Entropy modulation
For months, I have been subtly touched by something seemingly big. However, I haven’t been able to get even a millimeter closer to comprehending what it is and what to do with it in practice.
More precisely, it looks like something or somebody using statistically highly improbable events that nevertheless occur in front of me tries to grab my attention, send me a message, or point out something. But I just can’t figure out what it could be, what to do with it, and who or what does it.
Most of all, I am not entirely sure if it is all real or not just a random fantasy of a mind that, as usual, tries to find a pattern in pure randomness.
Entropy modulation to send messages
Whether randomness can be affected or not and whether information can be sent via entropy modulation is the whole point of discussion.
What the message feels like?
To make it short, it looks like I am experiencing highly improbable events — primarily, lucky events in Yatzy — that are designed to grab attention and boldly highlight that there are cases when basic probability and statistics, classical materialistic approach to reality do not work. It feels like somebody shows examples that there are other unnoticed forces that, nevertheless, affect the outcome, in my case — the Yatzy game — quite clearly and directly. “If you are inquisitive, pay attention and notice. If you are not — it is also OK, but you had a chance” — that kind of approach to get noticed.
Sent to me, to somebody else, broadcasted?
Introspecting deeper, I am not even sure that all these communication attempts address me personally and that I am who should understand something, but not those who are around me (wife, cat, somebody).
You know, like in Westerns, when the main character runs around the whole film, all kinds of adventures happen to him; there are obstacles that he successfully overcomes, thinking that all adventures revolve around him. But in reality, everything revolves around his old faithful Chinese assistant, whom he carries with him everywhere. And it turns out, to the great surprise of the protagonist, that he is not the main one, and the tests were not sent to him, and he did not come out of them like a hero, but his Chinese assistant was the real hero and the key player.
Is this real?
Some events that have been occurring are so unbelievably mathematically improbable that I can’t stop thinking that they have a meaning, a secret message, an attempt to reach you out and point to something big, that they are an attention grabber to establish contact first and communicate later.
Of course, it is possible that I grossly overestimated how rare those random events are, and there is even nothing to talk about. But, subjectively, it doesn’t feel that way.
Yes, yes, I have also watched “A Beautiful Mind.” I certainly don’t want people in white overalls to come after me, particularly considering that I still haven’t published any important work or contributed to humankind well enough — at least not to the level that I wouldn’t feel too upset being locked from sane people for long.
Interstellar also suggested a fascinating idea of communication via unusual channels.
I find many similarities between the “Interstellar” movie and my subjective experiences. This fact unsettles me a lot and pushes me back inside my shell since my experiences look too much like a partially reworked sci-fi movie plot. If this turns out to be the case, it is highly embarrassing, indeed …
On the other hand, people have been circling the subject of entropy modulation while playing cards or dice for centuries. Of course, they operated different terminology but meant more or less the same. I am sure that sooner or later, someone will discover something worth the time spent thinking about the vicissitudes of fate.
Tuning the mind to sense entropy modulation
Every morning is work. Every morning I make thousands of moves to ensure there will be enough cash to pay office rent and salaries when the time comes. In this familiar and somewhat even pleasant fuss, weeks and months fly by too easily and quickly.
But I also play Yatzy — mostly with my wife — whenever possible to set my mind in a meditative way, helping to gently shake up the head to release latent stresses that happen in working life.
Playing Yatzy gives a chance to randomness or those who can influence the randomness to affect the outcome while not violating the rules of the Universe.
With seemingly nonrandom events in inherently random games, like Yatzy, it looks like someone is trying hard to hammer my wooden head to propagate the message that such coincidences simply cannot happen. I nearly physically feel how the sender is amused and upset with my impiety and stubbornness not to accept the apparent facts that with the probabilities converging to zero and still happening and happening again, there must be something wrong, something unusual that even people like me — with a too solid materialistic approach to the world — shall start suspecting something weird.
Does my wife distort reality?
