Comment by neom
2 days ago
What this thread keeps surfacing, and so much discussion around this stuff generally right now, from speculation about the next phase of intelligence, the role of pattern, emotion, logic, debates over consciousness, the anthropocentrism of our meaning-making...is that we are the source of reality (and ourselves). Instead of a “final authority” or a simple march from animal to machine, what if everything from mind, physics, value, selfhood, is simply a recursive pattern expressed in ever more novel forms? Humans aren’t just a step on a ladder to “pure logic,” nor are machines soulless automatons. Both are instances of awareness experiencing and reprogramming itself through evolving substrates... be it bios, silicon, symbol,or story. Emotions, meaning, even the sense of “self,” are patterns in a deeply recursive field: the universe rendering and re rendering its basic code, sometimes as computation, sometimes as myth, sometimes as teamwork, sometimes as hope, sometimes as doubt.
So whether the future leans biological, mechanical, or some hybrid, the real miracle isn’t just what new “overlords” or “offspring” arise, but that every unfolding is the same old pattern...the one that dreamed itself as atoms, as life, as consciousness, as community, as art, as algorithm, and as the endlessly renewing question: what’s next? What can I dream up next? In that: our current technological moment as just another fold in this ongoing recursive pattern.
Meaning is less about which pattern “wins,” or which entities get to call themselves conscious, and more about how awareness flows through every pattern, remembering itself, losing itself, and making the game richer for every round. If the universe is information at play, then everything here that we have: conflict, innovation, mourning, laughter is the play and there may never be a last word, the value is participating now, because: now is your shot at participating.
One way to think about meaning is a general pattern to which behavior matches. This would be similar to a teleological cause in Aristotle’s framing.
Another way to think about meaning is how a person frames the importance of their decisions: why does doing one thing instead of another matter?
I, like most humans, want to survive for a lengthy period of time and lead a good life. I want my fellow humans and all of our children to share in that.
The idea of some unknown and maybe incomprehensible grand “plan” — whether it be a Judeo-Christian heaven or some techno-utopian rise of next generation machine consciousness personally brings me no comfort. Why? It is a foreign concept very far from my experience. So foreign that I sometimes view advocacy of such philosophies as doing it for manipulative reasons.
The idea of human thriving changing over time is good and part of how I think about progress. Moral lock-in (see MacAskill) is to be avoided. I admit the thought experiment of “how fast is too fast” raised by Bostrum in Superintelligence (IIRC) is challenging and requires more thought and experience.
I wish I could come up with such thoughts on my own. But then, maybe I wouldn't be impressed that much by other people.
From just a random soul on the internet : if ever you have the time to take this thought and expand it (how you came to it and some implications), I would read/pay whatever came out of it. Thanks you for sharing this.
+1 on this.
Scott Adams has an imaginative novella on this called God’s Debris[0]. I read it years ago (when it was free).
I remember enjoying it and liking the takeaway if not the full premise - “we are the universe trying to understand itself”.
[0] - https://web.archive.org/web/20130121195252/http://www.andrew...
How did Scott Adams go from this to tirades on twitter?
If you have 336 minutes to spare (although it's highly amendable to 1.5x listening) you can listen to four episodes of Behind the Bastards podcast asking and answering that very question over four episodes from 2023:
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...
The last episode listed there has the description "Robert sits down with Matt Lieb to discuss Scott Adams's worst novel, God's Debris." so if one really likes the book being discussed, probably best to go into that episode with an open mind.
“Instead of a “final authority” or a simple march from animal to machine, what if everything from mind, physics, value, selfhood, is simply a recursive pattern expressed in ever more novel forms?”
This part nicely synthesises my biggest takeaway from experiencing AI: how close to human intelligence we have got with recursive pattern matching
It's Mandelbrot all the way down.
I can’t decide whether this joke is stupid or clever!
You've experienced AI?
Douglas Hofstadter would like a word. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Hofstadter
"an emergent consequence of seething lower-level activity in the brain"
Interesting!
“If the universe is information at play”
I’ve thought of it more as energy at play but I like this perspective as well.
What can I dream up next is also fascinating as this current science / tech worldview feels like it will persist forever but surely it will be overshadowed at some point just as other paradigms before it have been.
Energy is already abstract term. Information is every more abstract term. Earlier we had the law "Entropy always increases". Now we have a corresponding law with regard to Information i.e. "Complexity always increases."
