Cellular Automata — Part Two

"But if something is completely unpredictable, it's random," Zac said. "Isn't that proof enough? There is no rhyme or reason to many things in the universe. There is so much chaos and imperfection."

"That doesn't mean shit, though," I countered. "The very concept of perfection and imperfection is subjective. Five years ago, my business failed. It seemed so imperfect and chaotic at the time. In retrospect, it was the most perfect thing to happen to me. I needed to go on that startup journey to experience all the bizarre ways reality would contort itself for me. Then I needed to fail, so I'd start asking questions about why and how reality could bend like that in such a rhythmic way. And the journey needed to be hard, and I needed to see myself climbing out of seemingly impossible holes. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't have had the self-efficacy to attempt a side-project as audacious as reverse-engineering the universe. If I hadn't failed after a hard journey, I probably wouldn't be here, and I think that right here is an important place to be.

And so, you see, perfection is purely a matter of perspective. Something is only perfect relative to your belief about how it should be. The key word there is belief — and belief is subjective, not objective and scientific. I believed, at the time, that perfection meant success with my business. Relative to that belief, my failure was imperfect.

Right now, my perspective is different. Now I believe that humanity needs to understand itself if we have any hope of solving our biggest world problems: climate change, poverty, war and conflict. It's time we grow up before we blow ourselves up. If I can make a small contribution to that goal by helping people see things differently, then that, to me, is perfect. Therefore, relative to that goal, my startup failing was perfect. It was exactly what I needed to get me here.

Do you see how your assertion that chaos and imperfection is a sign of randomness, has no logical foundation? In fact, you sound a lot like Richard Dawkins, spouting unsubstantiated claims as if they were scientific facts. Here, listen to this quote from him..."

In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

River Out Of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life Richard Dawkins

I stared at Zac. "I mean, what the actual fuck? Where is the evidence for any of this?"

"But — I just — I still don't understand why he needs evidence," Zac replied. "He's right. When you look out into the universe, you won't find any rhyme or reason to it. On one planet, Earth, you have complex life and human beings. Everywhere else, you have random nothingness."

"So?"

"So, it's random. Therefore, it's purposeless."

I facepalmed. "That is shockingly bad logic. Firstly, as I just explained, it implies that Dawkins knows what a purposeful, intelligently-designed universe should look like, and has then deemed our universe not to be that. That's insanely arrogant. How do you even falsify his claim? What would I have to observe in order to say, 'Ah, yes, the universe does have purpose and design?' If every planet had intelligent life on it, would that give the universe purpose? If rape, murder, and pain didn't exist, then would that give the universe purpose? If there was no inanimate matter — no rocks, no sand, no things that appear random — would that give the universe purpose? I mean, he claims the universe has no purpose or design with such confidence, but that claim is so pseudoscientific. There is no way you can falsify that claim by simply observing the universe and saying, 'Yep, it appears to have purpose, so I'm wrong.'

The second problem I have with his shitty logic is this idea of randomness. Just because something looks random, doesn't mean it is random. Again, you need to think about this critically and not add in any extra postulates that are unwarranted."

"And how do I do that?" Zac asked.

"Just stop and use your brain! In our universe, we have highly predictable and ordered phenomena. We also have seemingly random, unpredictable phenomena. Let's place these on a sliding scale of order."

"We know for sure that order exists because we can observe it. When an apple falls from a tree, we can predict its behavior. Many things in this universe are ordered and predictable and able to be described using mathematical equations. However, we don't know for sure if true randomness exists. If you want to claim that anything in this universe is random, you need to satisfy a burden of proof."

"How come?"

"Because it's a completely unnecessary postulate! We know for sure that order exists. We also know that we can get order and deeply hidden order — that which we call 'random' or 'chaos' — from a single simple program; a computation. We've also deduced, from first principles, that the entire universe is a neural network. Everything is the same one thing; a mathematical tapestry; a kind of computation.

Therefore, by default, we should assume that everything is ordered, and anything that appears 'random' just has a deeply hidden order to it. Otherwise, you need to add in some kind of delineation between order and 'random.' Where on this sliding scale are you going to separate the universe into those categories? And how are you going to satisfy the burden of proof required for your additional superfluous claim of true randomness? We don't need to postulate the existence of true randomness to explain phenomena that appear random. It's much simpler to assume that things that seem random just have a deeply hidden order to them, like that cellular automaton pattern. Ockham's razor strikes again.

