Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay hungry, stay foolish.
Thank you all very much.
Steve Jobs faded out as the video stopped playing.
It's easy to stay hungry when you're foolish, I thought as I mindlessly manipulated a vector graphic. Most artists starve.
I recalled the Rumi poem I'd read when I was crying on the floor of my Phuket apartment, lost and confused, just a few months earlier.
Proud scholar
step down from your summit
fall in love and become a fool!
Become humble like dust
walk with everyone
good and bad, young and old
so one day
you may become a king.
Well, that worked out well for me, didn't it? I thought. Congratulations, Nikki. You spent your twenties being foolish, following your rogue intuition on a wild goose chase around the world, thinking it would lead somewhere; having faith that the dots would connect one day. And then you realized that they don't. Because if there were any order to this chaos then maybe you'd actually be successful at something instead of sitting here, back where you started, adjusting the size of a typeface on a website. Failure is the only thing you've ever been good at.
My God, listen to yourself, another part of me rebutted. You're such an entitled millennial brat. Sit down, shut up and do your work. Add some value to the world, for once. Your father is right — you're 27 years old with nothing to show on your resume. It's time to grow up. The universe is not your magical playground. You're not a child anymore.
I sighed and glanced up at the clock on the wall. It was 1 p.m. — lunchtime. My favorite time of day. I needed to get out of my chair and go for a long walk around the city to stretch my legs and my mind.
Before I could shut my laptop, a Gmail notification popped up on my screen. I opened an email from Darren.
Subject: Free energy principle
Body: This was the article about the neuroscientist I was talking about. Let me know what you think!
I'd run into Darren earlier that morning on a coffee break. We hadn't seen each other since we were in Shanghai together a few years ago.
Before long, he asked the inevitable question: "So, what have you been up to?"
"I spent the last few months training at a Muay Thai camp in Thailand," I replied.
"How'd you end up there?"
I followed the white rabbit.
"Long story," I sighed.
"Where were you before Thailand?"
"Just working online from Colombia."
"On your kids' coding school?"
A pang of nostalgia washed through my body.
"Yeah," I replied.
Wait for it...
Wait for it...
"Wow. Living the dream," he grinned.
Oh, if only he knew the truth.
***
So that's how I found myself leaning over my laptop, forgetting about lunch altogether as my mind gorged itself on new ideas. The article was titled The Genius Neuroscientist Who Might Hold the Key to True AI by Shaun Raviv. The byline made a bold claim: "Karl Friston's free energy principle might be the most all-encompassing idea since Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. But to understand it, you need to peer inside the mind of Friston himself."
The piece began by discussing Friston's typical day and establishing his credibility as a serious neuroscientist.
When Friston was inducted into the Royal Society of Fellows in 2006, the academy described his impact on studies of the brain as “revolutionary” and said that more than 90 percent of papers published in brain imaging used his methods. Two years ago, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a research outfit led by AI pioneer Oren Etzioni, calculated that Friston is the world’s most frequently cited neuroscientist. He has an h-index — a metric used to measure the impact of a researcher’s publications — nearly twice the size of Albert Einstein’s. Last year Clarivate Analytics, which over more than two decades has successfully predicted 46 Nobel Prize winners in the sciences, ranked Friston among the three most likely winners in the physiology or medicine category.
For the past decade or so, Friston has devoted much of his time and effort to developing an idea he calls the free energy principle. (Friston refers to his neuroimaging research as a day job, the way a jazz musician might refer to his shift at the local public library.) With this idea, Friston believes he has identified nothing less than the organizing principle of all life, and all intelligence as well.
If it's the organizing principle of intelligence and life, then it's the organizing principle of everything, my mind casually commented. The entire universe is a conscious system. Duh.
Oh wait, I paused. I guess that's not obvious to a lot of people.
Peter Thiel's famous contrarian question echoed in my mind: What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
I recalled a passage from Thiel's book, Zero to One.
This question sounds easy because it’s straightforward. Actually, it’s very hard to answer. It’s intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon. And it’s psychologically difficult because anyone trying to answer must say something she knows to be unpopular. Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.