Again, I am not sure that improbable events are a message to me. My wife, who is my Yatzy game partner, is a far more spiritual person than me. She likes winning. I like winning as well. She is highly competitive. I am competitive too. And what may be important, she really doesn’t like losing. So much she doesn’t like losing that we typically play the Yatzy game until she wins. Otherwise, the morning, the day, or the evening may be ruined if she doesn’t win at the end.
For me, the game is more of a meditation, a possibility not to be too bombarded with emails and messages, to observe the inner me, and to give my thoughts the freedom to flow while I play. Thoughts are not about the game — there are just thoughts. I like winning a lot. But I am OK losing. For her losing would strike out all previous wins immediately.
She so much can’t stand losing that it looks like she could distort the reality and skew the entropy in one way or another.
How entropy fluctuations manifest themselves
Indeed, it is incredible to show your dicer partner how you shake the dice cup and teach her how to knock out Yatzy on ones like you just did yourself a few seconds ago. But you show her and …, and she gets them out — she also makes Yatzy on ones. What are the chances?!!! You jokingly reveal a secret of the Universe when there was no secret — just pure randomness and pure joy of a game. After all, it wasn’t a secret, right? … It was all just randomness, wasn’t it?
But how is this possible?!… After all, reasonable mathematical calculations clearly show that the probability of such an event is genuinely negligible! How can you knock out Yatzy twice on one by two different players within a couple of minutes! Usual coincident? I know… and then another coincidence a minute later… what just has happened?!
If it is true, how to check, how to measure it?
But what if the case is not random? Then how can you be sure of this? How can you measure it? After all, science begins with measurement, right? Before we go deeper, let’s check what other crazy things people do to find intelligence.
Other ways to detect intelligence
We have been trying to find alien civilizations listening to the radio because about 100–130 years ago, we successfully managed to send messages via radio waves. It is an outstanding achievement for humanity, of course, but considering that we as humans have existed for a couple of million years and the Universe exists about 13.8 billion years, our fixation on electromagnetic waves as the means of communication may look a bit naive.
Humans have tried different ways to flag our presence to those who can see and understand. However, some methods may take tens of thousands of years to reap the fruits, even in theory, considering the vast distances of space.
What could they do on the other end?
Those intelligent who are not us have faced the same dilemma. They can be upset with the limitations of our Universe, namely, the speed of light and unidirectional flow of time, which limits communication between intelligences living in different space and time.
I intentionally use the word intelligence and intelligences as I use them. You can substitute intelligences with the terms “intelligent agents”, “intelligent species”, or whatever is better suited to your taste in English. In my wording, intelligences is anything or anybody intelligent irrespective of their form and qualities.
There must be something even more universal than electromagnetic waves for communication, something even more fundamental to the fabric of space. And that could be entropy.
When we send a message using electromagnetic waves, we are, of course, showing the world around us our high level of development… a high level against something very primitive — like a stone or a single-cell organism. But from the point of view of gods or potential creators of the Universe or simply well-developed intelligence, our chosen way to communicate is somewhat limited because:
- Electromagnetic waves are just one of the forms of fields flooding the Universe
- We have somehow arbitrarily decided to use a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum — radio waves — simply because we can
- We have even more arbitrary chosen the modulation
- Our power and energy capabilities to send the message are below minuscule in Universe terms compared to stars, quasars, or magnetars. Even if somebody decides to check this form of communication, we are well below the natural noise of the Universe at any reasonable distance beyond our solar system, which is too constraining. Besides, why limit the search to our known Universe?…
- The speed of light is staggering in our imagination as primitive species, which are still very excited with their scientific discoveries of the last 300–400 years. But in terms of the Universe’s size, the speed of light is very low, and this fact may critically separate intelligences in space-time. We may live at the same time, but we will never meet each other using electromagnetic waves as a means of communication because electromagnetic waves are so slow. We may live in the same space, but at different times and we never meet because time flows in one direction — other intelligences either don’t live yet or they don’t live already, and we can’t meet or contact them
There must be something else that tackles both issues — distances and time — that is, pretty much the same thing if we think about it in terms of message propagation using electromagnetic waves or similar.