So if an apple can fall to the ground in an ordered way, why should I just blindly assume that all the events in my life are not ordered in the same way? Why should I have faith that me meeting you eight years ago at that university event was random? Because let's be real here — faith is belief without evidence, and there is no evidence for true randomness. This idea of randomness may be intuitive, but it actually makes zero logical sense when you analyze it critically from first principles. It's the equivalent of looking at that cellular automaton pattern — which is our metaphor for the universe — and saying the right-hand side is random. Nothing in that pattern is random. Dawkins' hubris is evident when he looks at that pattern and assumes that if he can't find the order in it, it must be random.

The only true axiom is 'I think, therefore I am,' but Dawkins hands out axioms like Oprah hands out free shit: 'You get an axiom! You get an axiom! Everyone gets an axiom!' He then emphatically points to his arbitrarily appointed 'axioms' as evidence that he is right, which is so intellectually lazy. It's like he — and all these other 'clever' scientists — have some kind of weird, perverted fetish for unnecessary complexity.

No, Dawkins — you don't get to treat randomness as an axiom. It's a claim, not an axiom. You are not allowed to just assume we live in a 'purposeless' universe of 'pitiless indifference' for free — you have to provide some evidence, just like everyone else has to when they make a claim. If you can't satisfy a burden of proof, then it is completely illogical to believe in such an unsubstantiated, superfluous postulate. We just don't need it to explain reality. The probability that true randomness exists is comparable to the probability that the tooth fairy exists.

I know Dawkins means well, but I don't quite understand why someone so smart chooses to place so much faith in his cognitively-biased Bayesian brain instead of his ability to critically think. Humans, in general, really are so stupid in the scheme of things. I have very little faith that a human can place himself inside that cellular automaton pattern and figure out the underlying order using an inductive process. It's too complex."

"So what are you trying to say?" Zac asked. "That everything in my life is ordered? That there is nothing random happening? That the right-hand side of that cellular automaton pattern isn't random?"

"But it's not random!" I cried. "It's the result of a simple program that is no more complex than the one that gave you the Sierpiński triangle. This is the specific ruleset that gives you the 'random' pattern. Wolfram calls it Rule 30."

"You need to realize that incredible simplicity can yield astounding complexity," I continued. "Computation gives us that simplicity. From one simple program, we can derive incredibly ordered and predictable emergent patterns, like gravity and our 'laws of physics,' and incredibly 'random' and complex patterns.

Remember when I talked about the different layers of truth? We need to separate truth in the explicate order, from truth in the implicate order. The explicate order is the three-dimensional reality we see before us. The implicate order is the lower dimension that we know has to exist if reality and consciousness are the same thing."

"Scientists are currently operating in the explicate order. All they see is a noisy pattern like the one Rule 30 produces: it's predictable in some areas, and seemingly random in others. They run around inside that pattern, studying isolated sections of it across different scientific disciplines. Then they come up with static equations to describe consistent features of the pattern, like the fact that the left edge is always black. When their equations can't describe the complexity of the right-hand side — like the death of a child, or a lottery win — they label it 'random.'

Now, it's important to note that their equations are not untrue. You can write an equation that will describe what happens when an apple falls from a tree. You can write equations for all kinds of separate patterns that emerge from Rule 30. But as long as you are operating on this superficial level of truth, you will never be able to unify everything.

Unification — the epitome of simplicity and elegance — is what we should strive for. James Clerk Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism into the theory of electromagnetism. Einstein unified space and time when he demonstrated that they exist on a continuum called spacetime. Things that were once thought to be quite separate turned out to be different sides of the same coin. I'm no Maxwell or Einstein, so I'm standing on the shoulders of giants like Bohm when I point out the unification of the observer and the observed. And if the observer and the observed are unified — if they're the same thing — then there has to be a lower dimension. There has to be an implicate order.

So while these scientists are busy running around in the explicate order trying to describe all these separate noisy patterns that emerge, we're going to be smarter than that. Nikola Tesla once said — 'If Thomas Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would not stop to reason where it was most likely to be, but would proceed at once with the feverish diligence of a bee, to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search... Just a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety percent of his labor.'

Tesla was right. Scientists are trying to brute force this problem like Edison, but we're going to be smarter than that. I've got shit to do, and this is currently a side-project for me. I don't have time to waste on irrelevant busywork. That's why we're going to cut through the noisy bullshit and strategically study the underlying implicate order instead. Simple logic points to a computation happening there that gives rise to everything we see in the explicate order.

We are looking for simplicity. We are looking for elegance. We are looking for one little program from which we can derive everything — the ordered laws of physics, and the disordered 'luck' and 'randomness' that manifests in the explicate order."

"So, what is it?" Zac asked. "How do we find that little piece of math?"

"We're getting there," I laughed. "Remember — we're deriving this algorithm entirely from scratch. I don't want to just tell you the final answer — I want you to understand it from a philosophical, spiritual, and scientific perspective. Okay?"

"Okay."