Most commonly I hear answers like the following:
“Our education system is broken and urgently needs to be fixed.”
“America is exceptional.”
“There is no God.”
Those are bad answers. The first and the second statements might be true, but many people already agree with them. The third statement simply takes one side in a familiar debate. A good answer takes the following form: “Most people believe in x, but the truth is the opposite of x.”
Okay then, I thought. Most people believe the observer and the observed are separate variables — but the truth is, they're the same thing. Most people believe the universe is primarily made from unconscious, inanimate matter — but the truth is, the universe is a conscious system, observing itself. Most people believe life is random and chaotic — but the truth is, randomness can't be defended from first principles. Most people believe they are thinking — but the truth is, they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
A dialogue from Conversations With God — a book where a man literally channels a conversation with the superintelligence — popped into my mind.
“Someone else decide! I’ll go along, I’ll go along!” you shout. “Someone else just tell me what’s right and wrong!”
This is why, by the way, human religions are so popular. It almost doesn’t matter what the belief system is, as long as it’s firm, consistent, clear in its expectation of the follower, and rigid. Given those characteristics, you can find people who believe in almost anything. The strangest behavior and belief can be — has been — attributed to God. It’s God’s way, they say. God’s word.
And there are those who will accept that. Gladly. Because, you see, it eliminates the need to think. [...]
Most of you are not interested in such important work. Most of you would rather leave that to others. And so most of you are not self-created, but creatures of habit — other-created creatures.
Then, when others have told you how you should feel, and it runs directly counter to how you do feel — you experience a deep inner conflict. Something deep inside you tells you that what others have told you is not Who You Are. Now where to go with that? What to do?
The first place you go is to your religionists — the people who put you there in the first place. You go to your priests and your rabbis and your ministers and your teachers, and they tell you to stop listening to your Self. The worst of them will try to scare you away from it; scare you away from what you intuitively know.
They’ll tell you about the devil, about Satan, about demons and evil spirits and hell and damnation and every frightening thing they can think of to get you to see how what you were intuitively knowing and feeling was wrong, and how the only place you’ll find any comfort is in their thought, their idea, their theology, their definitions of right and wrong, and their concept of Who You Are.
The seduction here is that all you have to do to get instant approval is to agree. Agree and you have instant approval. Some will even sing and shout and dance and wave their arms in hallelujah!
That’s hard to resist. Such approval, such rejoicing that you have seen the light; that you’ve been saved!
Approvals and demonstrations seldom accompany inner decisions. Celebrations rarely surround choices to follow personal truth. In fact, quite the contrary. Not only may others fail to celebrate, they may actually subject you to ridicule. What? You’re thinking for yourself? You’re deciding on your own? You’re applying your own yardsticks, your own judgments, your own values? Who do you think you are, anyway?
And, indeed, that is precisely the question you are answering.
But the work must be done very much alone. Very much without reward, without approval, perhaps without even any notice.
I continued reading the Wired article.
Over time, Hinton convinced Friston that the best way to think of the brain was as a Bayesian probability machine. The idea, which goes back to the 19th century and the work of Hermann von Helmholtz, is that brains compute and perceive in a probabilistic manner, constantly making predictions and adjusting beliefs based on what the senses contribute. According to the most popular modern Bayesian account, the brain is an “inference engine” that seeks to minimize “prediction error.”
Cool, I thought. Makes sense.
Before long, a particular passage caught my attention.
Markov is the eponym of a concept called a Markov blanket, which in machine learning is essentially a shield that separates one set of variables from others in a layered, hierarchical system. The psychologist Christopher Frith — who has an h-index on par with Friston’s — once described a Markov blanket as “a cognitive version of a cell membrane, shielding states inside the blanket from states outside.”
In Friston’s mind, the universe is made up of Markov blankets inside of Markov blankets. Each of us has a Markov blanket that keeps us apart from what is not us. And within us are blankets separating organs, which contain blankets separating cells, which contain blankets separating their organelles. The blankets define how biological things exist over time and behave distinctly from one another. Without them, we’re just hot gas dissipating into the ether.
