A new religion for a new era - Thermodynamicianism or more aptly titled, Scattered Ramblings 2nd Edition
The holy commandments:
10 Thou shalt seek moderentropy, a moderate entropy state.
20 Nothing is sacred, or above being challenged or questioned, including these commandments.
30 Going slow in the fast lane is the most grievest of sins, the gods will have no mercy on your residual energy phase shall you fail to repent.
40 Redundancy is powerful yet redundant.
50 GOTO 40
On a serious note, this was a post in need of a title and while editing it, I was thinking back to my time when reading of parody religions as the Church of the Subgenious, Discordianism and so on. Any religions, as the former two are, that don't take themselves seriously are ones that I can seriously get behind.
So to start off what I came here to rant about, let me just say that information is truth (I know, here I go again as my one and only reader rolls their eyes). If you want more truth, seek out online media formats that allow more bits of information as platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc aren't as optimal for this goal. Though I'm probably naive here as it seems most people don't want truths, they want tribalism or assurance of their long-held beliefs. 'What's my tribe having, I'll have that'. I think it's very tempting to fall into tribalism because we like being reassured of our truths and having a leader who shares those truths. And so a lot of people tend to fall into these groups and after much time of sheltering themselves from dissenting opinions they tend to lose touch of the turning tides. That's the fallibility of tribalism, it shelters against truths that sometimes should be heard and reinforces truths that may not relevant for survival any more if they were at all. Again, I'm conflating truth with a loose definition of relevance to survival and I'd argue that initial notions of truth stemmed from survival but of course since I'm no historical linguist and etymology was only a very passing interest of mine, I'm just going on a hunch. I'll also admit it's very easy for a loner type as myself to see things from this perspective as there's less peer pressure to adopt the ideologies of the tribes around me though despite that I'd say I'm still biased by various tribes on the internet as it's very hard to truly escape civilization and find more pure modes of thought. There's also involuntary loners out there who may find loneliness difficult so they seek peer validation and try to align with ideologies of a chosen tribe.
Personally, I fall very much in the former as I've gotten older and I rarely, if ever, feel lonely. I've also felt the pains of the latter when younger but generally during those times I've had enough friends around that I don't consider myself much of a victim of loneliness during my lifetime. There's just so much information in this world to discover and as long as it's there to occupy me, it makes me feel a certain kinship with the world itself. But back to the topic of tribalism, as much as I generalized in the previous paragraph, I have to admit that I dislike generalizing about people or groups since by its very nature it deals with condensing information and of course when you do so there's invariably some sort of useful information at some level, micro or macroscopic, that'll be lost. This phenomenon can also lead to misunderstandings which may spark tribal or personal conflicts. Generalizing is an often lossy compression method, to put it in IT terminology, and incidentally this tends to happen when we tribalize. To be fair, I'd also argue that tribalization does have its validity from an evolutionary perspective, which is probably obvious, as well from a thermodynamic perspective as cohesion serves to conserve the energy state in the local system. As foreword, don't take me as an expert on thermodynamics, I've just read a wiki article on it and so now I'm an expert like everyone else who reads a wiki article on a subject and spouts about it. Ok, in my defense, a bit more than that but enough to realize just what a great visual analogy it can serve to our common outlook but not so much as to realize it may be a useless analogy.
But I think if we're ever to survive this universe that it's best to get as much information as possible from this system, of course, within a certain limit. Too much information means information overload meaning less efficiency. That could be mitigated by increasing storage capacity but would equally require more processing power as we have more information that we have to grok. And inevitably, for myself, these topics usually lead to some sort of existential crisis so pardon me while I entertain that crisis. But once, if at all, humanity is using something such as a Dyson sphere, will we then finally ask ourselves what's all this information acquisition for? Are we to keep absorbing more energy until we become larger energy units? That reminds me of Agario.io, an online game which I've only played a few times, where you play a small circular unit and you encompass more units to keep increasing in size. And relatedly, when digg.com had digglabs, I was fascinated by the visuals reflecting how users seek and consume information in a similar manner. Since I'm a visual person, that tends to be a large part of how I process the world so it's also why I prefer the thermodynamic outlook and why I try to extrapolate that to other levels when and if I reasonably can. But to continue the crisis, I'd like to ask how big of a unit are we destined to become? Will we become as big as the universe we're consuming? Ok, that was a dumb question since it violates the second law but a more legitimate one would be to ask what our limit is. Is there a limit, a sort of Great Filter? We can only grow as much as our fuel source allows us or however much moderentropy (I like making up terms) or productive matter is in the system which appears to be a very very small amount of the size of the universe. Maybe towards the end we can find a way to convert our likeness into dark matter form, or not, since I'm very pessimistic about our future. But I'm already one step ahead as I have some ideas for humans2.0. Firstly, more protection for our vital organs. Guys who play sports, you know what I'm talking about. Ok, lame joke. But I'd definitely re-engineer the back since in evolutionary terms seems to have woefully lagged behind; also related.
