Divided by Zero — Options
An act of choosing; a thing that is or may be chosen
Like all naturally evolving systems reality doesn’t behave according to a predetermined plan, it runs on repeated trial and error and on eliminating the fruitless branches in the tree of choice.
Even though you can’t see it, reality presents and tests options for itself constantly and automatically, in a manner you may recognize from the quiet processes inside of a body.
It favors the organisms best fit to survive; it breaks down things that are in the way of processes in progress and it keeps altering the states of its major systems until they reach a balance with each other.
There is an unseen simplifier to this process, one that runs quietly in the background and one we don’t pay attention to: reality is constantly eliminating all the outcomes of a set of circumstances safe one.
We don’t think about it because that would add an unnecessary amount of complexity to an already overburdened understanding of life.
It is uncanny that a system supposedly ruled by an inexorable tendency towards disorder is so intent on increasing its organization, its connections and its complexity.
Things become more structured and more intricate, not less, especially living things, which cultivate growing their complexity with zealous dedication.
This trimming off of branches on the tree of choice happens out of sight, and there is no way of knowing whether the ramification selected was the best of all futures.
You may say this is a hopeless process, doomed to generate nothing but chaos, but life doesn’t see it that way: it compares, it chooses, and it moves on to the next branch in the tree, advancing towards equilibrium by churning through a very large number of experiences quickly and by eliminating of the ones that don’t work out, not through the analysis of the best choice.
If you remember only one thing, remember this: larger systems always have the right of way. Always.
This works for the weather, for the outbreaks of disease, for the shaping of the mountains, for the motions of heavenly bodies, the processing of options goes from larger to smaller scale and it doesn’t spare the details, not until it reaches the level of those details.
Even a rational thinker has to condescend that this is a process that sometimes provides better outcomes; if your life depends on it, you’re better off taking the chance of being wrong than picking the certainty of being dead.
Fortunately for us, the things we like to ponder usually have a longer time frame, and we have the time to think them through, but don’t forget that, for instance, while you are contemplating the advantages of undertaking a particular project or choosing a mate, you are also making flash decisions about whether to shuffle in your chair, walk on the left or right side of the street or look at that bird that just flew overhead.
You think these fast small decisions are without consequence, which is not true. When you looked at that bird you narrowed your field of vision to focus on it, at the expense of everything else around it, and that eliminated all the other things you could have seen. This is what reality does all the time: it eliminates every branch in the thick tree of possibilities but one. You have hundreds of these little selections every day, and you don’t have the means to over-think them all.
Keep in mind that these choices evolve the system, not its individual components, and things that make no sense at a small scale work very well inside the larger system. Hail falls in a field of wheat and flattens some ears. It doesn’t discriminate between the productive ones and the barren ones.
Why does this happen?
Two reasons: one — the field of wheat works at the scale of large numbers, where a portion of the harvest has been decimated, but the nature of the harvest itself has remained unchanged, and two — the hail is not about destroying a portion of the harvest which comes about as a secondary outcome, it is about trading off temperature and water content inside vast masses of air to bring the entire system back to balance.
What does that have to do with us? A lot.
How much energy is being lost in the pondering of why some things happened or didn’t, on why other people seem to have better luck, on what could have been, were you to make a different choice at a critical point in your life?
These musings, though interesting as a mental exercise, will yield no benefit, not because the past is gone (it never really is, we will discuss the changeable nature of the past shortly), but because since they didn’t happen, they didn’t sprout their own tree of possibilities, a tree whose ramifications are too many to compare even in its first branching, not to mention in the endless number of branches after that.
The reason you shouldn’t dwell on what could have been is because you can not know it, it is as simple as that.
Let’s assume for a moment that at some point in time an all powerful entity, one who theoretically has this capacity, allows you to see several ways in which your life could unfold, and based on that knowledge you develop a plan you think would yield the best life for you.