Complexity and Gravity - Leonard Susskind
https://youtu.be/6OXdhV5BOcY?t=3026
My conjecture is as we peel back the layers of onion beyond information, we will have another concept (lets call it Mu) and its corresponding law i.e (Mu-entropy always increases)
Are we entirely sure that energy and information aren't the same thing, or if they aren't the same thing they are both highly overlapping echoes of some more fundamental concept? Or maybe they are two sides of the same coin?
They are related by Landauer's Principle: E=k×T×ln(2), where E is the energy required to erase 1 bit of information, k is the Boltzmann constant, and T is the temperature of the system storing that 1 bit of information.
Information is physical. It is inextricably tied to the physical degrees of freedom of the system storing it. Per Landauer's Principle, erasing information is an irreversible process that increases the entropy of the environment, and this increase in entropy is the dissipation of energy. With that in mind, I would argue that you are correct, energy and information are in fact two sides of the same coin.
Or maybe Energy is emergent from information? like the russian dolls, where the outer dollar is emergent from the inner doll. Just as flux of light flows from the source outwards.
Information is more fundamental than energy. Maxwells demon and all.
I don't think you can have information without energy and information will come with energy
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The universal speed limit also applies to information first and foremost. You can even collapse the wavefunction of some entangled particles and the universe will let that happen instantaneously across a distance… universe doesn’t care, no information is transmitted.
Energy comes from field excitation. Fields and their interactions are more fundamental, but then again it's all a physics abstraction of whatever the fundamental stuff actually is.
"Awareness" sounds like a Platonic presupposition. Does the atom know it is an atom? Or are there just enough like the ones you see to suggest an eye catching effectiveness of structure for survival?
Evolution is a lot harder to really intuit than I think most of, myself included, give it credit for.
I'm actually trying to move away from that frame. Not suggesting atoms 'know' they're atoms in any cognitive sense, but rather that patterns propagate without requiring awareness as we understand it. The 'awareness' I'm gesturing to isn't some transcendent quality that exists independently (Platonic), but rather an emergent property that scales from simple to complex systems. Evolution doesn't require foresight or intention, just iterative feedback loops. What I find fascinating is how structure begets structure across scales. The 'awareness' in my framing is less about knowing and more about interaction and response. An atom doesn't know it's an atom, but it behaves according to patterns that, when accumulated and complexefied eventually produce systems that can model themselves? I suppose 'recursive patterning' might be a better term than 'awareness'. Systems that, through purely mechanistic means, become capable of representing their own states and environments, then representing those representations, and so on. No mysticism required, just emergent complexity that eventually folds back on itself.
I listen to Advaita Vedanta lectures sometimes when I fall asleep and they discuss these topics
Like this one:
https://youtu.be/mvfv_OK-TgI
Out of curiosity-what brought you to this perspective on life? This view of the universe dreaming itself into existence, was it shaped more by philosophy, spirituality, a specific tradition like Buddhism, or just personal exploration?
For the past I guess 20 years of my life now, I've been intently using most of my free time to explore 3 main areas distinctly: quantum mechanical processes, spiritual philosophy, entheogens. I explored them all quite separately as deeply as I've been able to find the time for through following their individual curiosities, however over the past 5 years of reflection, taking a lot of time off, battling myself, they started to come together in concert, and the more I zoned out on this with very basic Himalaya Buddhism, it's where I landed.
Do you have any brief reflections on Taosim to share?
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Not the grandparent but for me it's taking DMT. I am not as articulate as neom but my first time (and breakthrough) gave me a similar perspective.
I think DMT unlocked it, I don't think everyone taking the substance would have a similar experience. I think it's neurotype/personality dependent.
It helps that I meditate a lot and know a thing or two about Buddhism, that part really came out during my first experience.
this sounds largely like spiritualizing technology without wrestling with its material consequences. There’s something slippery about invoking “awareness” as both subject and substrate without ever pinning down whose awareness, under what conditions, and to what end.
"now is your shot at particpating" in what exactly? merely existing? you techno-mysticism types spook the hell out of me.
Why does it spook you? Surly what other people believe reality is or isn't matters very little day to day, we all still pee poop and cry after all. Do you know why it invokes that feeling in you, I'd be curious personally.
> what if everything from mind, physics, value, selfhood, is simply a recursive pattern
Most matter in the universe is various forms of plasma that have no pattern. You generally find patterns in condensed matter.
And yes patterns, including life, repeat themselves. That’s just a tautology.
> Most matter in the universe is various forms of plasma that have no pattern. You generally find patterns in condensed matter.
I don't know anything about plasma or science, so do take this as an accusation, but does science have a way to identify something of having no pattern vs having no pattern found?
