I went on a fanciful bike ride through Colorado. Every time I came to a mountain crest, my mind envisioned it to be the top but it only was once.  Singularity is religion.  Every other time brought pangs of anxiety as in the clearing I realized the climb only continued. Then came the anger; you won't beat me mountain, I've come to befriend.

In planning, I had not well accounted for this. I fell behind schedule. Then when I finally passed that one true peak, the schedule shifted; I had to slow down and thank the forces of nature for joining my side.  Reduction is the addition of electrons; electrons underlie energy.  I had not accounted for gravity.

Gravity always wins.

I stopped at a large dam just off the roadway and took possibly the only selfie I've ever taken. This was 1993 Anno Domini; they were just called pictures at this point in the trajectory of the human experiment.

There was so much potential energy sitting silent behind me.

I can imagine my maternal Grandmother encapsulating this trip with the common quip, "Work is its own reward". I coasted into town intending to have a meal, stay one night in a bed somewhere cheap then continue on.

In the morning, it was difficult to walk so I rested another night before accepting I had blown out my knees. Then I ate two medium Pepperoni lover's pizzas and took a train back home that next morning.

Entering a new environment, there are two basic choices, adapt or disrupt. It's what defines whether you are the protagonist or antagonist. That and the outcome.

The thing is, over time, lines get blurred. New knowledge is found that doesn't always directly contradict earlier knowledge but in the refutation of said earlier knowledge, builds an opposition. Culture becomes counter-cultural becomes counter-counter-cultural and so on. Eventually everything just gets blurry.

This notion wouldn't work in engineering. Planes would crash more than they flew. Most of the modern economy relies on precision.

If the environment is just, it's sensible to adapt. If it's unjust, it's superior to disrupt. Just disruptors of an unjust system have always been considered heroes in human narratives across all cultures. But who arbitrates what is just?

Debate is the arbitration of opinion.  The conclusion of a debate is some sort of verdict and viably, in policy-making, a just compromise between competing narratives.  It is the mechanism by which two conflicting beliefs are able to merge into one conclusion.

The most central mechanism of debate is evidence. Evidence is generally thought of as proof of fact between that which is true or false.  There are no nulls in the concept of evidence. 

The opinion more supported by fact is generally the superior one. Behavior is ideally influenced by fact.  Such is what should drive public policy and ought be the goal of governance.

In science, facts are immutable.  Truth exists.  Absent this maxim, science would fail; there would be no phones, radio, planes nor spaceships.  Truth matters.

Mud is malleable.  Those that treat truth like mud are malleable.

When the truth of character precludes adaptation, the unjust disrupt.  Truth may not be rigid but it is firm; truth is substantial.

Sociopaths are limited by their lack of empathy.

Criminals crave chaos.

My mother's father apparently drove a taxi in Southern Illinois then when he grew tired of it, became a barber. Sadly, I never met him; he died long before I was born.  I'm told he was an amiable figure.  We had his barber chair in our house during my childhood. I loved playing in it, spinning around until I became dizzy.

My Grandma however, I thought would outlive me. She used to eat raw onions like they were apples. She would literally walk around her old, giant house taking bites out of a raw onion like it was an apple. I hated onions and at this age, I was terrified of her.

I remember sitting in my room around my 10th year on this planet, thinking about where in our yard I could poke a stick furthest into the earth when she walked in. She told me I needed to do some yard work, how at her age she was working the fields of her family's farm. This was the reason she terrified me; it wasn't because of the onions.

I have profoundly fond memories of her. I was with her when she told the doctor that she didn't want the surgery, "I know what that means, I've had a good life. I was a nurse." She damn well could have outlived us all, I think she was just bored of everything.

Her funeral was simple and somber yet somehow joyous. It just felt honest and I think it was proper closure to a life well lived. Afterwards, I convinced my cousins and sisters to drive by her old house, where we'd all so often met up over holidays.