Entropy appears to be a much broader candidate for communication if it is possible to affect it and if it is possible to modulate it.
Even more, if there are other dimensions or forces that we don’t sense now or don’t take into account, they are most likely affected by entropy, which seems to be fundamental. For example, in theory, you can talk about “entropy of thoughts or ideas”, but “thoughts and ideas” may have a different physical basis than electromagnetic waves or our common three dimensions and matter. And we still would be able to communicate.
Weak signals finger-pointing to entropy modulation
We hit more and more strange things that are strange for our macro world but, as we are told, govern the quantum world. And suppose so far no one has found anything real linking intelligence, subject, and quantum worlds, then, by the very approach, by the very way of doing the measurements, we affect the randomness/entropy and distort the measurement.
Entropy can only increase on its own, chaos can only increase, and randomness can only get more random. In the close system.
As far as we can tell, life and mind are exceptional events in this sense — they reduce entropy. They make chaos less chaotic. Locally. For the expense of other parts of the system.
Thus, it is possible to say that the intelligences affect the outcome or chances in a broad term. Thus, any manifestation of non-randomness, any manifestation of abnormality of entropy is an indicator of intelligence.
The reference level of entropy?
As we know from communication, it is possible to send a signal using amplitude modulation or amplitude keying. A classic example is zero and one.
However, zero and one are always against some level. If we don’t know the level, we can’t even detect that there is a signal because we don’t have a reference to compare against.
If we can’t know for sure “a normal level of entropy”, how can we detect that entropy is “not normal” at some point in time?
Entropy modulation is a more robust indicator
Though it may be challenging to know the absolute level of entropy, it may be easier to detect the change in entropy. We also know that the level of entropy can only increase in time. In closed systems. Thus, any confirmed irregularities with entropy are a very signal of life and intelligence.
Differential signals can be much easier detected in the presence of noise if both signals are affected equally or similarly. It is not impossible to detect differential signals that are thousands of times smaller than the noise.
What does it tell us? It states that we must find a way to sense the differences in entropy — over time, in different areas of the same system, etc. — and it doesn’t matter what the level of entropy is. The change in the level does matter. And unexplained irregularities do matter.
Why entropy modulation is probably the best way to communicate between intelligences
But why entropy? What is so special about it?
- Entropy doesn’t depend on the field. Entropy can be seen and measured in fundamentally different systems: groups of atoms = matter, electromagnetic field, gravitation, society, and information. We may talk about the entropy of virtually anything. Entropy is universal and fundamental and thus less limited than electromagnetic waves, for example
- Entropy modulation is the most natural signal. Entropy nearly equals randomness. Randomness equals not having a signal. Any abnormalities of entropy (i.e., entropy modulation) are equal to the signal. Thus, any modulation of randomness is the most effective way to send a signal. For example, when we send a message by modulating a carrier, it is like a double modulation. A coherent electromagnetic wave (carrier) already has low entropy — it is a coherent and narrow-frequency signal. Carrier itself is already a signal because it is not random. We are making it more random by applying coding or modulation. Thus, we had a lower entropy signal and coded it with the message. Thus making it more random is contra-productive: we took a low-entropy something and increased its level of entropy. We could have taken the entropy itself and modulated it
- Entropy modulation is the most energy-efficient form of sending messages. Sending a signal always requires energy. Entropy is perfect in this regard since it requires the least energy. You have a random event. It may swing in one direction or another or whatever several potential states exist. Since the event is random, the probabilities of those events shall be known. Swinging in one direction or another requires the least possible energy because the event attempts to sway anyway already. Still, our modulation affects the direction of the swing with the least energy:
- Entropy modulation supports the highest dynamic range. The larger the dynamic range of the system the better the communication system is. There are virtually no limits to entropy levels, at least, from the top and, as a result, there is virtually no limit to the intensity of the signal that can be sent via the entropy modulation
What is entropy modulation?