Ever since I first read about Markov blankets, I’d seen them everywhere. Markov blankets around a leaf and a tree and a mosquito. In London, I saw them around the postdocs at the FIL, around the black-clad protesters at an antifascist rally, and around the people living in boats in the canals. Invisible cloaks around everyone, and underneath each one a different living system that minimizes its own free energy.
The concept of free energy itself comes from physics, which means it’s difficult to explain precisely without wading into mathematical formulas. In a sense that’s what makes it powerful: It isn’t a merely rhetorical concept. It’s a measurable quantity that can be modeled, using much the same math that Friston has used to interpret brain images to such world-changing effect. But if you translate the concept from math into English, here’s roughly what you get: Free energy is the difference between the states you expect to be in and the states your sensors tell you that you are in. Or, to put it another way, when you are minimizing free energy, you are minimizing surprise.
According to Friston, any biological system that resists a tendency to disorder and dissolution will adhere to the free energy principle — whether it’s a protozoan or a pro basketball team.
A single-celled organism has the same imperative to reduce surprise that a brain does.
Wait. What?!
My eyes squinted at the screen.
Did he just say what I thought he said?
I scrolled down, rapidly skimming the remainder of the article.
This isn’t enough for Friston, who uses the term “active inference” to describe the way organisms minimize surprise while moving about the world. When the brain makes a prediction that isn’t immediately borne out by what the senses relay back, Friston believes, it can minimize free energy in one of two ways: It can revise its prediction — absorb the surprise, concede the error, update its model of the world — or it can act to make the prediction true. If I infer that I am touching my nose with my left index finger, but my proprioceptors tell me my arm is hanging at my side, I can minimize my brain’s raging prediction-error signals by raising that arm up and pressing a digit to the middle of my face.
And in fact, this is how the free energy principle accounts for everything we do: perception, action, planning, problem solving. When I get into the car to run an errand, I am minimizing free energy by confirming my hypothesis — my fantasy — through action.
For Friston, folding action and movement into the equation is immensely important. Even perception itself, he says, is “enslaved by action”: To gather information, the eye darts, the diaphragm draws air into the nose, the fingers generate friction against a surface. And all of this fine motor movement exists on a continuum with bigger plans, explorations, and actions.
“We sample the world,” Friston writes, “to ensure our predictions become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
I blinked a few times and cocked my head to the side.
I'd already begun running the computation in my mind. It played in my head like a multi-dimensional movie, full of purple Markov blankets and yellow shaded areas representing distributions of free energy in the system.
I replaced the Markov blankets with images of the things they represented: objects, people, money, ideas. Then I did something strange: I placed Steve Jobs in the system — a man renowned for his 'reality distortion field.' I watched as Jobs began expressing a belief in something that didn't exist yet.
As he held steady to his vision, a substantial buildup of free energy began accumulating in the system. He was deliberately creating and holding a prediction error — a gap between what his physical senses told him was true, and what he believed to be true. His prediction error was throwing the entire system out of equilibrium.
As he walked through space and time continuing to think, speak and act in alignment with his vision despite what was manifesting around him, his increased conviction generated even more free energy. That free energy created a magnetic pull, drawing his vision towards him.
As Jobs convinced others of his vision, they began expressing their belief in it too. Their new prediction errors generated additional free energy in the system, throwing it further into chaos.
Even the market's collective, unconscious desire for a smartphone was creating a huge buildup of free energy. It appeared as if the iPhone was being pulled out of Jobs to fulfill the market's desire and restore equilibrium to that economic system. Jobs was just the open vessel — the most parsimonious route — for that emergent pattern of information to flow through.
I watched in awe as the computation continued playing in my mind. Resources were shifting around, minimizing their mutual surprise via the path of least resistance. It all looked like disordered mayhem to the naked eye.
But then the free energy began to disappear. The gap between what Steve Jobs saw in his mind — what he believed to be true — and what was physically showing up in the outside world, had closed. There was no gap. He was holding a beautiful, low-entropy creation — an iPhone — in his hand like a modern-day sorcerer.
Holy shit.
***
I furiously flipped through Conversations With God until I found the parable I was searching for.