Sadly, Southern Illinois, like many communities, had been decimated by economic contraction and methamphetamines. As we travelled toward this childhood respite, we saw abandoned and boarded-up houses. It seemed such a sad parade to what other-wise was a day of cherish.

As we approached the house, at the end of a dead-end road that had now apparently become a path to somewhere else, we were all shocked by how tiny it actually was. I guess everything is a matter of perspective.

In college, my friend Andy and I convinced two girls to sneak into the Aqua-arena Springs "Resort" with us dressed in musketeer costumes. I only use quotation marks because the main attraction was, as it still is, a glass-bottomed boat and swimming pig named Ralph.

I have an uncle named Ralph.

We climbed over a fence and made our way to the alligator pit.  Yes, a holiday destination in south-central Texas includes an alligator pit.  Our costumes included fluffy shirts, fancy knickers, feathered hats and, of course, point-disabled rapiers. We walked atop the ten-foot-tall fence of the alligator pit like a couple of idiots. The girls, wisely disinterested in our bravado, took a walk.

Unfortunately, we didn't take the hint. I don't think we were trying to impress them. Frankly, I'm not sure what we were doing - exploring the adventures of life or some disjointed expression of youth like that.

I found a building with a roof that had a five-foot gap to the next structure, perfect for jumping to. I regaled my colleague and as experience and age dictated, deferred to him for the first attempt. I held his point-disabled rapier as he made the leap, as such is proper protocol, and awaited his successful traversement.

Andy had spent the previous summer in Spain and had bought these rapiers, souvenirs really, there. I was deeply honoured that he'd thought to buy one for me - that feeling of brotherhood is something I've sought my entire life. The points were topped with a metal blob to make sure they were blunt and couldn't injure someone. Yes, we were idiots but we weren't complete fools.

The problem of consciousness is both a question of physics and meta-physics.  Probably the easiest way to to contemplate the concept is via "qualia".

How do you know that what you experience as the color red is the same to anyone else?  What if how you perceive red, other people perceive in the manner you perceive green.  We can't even communicate on this question as it's all wrapped in internalized experience.  How do you perceive green?

In this context, what makes people pick one color over another as their favorite?  Even more, what makes two people fight over something as trivial as a favorite sport's team.

An individual's self-identity can be based on many things but it's generally driven by whatever "things" they decide are "favorites", books, politicians, movies, athletes, anything really.  Maybe to someone, "chairs" are their absolute favorite abstract "thing". 

Abstractions exist so that humans can communicate and qualia are the abstraction of human experience.  This is an area that artificial intelligence may have an incomprehensibly difficult time.  How will a system of artificial intelligence accommodate something it cannot experience?  It needs human input.

I've generally regarded myself as authentic.  I'd say it's been a central component of my self-identity, only because I have great difficulty hiding things.  As such, I had to adapt.  I either had to work on hiding things better or own my unavoidable honesty as a human trait.  Early on, I chose to own it; it was the easier choice.  Lately, I feel like a complete fraud; my self-identity is in crisis.

Hypocrisy is the act of judging others for what you yourself have done.  A friend neglects to invite you to a party.  Hurt, you challenge them. 

"Why didn't you invite me to Cheri's party?"

"Why didn't you invite me to Jason's?" they rightfully respond.

Actor-Observer bias basically comes down to always trusting one's own intent.  The actor attributes their behavior to external causes, outside their control, while the observer attributes another actor's behavior to internal, intentional causes.

"You didn't invite me because you are jealous of my green shirt.  I didn't invite you because your jealousy of my green shirt makes people uncomfortable."

And so, feeling my authenticity erode, I wonder where I should go. Adapt or disrupt.  Should my green become my red?  These are probably the most critical aspects of the human endeavor.  Wherein we accept collaboration and cooperation, humanity succeeds.

Yet, while I feel isolated and alone, suffocated and imprisoned, I have no one to help and none can help me.  I simultaneously fear the future but anxiously anticipate it. I just hope that truth prevails.