Comfort from those genetic code patches may not last long because it seems for every positive evolutionary change there tends to be some entity that comes along to exploit the new niche when evolutionary selective pressures increase, something we also see in information and network security fields. New changes create new niches for possible exploitation and on the defensive side, more changes to harden system defenses means more entrenchment within a niche, which means less adaptive mobility potential for other niches as changing code base can create new possible exploits. I went into a tangent here about the security and business (dis)advantages of open versus closed source software here but it is no more, thanks Chromium. But in evolutionary terms, higher stress on the species means higher chance of more speciation when possible, otherwise it's end-game, thermodynamic dissipation of the unit seems to reach a sort of equilibrium, or satisfaction, at this scale. Species seek to diversify, to put more eggs in more baskets as a defensive measure against these pressures. I suspect this has relation to the phenomenon of higher birth rates in poorer communities; as selective pressures are greater, within tolerable amounts to life, output becomes greater. Conversely, when evolutionary pressures decrease, what we would define as decadence becomes more common and reproduction decreases. I can't source it at the moment, perhaps later in an edit, but I recall an experiment with mice that when fully satisfied, normal pro-active evolutionary offensive measures decreased, in other words they became less evolutionarily vigilant and who can blame them when evolution is basically telling you in some way that it doesn't exist, they're not "feeling" the pressure to compete. (Insert joke about evolution deniers). But to elaborate so I'm not mistaken, I'd also argue that high evolutionary pressure, high entropy beyond optimal, isn't very conducive to societal intelligence as some amount of, what some might define as "decadence", for lack of a better word, or negative pressure, gives us leisure time to examine the world. In this time of less evolutionary pressure, species repair can be facilitated by means of establishing stable cultural norms and serving as a base for what's "good" or satisfactory. The Egyptian pyramids, the Roman Empire at its height, the birth of your religion of choice, the Enlightenment era and so on. You can debate who they were good for but they set a base for many cultures and were established during a time when the peoples weren't overwhelmed by where their next meal was coming from, they had leisure time to be creative. So we need low entropy as it's the soup, if you will, of life and we could probably call high entropy the spark. Soup is always better when warm anyway, right? All in all in accordance with thermodynamic law, total universal entropy increases, or stays the same depending on how macroscopically you look at it, while local entropy may decrease. With higher entropy comes more variation, whether this output is more variation of species, a greater number of certain species, more cultural variation, technological innovation and so on while lower entropy gives us much-needed stabilization and establishment. I want to make the case that pressure, negative and positive, is proportional to variation in many cases but that breaks down if we analogize to the quantum level, such as a wave function collapse, where observation, or pressure, collapses the variable into a non-variable, or so as far as we can tell unless string theory can save my analogy. More stress or conformative pressure on the input creates less variation of output, pressure inversely proportional to variation in this case. Perhaps at the quantum level there exists a thermodynamic end-game, a veritable mouse-in-a-corner type of situation and so the analogy breaks down here. But trying to stay in tune to this basic premise is what I jokingly define as Thermodynamicianism, try to say that three times fast. It's a term I made up only after editing this post because it needed a title and I was feeling cheeky, as those across the pond would say. I suppose you could extrapolate these analogs to a sociological framework even more but my views on that aren't very definitive at the moment, if ever. Part of the problem with trying to generalize as I discussed elsewhere is that what might possibly be useful information is inevitably lost and as we traverse different layers of physics, rules start breaking down and so unless you have a Theory of Everything, Godel would be suspicious, you can't properly summarize these layers and if so, it'd take someone a lot smarter than I to do so.
So where was I before I went on a tangent. Probably in space, that's where my mind tends to reside. No, not astronomy though I did have a passing interest in it. But back to my evolutionary pessimism, I guess. To elaborate, some of us make great strides to understand our fellow man and what we do to the environment that supports us while others seem to spend just as much energy trying to harm them, some of it in optimal forms, I'll admit, since it's good that we stay challenged. But as we gain greater power to harm more people with greater technology, the chances of our own destruction increases as all it takes is one insane leader to harm our progress or upset the thermodynamic equilibrium within this system enough to set us back or destroy us all. Earth has a very intricate and delicate equilibrium. For now and the distant future, life will still evolve should a major catastrophe occur as long as it's not too great but the equilibrium may be upset in ways not necessarily optimal for intelligent life. Intelligence needs to be fed enough entropy, enough chaos within that it can process equivalent external chaos, but low enough entropy that order can reside within the system, or enough balance of the low and high entropy of the external system that it can be simulated within the internal system, the brain, if you will. We're basically simulation machines so we naturally need to reflect, or process, the nature of the system which we're simulating. I'm stretching the thermodynamic analogy here since when you're discussing neurology and sociology, there's no scientific theory that successfully marries those subjects together that I've heard of but that's the fun in having a blog and not being an expert in these things. You're allowed a certain amount of intellectual freedom but I do take great worry in making sure my information is correct, the known information, and that the known unknowns, which I mostly discuss, aren't too far out of alignment of known science and that I usually to note when my opinions may be a bit out of alignment with standard opinion. I know my outlook is a bit out there but I still try to somewhat grounded by analyzing my thoughts from as many views as possible.
So to get back on topic and use a well-known mantra, with more power comes more responsibility for that power. Is this the, or a, Great Filter? Or perhaps it's more biological and there's an evolutionary filter against very high biological intelligence. I've noticed many instances where being more intelligent just simply isn't beneficial to the host, for instance, one of many, where in a competitive environment if you perform too efficiently you draw the ire of other competitors, somewhat related. With increasing intelligence in a lower intelligence society you become more of a target which is where, what I term as the Champion's Paradox, comes into play. The Champion's Paradox could be explained as the greater you acquire, the greater your defensive taxes. Or more relative to fighting, the greater you rank, the greater desire for others to evolutionarily exploit that rank, ie, you become a bigger target with perhaps a secondary tax of becoming more comfortable, less hungry and so chances of failure may increase. The greater gain, the greater resistance. It's also relative to what I said earlier about niche exploitation regarding information security, evolution and you could also extrapolate this to other areas such as sociology, politics, etc. and how greater machine complexity equals greater chance of failure; it could be applied on many scales. With more intelligence you'll inevitably have more matter, more variables, and so there's a higher chance of quirky or unpredictable behavior unless there's a proper means of error correction, something we see in IC fabrication where we now face more thermal leakage issues with smaller fab processes and more chips being binned for defects. In software, the more code you write the more chance of human error, this compounded on the complexity of hardware, both of which susceptible to even more esoteric external issues such as cosmic background radiation which I discussed in another blog post about data recovery. Another example, complex biological systems where errors in the system create cancers if DNA repair facilities aren't working optimally and so to combat more complex errors you have to use more complex heuristics and so this mechanism too isn't safe from the paradox. And finally another of many instances, I think this applies to the laws of physics themselves, both intrinsic and extrinsic, as the more physical layers you have, the harder it becomes to predict outliers or what you would define as unknowns or errors, depending on the subject. The more complicated a machine, the more chance of unwanted output or failure. NASA knows this very well and tries to keep their own hardware and software very pruned; related fascinating article. I also notice this pattern in other areas such as velocity, the faster you go, the more logarithmic power required to go faster. More anecdotally, the more knowledgeable we become, the more burdened or mediated we become as our views become more nuanced. Time is energy and the older humans get, the more resistance we face so humans seem to possess some sort of median energy that becomes exponentially harder to maintain as we fight our way through time. Gravity, as said by a theoretical physicist I can't recall, is matter taking the shortest point through time-space. In our quest to gain power or energy, time slows and entropy increases for the bearer, so do the aforementioned examples represent time or entropy burdening us as we gain power? Could there be some beautiful, elegant algorithm underlying the Champion's Paradox? The more local power acquired, the more external powers work against you. Perhaps you can extrapolate from e=mc2 in a way that I can't elegantly surmise and Champion's Paradox is a sociological representation of the formula. Ok, I'm getting too far off my rocker here and my rocker isn't that stable to begin with. Though this all does give me some justifiable solace for my minimal tastes and when I like to use the idiom 'less is more'. I paraphrase Sun Tzu when I say that power is not always best flaunted and sometimes feigned weakness is preferred lest one draw too much attention and dispel too much of one's manipulative (offensive/defensive) capabilities; flaunt when you can either back up the flaunt or signal as last resort. Or whatever. If I may flirt with nihilism here, I don't bother stressing rules as these so much because I think the universe is a logical system and that all within and of it are inherently logical, perhaps just in ways that we don't comprehend or we perceive as incompatible with our biological, ideological or circumstantial imperatives. While on the subject, I could argue that nihilism is the most godly of ideologies as you have total faith in the system, that the powers that be are good and know what they're doing so less imperative to interfere with this divine system. Brain and body are at odds with this ideology though. My body still wants to fight against this system yet my brain wants to understand its logic assuming it's a logical and "correct" system. My hunch is that it is a "correct" system as long as entities, such as us, are in and of it to execute the corrective mechanism, to play our part in bringing about our own subjective, and therefore, becoming objective equilibrium.
Anecdotal but when I look at some of the more intelligent species such as humans, dolphins who commit infanticide, primates who kill for sport and so on, I'd say that quirkiness is sometimes more a bug than a feature. But intelligence is a form of sense, awareness of environment, and so what if we use our other senses as an analog here as a thought experiment? Why don't we have super-sensitive ears, eyes or touch? My guess, I think very high sensory awareness would be a burden, not to mention with higher sensory awareness you'll naturally have higher entropy, a higher thermal fingerprint, and so more calories needed for this awareness. More need for calories means more need for an even higher sensory awareness to feed this high-sensory entity and so we get a self-feeding loop which either gets exploited by another thermodynamic entity or increases and possibly eventually reaching an inescapable event horizon like a black hole. My mind so wants to go there and analogize planetary objects as intelligent entities but that's a big leap and I already take enough leaps trying to equivocate as I have. I'll dial it down and argue that intelligence is all around us. If our brains are intelligent bodies which simulate a reflection of the universe, is the universe, that which is being reflected, not intelligent itself? Both of which are composed of intelligent bodies within, neurons within the brain and brains within the universe. Computations are being done all around us, within and without. I know, I'm stretching the definition of intelligent which is what I like to do but some don't like muddying the definition. Intelligent life observes other intelligent life in its like as a threat so any time we create stronger AGI (artificial general intelligence), some feel threatened and like to move the goal posts or the definition of AGI even further. Life naturally likes to exploit. It's the thermodynamic system trying to dissipate energy, seeking equilibrium or maximum entropy production (MEP).
I hesitate to lecture, as the ghosts of Turing (Halting Problem) and Gödel (Incompleteness Theorem) remind us formally that we'll never know everything and so we'll never have the big picture but I'd like to say that we have to be careful about increasing entropy in this system too rapidly, meaning we should conserve and re-use as much as we can and limit pollution. We should also learn to get along better with each other as war or any form of societal chaos within the system is indicative of an increase of entropy. But at the same time I'm a determinist and so I think these things are written in stone, predetermined by the laws of physics but then again I do have a chisel and don't mind playing my part in chiseling the stone in a way I think is optimal for society though it's tamed by my determinism so all-in-all, I'm fairly chill about my opinions. And on the converse, some amount of chaos, or diversity, within the system promotes strength and because change is needed in a changing system that will happily squash us if we don't. I'd also emphasize that we should do everything we can to not keep our eggs in the same basket, meaning we should work on getting off this planet because its entropy will inevitably increase beyond tolerance so we need to find a system that's in a state of thermodynamic equilibrium compatible with life as we know it and/or find a way to exploit the thermodynamic state of other systems that aren't directly compatible, ie, using Dyson Spheres, energy extraction satellites and whatnot.
You know, I railed against information compression in much of this post but in fairness I admit that it's a necessity and in this case as many others, it can be a great thing. You don't have to know every second of my life nor should you. All of my years of product acquisition, what little I have, amount to nothing worthy. And all my years of travelling different roads of religion, philosophy, science, politics, etc converge on this chest that I can put it all in, at least the main goods that I've acquired from those travels. Too much unfettered information is a burden while properly pruned information is a gift. Try to take the time to sum up what matters to you most because a person's time is precious and as cliche as it may sound, it's true that the more you say, the less it means. And no, to anyone reading who may know me, I didn't justify being a mute or less vocal in childhood because of this idea, it's only after the fact, after growing up, have I realized just how important it is. Also realize even though my blog posts may be long, these are carefully thought-over summations of lessons I've learned in life and the last thing I want to do is burden others with my own useless minutia. But for a post that I only intended to be a short paragraph, this one is long over-staying its welcome and only longer now since I edited which isn't surprising because deep down I knew I couldn't write a short post. I felt sometimes compelled to elaborate on thoughts that might possibly be misconstrued since accuracy of expression is really important with me, especially when it comes to my blog as it's become a bit more important to me as I've written more here. I didn't really intend when creating it and I've had a few other personal writing platforms that I've played around with over the years but I've never cared to put much thought into them as I have this one. I think my writing here reflects me fairly accurately, for good and bad, so I'm kind of glad I did this.
Sometimes I ask myself why I bother to write and I think I've already justified it to myself that it's an anxiety outlet but I also do this to consolidate my thoughts as well as to share them to any friends and family who may happen to be reading, though I rarely ever if at all mention the blog. It's partly because it'd seem perhaps too self-promotional and also because of insecurities since I don't want to be perceived as foolish or crazy. My views are very moderate but when you try to marry morality with a shallow interpretation of thermodynamics, it will inevitably and justifiably be seen with some skepticism. But I won't have much of anything to leave behind after I'm gone as I've never had near as much financial ambition as I've had intellectual ambition, especially in recent years, and so this is just some of what I leave behind that might be of interest to others. It may not be edited well but that's what you get, you get me, I'm not edited very well especially when speaking impromptu. This is only the very minutia, but an information-dense kernel, of what I've learned of usually bigger-picture existential topics. I could write more but nobody's going to care in ten or twenty years what menagerie of time-specific and space-specific problems I've solved and how I've dealt with them; they'll quickly become irrelevant to other people who face problems in a newer time and space. There's questions and answers that are more timeless and placeless and these are ones that I care to share more.
Whew! I didn't mean to write this much. I didn't even know what I was going to write about exactly, mostly just a small rant about our need for quick information fixes and how it fashionably manifests in online media platforms as Twitter, where lack of verbal nuance tends to create conflict, and our meme-ful media which seems to perpetuate faster than reality. I was thinking I might also descend into a small rant, that I'll heretofore execute, about how hyperbole tends to spread faster than more nuanced truth, partly because hyperbole and image memes are compressed information, and therefore, incomplete and less truthful information but quicker to consume. They're the equivalent of candy, which may taste better and quicker to digest than a sandwich, but less filling and nutritious. We want exciting, we want it tasty and we want it now. I have a confession to make. I have a speck, perhaps even a log, in my own eye, as I can also be impatient but I'll point out the speck in my brother's eye so we can possibly both see better. I'll cast the first stone even though I have sinned so my brother can cast them on me when I sin and we can then more nimbly deflect future stones. I'll judge because I want judged myself and then we can both become wiser from each other's judgement. But not too much. Too much judgement, too much casting of stones and too much reflection of imperfection creates too much entropy in the system, it's not conducive to intelligent life. Conversely, too little conflict means lower entropy which fosters idleness which creates weakness and so also not conducive or optimal to intelligent life, [we need some variance and diversity of environment for intellectual stimulation](https://news.yale.edu/2018/07/19/arent-sure-brain-primed-learning), both local in time and apparently evolutionarily. We reside within a very delicately balanced system. Many different (non)religions, different sciences, different philosophies, different laws, different policies and different tribes tend to be in tune with this balance in differing manifestations but I think they're all singing the same general song but this song is always changing because the stage is always changing. If you're a lover of human life and want to promote and perpetuate human life in as much time and space as possible, I think it'd be wise to try to stay in tune with it, to not keep singing the old songs that worked on the old stage or look too far ahead to try to sing a song set for a new stage that we're not ready for. Science and, I grudgingly state mathematics since my low, or very distracted, working memory aren't optimal for it, are the best ways to stay in tune with it all, in my very open opinion.
To wrap it up since it's 3am now and I won't even bother to re-read or edit this until tomorrow, it's become customary to post a related video or song so here's some Pink Floyd because why not? Because they're always relevant and of course because this song's been in my head lately. I love the relaxed tempo, the serene atmosphere in the video, the carefree low-entropy (first time referring to a song by its perceived entropy levels but a related and worthy descriptor, imho) mood it induces and it also reminds me of being young back in the summer of '69. Of course, I wasn't around then but that's just how good it is. Pink Floyd, like many great bands don't just create songs, they create soundscapes.
Editing is complete (re-edit:ok, this time I mean it, maybe) unless I get the urge to revisit the post again but it's rather unsatisfactory. I've posted so much and I tend to gradually go into so many (un)related topics, some that may not necessarily merge that gracefully with others, and I'm such a scatterbrain that editing my writing can be painful. I'm not a professional so I can get away with it but I at least try to make sure I've conveyed some accuracy of thought because I know I can be hard to follow and I'm not sure I did so here. The post may seem disjointed, partially because it is. The fourth major paragraph that I was working on wasn't saved before my browser crashed. This happened once on Windows and I restored my post by using a hex editor to examine memory contents. Though I'm now using Linux, Antergos specifically, but recent kernels don't allow full volatile dump and examination of memory unless you load a specific kernel module, as a security measure, fortunately or unfortunately in my case. I could only dump 1MB of memory and in which case was fruitless when examined. I already force-closed Chromium so dumping PID-specific memory was out of the question. Examining cache was out also since I had no luck decrypting the newer version, v3, of Chromium's cache contents and it probably wasn't in there anyway for various reasons nor in my swap file as it was virtually empty. I used to dabble in OS forensics for fun so I didn't mind the easter egg hunt. But I suppose my crash had something to do with enabling hardware acceleration in Chromium ://flags, which is opposite the defaults, and caused Chromium to crash a few times before since changing. I never had such egregious crashes on Firefox and they were very rare, on Windows and Linux. For the first time in a long while I've wanted to punch my computer. I had a great paragraph, it was my favorite, elegantly expanding, ironically enough, the relationship between open and closed source software, information security and evolutionary analogs as well as discussing the 'imprisoned by choice' paradox of the Linux software ecosystem versus a more dictatorial course such as what Windows and Apple follow. Though I did minorly go into that subject in the new paragraph but not satisfactorily. I tried to recall what I lost but as Winnebago Man would say, "my mind is just a piece of shit" now after getting upset and I can't think for nothing so the fourth major paragraph isn't as elegant and over-arching as the initial edit was.
If I can be serious about one thing, don't take me too seriously. I like to jot down my thoughts, of which, tend to be scattered, high-entropy as I like to say, and so perhaps have a higher likelihood of error in communication. I'm also aware of just how amusingly autistic I probably come across, as I've been most of my life, and I'm hoping it's something that can be more of entertainment than serious matter. Life is just too absurd to take too seriously.
And do note, I use modifiers the high, low, moderate, etc when referring to entropy but those can be very arbitrary terms when referring to life forms, and some may even argue not very appropriate if arguing fundamentals. Entropy itself isn't something that can really be calculated though you can calculate the amount of entropy change that has taken place, well, people smarter than I can. I gauge those terms by comparing with known low entropy units as "vacuum" space and very high entropy units as stars and consider known life somewhere in an optimal state between. Those more versed in thermodynamics could validly criticize my definitions here. And so as I was saying about taking me too seriously, as with all matters high-entropy and of high-entropy matter, quirkiness or outlier tendencies are an inherent, matter-of-fact, part of its nature. Coincidentally, this is why we can't have nice things and my answer to 'why you always be playin''.
