JoeTheFractal
Greenlighter
Hi,
I wrote this years ago when I was doing a lot of acid every few days for the best part of a year. It still makes sense to me if I let my self slip in to a certain kind of mindset (no drugs required). Its basically how everything in existence evolved from cause and affect and how everything contnues to work and interact, but I never finshed it. I'd like to know if other people think along the same lines and what peoples opinons are of it. It's un-edited so excuse the spelling:
Joe
I wrote this years ago when I was doing a lot of acid every few days for the best part of a year. It still makes sense to me if I let my self slip in to a certain kind of mindset (no drugs required). Its basically how everything in existence evolved from cause and affect and how everything contnues to work and interact, but I never finshed it. I'd like to know if other people think along the same lines and what peoples opinons are of it. It's un-edited so excuse the spelling:
Systems
The following is very hard to hold in ones head and even harder to put down on paper. Ill start with a few basic ideas:
The universe is infinate.
There is an infinite amount of matter/energy in the universe.
The universe itself is a very very very complex system, it could theoreticaly be written down as a very complex equation. The universe is in turn made up of an infinite number of smaller systems which can then be infinately divided into smaller systems. An example of this would be the earth - humans - biological/phsycological etc systems - the energy/matter that make up humans and how that energy/matter interacts - the atomic structure of atoms. After this point everything gets slightly hazy and 'random' as we reach the quantum level. In the world around us we see very few (if any) things that are truely random.
This means that the randomness of quantum mechanics must be explainabe. When the behavior of subatomic particles is described as random that is only in relation to each other. It is my beleif that this behavior cannot be truely random since there are predictable logical systems based upon it. This is recognised and it is said that there is always a minute possability that these systems may misbehave slightly. (Such as the idea that if you were to bounce a ball against a wall several billion times then eventualy the ball would pass through the wall unharmed. Obviously this is just an example - this behavior is much more likely when we are talking about colliding single particles not big lumps of particles. As far as I know then this is an established scintific fact in quantum mechanics.)
I however propose that the unpredictability of these subatomic particles is due to the fact that they are linked to or rather can effect (all) other particles this linking is what allows rules to be formed and allows systems to evolve and function.
For example imagine a jug of water where particles are resonably free to move around etc. If a force acts upon a particle in said jug of water then that particle effects the surrounding particles. If we apply the above theory to every particle then there is a very small chance that the random movement of one particle may effect that of another that it is not directly in contact with. This in combination with the normal physical interactaion would eventualy begin to form patterns (convection currents in this case) which would evolve into systems etc. Any patterns that evolved inside of this jug of water would be very simple, unstable and short lived due to the fact that this is a finite universe with static 'walls' which cannot act/be acted upon. If you apply the same theory to an infinate amount of matter then you would get an infinite number of systems of a theoretical infinite complexity. I belive this is how the universe evolved.
The example above has been simplified slightly since we asume that there is randomness at the 'begining of time.'I do not belive that time has a beginning since if it has a begining it must have an end (if the universe began from a stable static state then it could in theory return to that stable static state.) This would mean that time would not 'flow' as such since everything would have to follow a set path to end in a set place at a set time. This means that every outcome and every step leading up to that outcome would be predetermined. So every event would in effect happen at once and time would be static. I do not mention time much in this paper since it is complex enough as it is, however my views are that time is only a concept invented by sentient beings in order to describe change. So when we talk about time we are only realy talking about rate of change (or rather what we observe the rate of change to be.) This makes ideas like time travel seem a bit stupid. If we apply the concept of time to a car going down a road then when people talk about time travel they just mean teleportation(?) or rather the car somehow getting from one end of the road to the other end without any intermediate steps. This is although theoreticly possible (in the same way the bouncing ball example above is theoreticaly possible) is extremely unlikely.