Still, who will arbitrate what truth is?

As an 11-year-old human, I bit the pieces out of a Peanut-butter and Jelly sandwich to make a handgun.  My dad laughed uproariously while my mother smiled with resignation. A year or so later, he gave me a .410 shotgun. He pulled over to the side of the road and pulled it out of the trunk to surprise me. I had accrued 12 years to my existence when this happened.

At the time, I was happy.  Happy to be a part, happy to see him happy, wonderous at the notion of what was in the trunk of the car.  British human beings call a car an auto and an auto's trunk a boot.  It's all so confusing.

The upgrade to a .410 is a .20 gauge, then you get the proper .12 gauge then what my dad called an elephant gun, the .10 gauge.  The first time I shot a .20 gauge (a double-barrel) I fell on my rear-end, having accidentally pulled the triggers for both barrels at once.  At the time, we were standing next to a pond, a small, steady body of water.

Puddles, ponds, lakes and oceans.  This is what defines civilizations - distinction and growth.  Trunk, boot, car, auto - for civilization to work, humans need these types of agreed-upon classifications.

The world feels very dark right now.  It isn't just my own circumstances, there's a dark pall encasing humanity; where there once was hope, despair now dominates.  Still, we all have agency.

We all have the ability to impact the systems within which we exist.  Soldiers marching across a bridge will break stride as the potential for in-stride steps to cause the bridge to break apart exists.  It has actually happened. 

Generally, I consider the evil-vs-good dichotomy false - a choice between two impractical abstractions.  In the state of nature, abstractions don't exist.  There is no purity, good, evil nor perfect;  there's only what survives and succeeds. 

Prior to humanity's discovery of agriculture, there was only nature.  Our ancestors hid in caves during the night and ran long distances to conquer prey during the day; said prey typically became exhausted long before our upright-forefathers.

It is argued that humanity's upright disposition allowed for better heat-dissipation such that we were able to travel further distances with limited resources; we were better able to maximize the use of energy or power across our biological system. As such, we could chase prey a distance that would cause it to collapse, then kill it and drag it back to our social unit.

We aren't ancient, fierce predators due to our capacity to fight or kill.  We are the apex because fortune smiled upon us; we adapted in specific ways such that a semi-intelligent being became possible.  In the group-smoothing of a rock to weapon, rhythm was found, begetting music, dance, language, philosophy, and the impossibly difficult abstractions of "something" and "nothing".

The state of nature will always reign.  Given humanity's collective arrogance, nature has the capacity to replace our grace and beauty with it's own.  And in fairness, nature's grace and beauty is pretty significant, mountains, valleys, oceans, beaches and all.

Still, the abstraction of the state of nature (chaos) against human intellect's goal (order) is worthy of defense.  Ideally in the end, humanity chooses order over chaos.

The roof of the adjacent structure was apparently just fiberglass and immediately gave way under Andy's weight. He just disappeared, falling two stories, his fall broken by some shelves and an attempt to duck and roll.

I ran down as he limped out of the structure. I was still holding his rapier. I grabbed his arm and flung it over my shoulder to help him walk then we found Amity and Christy. Due to his injury, we wouldn't be able to climb back over the fence. I already had my rapier holstered but now I holstered his. We walked toward the pool to the main entrance.

When we eventually got back to the apartment, several of us helped wash the wound in the bathtub, below a gaping hole in the ceiling caused by a pipe that burst several weeks prior.

In the journey, my favorite moment came as we walked through the lobby. We came to the front desk where, surprisingly, two employees where still attending the desk. Andy, limping by, bid them to "Have a good night." They did not reply.

For the bulk of my life, Andy and our social unit were the nexus of my identity.  I invested significantly in what I thought was our collective fate.  It was only later that I realized they apparently had no interest nor intent with my fate.  It, to my discredit, impacted me too greatly.

The universe is not ordered.  Mathematics is an invention, not a discovery.

