A little Friday food for thought, about how small we really are. Well worth the ten minutes.

(Hat tip to Tim Ferris for this one, from his Five Bullet Friday newsletter.)

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10-minute film I'm enjoying
Total Pixel Space by Jason Adler. This was sent to me by one of the most creative people I know. The writing and thought experiment within are definitely worth experiencing. From the description: "Total Pixel Space contains every possible digital image, including films of your entire life, every life you never lived, and the lives of every creature or object that ever and never existed on or off the earth, from every possible angle."

"The annual AI Film Festival, organized by Runway, a company that specializes in AI-generated video, kicked off in New York … with ten short films from around the world making their debut on the big screen. … The one-and-a-half-hour lineup stretched across a range of creative styles and ambitious themes, with Jacob Adler's Total Pixel Space taking home the festival's top prize."

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Enjoy!

Interesting.


My brain is so vanilla.

This kind of reminds me of the Library of Babel where every book that has been written and ever will be written is.

Can't even begin to wrap my head around that. So basically from a mathematical standpoint, infinite images exist of me typing this reply on my phone where I am sitting in my office right now. But also, an image exists of me typing this very same reply at this exact moment of me sitting in Tahiti with beautiful scantily clad women serving me piña coladas as well. Therefore, you do not know which one is real and which one is fake, they both exist from a mathematical standpoint.

NPH- said:

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Can't even begin to wrap my head around that. So basically from a mathematical standpoint, infinite images exist of me typing this reply on my phone where I am sitting in my office right now. But also, an image exists of me typing this very same reply at this exact moment of me sitting in Tahiti with beautiful scantily clad women serving me piña coladas as well. Therefore, you do not know which one is real and which one is fake, they both exist from a mathematical standpoint.

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Or...they are both real. The guy in Tahiti is pondering the same thing as you.

KidDoc said:

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Couldn't finish watching it. First off how can anyone estimate the number of atoms in the universe if the universe is infinite. In addition, such numbers are never ending as well, there is no limit to the number of pictures/pixels.

Add to that the high pitched background hum and I had to cut it off.

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It's a lot better at 1.5x speed.

NPH- said:

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Can't even begin to wrap my head around that. So basically from a mathematical standpoint, infinite images exist of me typing this reply on my phone where I am sitting in my office right now. But also, an image exists of me typing this very same reply at this exact moment of me sitting in Tahiti with beautiful scantily clad women serving me piña coladas as well. Therefore, you do not know which one is real and which one is fake, they both exist from a mathematical standpoint.

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Actually, the opposite. An interesting paradox. By basing it off of mathematics, the universally agreed upon language of science, it would be a finite number of images possible. As mentioned an image on a screen is determined by really only two parameters. Colors and where they go (pixels). An image is tangible, based in reality and deterministic. We can be pedantic and say typing in another infinitesimal 1 to the electromagnetic spectrum generates a new color everytime but that falls apart as an argument IMO. So there would be a finite number of images in the universe.

Yet, it clashes with the concept of infinity obviously as there should be infinite possibilities in the universe. Not to mention any possibility of a multiverse.

A fun mind bender, even though I don't think that was the main point of the film. But that's what I took from it.

"Through contrast, the meaningless frames the meaningful"

Only if you accept their framing, which isn't reality. There is a present limit to our knowledge, but the further we reach the more we find. From the micro to the macro. They tell you there's a specified number of colors, there's not. They tell you there's constraint on the size of the pixels, there's not. Even a single additional color in their example, a single additional pixel, explodes their calculation further into the infinity. The universe and its possibilities are constrained if you accept their proposed constraints.

They also made a couple of assumptions that make the number of images finite. They used a fixed number of digital colors, and a fixed pixel frame size. Remember when a 1 Megapixel camera was the best you could get?

Digital technology is a sampling representation and at a large enough level it is enough to trick our eyes (analog devices) into not being able to tell the difference.

If you take the image size in their example and increase it, or the color scale and increase it, you get even larger numbers. So start varying those and pretty soon get to infinity.

agchino said:

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They also made a couple of assumptions that make the number of images finite. They used a fixed number of digital colors, and a fixed pixel frame size. Remember when a 1 Megapixel camera was the best you could get?

Digital technology is a sampling representation and at a large enough level it is enough to trick our eyes (analog devices) into not being able to tell the difference.

If you take the image size in their example and increase it, or the color scale and increase it, you get even larger numbers. So start varying those and pretty soon get to infinity.