The above is an extremly simple example of time/rate of change. As mentioned before, time is only a concept invented by sentient beings to describe changes in their outlook of the universe. If the car in the example was to go through a long windey tunnel, but then take some kind of short cut whilst inside the tunnel then to an outside observer (unknowing of the short cut) once the car exited the tunnel it would apear to have traveled exeedingly fast/traveled in time/some other seemingly impossible thing. This shows how time is wholey dependant on ones view point within the universe, ones knowledge of the universe and the internal workings of ones mind/being. We however base everything we do and all the ways we effect our surroundings upon this idea of time (along with many other ideas/beleifs we form our selves.) Humans often do things which apear extremely illogical to anyone who doesnt have exactly the same point of view and knowledge as them. All other animals do this aswell but to a lesser degree. So for example it is much easier to predict what an ant is going to do than it is to predict what a human is going to do since ants think alot less (or most probably not at all.) This makes sentient life extrmely special since we hold a very complex system inside our heads which is very much seperate from the rest of the universe. So to the systems that we interact with we seem very illogical since they cannot see inside our heads. If the universe were a computer system then this makes us its random number generators. I will return to this idea later on in this paper as this maybe vital to the systems we interact with and the fact that the universe does not resolve itself, stagnate, become a closed system, stop time etc (as we discussed before.)
This if anything is the 'meaning of life.' However this applies to everything not just humans. Whenever there are very complex systems which are largely seperate from each other but can interact to a degree we get the random effect described above. Sentient beings are just a very extreme example since our minds are so seperate from the rest of the universe. Also the fact that humans understand each other (to a degree) means that we are 'on the same level' which makes us much more complex as a whole. This 'meaning of life' or rather meaning of existance is what fuels our primary goal (discussed later in the paper.) This is the same for all systems and makes a very nice example:
Humans interact with (and do not entirely understand) the rest of the universe. Out of everything in the universe we understand each other the most and we interact with each other the most, this groups us together. The human race (as a whole) interacts with the rest of the universe and does not entirely understand the rest of the universe. What we understand the most out of the rest of the universe is life on earth.
I have simplified this logic a hell of alot but this pattern continues infinitly and gets insanely complex. Obviously things can be grouped like this in many differt ways but the same basic logic aplies to any group. As the groups get bigger and more complex they get more complex and less easy to apply rules to. This breaking down of logic is in fact what ties the universe together. As a very breif example.
As previously mentioned one of the primary groups that humans fall into is the human race since most humans interact with each other alot but we can group humans into an infinate number of other groups of lesser importance/validity. If we take one single human as an example (lets call him bob) the here are a few random groups of the many groups bob can be put into:
5: is part of existance
4: exists physicly - has the ability ot affect things
3: human - animal - living - exists physicly
2: english - european - earthling - is in this solar system - exists physicaly
1: has a scar - looks X <-Many groups here - has arms and legs - is human
0: single component of the universe but made up of many groups himself
The largest/most important groups are at the top
I have expanded the groups to the right
Back to the example, every system gets to a critical level of complexity where it apears to be (and in some ways is) completly random. This means that systems (and the universe etc) can oscilate in there complexity and reform into new systems. This can be observed in simple systems in every day life.
If we consider a very simplified example where there are an infinite number of particles in an infinite space and each particle in one moment can only stay still or move to 20 of the surrounding spaces (imagine 3 by 3 cube with the particle in the middle.) This means that although in one moment the particle can only do 21 things in 10 moments the particle can do (21^10)+1 things. Whilst over an infinite amount of time the particle can do an infinite number of things. When trying to work these kind of things out we get very large numbers very quickly. When one particle effects another particle we start to get the prospect of an infinity to the power of infinity number of possibilities or rather if we asume that all particles are linked to each other then we get (((infinity ^ infinity) ^ infinity) ^ infinity) etc.
This is where things get realy strange and hard to put down on paper, the above example shows a simple logical 1d linear structure (infiinity ^ infinity) or a more complex logical 2d lattice structure ( (((infinity ^ infinity) ^ infinity) ^ infinity) etc.) There should in theory be a 3d cuboid structure to this which I cannot express mathematicaly, there would then be a 4th dimensional structure and we could carry on adding on dimensions and 'macro' dimensions if you will infinitly.
If you can picture the above in your head then well done, if not then draw it out on paper and then try to visualise it (paper is very limiting.) This gives us an idea of how insanely complex the inner structure of systems can be when involving interconnected infinites. It also draws some alarming conclusions about the universe when it is looked at from a purely mathmatical point of view. The above model can have transformations of the same nature aplied to it. This seems to be the simplest way to express the notion of an infinite number of points interconnected in an infinite number of ways. It also shows us the amazing scope of such systems and how complex they could possibly get.