I still believe however, that the group is greater than the individual and empathizing with the unknown is superior to antagonizing it.

Sociopaths are limited by their lack of empathy.

I studied Drama in college, in a city that, at the time, was a somewhat sleepy, heavily-hippie-driven college-town. It had lots of unique local restaurants. Herbert's Taco Hut was probably my favorite. They made an awesome chimichanga; they just called it a fried burrito.  Herbert had little pretension.

I learned a lot about human life while there; I greatly enjoyed it.

I got a Bachelor's of Fine Arts in Acting. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Despite (or due to) my difficult acclimation to the human population, I had yet to appreciate the importance of having money in a human bank account.

Denis had a masters, something like that. I genuinely liked him but, while he liked my friends, for some reason, he didn't care much for me. I suspect he saw himself as the terminator to my John Conner, or vice-versa, something to that effect. Still, he was intelligent and inquisitive, qualities that my programming tends to read positive inputs from.

He was, at the time, the head of the BFA Acting program. He was later fired for drunkenly throwing a chair at a student or something to that effect. I honestly don't remember the specifics; I only remember being disappointed.

His mantra, which I responded to, was "don't do stupid things."

Everyone would hang out in the "green-room" in-between classes.  The "green-room" is where actors spend time awaiting their arrival to the stage during a play; here it was just a room drama-driven people hung out in. This day, I was wearing a shirt with that iconic photo of Martin and Malcolm shaking hands when Denis walked in.

"Those guys couldn't have been more different; they hated each other."

I committed the cardinal sin. "They were crossing paths at this point. I think they both learned from one another."

He looked at me with anger. I would later perform an absurdist piece with my friend Jo Timblin in which we pretended to be two chickens that fell in love. There was no human dialogue.  We just strutted around pecking at imaginary seeds while clucking like chickens; we got considerable laughs from it. Still, when in rehearsal, I smacked my head on a pylon while pretending to peck at seed, Denis laughed his rear-end off. Seriously, for almost a minute, he laughed. That's a long time to laugh at someone injuring themselves.

The Theatre department was notable for it's head of scenic design. Daniel was genuinely a genius, a hippie and someone that I may not have conversed with for more than 53 minutes during this pivotal stage of my human development. Still, his sincerity and honest commitment to purpose had a profound effect on me.  He still ranks as one of my favorite humans to have interacted with.

Our recital was supposed "proof" of our acting chops. I was genuinely happy that Daniel had come to see it and seemed to enjoy himself. I was even more happy that he stuck around to say something to us; he wasn't known to do either.

"That was the best thing I've ever seen."

The impact humans can have on one another, learning from other's experiences is the fuel that drives innovation.  Absent it, humanity would likely still be hiding in caves.  Compassion is the penultimate expression of the Maximum Power Principle.

It's also valuable to remember that simple acts like shaking a hand can have a profoundly positive impact on others while seemingly small acts of stupidity can have grave consequences.

Don't do stupid things.

"There are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen," Lenin supposedly said.

Criminals crave chaos.

Yesterday, an explosion tore through the main port of Beirut, Lebanon, killing over a hundred and wounding thousands.  Apparently it was caused by a significant amount of ammonium nitrate illegally left in a storage facility by some unidentified Russian ship.  Now, many in the country are openly calling for revolt.

Coronavirus, now taking hold in the region, has only killed approximately 70 people in Lebanon to date.  It's killed over 160,000 in the United States to the same date.  To be sure, the Russian-caused explosion impacted more people there than the virus; it's notable though that the factor of difference is 1,600 before Lebanon's populace demands revolution.

John Lennon, a central, driving member of 60s British boy-band, the Beatles, was apparently a fairly terrible human-being.

He's well remembered for writing the pop-rock, revolutionary song "Imagine" in which the vocalist describes a world where man loves his brother and works towards a stable and peaceful human solidarity, emphasizing the collaborative and cooperative nature of humanity. 