Well, in short, entropy modulation is an abnormality of randomness. The randomness of what? — of anything, actually: electronic noise, electromagnetic fields, dice throwing outcome, relative positions of atoms, Brownian motion, a flock of birds — anything. But it is not necessarily material or tangible in common sense. As discussed above, we can talk about the “entropy of thinking” without specifying the method for thinking or thoughts.
How to detect whether there is an abnormality?
Compare with the reference. If we had an alternative reality in parallel with our reality and could compare them, it would be effortless to spot the abnormalities. However, I guess this way, we would violate many laws of nature, from the information propagation speed to some “energy/information saving law” — something would prevent anyway. Otherwise, it would be too easy and too good. Our Universe isn’t built this way. For some reason. Let’s not move there just yet. What we are discussing here and how we are discussing it — minimum mathematics, very little physics, and a bit of philosophy — is mostly speculation rather than science. Bringing alternative reference realities would make it speculation in square, at least.
What else could be options to detect abnormalities in randomness?
- Self-coherence. Compare the level of entropy over time with itself and detect the differences. It is, probably, the easiest, the most powerful, and the most confusing method. Imagine: you are throwing dice. You can be “lucky” or “not lucky”. If you adhere to classic mathematics and the classic approach to entropy/randomness, you can easily describe the events as just probability outcomes. For example, a strike of luck is just highly improbable, but still a possible sequence of winning moves, which will undoubtedly, in the long run, be outweighed by the similarly long strike of losing moves. According to classic mathematics. However, you can describe them from a different perspective: “better luck” and “worse luck” or “not my day”. Sure, it can be just a random event. But equally, it could be a fluctuation of randomness/entropy, i.e., some events temporarily may become less random or more random. The fluctuation of randomness can be a random and natural effect. It can be standing waves of entropy fluctuations from other events; thus, it may not be random anymore if that information is available
- Intelligent sensors. Since intelligence is the prime suspect for entropy fluctuations, it also makes sense to use intelligence to sense the fluctuations. Applying our physics knowledge, we see many examples of similar usage: a speaker can be used as a microphone, a radio-emitting antenna and radio-receiving antenna are the same object, an atom can absorb a quantum of energy, and it can emit a quantum of energy. It is not a 100% universal law of physics, but it is a good direction to start digging into. Who are the “intelligent sensors”? — well, humans or other living organisms that exhibit intelligence. Humans can be high on intelligence, but not necessarily the best “antennas”: their sensing capabilities can be befogged with prior knowledge or opinions; we can’t easily connect to human brains as “see what it sees”, unlike other intelligent brains. We are still barbarians and allow ourselves to risk other living brains, but since it is still perceived as acceptable, it may help to develop the field
- Against the classical rules of experimental physics. Typically, any physicist tries to eliminate any subjectivity from the experiment, and for that, it is crucial to eliminate subjects — people from the process. Everything must be done by devices that are not biased, calibrated, and can be trusted. That is a perfect approach for the majority of sciences. But there could be areas where we exclude major areas by not using brains or intelligences. We may simply miss large fields of knowledge and never are able even to come closer to the field because, unlike classical physics, where subjects must be avoided to be objective, there are fields where subjects are essential elements of studies and even essential elements of sensing elements
- Human dicers. Knowledge is a tree — not necessarily a binary tree — more likely the tree with higher dimensions, but it is a tree. Yes, some brunches are intersecting. But at large, if you decide to avoid something, a large brunch of the tree won’t be accessible ultimately. Thus, I am returning to the same point again, but from a slightly different perspective. While experimenting with entropy and randomness, it is very tempting to use true random events like the noise of electric current, etc. — something truly impersonal to eliminate bias or subjectivity. But along the way, we may eradicate large brunches that do require that intelligences through the dices, that something or somebody potentially affects the entropy and probabilities, experience the probabilities, interacts with probabilities. It may be the key to sense that the randomness is affected. In this case, it shall be not only more prominent to see how subjects affect the outcome of presumably random events, but it may be a required ingredient for the whole experiment
Who/what could be the originators of the entropy modulation?