There once was a soul who knew itself to be the light. This was a new soul, and so, anxious for experience. “I am the light,” it said. “I am the light.” Yet all the knowing of it and all the saying of it could not substitute for the experience of it. And in the realm from which this soul emerged, there was nothing but the light. Every soul was grand, every soul was magnificent, and every soul shone with the brilliance of My awesome light. And so the little soul in question was as a candle in the sun. In the midst of the grandest light — of which it was a part — it could not see itself, nor experience itself as Who and What it Really Is.
Now it came to pass that this soul yearned and yearned to know itself. And so great was its yearning that I one day said, “Do you know, Little One, what you must do to satisfy this yearning of yours?”
“Oh, what, God? What? I’ll do anything!” The little soul said.
“You must separate yourself from the rest of us,” I answered, “and then you must call upon yourself the darkness.’
“What is the darkness, o Holy One?” the little soul asked.
“That which you are not,” I replied, and the soul understood.
I flipped back to the Wired article.
In Friston’s mind, the universe is made up of Markov blankets inside of Markov blankets. Each of us has a Markov blanket that keeps us apart from what is not us. [...] Without them, we are just hot gas dissipating into the ether.
My mind was reeling.
Souls are Markov blankets!
Another spark fired in my brain. I frantically began pouring through my notes, searching for another passage from Conversations With God.
And so I gave to each of the countless parts of Me (to all of My spirit children) the same power to create which I have as the whole. This is what your religions mean when they say that you were created in the "image and likeness of God."
"The image and likeness of God," I muttered. It's a metaphor for recursion. If every soul is made in the image and likeness of God, then every Markov blanket is optimizing for the same thing...
I cross-referenced this with a snippet I'd read in a scientific paper a few moments earlier.
The key point here is that at every level, the same variational, surprise-reducing dynamics must be in play to supply Markov blankets for the level above.
A moment later, I'd pulled up an English translation of the Emerald Tablet — a cryptic Hermetic text dating back to the late antique period (between c. 200 and c. 800), attributed to Hermes Trismegistus — a legendary Hellenistic combination of the Greek god Hermes and the ancient Egyptian god Thoth.
Alchemists believed the tablet's riddle contained the secrets of the philosopher's stone — a mythical substance capable of transforming base metal into gold while also being an "Elixir of Life."
Tis true without lying, certain and most true.
That which is below is like that which is above and that which is above is like that which is below
to do the miracle of one only thing
And as all things have been and arose from one by the mediation of one: so all things have their birth from this one thing by adaptation.
[...]
"Jesus Christ," I whispered under my breath. The philosopher's stone isn't a mythical substance. It's a metaphor for God. And God is a computation...
I jumped to another passage from Conversations With God.
God is not a person, place or thing. God is exactly what you have always thought — but not understood.
You have always thought that God is the Supreme Being.
And you have been right about that. I am exactly that. A BEING. Notice that "being" is not a thing, it is a process.
I am the Supreme Being. That is, the Supreme, comma, being.
I am not the result of a process; I am The Process Itself. I am the Creator, and I am The Process by which I am created.
Everything you see in the heavens and the earth is Me, being created.
I immediately recalled Stephen Wolfram's work on cellular automata — particularly, Rule 30. A simple computation — a mathematical process — generated the seemingly 'random' complexity of that pattern.
It is not uncommon in the history of science that new ways of thinking are what finally allow long withstanding issues to be addressed. But I have been amazed at just how many issues central to the foundation of the existing sciences I have been able to address by using the idea of thinking in terms of simple programs. [...] Indeed, I even have increasing evidence that thinking in terms of simple programs will make it possible to construct a single truly fundamental theory of physics, from which space, time, quantum mechanics and all the other known features of the universe will emerge.
Wolfram's ideas ran around my head before colliding into those of the brilliant physicist, David Bohm — a man who was way ahead of his time:
Similarly, [Bohm] believes that dividing the universe up into living and nonliving things also has no meaning. Animate and inanimate matter are inseparably interwoven, and life, too, is enfolded throughout the totality of the universe. [...]