The particles mentioned in this section arent neccessarily atomic particles, they are just parts of a system that act and are acted upon (or make up bigger parts.) An example is the beggining of the universe (after the big bang) eventualy some non descript particles began to stick together (yes they are moving apart but you know what I mean) then orbit each other and form atoms, etc. The laws of physics could have literaly evolved like that.
In the next section (yep so far this is just the basics) Ill cover a few interesting things that complex systems do - Im jumping ahead slightly since in between randomness and complex systems there are patterns. As in particles affecting each other in a repetative way that isnt quite a system yet.
The actual system dynamics
I dont actualy know that much about cybernetics as Im still researching it. What ive written bellow is my take on things (and how they are applied to this theory) just to give you an idea of what I mean (alot of it is subject specific to this but if you find transformations interesting go get a book on cybernetics.)
Control, power and knowledge tend to be what every sentient being and component in a system wishes to obtain. I think this is what separates a pattern from a system. It is this want/need which causes the systems' parts (and the system as a whole) to progresss and evolve. It is also what makes a system so unstable. One can only be all knowing if one is powerless (or near enough) whilst the only way somthing can become all powerful is for it to stop making decisions/posessing knowledge. These are the two aspects of conrol.
Every single part in a system wishes to become the system or wishes that the system become it. Unstable systems are often linked together to stabalise each other. All systems are inherently unstable in the way that they are always changing. If a system stops changing then it is 'dead' this hardly ever seems to happen (see infinate time arguement above.) Some systems are stable, or rather closed and will always be there, for instance the energy/matter governed by e=m(cc) will always exist in one form or another. These systems are in effect closed and can be (and are) heavily interwoven into other systems to provide simple, predictable stability.
Control
In a rather abstract example if 2 children inherited 50% control of their parents' buissness there would be fighting and chaos. Similary if we gave 3 children 33% of their parents buissness whilst no 1 child could monopolise the buissness steps to take control could be taken.
A more complex and stable control system would be that a buissness is divided up between 2 children 50:50 but each child has a financial adviser (the child only knows their own financial adviser and the advisers do not know each other.) Every decision that is made has to be ok'd by the childs adviser (thus halving the control.) Every year each child has to send their portion of the records off to the other childs financial advisor (obviously they do not know who this is) we shall call this an exchange in control and we can say the records count as 1% control. The adviser then checks the sums (but again does not know who they are from) and sends them back. This is a kind of anonymous control where each child and their adviser do in fact control half the buissness but do not know how to take complete control. This system is still amasingly unstable since if anyone ever got a sum wrong etc then they would upset the balance. A more stable system would have more children and advisors. (We are asuming these children are very stupid - in reality systems are much more intricate.)
This demonstrates how knowledge can indeed be power and how if anyone were to be 'all knowing' then they would have to be powerless or they would break things. The oposite is also true; if someone was all powerful they would have to know very little or they could take control of an system. INSERT EXAMPLE.
Scale and slack
Scale is a very simple term, oposed to having one person with 10% control you could have 10 people with 1% control and vica versa.
Slack is a bit harder to understand. Slack is when we asume that control/power/energy/mass whatever is there but it actualy isnt for a short time, its similar to when a shop continues to sell an item knowing that it is losing money at that particualr time but will make it back later. When combined with scale slack can be extemely useful. Example imagine the combined finance of the markets of the game eve online over a period of time, they have to rake in a certain amount of isk in relation to the universal consumption of minerals and trading etc and it has to be worked out pretty well considering that the market price history looks real and they dont shadily add/remove isk from accounts.
Slack is also useful for simplifying things. Take the example of a shop you can say 'I spent £100 on milk (in many transactions) and sold £200 worth(in many transactions)' oposed to noting down every single transaction. At first slack doesnt seem very important until you have multiple amounts of slack. Look at how banking works there are millions of depts and loans, whilst there are also millions of accounts full of money aswell as investments, stocks, shares etc. All of this balances out but is very complex. Slack can be imagined like a folded cloth which can be made flat.
Slack is also often a grouping of smaller systems, for instance life on earth. There is a certain amount of energy put in from different sources (such as the sun or nuclear power) which equates to the same amount of energy out at different points. It could simply be that the meaning of life (not just human life) is to re distribute energy and resources etc. Slack is simply an idea which simplifies the visualisation of systems since every detail does not have to be shown (or understood by other parts of the system.)