We can hypothesize about this question endlessly. Everything is just guesswork until we have the contact, decipher the messages, or understand the nature of the entropy fluctuations. Again, not to mention that there could be nothing real at all, as I am sure countless experiments before me clearly showed. Nevertheless:
- Gods/creators of our Universe. Random events are a perfect backdoor to keep the Universe under control while not violating creators’ own rules and not accepting that the Universe is not perfect and requires constant manual adjustments. Randomness is random and can easily sneak under the radar of those living in the Universe because it is difficult to prove that the event wasn’t random, particularly for one-off events. Thus, those responsible for corrections and control can affect the outcome in the desired direction while still keeping a low profile and being hidden in the “natural noise”
- Simulated reality. If we live in a simulated reality, there are multiple ways the non-randomness may manifest or be explained: from “glitches due to updating the software” to already mentioned “manual patches by creators to keep the build stable”. Of course, it is also possible that these are communication attempts or even unpredictable “spillovers” between different parallel realities in the cloud where our reality is run
- Natural phenomena. There may be noticeable entropy fluctuation but no meaningful messages created by somebody or something. It is a kind of second-degree derivative of randomness. It could even be practically valuable, like a detectable arbitrage of randomness, and could even be used as tide waves to generate some profit. We wouldn’t be violating any thermodynamics rules since we would behave like equalizers of entropy, like mixers and shakers — we would stir up the space to make the entropy more. On the way, we would gain something
- Other intelligences from regular space. They could have faced the same communication urge and the same communication hurdles and advanced a bit further than us in this method
- Other intelligences from other spaces/Universes. Our universes could be linked or co-existing but not interacting in other practical ways except for probabilities. We may be quantum linked, i.e., affecting quantum states in their Universe could affect quantum states in our Universe and vice versa. Since we have started messing up with quantum states, they could have detected abnormalities on their end and are banging the wall from the other side, trying to grab our attention
- Mirrored worlds. Similar to other spaces/Universes, there could be more closely linked with us worlds — mirrored worlds. They could be driving in the opposite direction of time; there could be living in inverse to us energies or matters (anti-matters). In one way or another, they are in other spaces/Universes, but sister-like, more mirror-like than just not directly linked worlds
- Somebody from another time. Since time, unlike other dimensions, seems to be unidirectional, maybe, entropy fluctuation is linked with time. Thus, messing up with fluctuation is linked with messing up with time. Things linked and somebody from another time — past or future — experimenting or intentionally steering up our entropy to grab attention
- Ourselves. There could be nobody else but us who steers up the entropy state, thus creating waves of entropy, fluctuations of entropy. When people say that “Steve Jobs shaped reality”, they typically mean it metaphorically. It could be far more real than we think. If intelligence and life create local entropy decreases, the entropy fluctuations, which life is, inevitably must create entropy waves. The waves propagate, reflect from irregularities, and return. They can create standing waves of entropy, like any other waves. Thus, there could be an arbitrage before the standing wave disappears. There could be many unusual effects due to this
We can throw more and more hypotheses. I tend to point fingers at ourselves.
We are the most probable influencers of entropy from several perspectives
And there are several opposite ways we may be involved in the subject:
- There is nothing. It is just our neural network in our head tuned to find patterns where there are not. It could be local combinations of fascinating coincidences that we perceive as messages and assign meanings. The ground truth is there, well known by Ancient Greeks, tested and challenged many times, and still remains the ground truth. If there is nothing, we shouldn’t worry about it. We will just one more time prove that there is nothing, and the reality will be waiting for new people to challenge the ground truth again
- We do straightforwardly skew the chances, and we do affect the entropy. We do it consciously or subconsciously, but we do affect it
Epilogue
“When throwing stones into the water, watch the circles they form; otherwise, this activity will be a complete waste of time” (Kozma Prutkov)