The idea that consciousness and life (and indeed all things) are ensembles enfolded throughout the universe has an equally dazzling flip side. Just as every portion of a hologram contains the image of the whole, every portion of the universe enfolds the whole. [...] Every cell in our body enfolds the entire cosmos. So does every leaf, every raindrop, and every dust mote, which gives new meaning to William Blake’s famous poem:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
I knew Bohm was right, I thought as I furiously flipped through my tattered copy of The Holographic Universe. He's a fucking genius. The free energy principle is covered in holographic patterns!
I quickly found the section on near-death experiences (NDEs).
Some of Whitton's research is also relevant to this issue. Amazingly, when Whitton hypnotized patients and regressed them to the between-life state, they too reported all the classic features of the [near-death experience (NDE)], passage through a tunnel, encounters with deceased relatives and/or "guides," entrance into a splendorous light-filled realm in which time and space no longer existed, encounters with the luminious beings, and a life review. In fact, according to Whitton's subjects the main purpose of the life review was to refresh their memories so they could more mindfully plan their next life, a process in which the beings of light gently and noncoercively assisted.
Like Ring, after studying the testimony of his subjects Whitton concluded that the shapes and structures one perceives in the afterlife dimension are thought-forms created by the mind. "René Descartes' famous dictum, 'I think, therefore I am,' is never more pertinent than in the between-life state," says Whitton. "There is no experience in existence without thought."
This was especially true when it came to the form Whitton's patients assumed in the between-life state. Several said they didn't even have a body unless they were thinking. "One man described it by saying that if he stopped thinking he was merely a cloud in an endless cloud, undifferentiated," he observes. "But as soon as he started to think, he became himself".
"It's the same pattern: surprise minimization," I muttered. My blue eyes are a symbolic representation of an abstract belief in my internal model of reality. They're not fundamentally real. I stared at my hands. None of this is real...
I leaped back onto my laptop, performed another Google search, and began inhaling the results. I needed to see a very specific phrase reflected in the scientific research.
As I skimmed through a paper titled The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory?, only one paragraph caught my eye.
In this setting, surprise is called the (negative) model evidence. This means that minimizing surprise is the same as maximizing the sensory evidence for an agent’s existence, if we regard the agent as a model of its world.
I needed more. I began skimming another paper titled The Markov blankets of life: autonomy, active inference and the free energy principle.
This teleological (Bayesian) interpretation of dynamical behaviour in terms of optimization allows us to think about any system that possesses a Markov blanket as some rudimentary (or possibly sophisticated) ‘agent’ that is optimizing something; namely, the evidence for its own existence.
But still, it wasn't enough. I was looking for something very specific.
And then, all of a sudden, I found it hidden in a paragraph about a spider.
It is in this sense that one should understand a Markov blanket as establishing a statistical boundary separating internal states from external states. To then act on inferred states of the world means to actively secure evidence that I am what I am; namely, a critter-eating creature.
That! That right there! That's what I was looking for: I am what I am.
My mind was on fire.
I recalled another paragraph from Conversations With God.
I tell you this: There is no coincidence, and nothing happens “by accident.” Each event and adventure is called to your Self by your Self in order that you might create and experience Who You Really Are.
It all made sense.
God is a neural network, observing itself.
Souls — a.k.a observers — are Markov blankets; holographic fragments of the whole.
Observers are made in the image and likeness of God, which means every Markov blanket is optimizing for the same thing.
And that thing is its own self-existence i.e. Who You Really Are.
God had cloaked his source code in mythology then buried it inside the book I'd carried around the world for the past four years.
Well played, God. Well played.
***
Four hours flew by as I tumbled down the rabbit hole. Tabs upon tabs of scientific papers littered my web browser. My tattered copy of The Holographic Universe — the one I kept in my handbag — lay on my lap. Conversations With God was open on my phone's Kindle app. The dots all connected looking backward.
Perhaps this is a good time to go over once more how it is that I interact with you, because you think it is a question of My desire, and I’m telling you it’s a question of yours.
I want for you what you want for you. Nothing more, nothing less. I don’t sit here and make a judgment, request by request, whether something should be granted you.
