult and time-consuming to compute as humans without massive parallel computation power to account for all the possibilities - something pretty new for us. 

Here's an "information-heat engine" experiment that more or less proved the Maxwell's demon idea could help us create nanobots: https://arxiv.org/abs/1009.5287. These researchers created a little stair-stepper nanobot made of very few atoms and sent commands for it to walk up a nano-scale staircase using a minimum amount of heat as the information medium. A bi-product of being able to solve for the minimum amount of energy to operate a medium (i.e. finding the fastest, most efficient way to promote survival without getting everyone killed - i.e. the "best" method) is that you can suddenly use that metaphor to figure out how to send real information through the tiniest mediums and command even nanoscopic structures. Quantum mechanics just got an upgrade.

So the gist is, with that big ol superstructure up there, and these allegorical structures down here... what if we're the nanobots?

 *hides under blanket*

Never forget your blanket.

 

This came out the day after I posted this, makes a nice addition: