Divided by Zero

High-minded thinkers have spent a lot of time trying to find the order, the simplicity inside reality, inside its systems which look random, but which work too well not to be governed by rules. The problem lies in the kind of simplicity we have been searching for. Life is not simple like a perfect circle, life is simple like a handful of beans. All the components are more or less the same, and yet no two are identical.

Variations on a theme, remember?

Reality processes matter and events in the same way we process food, it draws energy from some, it gives away energy to others, and it fashions different things for itself out of the same fabric, an intricate tapestry woven in its entirety from a few types of threads.

Your body is made of muscles and bones and organs and sinews, which look nothing alike, but they are all the same substance, the substance that makes you.

Reality is the same way, it can’t produce things that are not of itself.

Can I elaborate on what that means?

Energy, matter, time, thought, being, they are all and they all share its essence.

That is what makes it possible for them to interact with each other and create new structures.

What comes out of energy and matter? Everything there is.

You have asked why I said being and not life, what is the difference. Life is that which animates the things we normally think about when we hear the term: humans, plants, animals. Being is that which animates everything: the power in magnets, the pure sound of crystal, the movements of the wind, the shining of stars, the vibration in the string of a violin.

Being is that which animates

Are we too small to affect any changes at all? We may be, but if we take ourselves out of this equation, who’d be left in it to judge us unworthy?

I hope you appreciate the irony.

What is the advantage of using a system of trial and error and an unreasonable number of iterations instead of larger organizing principles?

First, the larger organizing principles are there, they are few and they are simple.

When you have to put together a mosaic, what would get the job done faster, going through the random pile of pieces until you find the one that matches your design or trying to create a theory for sorting pieces which would reveal to you the piece you need for each instance? Especially if you are very fast and have plenty of time. Is reality alive?

We have a narrow and biased definition of this term, so I hesitate to use it.

What do you call something that runs on its own power, can organize, evolve, grow and heal its own essence, responds when prompted and can experience death, and which does all of the above with no guidance from outside of itself?