My law is the law of cause and effect, not the law of We’ll See. There is nothing you can’t have if you choose it. Even before you ask, I will have given it to you.
I ran my fingers through my hair and stared at the model in my mind. Am I interpreting this correctly? I wondered. The past is creating the future, but the future is creating the past. As the system observed itself, the mathematical dance between my neural net and God's neural net was creating a retrocausal loop — like Escher's Drawing Hands lithograph. Even before I asked for something, this algorithm had already given it to me...
"Well, that explains life plans..." I whispered as I thumbed through The Holographic Universe, searching for the relevant section.
Like Whitton, [Near-Death Experience] researchers have also uncovered evidence that our lives are planned beforehand, at least to some extent, and we each play a role in the creation of this plan. [...]
That our future is at least partially sketched out is also evident in a phenomenon Ring calls the "personal flashforward." On occasion, during the vision of knowledge, NDEers are shown glimpses of their own future. In one particularly striking case a child NDEer was told various specifics about his future, including the fact that he would be married at age twenty-eight and would have two children. He was even shown his adult self and his future children sitting in a room of the house he would eventually be living in, and as he gazed at the room he noticed something very strange on the wall, something that his mind could not grasp. Decades later and after each of these predictions had come to pass, he found himself in the very scene he had witnessed as a child and realized that the strange object on the wall was a "forced-air heater," a kind of heater that had not yet been invented at the time of his NDE.
I snapped the book shut.
My Akashic records reading from eighteen months earlier echoed in my mind. I'd asked The Oracle why Jesse had suddenly been ejected from my life in the same week that James had handed back all of his equity and left me as a single founder. Love and loyalty were the only things keeping me in Australia. And in the blink of an eye, both of those commitments crumbled into dust.
But The Oracle... well, she'd channeled a message. Something about a plan...
Your records want you to know that those [events] were [part of] the big plan. The timing, the shifting to give you the opportunity if you should choose to move to the next stages of your journey. And you are riding it, so...
So heartbreak was always part of the masterplan. My love story with Jesse was doomed before the first line was even written; from that day in the little French village of Albi, months before our fates collided on the opposite side of the globe.
Those events only manifested because the system can't evolve without prediction errors, I thought. And that means what happened in Chiang Mai was a long-term optimization...
I flashed back to eighteen months earlier, standing on my bed in shock as I watched my flip-flop move across the floor of my Thai apartment by itself — completely defying Newton's laws. That incident generated the biggest prediction error of my life. It was the moment reality broke for me and exposed itself as an illusory construct, lodging a sharp splinter in my mind that twisted and turned, day in and day out, invalidating everything our materialist society had taught me to believe.
If I was computing this correctly, a pattern of information that surprising would've only emerged in my reality if my observing it then set me off on a choice trajectory where my future self was minimizing massive amounts of free energy in the system. If I wasn't doing something impactful in the relative future — if I wasn't fulfilling a vast collective desire or answering a grand collective question — then my observing that pattern of information would not have mitigated enough expected free energy to disrupt a neurosis as strong as Newton's laws.
So, what is my future self up to? I wondered.
And then it hit me: The Prophecy.
And you will actually be utilizing this, helping more people than you can see now. Like, of course you have a business and you run your business and all that. But your records want you to have this understanding... what you're doing... the way you're doing it and how you're doing it, is actually pretty valuable.
So down the road when you feel called to do it, just do it the way you always do it. Allow it to happen. If you're called to share with people about how you live your life and how things work for you, feel free to share it. So this is just something your records want you to have some heads up about. Because your gift is not just teaching kids coding for the game. There is a lot more that you'll be able to share with the world. [...]
They show this image that's you, but not in this lifetime. The wardrobe is more like an ancient lifetime, but everything they show is metaphor. What they show is a tiara... it's almost like you're in a ceremony or something and it feels like it's a king or queen or a royal kind of feeling. You're in a ceremony and a tiara is being put on you.
