Life is a dance of order & disorder
Mar 2020
In Feb 2020, I went to vipassana. It was a beautiful experience, full of happiness and epiphanies. It gave me strength to move towards my calling. I came out with a better sense of the world and more formed answers to deep questions. Let me share them here:
Of whatever is underlying, there is constraint perpetuation that leads to emergence of patterns. A perpetuating pattern is order. A vanishing, destructing or decaying pattern is disorder. Perfect order is death. Perfect order is death. Life is a dance of order and disorder.
Agency is the concertmaster of the orchestra of life. It can carve an elegant dance. Atleast strive to. That's about it.
A lot of things may be inevitable or beyond our control, but a lot of things are in our control too. The gift of consciousness is an outcome of the inherent power of agency. It isn't absolute, but it's special.
It's a gift to be able to think, to be able to reason, to be able to make choices. It's a gift to be able to feel, to be able to experience, to be able to empathize. It's a gift to be able to create, to be able to build, to be able to make things. It's a gift to be able to love, to be able to care, to be able to be compassionate. It's a gift to be able to be alive. It's a gift to be able to be human.
As it's in the mechanics of the world that there's no free lunch. All gifts are debts. And it's our duty and destiny to repay this cosmic debt.
Hedonism traps and Nihilism destroys agency.
The debt of agency is not to perpetuate order to an order-death, but to ensure an elegant dance or order and disorder. The beauty and elegance of this dance can be considered our ultimate goal.
Not the way we imagine, it's not like this: "Somethings are just not meant to be," said GOD, putting his hands up in air, staring at his life's work, a sophisticated simulation program that won't compile. He then gave it his last try, and the big bang happened.
It's more like the answer to question: what's the dividing line between software and hardware?
I answer it as software is any pattern whose identity is independent of underlying patterns. But then almost every pattern is independent of underlying pattern. A car is a pattern that is independent of the metal, plastic and rubber that makes one. It can be considered a composite pattern, but nevertheless is a new pattern. So there is something more.
I then expanded the definition of software to be any pattern which maps different states of underlying patterns but has a high entropy of viable possibilities over the same underlying patterns. Merely state changes are enough to completely change the emergent pattern.
A simpler way to put it may be software is a pattern above an underlying pattern that is turing-complete.
I discuss Turing completeness below, but not completely, do read about it. Add pinrose tiles and convey's game of life to the reading as well.
The bigger epiphany was that within our observable reality, a lot of patterns are recursively turing complete, and thus we are in a simulation multiple times over.
Let me say this again within our observable universe there is a simulation within a simulation within a simulation. If we were to actually map patterns whose boundary resembles that of software and hardware, we find many. Chemistry and Physics seems one. Biology and Chemistry seems another. So on.
In short the answer, I think, is we are in a simulation multiple times over. Even within our observable universe. To prove this, to remove the occasional I think, we need to rigorously find states of abstractions of our reality which create a turing complete setup.
If reading pattern so many times was confusing to you try re-reading it by replacing pattern with abstraction.
Turing completeness is closely tied to turing machines, you can imagine turing machines as constraint perpetuating systems, but with a special design that they can perpetuate arbitrary constraints.
Effectively, turing completeness is what we call a pattern that can generate any pattern. And your computer is turing complete, so is the programming language we use in it, well so is English.
Where does it all start ? It can start anywhere, complexity can collapse into simplicity, see any metastable system. And simplicity can burst into complexity, see Conway's game of life, Pin-rose Tiling, or Wolfram's Rule 30. This is why, if you start reasoning why's you end up reaching an Agrippan trilemma: Dogma(Axiomatic), Regression(Infinite reasoning), Circular(A->B->A).
So does that mean we have no way out? No we have too many ways out. We can try zooming-in or zooming-out, or speeding-up, or slowing-down, or creating a simulation, or try jumping out of ours.
We are lucky we have light, making the playground we operate on information rich. And beautiful possibilities lay before us. There's everything to play for.
To be continued...