There is absolutely no reason for you to believe that you will get the outcome you are hoping for, because every second brings another choice. You make any change, even a minor one, the most insignificant ever, and it throws you on a different branch, and there goes your tree, never to be seen again. I’m just trying to point out the futility of this tight-fisted grasp on life planning. While life is subject to your free will in the present time, its overall path is entirely out of your control. I didn’t even bring up the influences other people’s wills have on your choices, your interactions with these people have impact, like balls hitting each other and altering each other’s trajectory.
Also, there is a self-reinforcing loop between the present, past and future through which we constantly reshape our memory and the meaning of events as we gain new knowledge, and that new perspective alters your reactions in the present and your selections for the future.
The choice you make today, based on your experience, may be radically different from the choice you would make the next morning, after an outcome blatantly invalidated it.
You should never be sure of anything, we never have enough data to know something in the absolute.
There is a silver lining: while we cannot control the actual path, we have some bearing on the general direction of events, although a lot less than strong-willed people think.
We can consistently compare and eliminate the branches that look like they’re altering the course, even though that doesn’t come with any guarantees.
This is a paltry tool to rely on when you want to fix something as complicated as life, but it’s all we’ve got.
So where does this leave us? Do we just quit making plans altogether and live by the second? There are schools of thought that advise doing precisely that, but not all of us are so inclined. Living without a plan is anathema to the rational mind, which is better off perpetually disappointed than stark raving mad.
The goal of these lessons is not to offer a solution to reign control over your life, which, as follows from the writing above, is an impossibility, but to make you aware of a few of the moving parts involved in its shaping, so its unlikely circumstances do not bewilder you constantly.
Whenever something makes no sense in the context of your personal experience, look to the next system up, the bigger picture, as people like to call it, for it might make sense in there.
What you also have to remember is that this event was decided before you had the chance to weigh on your options.
By the time you are aware of it happening, reality had already eliminated all alternatives safe one. You can’t guess, for instance, what ears of wheat would have made it to harvest if there was no hail. Maybe the absence of hail would have brought a terrible storm later on, so devastating that none of the wheat could withstand it. Maybe a gentle wind blew away the air of different temperatures and all the wheat made it, but in the process it spread too much and killed off the barley.
Maybe your own actions to safeguard the harvest end up in doing it more harm than good. There are wise people who warn that every time you try to fix a large system, you end up breaking an even larger one, but that can’t be the case, because otherwise we’d still be living in caves, afraid of fire. Besides, breaking and fixing are relative concepts.
I’ll answer this one question before we go to break. What is the point of knowing you can’t take anything for granted?
Not all teaching is geared towards finding solutions to problems. Some of it meant to paint a picture of the way things are.
[It has occurred to the research team that this tome might have been meant as a literary exercise rather than a teaching tool for some obscure discipline, and frankly we are all at our wit’s end about what direction to take from here.
Evidently the category the work belongs to drastically changes our approach and branches out into many important areas, starting with which department to approach for grants for ongoing research and ending with what to tell people it is we actually do.
There have been moments when the team considered abandoning this project, which seems to raise ten new problems for each one it is attempting to solve.
Unfortunately, our perspective on life has evolved past the point where this would be a gratifying choice.]
How do you make sure not to break things while trying to fix them?
Tiny changes in tiny increments with plenty of time in between to test the consequences. That requires a much longer lifespan than the one we are currently enjoying, maybe that should be a goal worth striving towards.
Reality intervenes frequently to fight attempts at improving it, attempts which you deem worthy and blameless, and it starts chain reactions that go through very unlikely stations until they get the things you are trying to change back to what it perceives as balance.
Reality is intent on doing this again and again until it sends your efforts back to start in ways that may look very unnatural to you.
You would like some examples?
The way cultivated land reverts to its natural state when left unattended, the regular upheaval of social discontent and the eventual decline of civilizations, the swift crumbling of abandoned structures, the shape-shifting perfidy of disease.
Why do I compare the workings of reality to the body of a living entity?
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 of reality and they all share its essence. That is what makes it possible for them to interact with each other and create new structures. Energy and time create motion, matter and time yield growth and decay, time and thought prompt evolution, and so on.
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?