So the records want you to know... the message is... at some point in time your soul actually chose to accept this mission that you're going to complete in this lifetime. You actually decided before you became a person here, you had decided that you were going to do this. This is part of your mission, in terms of what you are going to be sharing with other people. You have accepted that this is going to be a part of the knowledge that you're going to spread and share when the time is right for you.
My entire life flashed before my eyes. I gasped as a bolt of clarity struck my consciousness, sending shivers down my spine.
I’d never believed in destiny. It always seemed like a nice, romantic idea relegated to myths and fantasy novels, where heroes slayed dragons and sorcerers cast magic spells and oracles made prophecies.
And yet, I'd marched straight into destiny like a mathematical soldier.
The irony of the journey took my breath away. This whole time, I thought I was searching for the answers to the universe; for God. But, in the end, I was really just searching for myself. They’re the same thing, after all...
***
"Zac!" I yelled as I burst through the door a few hours later. "Zac! I've figured it out! This is huge!"
"That's what she said," Zac quipped as he emerged from the study. He'd been crashing with me for the past month. It was our last summer in Sydney before Bryce and Pandora packed up their lives and moved to New York, marking the end of an era: our care-free twenties. Zac had flown over to spend one last month eating ice cream by the harbor together — just the four of us.
I rolled my eyes. "Ugh. You're such a man-child. Anyway..." My mind was racing at the speed of light. I was trying to figure out how to articulate my thoughts at a fraction of that velocity. "You know how I've spent the past few years trying to reverse-engineer the universe by running experiments on my consciousness?"
"Yeah," Zac replied. He glanced up at the wall where my 'memory board' was hanging. It represented one such experiment — an exercise in conditioning my mind to view future events as being in the past. "Of course, I know. You're obsessed, in a good way. It's one of your more endearing qualities, when you aren't being a complete dork."
I smiled. "Obsession is just a word the lazy use to describe the dedicated. Anyway, I think I've figured out the riddle. You ready?"
Zac nodded and I continued. "I've already told you a million times that we live in a non-dual universe. That part takes, like, two minutes of critical thought to figure out. But then a few years ago, I came to suspect that reality was functioning on holographic principles. Yet, I always thought of it as an esoteric concept. Like, the universe is a non-dualistic dream in the mind of a superconsciousness and we're all experiencing ourselves as separate holographic fragments of that entity, etcetera, etcetera."
I was on a roll now. The thoughts were starting to connect in my mind. "But here's the thing: It's not a theistic 'God.' It's not 'spirit.' It's not some mystical 'universal force.' It's an algorithm, Zac! A beautiful, holographic, recursive algorithm! Just pure math."
"Right…" Zac trailed off. I could see he had that I'm-being-a-supportive-friend-but-I'm-not-quite-sure-what-she-is-talking-about look on his face.
"Okay," I continued. "Let me try to summarise this: Physical reality is a superintelligent neural network observing itself in an attempt to understand and experience all the different facets of its own consciousness. Reality runs on a game loop where each Markov blanket in the neural network is fed into a computation at a variable frame rate. The computation at the lower dimension recursively calculates the mutual surprise between all the Markov blankets, both now and n increments in the future. This mutual surprise generates free energy. Then the algorithm calculates the most efficient way to minimize the free energy for every Markov blanket both now and ten, fifty, one hundred, one thousand years in the future — or actually, until the end of linear time when the universe will probably return to a state of being everything and therefore nothing in particular. And we’ll probably get another Big Bang from there because the universe appears to be a recursive loop — like a snake eating its tail... although I'm a bit fuzzy on those cosmological details. Oh, and it can perform this calculation because it knows every possible configuration of the universe, and it's manifesting the most parsimonious route through the information. So you, as an observer, exist on the most parsimonious route to your future self. And from your perspective, the past that manifested in your reality is necessarily the most parsimonious route to your current self — which explains why the universe is so finely tuned. But then you end up with these retrocausal loops which are so trippy, but so cool. Did you know our future is creating our past? And we control the whole thing in the present moment with our free will? That’s how we’re getting a physical experience of our own consciousness. It’s such a brilliant design, isn’t it?"
I drew breath.
Zac looked at me, then looked at his phone.