When instability arises; slack, or rather a group of many small and idealy simple systems are normaly to blame. A perfect example is human life on earth. Every other animal (even aparently intellegent dolphins) does its job as it is suposed to. Humans however have evolved to the point where we have knowledge of things we are not suposed to, such as access to energy that would normaly be locked away (fossil fuels, nuclear power etc.) This is how we have been upsetting the balance of the system of life on earth.
However the way that we have evolved means that we will more likely destroy each other before we destroy earth since the system of life on this planet is much older and more stable.
The interior universe, design and purpose of sentient life.
It has long been beleived that humans are some how special and are different from animals. I had always thought that humans were simply highly evolved animals with an ego problem who were scared of death and forces that they could not control/understand, I thought this was why they came up with religion.
Sentient life however seems to just be a set of extremly complex systems that have adopted an 'ego' and feeling of individuality. This is what makes humans so different since if the ego(/soul/self etc) was removed then although they would continue to exist and even survive it would only be on a very basic level. The key thing that humans would ceese to do as systems is evolve. It could be said that whilst for any major evolution there must be an ego, an ego could also be a by product of evolution/change. There are certain systems which could not have evolved (or at least not as directly) through simple chance. An example would be natural selection amongst humans, what humans find atractive can change from week to week and from country to country. This means that we have evolved in lots of very slight very complex ways. For example the majority of people conceived in the 60s in a certain group would have inherited alot of features from their parent's. These days those two parents would probably have not gotten together.
This is a very very complex example where a collection of egos known as society decide an evolutionary path. This complexity can be scaled down alot and can be aplied to most systems (and groups of systems) that have evolved in a structured way oposed to a hit and miss way. This could well be why we as humans personify things so much, eg mother nature. Systems of a certain complexity/decision making potential may have extremly primitive egos (or rather what we class as ego's since we invented the concept and like to personify things.)
This personification and often fear/love of other systems has in some cases can develop into the idea of a god or some other kind of diety, eg thor 'god of thunder.' If you have read any of Carl Jung's work (leading phyciatrist at turn of century - worked with Freud and founded alot of moden phycology is based upon what he established) then you will know that he beleived in the idea of a shared unconcius. This tyes in with the idea of every particle being linked to every other and if a system could be controled on a very basic level then this could be achieved. This also explains why certain phycological features seem to be genetic but there is no evidence in a DNA sample of the features.
Jung also wrote of Jungan Archietypes, this is the idea that if enough people beleive in somthing it empowers it and makes it in effect real. Even if the idea is not real then it would have the same effect on the systems (humans) that beleive in it. I beleive this is how the ideas of gods come about, somthing is studied to a degree and generaly noticed, has an emotion linked to it, is personified and details our invented, and it is then accepted by a group of people who beleive in it and empower it to an extent. This can be seen in every beleif and also in modern society. We may not have gods but we have things which enough people take part in, have views on, have emotions linked to or think about alot. This creates a focus upon that object and is the begining of a persona. An example is arshewits I think that it would be very interesting to get someone who had never heard of hitler (so aboriginal australian perhaps) and take them to arshewits and see what they think. Alot of what they pick up would probably be from the atmosphere of other people there etc but even this to a degree is an (albeit very direct) example of a shared unconciousness.
But why? Simple, it is an excelent way to acheive stability across an entire system. Every single religion that has ever existed has had similaritys to other religions. Humans seem to need a religion since we have reached an evolutionary point where we can ask 'why are we here?', 'What is the meaning of life?' and 'What is after death?' We may not like the answers to these questions and they would most probably de stabalise our systems to the point where we feel there is no point to anything we do or even life. So we simply envent our own answers, over millenia the current society and past societies/religions have deveoped a model for religions which helps stabalise many aspects of our lives. Eg ourselves (the idea that God loves you, rewards good deeds and that there is an ultimate purpose.) Society (Gods punish wrong doers and reward good people.) This rough model for religions can be seen by looking at the similarities in religions and things such as the 10 commandments. This model would have had to be passed on through the shared unconcious of many generations. Other similar models seem to exist for other things and in other systems.