10 Thou shalt seek moderentropy, a moderate entropy state.
20 Nothing is sacred, or above being challenged or questioned, including these commandments.
30 Going slow in the fast lane is the most grievest of sins, the gods will have no mercy on your residual energy phase shall you fail to repent.
40 Redundancy is powerful yet redundant.
50 GOTO 40
On a serious note, this was a post in need of a title and while editing it, I was thinking back to my time when reading of parody religions as the Church of the Subgenious, Discordianism and so on. Any religions, as the former two are, that don't take themselves seriously are ones that I can seriously get behind.
So to start off what I came here to rant about, let me just say that information is truth (I know, here I go again as my one and only reader rolls their eyes). If you want more truth, seek out online media formats that allow more bits of information as platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc aren't as optimal for this goal. Though I'm probably naive here as it seems most people don't want truths, they want tribalism or assurance of their long-held beliefs. 'What's my tribe having, I'll have that'. I think it's very tempting to fall into tribalism because we like being reassured of our truths and having a leader who shares those truths. And so a lot of people tend to fall into these groups and after much time of sheltering themselves from dissenting opinions they tend to lose touch of the turning tides. That's the fallibility of tribalism, it shelters against truths that sometimes should be heard and reinforces truths that may not relevant for survival any more if they were at all. Again, I'm conflating truth with a loose definition of relevance to survival and I'd argue that initial notions of truth stemmed from survival but of course since I'm no historical linguist and etymology was only a very passing interest of mine, I'm just going on a hunch. I'll also admit it's very easy for a loner type as myself to see things from this perspective as there's less peer pressure to adopt the ideologies of the tribes around me though despite that I'd say I'm still biased by various tribes on the internet as it's very hard to truly escape civilization and find more pure modes of thought. There's also involuntary loners out there who may find loneliness difficult so they seek peer validation and try to align with ideologies of a chosen tribe.
Personally, I fall very much in the former as I've gotten older and I rarely, if ever, feel lonely. I've also felt the pains of the latter when younger but generally during those times I've had enough friends around that I don't consider myself much of a victim of loneliness during my lifetime. There's just so much information in this world to discover and as long as it's there to occupy me, it makes me feel a certain kinship with the world itself. But back to the topic of tribalism, as much as I generalized in the previous paragraph, I have to admit that I dislike generalizing about people or groups since by its very nature it deals with condensing information and of course when you do so there's invariably some sort of useful information at some level, micro or macroscopic, that'll be lost. This phenomenon can also lead to misunderstandings which may spark tribal or personal conflicts. Generalizing is an often lossy compression method, to put it in IT terminology, and incidentally this tends to happen when we tribalize. To be fair, I'd also argue that tribalization does have its validity from an evolutionary perspective, which is probably obvious, as well from a thermodynamic perspective as cohesion serves to conserve the energy state in the local system. As foreword, don't take me as an expert on thermodynamics, I've just read a wiki article on it and so now I'm an expert like everyone else who reads a wiki article on a subject and spouts about it. Ok, in my defense, a bit more than that but enough to realize just what a great visual analogy it can serve to our common outlook but not so much as to realize it may be a useless analogy.
But I think if we're ever to survive this universe that it's best to get as much information as possible from this system, of course, within a certain limit. Too much information means information overload meaning less efficiency. That could be mitigated by increasing storage capacity but would equally require more processing power as we have more information that we have to grok. And inevitably, for myself, these topics usually lead to some sort of existential crisis so pardon me while I entertain that crisis. But once, if at all, humanity is using something such as a Dyson sphere, will we then finally ask ourselves what's all this information acquisition for? Are we to keep absorbing more energy until we become larger energy units? That reminds me of Agario.io, an online game which I've only played a few times, where you play a small circular unit and you encompass more units to keep increasing in size. And relatedly, when digg.com had digglabs, I was fascinated by the visuals reflecting how users seek and consume information in a similar manner. Since I'm a visual person, that tends to be a large part of how I process the world so it's also why I prefer the thermodynamic outlook and why I try to extrapolate that to other levels when and if I reasonably can. But to continue the crisis, I'd like to ask how big of a unit are we destined to become? Will we become as big as the universe we're consuming? Ok, that was a dumb question since it violates the second law but a more legitimate one would be to ask what our limit is. Is there a limit, a sort of Great Filter? We can only grow as much as our fuel source allows us or however much moderentropy (I like making up terms) or productive matter is in the system which appears to be a very very small amount of the size of the universe. Maybe towards the end we can find a way to convert our likeness into dark matter form, or not, since I'm very pessimistic about our future. But I'm already one step ahead as I have some ideas for humans2.0. Firstly, more protection for our vital organs. Guys who play sports, you know what I'm talking about. Ok, lame joke. But I'd definitely re-engineer the back since in evolutionary terms seems to have woefully lagged behind; also related.