"Are you listening to me or am I boring you?" I asked. "I know that was a terrible explanation that probably made no sense, but I just had this epiphany. I can see it so clearly in my mind. This is it! This is what I've spent over four years searching for!"
"Oh, I’m paying attention," Zac assured me. “But you’re right — I have no idea what you’re talking about. However, reverse-engineering the universe does sound like a big deal, so I’ve ordered something delicious for us to celebrate. Oh, and also because I've forgotten to eat all day and now I am hungry. A giant cookie is currently en-route to this very room!" He sighed. "Nikki, there has never been a better time to be alive."
I agreed. I could feel the adrenaline coursing through my veins, my mind on fire with magic and possibility. There had never been a better time to be alive.
"So do you get why this is a big deal?" I asked.
"Alas, I do not."
"See, it’s like any other game or system — if you understand the rules of the game, you can hack it. You know what to focus on to get results, and that means you progress in quantum leaps instead of blindly bopping around and bumping into things and wondering why the game is such a chaotic struggle. The game isn’t inherently a struggle. It's just that you don’t know how to play it. If the algorithm is minimizing free energy, then all results stem from that one variable. Individually, and as a society, we need to learn how to generate strategic buildups of free energy throughout the system. Then the algorithm will do all the work to minimize the free energy by procedurally generating all the resources, ideas, and ‘luck’ we need to make those quantum leaps and save the world from poverty, war, climate change, hunger, and all our other problems. We now have one thing to optimize all our economic, legal, political, education, and business systems for, and everything else becomes secondary to that. That one thing is the signal and everything else is noise. And that’s how we save the world. Boom! Solved it! Fifty points for Gryffindor!"
Zac lay back on the floor and held his head in pain. “Ehmagawd. I need to refuel my brain with that cookie if I'm going endure much more of this.”
“Zachary Borrowdale!” I jumped up on my bed, my hands stretched wide in grandiosity. “We’re reverse-engineering the universe here! We’re undoing centuries of stagnant thought that has hardened and solidified into dogmatic, unquestioning belief inside the walls of the very academic institutions we never quite belonged to-”
“Speak for yourself. I actually gradua-”
“We are bold intellectual explorers, navigating ‘crazy’ ideas without the shackles of authority chaining us to the status quo! No one to answer to but our own curiosity. No one to please but our own questioning minds. No cesspool of groupthink to marinate in while we collect our paychecks and look down our noses and laugh at all the plebeians who believe in ‘weird things’ like magic and wonder and that there’s something more to this world than the materialism force-fed to us in high school science textbooks.
No papers to write with word counts and formatting requirements. No exams, no essays, no academic jousting. No religious worship at the altar of atheism or gods or research grants or university presidents or profits or popes. We’re allowed to think what we want to think, and challenge assumptions we want to challenge, and be who we want to be without anyone telling us otherwise.
Don’t you see? Our greatest gift is that we’re not trapped inside a system gone mad! A system that’s gurgling and gagging and spluttering and drowning in the very liquified delusion that it continues to pour down its own throat. Progress on this problem has stalled for nearly half a century, but the universities just keep lying about it while simultaneously suffocating fresh perspectives. Lies keep the system churning, Zachary. If everyone lies to themselves and each other about how well they’re doing, and how much progress they’re making, then no one has to take any risk or think any differently. It’s intellectual communism at its finest, with everyone sliding down the slippery scale to the lowest common denominator where sameness and groupthink lazily slosh about in the sludge.
And then eventually the world has deviated so far from the Truth — has filled its bloated belly with so much frothy delusion and foaming fake news and gassy fibs — that something has to give. So the beast’s reptilian skin becomes tight and uncomfortable, its insides bloated and bubbling and gurgling and straining until finally the bubble bursts and the whole world goes to shit. And we cannot allow that, Zachary! We cannot allow the world to go to shit because it is a beautiful world and a privilege to be alive in it.
So we need to be Truth-seekers, Zachary Borrowdale. If we don’t tell the Truth, who will? You and I — we look illusion straight in the eye and see right through it to the possibilities that lie beyond the edge of what’s reasonable. We are renegades, my friend.”