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Exactly. Given a relatively small image size and depth, the outcome is incredibly large but finite.

agchino said:

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They also made a couple of assumptions that make the number of images finite. They used a fixed number of digital colors, and a fixed pixel frame size. Remember when a 1 Megapixel camera was the best you could get?

Digital technology is a sampling representation and at a large enough level it is enough to trick our eyes (analog devices) into not being able to tell the difference.

If you take the image size in their example and increase it, or the color scale and increase it, you get even larger numbers. So start varying those and pretty soon get to infinity.

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Image size and color depth just changes the clarity of the image, not the subject. Every possible image regardless of size or color depth can be rescaled to fit those parameters. The subject of the image is still there regardless of whether someone recognizes what the image represents. In that respect even the noisy images with those parameters, rescaled, up out down may actually represent a recognizable subject.

agchino said:

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They also made a couple of assumptions that make the number of images finite. They used a fixed number of digital colors, and a fixed pixel frame size. Remember when a 1 Megapixel camera was the best you could get?

Digital technology is a sampling representation and at a large enough level it is enough to trick our eyes (analog devices) into not being able to tell the difference.

If you take the image size in their example and increase it, or the color scale and increase it, you get even larger numbers. So start varying those and pretty soon get to infinity.

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I haven't watched the video, but I assume one of the central points is that "too large to comprehend or reason about" does not mean infinity. As long as your pixel size is fixed and your color space is fixed, your output range is fixed. The output is only truly infinite if one of the inputs is infinite.

KidDoc said:

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Couldn't finish watching it. First off how can anyone estimate the number of atoms in the universe if the universe is infinite. In addition, such numbers are never ending as well, there is no limit to the number of pictures/pixels.

Add to that the high pitched background hum and I had to cut it off.

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They were using a generally agreed upon estimate of number of atoms in the observable universe. They didn't make the estimate.

What is going on. Can someone explain this to an idiot? Also I didn't hear any high pitched humming I must be deaf too

lazuras_dc said:

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What is going on. Can someone explain this to an idiot? Also I didn't hear any high pitched humming I must be deaf too

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pictures are colors (colors that can be described by numbers from a technical perspective). basically, any picture that can be thought of (imagined, real, or exist in another reality) can technically be described by these number combinations.

long story short, if you imagine it, there is a number combo that can detail it into a visual picture. every angle, every combination of scenarios (whether it exists or not) can be described by a number sequence -- and this video puts into a thought experiment all of these possibilities.


someone was high and thought this out, and decided to put together a video describing this thought.

NPH- said:

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lazuras_dc said:

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What is going on. Can someone explain this to an idiot? Also I didn't hear any high pitched humming I must be deaf too

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pictures are colors (colors that can be described by numbers from a technical perspective). basically, any picture that can be thought of (imagined, real, or exist in another reality) can technically be described by these number combinations.

long story short, if you imagine it, there is a number combo that can detail it into a visual picture. every angle, every combination of scenarios (whether it exists or not) can be described by a number sequence -- and this video puts into a thought experiment all of these possibilities.


someone was high and thought this out, and decided to put together a video describing this thought.

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while no one knows the exact combination of numbers to make this picture --- from the thought experiment perspective --- an image can theoretically exist of you during your last poop session, and a picture of every angle of the event sequence can theoretically exist.

lazuras_dc said:

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What is going on. Can someone explain this to an idiot? Also I didn't hear any high pitched humming I must be deaf too

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It is a dumb video that doesn't make any actual sense and you may want to see an audiologist.

Made sense to me.

Brian Earl Spilner said:

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Made sense to me.

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It only makes sense if you accept the premise of a limited universe or pictures of only a specified number of pixels.

lazuras_dc said:

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What is going on. Can someone explain this to an idiot?

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It means that out there in the universe exists a set of numbers that would give visual evidence that the dude you met in Call of Duty might have been telling the truth... maybe he really did do something with your mother!

The chosen pictures and the constant eerie (and annoying) audio are trying to portray that its is some mind blowing information. Ask yourself how different the video would have been if he got to the point quicker, replaced fantastical alien pictures with smiling babies, and had more pleasant audio. Totally different tone.

The universe and numbers are infinite. The End.

Every image [combination of pixels] exists in the same way that an infinite number of numbers also exist in our mathematical universe.

It's a simple thing to explain, but kind of interesting to think about.

Not something to get that upset about though.

KidDoc said:

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Brian Earl Spilner said:

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Made sense to me.

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It only makes sense if you accept the premise of a limited universe or pictures of only a specified number of pixels.

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A limited, observable universe isn't a premise.

The video a long-winded way of saying that infinity...is like...really...big, man. Woah. Pass the bong, dude.