Chaos and Order

Imagine creating a cube in a 3D rendering program. You may randomly attach another cube to it by a face or by an edge. Apply this rule a thousand times. In the next phase, you randomly attach one of these structures with another of the same kind, and do this a thousand times. And on to the next level.

After a very long time, you have a field littered with structures of various sizes and shapes. However, among them shall be a very small number of functioning machines. These are structures like cogs and pinions that interact smoothly. A very small number of these devices shall be complicated enough, and in the right way, to self-replicate. The number would be so small that such structures would be statistically non-existent —but they would exist. This is the logic of combinatory possibility.

If emergent order underlies the reality that we can perceive, then nearly all of what we can see is emptiness or noise. A vanishingly small part contains order. Most of our galaxy is empty, with a vanishingly small part of space occupied by planets and stars. The Earth’s volume is nearly completely uninhabitable. A tiny sliver of its crust has life.

In the rare zones containing order, much of it is self-similar. For example, life on Earth is based on DNA, proteins, and carbon atoms. Once amino acids accidentally formed, they could participate in the next level of random combinations, until proteins were formed. Life, as we know it, has used and reused this innovation.

The phenomena of combinatory possibility and self-similarity gives rise to fractals. Reality is self-similar at any given level, and levels have self-similarity.

Order has principles, and these principles apply everywhere.

It is useful to see these principles at work in our waking world, because they show us that things can exist, not because they are right or desirable, but because they participate in greater machinery. Machinery may participate at abstract levels, like humans participating in a civilization. In turn, civilizations may have aspects which are not right, or desirable, but because they are emergent from what they are based on.

There is much benefit to view waking reality from the outside rather than from the inside. There is no frustration in the external view.