Comfort from those genetic code patches may not last long because it seems for every positive evolutionary change there tends to be some entity that comes along to exploit the new niche when evolutionary selective pressures increase, something we also see in information and network security fields. New changes create new niches for possible exploitation and on the defensive side, more changes to harden system defenses means more entrenchment within a niche, which means less adaptive mobility potential for other niches as changing code base can create new possible exploits. I went into a tangent here about the security and business (dis)advantages of open versus closed source software here but it is no more, thanks Chromium. But in evolutionary terms, higher stress on the species means higher chance of more speciation when possible, otherwise it's end-game, thermodynamic dissipation of the unit seems to reach a sort of equilibrium, or satisfaction, at this scale. Species seek to diversify, to put more eggs in more baskets as a defensive measure against these pressures. I suspect this has relation to the phenomenon of higher birth rates in poorer communities; as selective pressures are greater, within tolerable amounts to life, output becomes greater. Conversely, when evolutionary pressures decrease, what we would define as decadence becomes more common and reproduction decreases. I can't source it at the moment, perhaps later in an edit, but I recall an experiment with mice that when fully satisfied, normal pro-active evolutionary offensive measures decreased, in other words they became less evolutionarily vigilant and who can blame them when evolution is basically telling you in some way that it doesn't exist, they're not "feeling" the pressure to compete. (Insert joke about evolution deniers). But to elaborate so I'm not mistaken, I'd also argue that high evolutionary pressure, high entropy beyond optimal, isn't very conducive to societal intelligence as some amount of, what some might define as "decadence", for lack of a better word, or negative pressure, gives us leisure time to examine the world. In this time of less evolutionary pressure, species repair can be facilitated by means of establishing stable cultural norms and serving as a base for what's "good" or satisfactory. The Egyptian pyramids, the Roman Empire at its height, the birth of your religion of choice, the Enlightenment era and so on. You can debate who they were good for but they set a base for many cultures and were established during a time when the peoples weren't overwhelmed by where their next meal was coming from, they had leisure time to be creative. So we need low entropy as it's the soup, if you will, of life and we could probably call high entropy the spark. Soup is always better when warm anyway, right? All in all in accordance with thermodynamic law, total universal entropy increases, or stays the same depending on how macroscopically you look at it, while local entropy may decrease. With higher entropy comes more variation, whether this output is more variation of species, a greater number of certain species, more cultural variation, technological innovation and so on while lower entropy gives us much-needed stabilization and establishment. I want to make the case that pressure, negative and positive, is proportional to variation in many cases but that breaks down if we analogize to the quantum level, such as a wave function collapse, where observation, or pressure, collapses the variable into a non-variable, or so as far as we can tell unless string theory can save my analogy. More stress or conformative pressure on the input creates less variation of output, pressure inversely proportional to variation in this case. Perhaps at the quantum level there exists a thermodynamic end-game, a veritable mouse-in-a-corner type of situation and so the analogy breaks down here. But trying to stay in tune to this basic premise is what I jokingly define as Thermodynamicianism, try to say that three times fast. It's a term I made up only after editing this post because it needed a title and I was feeling cheeky, as those across the pond would say. I suppose you could extrapolate these analogs to a sociological framework even more but my views on that aren't very definitive at the moment, if ever. Part of the problem with trying to generalize as I discussed elsewhere is that what might possibly be useful information is inevitably lost and as we traverse different layers of physics, rules start breaking down and so unless you have a Theory of Everything, Godel would be suspicious, you can't properly summarize these layers and if so, it'd take someone a lot smarter than I to do so.
So where was I before I went on a tangent. Probably in space, that's where my mind tends to reside. No, not astronomy though I did have a passing interest in it. But back to my evolutionary pessimism, I guess. To elaborate, some of us make great strides to understand our fellow man and what we do to the environment that supports us while others seem to spend just as much energy trying to harm them, some of it in optimal forms, I'll admit, since it's good that we stay challenged. But as we gain greater power to harm more people with greater technology, the chances of our own destruction increases as all it takes is one insane leader to harm our progress or upset the thermodynamic equilibrium within this system enough to set us back or destroy us all. Earth has a very intricate and delicate equilibrium. For now and the distant future, life will still evolve should a major catastrophe occur as long as it's not too great but the equilibrium may be upset in ways not necessarily optimal for intelligent life. Intelligence needs to be fed enough entropy, enough chaos within that it can process equivalent external chaos, but low enough entropy that order can reside within the system, or enough balance of the low and high entropy of the external system that it can be simulated within the internal system, the brain, if you will. We're basically simulation machines so we naturally need to reflect, or process, the nature of the system which we're simulating. I'm stretching the thermodynamic analogy here since when you're discussing neurology and sociology, there's no scientific theory that successfully marries those subjects together that I've heard of but that's the fun in having a blog and not being an expert in these things. You're allowed a certain amount of intellectual freedom but I do take great worry in making sure my information is correct, the known information, and that the known unknowns, which I mostly discuss, aren't too far out of alignment of known science and that I usually to note when my opinions may be a bit out of alignment with standard opinion. I know my outlook is a bit out there but I still try to somewhat grounded by analyzing my thoughts from as many views as possible.
So to get back on topic and use a well-known mantra, with more power comes more responsibility for that power. Is this the, or a, Great Filter? Or perhaps it's more biological and there's an evolutionary filter against very high biological intelligence. I've noticed many instances where being more intelligent just simply isn't beneficial to the host, for instance, one of many, where in a competitive environment if you perform too efficiently you draw the ire of other competitors, somewhat related. With increasing intelligence in a lower intelligence society you become more of a target which is where, what I term as the Champion's Paradox, comes into play. The Champion's Paradox could be explained as the greater you acquire, the greater your defensive taxes. Or more relative to fighting, the greater you rank, the greater desire for others to evolutionarily exploit that rank, ie, you become a bigger target with perhaps a secondary tax of becoming more comfortable, less hungry and so chances of failure may increase. The greater gain, the greater resistance. It's also relative to what I said earlier about niche exploitation regarding information security, evolution and you could also extrapolate this to other areas such as sociology, politics, etc. and how greater machine complexity equals greater chance of failure; it could be applied on many scales. With more intelligence you'll inevitably have more matter, more variables, and so there's a higher chance of quirky or unpredictable behavior unless there's a proper means of error correction, something we see in IC fabrication where we now face more thermal leakage issues with smaller fab processes and more chips being binned for defects. In software, the more code you write the more chance of human error, this compounded on the complexity of hardware, both of which susceptible to even more esoteric external issues such as cosmic background radiation which I discussed in another blog post about data recovery. Another example, complex biological systems where errors in the system create cancers if DNA repair facilities aren't working optimally and so to combat more complex errors you have to use more complex heuristics and so this mechanism too isn't safe from the paradox. And finally another of many instances, I think this applies to the laws of physics themselves, both intrinsic and extrinsic, as the more physical layers you have, the harder it becomes to predict outliers or what you would define as unknowns or errors, depending on the subject. The more complicated a machine, the more chance of unwanted output or failure. NASA knows this very well and tries to keep their own hardware and software very pruned; related fascinating article. I also notice this pattern in other areas such as velocity, the faster you go, the more logarithmic power required to go faster. More anecdotally, the more knowledgeable we become, the more burdened or mediated we become as our views become more nuanced. Time is energy and the older humans get, the more resistance we face so humans seem to possess some sort of median energy that becomes exponentially harder to maintain as we fight our way through time. Gravity, as said by a theoretical physicist I can't recall, is matter taking the shortest point through time-space. In our quest to gain power or energy, time slows and entropy increases for the bearer, so do the aforementioned examples represent time or entropy burdening us as we gain power? Could there be some beautiful, elegant algorithm underlying the Champion's Paradox? The more local power acquired, the more external powers work against you. Perhaps you can extrapolate from e=mc2 in a way that I can't elegantly surmise and Champion's Paradox is a sociological representation of the formula. Ok, I'm getting too far off my rocker here and my rocker isn't that stable to begin with. Though this all does give me some justifiable solace for my minimal tastes and when I like to use the idiom 'less is more'. I paraphrase Sun Tzu when I say that power is not always best flaunted and sometimes feigned weakness is preferred lest one draw too much attention and dispel too much of one's manipulative (offensive/defensive) capabilities; flaunt when you can either back up the flaunt or signal as last resort. Or whatever. If I may flirt with nihilism here, I don't bother stressing rules as these so much because I think the universe is a logical system and that all within and of it are inherently logical, perhaps just in ways that we don't comprehend or we perceive as incompatible with our biological, ideological or circumstantial imperatives. While on the subject, I could argue that nihilism is the most godly of ideologies as you have total faith in the system, that the powers that be are good and know what they're doing so less imperative to interfere with this divine system. Brain and body are at odds with this ideology though. My body still wants to fight against this system yet my brain wants to understand its logic assuming it's a logical and "correct" system. My hunch is that it is a "correct" system as long as entities, such as us, are in and of it to execute the corrective mechanism, to play our part in bringing about our own subjective, and therefore, becoming objective equilibrium.