Bees/wasps/ants are a great example since they have no brain and only have a nervous system but when they act together they can seem strangely intelligent. For instance when attacked by a swarm of hornets, bees grab on to them and work together to generate heat and they eventualy cook the hornet since bees can survive at higher temperatures. Ants are also amazing in the way that they can work together to carry loads. All of these systems have little or no capacity to learn and little or no memory yet they all seem to know instinctivly what to do. The idea of a 'hive mind' is semi accepted in this feild. It seems that between humans it is just alot more complex and buried under our sub concious. Since insects dont seem to be concious (at least individualy) they do not have a sub concious part of there mind to get in the way. The same hive mind / shared unconcioussness feature is visible in all animals and alot of other systems. It seems that the more advanced, (subsequently individual) and concious an animal is the less they need this feature since they are able to exist as a single concios unit. Humans seem to have re developed it mainly for stability and the passing on of models and information. Apes however do not show any evidence (culture, highly developed comunication etc) and therefor do not seem to be at any risk of a mental upheavel due to any philisophical realisations. It would apear that this shared unconciousness is mostly dormant within apes. Or it is at least given very little context in which to act within.
However at any point in recorded history if you had said to someone (ex a roman) your gods are fake, your life is largely pointless and you can do pretty much anything you want without any non physical re procussions, and if this had been accepted and fully realised then society, life and individuality would fall apart within days. So we remained god fearing and lied to ourself in order to keep ourselves alive and to keep our mental and social evolution controled and directed. However both technologicly and mentaly we evolved very slowly. It then got to a point when we quite unexpectedly exploded forth into the real world and thousands of years of mental/technilogical/social evolution took place in only a few hundred years. I beleive this started when a certain ratio of devout religious followers to not so devout people was reached. The new non devout people may not even have known that they were different, they were most probably religious (as they were brought up) but were less god fearing and had the intelligence and individuality to question things. Since that point people have began to realise that there beleifs were false or at least non litteral. These days alot of people are atheist/agnostic and the few that arent know that their religious beleifs/texts are only figurative. However we seem to have had quite a gentle transision in comparison to the previous example. Although religions are widely abused now (Jihads etc) they seem to have reached a stable point of 'Well its not actualy true but its a good set of rules to live your life by.' Underlying this view, our human need for religion and an after life etc are known and has been debated and studied.
It seems that we had advanced enough to partialy accept the truth and survive without our religions. We can now look at the univers unblinkered as I hope that I have been doing and helping you to do in this paper. I think that one of the most important questions is why did we change? Was it just chance that with the abrupt end of the dark ages some of us became too liberal and we were lucky enough to have evolved to a state where we could cope. It is also possible that as we have evolved further and further away from the primative hive mind of insects (which we do not actualy need for survival at all now) it simply became completly dormant. Another possibility (the one I believe to be most likely) is that this is simply the next evolutionary step since a species cannot evolve if it is constantly lying to itself. However it may be that we took this step too early and with inadequate knowledge of the mechanics of the universe and ourselves. Subsequently we are only just now realising how much damage we have done to planet earth.
Not there yet - freewill is an illusion or is at least based upon the interconnectedness of all things which we can experiance and utilise in our minds since they are such an isolated system.
Individuality and free will: The intricacies of extremlye advanced systems
Now that I have explained the idea of the ego I can explain exactly what I mean when I say that we are becoming more and more individual as we evolve. I do not mean that we do not rely on each other, these days we rely on each other (society) more than ever. I mean individual in a purely mental term, we seem to be very distant from the primitive, instinctive hunter gather that had a simple enough mind for a complete shared conciousness to be not just possible but necissary. These days we have much larger and more complex egos and we are in a larger degree of control of our own minds and lives, we do not rely on a large amount of preprogrammed personality and we do not project things into our unconcious minds as gods in order to govern, rationalise and comfort us. It would seem that we do now have genuine free will now. However if we do have free will then this breaks the previously discussed modal where we are just extremely complex but theoreticly predictable systems. Now that we can understand and govern our own lives we seem to have evolved past the point of normal animals. This is why I seperate the internal universe and the external universe, to the outside world the human mind is all slack and cannot necesarily be predicted as we have a new aspect to control, intent.
Joe