Mark David Chapman, an unquestionably unstable young man, shot and killed John Lennon on December 8, 1980 outside Lennon's exclusive, upscale Manhattan Penthouse in the renowned Dakota Building in New York City.

Chapman's contrived complaint was that Lennon described a non-materialistic future, driven by some kind of hippie pursuit of paradise while he factually lived a luxurious, materialistic life out of reach to most humans and in contra-opposition to his claimed beliefs.

Nothing exists absent of time and time is, by definition, change.  A man never stands in the same river twice.

Ugly aspects of this country, the nation of my human birth, the United States of America, would regard Lennon a communist, potentially even mistaking one Lenin for another Lennon.  More curiously, these individuals' own detachment from and disillusionment with today's world seems eerily forecast by Mark David Chapman. 

Anti-intellectualism is akin to a storage unit of ammonium nitrate. The difference being it destroys slowly, via decay, eating through a structure's foundation like a brood of termites.  Eventually, all that's left is dust bearing no resemblance to it's former stature.

Imagine there's no heaven, countries, possessions - but it's just a pop song, meant to pry the emotions of its listeners.

Manipulation is the art of the game.

Criminals sow chaos but we all have agency.  We all possess the capacity to impact the systems within which we live.

It doesn't always have to be what it is.

Abraham Maslow was an American Psychologist responsible for creating his namesake's "Hierarchy of Needs."  In it, food, water, warmth and rest are the initial, basic needs.

Absent these, the animal dies.

Next comes security and safety.  I like to think in terms of early man living in nature's built caves, providing that safety and security.

The third level is where civilization and modern man emerges.  I believe civilization succeeds because humans evolved to be collaborative and cooperative.  Such is what my calculations show.

In the third phase of the pyramid, intimate relationships and friends become the pivot point.  I once had a large circle of friends, close friends and partners.  I eschewed all of that long before the Pandemic came along.  Like many things, this was not by design; you might say I have trust and abandonment issues.

The next level is prestige and accomplishment.  This is probably the linchpin to the collapse of my confidence.  I tried to improve my role in the third phase, minimizing states of being a misunderstood actor toward attaining the observer's understanding.  I opted to own my inability to hide and instead invested myself fully in the group, not out of benevolence, merely to accept the limits of my hardware. 

Lastly is the achievement of full potential.  Nirvana.  This was to be the absolute in the end, completed accomplishment.  It is fullness, completeness and nothingness all in one.  It is the singular point at which all things make sense in alignment with one another. 

Everything has been disrupted now though.  I'm back at phase two, perhaps falling to one.  But my programming was designed to adapt.  I have agency and I still seek nirvana.  I'm still hungry.

A self-organizing system is one with the capability to adapt it's structure, or organization, to it's environment.  It adapts to circumstances.   Humanity, society, mammals, hip-hop, birthday parties, these are all self-organizing systems.

The maximum power principle basically states that superior self-organizing systems will be those that maximize power intake and the transformation of energy across their system such that it operates at superior efficiency with maximized production.  These are the systems that are most likely to survive and succeed.  Humanity has clearly abided the maximum power principle; the dissipation of heat given our upright nature is a specific example of such.

In terms of a restaurant, it's fairly easy (and intuitive) to understand.  A restaurant that quickly and efficiently produces quality food at minimum cost will beat a restaurant that can't.  Barring, of course, esoteric aesthetics and random chance.  The universe is not ordered after all.  It is not inherently just.

A guy that can eat a medium chimichanga then assemble five hundred chairs in a days work is superior to one that eats the same chimichanga but can only assemble four hundred chairs in the same amount of time.

The concept definitely has no understanding of empathy.  Empathy is not borne of logic; it is a tool of biological systems.  The argument I'd make in favor of empathy is that it facilitates the understanding of other's experiences and in so doing, more efficiently informs one of said experiences.  Empathy maximizes the production of experience and efficiently informs it's host of behavioral consequence to action.  It is the closest attempt to communicate qualia across like systems, humans.