Anecdotal but when I look at some of the more intelligent species such as humans, dolphins who commit infanticide, primates who kill for sport and so on, I'd say that quirkiness is sometimes more a bug than a feature. But intelligence is a form of sense, awareness of environment, and so what if we use our other senses as an analog here as a thought experiment? Why don't we have super-sensitive ears, eyes or touch? My guess, I think very high sensory awareness would be a burden, not to mention with higher sensory awareness you'll naturally have higher entropy, a higher thermal fingerprint, and so more calories needed for this awareness. More need for calories means more need for an even higher sensory awareness to feed this high-sensory entity and so we get a self-feeding loop which either gets exploited by another thermodynamic entity or increases and possibly eventually reaching an inescapable event horizon like a black hole. My mind so wants to go there and analogize planetary objects as intelligent entities but that's a big leap and I already take enough leaps trying to equivocate as I have. I'll dial it down and argue that intelligence is all around us. If our brains are intelligent bodies which simulate a reflection of the universe, is the universe, that which is being reflected, not intelligent itself? Both of which are composed of intelligent bodies within, neurons within the brain and brains within the universe. Computations are being done all around us, within and without. I know, I'm stretching the definition of intelligent which is what I like to do but some don't like muddying the definition. Intelligent life observes other intelligent life in its like as a threat so any time we create stronger AGI (artificial general intelligence), some feel threatened and like to move the goal posts or the definition of AGI even further. Life naturally likes to exploit. It's the thermodynamic system trying to dissipate energy, seeking equilibrium or maximum entropy production (MEP).
I hesitate to lecture, as the ghosts of Turing (Halting Problem) and Gödel (Incompleteness Theorem) remind us formally that we'll never know everything and so we'll never have the big picture but I'd like to say that we have to be careful about increasing entropy in this system too rapidly, meaning we should conserve and re-use as much as we can and limit pollution. We should also learn to get along better with each other as war or any form of societal chaos within the system is indicative of an increase of entropy. But at the same time I'm a determinist and so I think these things are written in stone, predetermined by the laws of physics but then again I do have a chisel and don't mind playing my part in chiseling the stone in a way I think is optimal for society though it's tamed by my determinism so all-in-all, I'm fairly chill about my opinions. And on the converse, some amount of chaos, or diversity, within the system promotes strength and because change is needed in a changing system that will happily squash us if we don't. I'd also emphasize that we should do everything we can to not keep our eggs in the same basket, meaning we should work on getting off this planet because its entropy will inevitably increase beyond tolerance so we need to find a system that's in a state of thermodynamic equilibrium compatible with life as we know it and/or find a way to exploit the thermodynamic state of other systems that aren't directly compatible, ie, using Dyson Spheres, energy extraction satellites and whatnot.
You know, I railed against information compression in much of this post but in fairness I admit that it's a necessity and in this case as many others, it can be a great thing. You don't have to know every second of my life nor should you. All of my years of product acquisition, what little I have, amount to nothing worthy. And all my years of travelling different roads of religion, philosophy, science, politics, etc converge on this chest that I can put it all in, at least the main goods that I've acquired from those travels. Too much unfettered information is a burden while properly pruned information is a gift. Try to take the time to sum up what matters to you most because a person's time is precious and as cliche as it may sound, it's true that the more you say, the less it means. And no, to anyone reading who may know me, I didn't justify being a mute or less vocal in childhood because of this idea, it's only after the fact, after growing up, have I realized just how important it is. Also realize even though my blog posts may be long, these are carefully thought-over summations of lessons I've learned in life and the last thing I want to do is burden others with my own useless minutia. But for a post that I only intended to be a short paragraph, this one is long over-staying its welcome and only longer now since I edited which isn't surprising because deep down I knew I couldn't write a short post. I felt sometimes compelled to elaborate on thoughts that might possibly be misconstrued since accuracy of expression is really important with me, especially when it comes to my blog as it's become a bit more important to me as I've written more here. I didn't really intend when creating it and I've had a few other personal writing platforms that I've played around with over the years but I've never cared to put much thought into them as I have this one. I think my writing here reflects me fairly accurately, for good and bad, so I'm kind of glad I did this.
Sometimes I ask myself why I bother to write and I think I've already justified it to myself that it's an anxiety outlet but I also do this to consolidate my thoughts as well as to share them to any friends and family who may happen to be reading, though I rarely ever if at all mention the blog. It's partly because it'd seem perhaps too self-promotional and also because of insecurities since I don't want to be perceived as foolish or crazy. My views are very moderate but when you try to marry morality with a shallow interpretation of thermodynamics, it will inevitably and justifiably be seen with some skepticism. But I won't have much of anything to leave behind after I'm gone as I've never had near as much financial ambition as I've had intellectual ambition, especially in recent years, and so this is just some of what I leave behind that might be of interest to others. It may not be edited well but that's what you get, you get me, I'm not edited very well especially when speaking impromptu. This is only the very minutia, but an information-dense kernel, of what I've learned of usually bigger-picture existential topics. I could write more but nobody's going to care in ten or twenty years what menagerie of time-specific and space-specific problems I've solved and how I've dealt with them; they'll quickly become irrelevant to other people who face problems in a newer time and space. There's questions and answers that are more timeless and placeless and these are ones that I care to share more.