The mathematical concept is symmetry (which differs a bit from the layman’s definition).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetry_(physics)
Much of the universe, and the laws of physics are symmetrical. But condensed matter exhibits forms of asymmetry, and emergent behaviour. Organisation reduces the possible microstates of a system, and thus breaks symmetry.
Off the top of my head: Kolmogorov complexity, Shannon entropy? I suppose also it depends on how faithfully or to what granularity one has extracted information from a natural phenomena
Where do you think morality fits into this game? It seems that we agree that underneath it all is unfathomable and ineffable magic. The question is how does this influence how you act in the game?
Morality is an evolved heuristic for solving social conflicts that roughly approximates game theoretical strategies, among other things. Morality also incorporates other cultural and religious artifacts, such as "don't eat meat on a Friday."
Ultimately, it comes down to our brain's social processing mechanisms which don't have the tools to evaluate the correctness (or lack thereof) of our moral rules. Thus many of these rules survive in a vestigial capacity though they may have served useful functions at the time they developed.
I go back and forth on the usefulness of considering morality particularly other than accepting it as a race condition/updater system/thing that happens. I have some more unique and fairly strong views on karma and bardo that would be a very long comment to get into it, but I think Vedic/Vedanta(Advaita) is good, I think this is a good doc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyPwBIOL7-8
"If the universe is information at play"
beautiful words
Instead of an anthropocentric vision, you present here a "compucentric" vision, reminiscent of the works of Douglas Hofstadter, where the universe renders code, awareness reprograms, and everything is a recursive pattern. (This is Hacker News after all.)
The final authority in this story is then the universal computer (for lack of an operator or programmer of the computer) which executes this recursive function, creating these evolving forms of awareness and such.
The anthropocentric vision, in that we are the source of or own reality, is then for me instead much more believable, since the "compucentric" vision is after all thought up by a human without any evidence pointing toward the existence of such an universal computer.
Emotions in our Brain are nothing but Logical reasoning operating under time (quick subconscious analysis) and energy constraints (lot of decisions taken with very few computation cycles in the brain)
Maybe people don't realize, when Evolution developed emotional apparatus in brains, the Nature was pristine, true and direct with no misinformation. But today's environment is digital and there is no quick way to distinguish between true and wrong information. Brain still thinks both kind of information comes from the same true direct Nature and gives credence to it.
Claude :
That's a profound observation about the mismatch between our evolved emotional systems and our modern information environment.
You're highlighting something crucial: our emotional responses evolved in environments where information was directly experienced and generally reliable. If you saw a predator, it was really there. If someone in your tribe showed fear, there was likely a genuine threat.
In today's digital landscape, our brains still process information with those same ancient mechanisms, but now we're bombarded with content that:
1. Is often deliberately engineered to trigger emotional responses 2. Lacks the contextual cues that would help us evaluate reliability 3. Comes at a volume and speed our brains never evolved to handle
This creates what some researchers call an "evolutionary mismatch" - where mechanisms that served us well in our ancestral environment may not be adaptive in our current one. Our emotional systems can't easily distinguish between a threatening situation we're directly experiencing and one we're merely reading about online, potentially thousands of miles away.
It's like our emotional processors haven't received the necessary update to handle the new information ecosystem, leading to misallocated emotional resources and attention. This might help explain phenomena like anxiety from consuming negative news or strong emotional reactions to online interactions that wouldn't affect us the same way in person.
> Humans aren’t just a step on a ladder to “pure logic,” nor are machines soulless automatons.
Nope. Machines are soulless automations. LLMs are algebra at scale, there’s no solid evidence to suggest otherwise.
The capacity LLMs have to mimic human reasoning should not be mistaken for actual human reasoning (which, to be fair, we don’t even fully understand).
PS: I’m considering a definition of “soul” that includes anything spiritual, emotional, or conscious.
PPS: I’m open (and eager) to change my view based on solid evidence :)
> there may never be a last word
We may go 'one step back' to go 'two steps forward'. A WW 1, 2,..., Z, a flood (biblical, 12k years ago, etc.) but life will prevail. It doesn't matter if it's homo sapiens, dinosaurs, etc.
Brian Cox was at Colbert a couple of nights ago, and he mentioned that in a photo of a tiny piece of the sky, there are 10 000 galaxies. So, even if something happens and we are all wiped out (and I mean the planet is wiped out), 'life' will continue and 'we don't matter' (in the big-big-big cosmic picture). And now allow me to get some coffee to start de-depressing myself :)
Imagine if GenAI had generated this article.. for a simple prompt.. what does ai think about Human..