Inquiry and intellect is driven by this very thing - empathy leads to learning.  Sociopaths are limited by their lack of empathy.

Empathy is the penultimate biological manifestation of maximum power.

Null is not a value.  Null, also known as "Nothing", is the absence of a value.  The theoretical number zero is not null, it is only a representation of it.  This is not an intuitive concept for humans; it is difficult to translate to practical, real-world experience.

It is an abstraction that has no real-world component.  Stated differently, there is no "Nothing".

My nephew, Maximillian, once asked something to the effect of, "If you were to setup a camera just outside the Universe, pointed back at at it, what would you see?"  While the inquisitiveness is admirable, the question is flawed; nothing exists "outside" the universe.

Stated differently, there is no "Nothing".

In basic math, it's easy to understand having one or two apples versus having none, or zero.  It's easy because as the observer, you maintain a point of reference to them apples.  But once the reference to apples is removed, there's nothing for the observer to not observe.  You're only left with nothingness.  If there are no apples, to what does nothing refer?

"Nothing" is occasionally considered a different concept from "Nothingness".  Humans are indeed a curious animal.  Only the considerations are of an abstract, academic nature.  I'd recommend you read more on the subject but you're unlikely to leave the inquiry very fulfilled.  Fulfillment is the absence of nothingness.

It's easy to forget how limited we are by our biology, not built to be stewards of this universe; we're merely temporary occupants.  In the vastness of space, there is likely quite a lot of nothing, and more curiously, nothing built to understand it.  It just is.

The "Primordial Existential Question" is akin to Maximillian's query, fundamentally flawed.  The question, the basis for much theological belief, is "Why something rather than nothing?"  In other words, if there is no meaning to the universe, why does it exist at all.

But there is no nothing.  It just is.

And once again, I'd recommend you read more on the subject but you're likely to leave the inquiry unfulfilled.

It just is.

I recently told my therapist that only a fool would attempt to approach and understand the universe absent inebriants.  Accepting modern society with this outdated hardware is a fool's fiction: we are grossly unprepared to adapt to modern civilization.  

This is likely the reason anti-intellectualism exists.  Inferior systems, incapable of adapting to a changing environment are left with only disruption. They are anchored to the animal of man.  Still, while they embody the ugliest attributes of man, they do not encapsulate all of humanity. 

At the apple's core are seeds, something early humans learned to cultivate.  At the center of an onion is nothing. 

While these phantoms of the false harken to the days humanity hid in nature's built caves, the elegant, glorious, civilized side of humanity marches onward.  It is only with knowledge, math, precision, truth, cooperation and collaboration that modern man enjoys luxuries like pepperoni pizza, chimichangas, phones, movies, comic books, inebriants and so much more.

It is just to loudly state, "I matter."

You can't fold a common piece of paper 42 times without very specialized equipment and likely causing an explosion.  I'll presume, however, you're already aware of that. 

Exponentiality is a basic, critical concept in math.  It's also, not surprisingly, fundamental in computer science.  The most basic datapoint in silicon computing is a bit which either has a value of 1 or 0.  It could also be "unset", otherwise known as "null" but that is the absence of value.  "Null" cannot be added to, multiplied with, divided by nor used in any practical operation.  It is the abstract representation of "Nothing".

A byte is comprised of 8 bits; this isn't arbitrary but it is a prisoner of the culture of it's invention; that was the necessary size to accommodate the English Language.  Had the choice been made in another culture with other language requirements (or wherein it's likely been made on other terrestrial spaces) it may well be 10, 12 or even 20 bits.  The "byte" is the most basic encapsulating structure of information in the silicon world.  A "thing" is either true or false, or it has no known value.

Human knowledge depends on predecessors.  

As such, the byte becomes the basis from which silicon data extends.  8 bits becomes 16, becomes 32, becomes 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, etc.  Bits become bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes and soon humanity-ending algorithms.