Whew! I didn't mean to write this much. I didn't even know what I was going to write about exactly, mostly just a small rant about our need for quick information fixes and how it fashionably manifests in online media platforms as Twitter, where lack of verbal nuance tends to create conflict, and our meme-ful media which seems to perpetuate faster than reality. I was thinking I might also descend into a small rant, that I'll heretofore execute, about how hyperbole tends to spread faster than more nuanced truth, partly because hyperbole and image memes are compressed information, and therefore, incomplete and less truthful information but quicker to consume. They're the equivalent of candy, which may taste better and quicker to digest than a sandwich, but less filling and nutritious. We want exciting, we want it tasty and we want it now. I have a confession to make. I have a speck, perhaps even a log, in my own eye, as I can also be impatient but I'll point out the speck in my brother's eye so we can possibly both see better. I'll cast the first stone even though I have sinned so my brother can cast them on me when I sin and we can then more nimbly deflect future stones. I'll judge because I want judged myself and then we can both become wiser from each other's judgement. But not too much. Too much judgement, too much casting of stones and too much reflection of imperfection creates too much entropy in the system, it's not conducive to intelligent life. Conversely, too little conflict means lower entropy which fosters idleness which creates weakness and so also not conducive or optimal to intelligent life, [we need some variance and diversity of environment for intellectual stimulation](https://news.yale.edu/2018/07/19/arent-sure-brain-primed-learning), both local in time and apparently evolutionarily. We reside within a very delicately balanced system. Many different (non)religions, different sciences, different philosophies, different laws, different policies and different tribes tend to be in tune with this balance in differing manifestations but I think they're all singing the same general song but this song is always changing because the stage is always changing. If you're a lover of human life and want to promote and perpetuate human life in as much time and space as possible, I think it'd be wise to try to stay in tune with it, to not keep singing the old songs that worked on the old stage or look too far ahead to try to sing a song set for a new stage that we're not ready for. Science and, I grudgingly state mathematics since my low, or very distracted, working memory aren't optimal for it, are the best ways to stay in tune with it all, in my very open opinion.
To wrap it up since it's 3am now and I won't even bother to re-read or edit this until tomorrow, it's become customary to post a related video or song so here's some Pink Floyd because why not? Because they're always relevant and of course because this song's been in my head lately. I love the relaxed tempo, the serene atmosphere in the video, the carefree low-entropy (first time referring to a song by its perceived entropy levels but a related and worthy descriptor, imho) mood it induces and it also reminds me of being young back in the summer of '69. Of course, I wasn't around then but that's just how good it is. Pink Floyd, like many great bands don't just create songs, they create soundscapes.
Editing is complete (re-edit:ok, this time I mean it, maybe) unless I get the urge to revisit the post again but it's rather unsatisfactory. I've posted so much and I tend to gradually go into so many (un)related topics, some that may not necessarily merge that gracefully with others, and I'm such a scatterbrain that editing my writing can be painful. I'm not a professional so I can get away with it but I at least try to make sure I've conveyed some accuracy of thought because I know I can be hard to follow and I'm not sure I did so here. The post may seem disjointed, partially because it is. The fourth major paragraph that I was working on wasn't saved before my browser crashed. This happened once on Windows and I restored my post by using a hex editor to examine memory contents. Though I'm now using Linux, Antergos specifically, but recent kernels don't allow full volatile dump and examination of memory unless you load a specific kernel module, as a security measure, fortunately or unfortunately in my case. I could only dump 1MB of memory and in which case was fruitless when examined. I already force-closed Chromium so dumping PID-specific memory was out of the question. Examining cache was out also since I had no luck decrypting the newer version, v3, of Chromium's cache contents and it probably wasn't in there anyway for various reasons nor in my swap file as it was virtually empty. I used to dabble in OS forensics for fun so I didn't mind the easter egg hunt. But I suppose my crash had something to do with enabling hardware acceleration in Chromium ://flags, which is opposite the defaults, and caused Chromium to crash a few times before since changing. I never had such egregious crashes on Firefox and they were very rare, on Windows and Linux. For the first time in a long while I've wanted to punch my computer. I had a great paragraph, it was my favorite, elegantly expanding, ironically enough, the relationship between open and closed source software, information security and evolutionary analogs as well as discussing the 'imprisoned by choice' paradox of the Linux software ecosystem versus a more dictatorial course such as what Windows and Apple follow. Though I did minorly go into that subject in the new paragraph but not satisfactorily. I tried to recall what I lost but as Winnebago Man would say, "my mind is just a piece of shit" now after getting upset and I can't think for nothing so the fourth major paragraph isn't as elegant and over-arching as the initial edit was.
If I can be serious about one thing, don't take me too seriously. I like to jot down my thoughts, of which, tend to be scattered, high-entropy as I like to say, and so perhaps have a higher likelihood of error in communication. I'm also aware of just how amusingly autistic I probably come across, as I've been most of my life, and I'm hoping it's something that can be more of entertainment than serious matter. Life is just too absurd to take too seriously.
And do note, I use modifiers the high, low, moderate, etc when referring to entropy but those can be very arbitrary terms when referring to life forms, and some may even argue not very appropriate if arguing fundamentals. Entropy itself isn't something that can really be calculated though you can calculate the amount of entropy change that has taken place, well, people smarter than I can. I gauge those terms by comparing with known low entropy units as "vacuum" space and very high entropy units as stars and consider known life somewhere in an optimal state between. Those more versed in thermodynamics could validly criticize my definitions here. And so as I was saying about taking me too seriously, as with all matters high-entropy and of high-entropy matter, quirkiness or outlier tendencies are an inherent, matter-of-fact, part of its nature. Coincidentally, this is why we can't have nice things and my answer to 'why you always be playin''.
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