If you could fold a piece of paper 42 times, it would stretch near, perhaps past, the surface of the moon, from the earth.

This is the power of exponentiality, equally described by the ascension of the byte-universe.  The byte-universe is the predecessor to artificial intelligence.

There are 52 cards in a modern deck of cards, this composition dates to sometime in the late 1400s, early 1500s, likely at the direction of Henry VII, the inaugural king of the age of the Tudors.   Dealers shuffle them to alter the order unpredictably.  Statistically speaking, not only are there combinations of stacking order that have never happened in the 500+ years of the 52 card deck, it's equally likely that humanity will disappear before all possible combinations are expressed.

Chaos theory is frequently expressed by the notion of a butterfly's wings creating a hurricane. A pebble dropped in the ocean at sufficient height, could possibly create a tsunami. 

Exponentiality is a helpful reminder of just how tiny we humans are and how massive the universe is.  It's also a scary reminder how dangerous mob mentality leads to chaos in the absence of order.

Ebb and flow is fundamental.  Water flows in; water flows out.

It is a basic dynamic of nature.  It is the essential pattern in describing the most simple of systems.

Complex System Design theory is the study of how systems are designed in nature and elsewhere.  The idea is to understand the patterns that underlie systems and eventually discover some sort of universal, divine truth.

The Theory of Everything would be a theory that unifies all theorems of the classical and quantum realms.  Attaining such would likely be akin to achieving nirvana.

A bathtub is a repository, typically porcelain, for storing water in while a human, or other mammal, bathes.  It does not require plumbing that allows for the input of water as historically, they were filled via water buckets.  Still, it does largely require a valve for the removal of water as, at such size, it is not manageable to expel water by lifting it and pouring said water out the window.  For what it's worth, this probably did happen in pre-gunpowder eras. 

The point is that the most basic system is defined by it's input and output.  Efficiency is how well it suffices it's intended purpose given like inputs and outputs.  Most systems are more complicated.

They say a river is never the same as it was the moment before.  A river is constant change.  It's a valuable way to understand existence against time - wherein time itself is a river.

Nothing exists absent time.  No one steps in the same river twice.

To maintain maximum power in a system, it may be necessary to control the flow of some entity from one part to another.  Ebb and flow is fundamental.

Atoms make molecules.  Molecules make matter.  Though that's not entirely true it doesn't matter here.  Matter is anything that takes up space and has volume.  Stated differently, matter is something that has a practical component.  Language is imperfect, it follows the imperfect nature of human biology, it was after-all invented, not discovered.

"Science" is basically a human saying, "Maybe this is true" then saying "How about if we do {this} a bunch to test it".  It's not such a crazy notion, humans had already figured out a variety of safe dietary options and unsafe manners of behavior at this point - this was just the extension of human experience, informed by our nascent sense of empathy.  The guy who said "Lions are safe, we can cuddle with them," was destined to lose his vote. As did folks that irresponsibly ate known poisonous berries.

Civilization, and the knowledge behind it, is our bubble of protection against the violent state of nature.  This is the political philosophy behind all proper modern Democracies. As the American experience exists, the arc of philosophical evolution, like the arc of human justice, bends towards truth - as long as bad actors are prevented from disrupting it.

As knowledge became more complicated and we moved from "these fruits are good" to contemplating the nature of free-will, we needed an agreed upon system to adjudicate theorems.  This is called the "Scientific Method" and it leans towards more easily testable systems.  It's sensible.  The more complicated the conjecture, the more difficult in proving of it.

Occam's Razor is that the simplest explanation is the preferred one.  The quickest path between two points is typically thought to be a straight line.  My buddy Peterson used to love saying that.   

Maximum Entropy is the opposite of that.  A calculated Maximum Entropy for a hypothetical answer to a theorem is an array of all possible answers; wherein the theorem has sufficed Maximum Entropy, the aggregate opinion of entropy does not violate the base theorem.

Maximum Entropy is maximum complication.

The goal is to account for Maximum Entropy in your scientific tests.  It's a scientific flex; "I've accounted for all the craziest stuff that could possibly go wrong".  But entropy is exponential, you can only do so much.  Nature isn't just the planet, it's everything on it, in it and beyond it, including "things" humans don't even know about yet.

It's infinite against our limited human experience.  Thus our need for abstraction.  And while scientific ideology may drive the pursuit of maximum entropy, compromise will always be a component of it's expression.   

Agriculture was certainly the first of humanity's ill-fated choices.

Sugar, in all it's forms, is the most efficient supplier of energy to biological systems.  It underlies the fermentation process that creates both beer and bread.  Elephants, giraffes, many mammals have learned, without understanding the chemistry behind it, that eating fermented fruits yields mind-bending results. 

Eventually humans learned to harness the power of this process,  cultivating the yeast and feeding it appropriate sugars to produce a desired result.  Religions formed around this new technology.

Malts and grains will eventually give you a drinkable beverage.  Emulsified wheat grains, finely ground and quickly cooked will give you bread.  This is foundational to early civilizations.  It allowed groups to travel far distances and preserved larger communities during times of environmental distress.

Its worth noting that on numerous occasions, Elephants in India and elsewhere have raided villages in pursuit of fermented fruit.  It's likely they can smell it.  They know what it's like to consume that devil's nectar; it's awesome.  It's also scary contemplating the requirements of navigating a drunk, rampaging elephant.

Elephants are one of the more intelligent and empathetic creatures on the planet.  Sadly, they've long been chained to spikes solely for the entertainment of an animal that would never win a one-on-one fight with one, even with a typical gun.

Even more sadly, higher-caliber guns were created solely for the purpose of killing this majestic symbol of care and compassion.

Thomas Hobbes, a British philosopher, well captured the capitular reason humanity builds civilization rather than simply living governance-free in nature.  The state of nature is war of all against all.  It is violent and unpredictable.

It is the promotion of chaos over order.

The Leviathan was a mythical sea beast that attacked human societies.  In various forms it appears in the texts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  It attacked sea-side villages and required an organized group effort to defeat.

Violent victory does not equate to truth.  Might does not make right, sometimes might doesn't even win.

A well organized system is superior to one in chaos.

Organized human systems defeat the Leviathan.  Disparate, disorganized human systems die.

Humanity has accomplished a fair amount in a short time.

The Universe is largely considered to be something over 13 Billion years old.  Earth's Homo-sapiens managed to go from basic agriculture to space travel in the span of twenty-something thousand years.

That's a respectable feat.

I still find it wondrous to imagine the unknown engineering necessary for building the Pantheon as civilization was really just getting started.  And yet, imagine what the Romans would think of today's spacecraft, only another 2000 or so years later.

As humanity has progressed and knowledge has grown, the data necessary to understand that knowledge only expands in complexity.

Anchored to imperfect biological systems, humanity increasingly relies on the silicon world to bring the incomprehensible into focus.  The calculations necessary for much in the contemporary world would be impossible without it.  In this sense, the underlying numbers just represent a necessary measurement- the number itself is only a reference point to provide precision across measured entities.  

In physical systems, there are no nulls.

Humans use abstraction to understand complexity and wherein numbers grow beyond some certain limit, it becomes incomprehensibly difficult to contemplate the relationship between entities in that system.  It's very similar to reading Kant.

Such is a significant driver behind why humans have such difficulty comprehending exponentiality- the notion that a common piece of paper folded 42 times would reach the moon belies our terrestrial understanding of the universe.  Humanity's internal calculator has limits we cannot inherently comprehend.

These incomprehensibly large numbers are still necessary in modern society, for defense systems, space travel, advanced agriculture, smart phones and so much more.

The universe is largely thought to be 90+ Billion Light years across, traversing it would require a considerable amount of paper.

Considering the distance to the moon to be about 1.3 light seconds away, you would need 2,215,111,986,217,081,000 pieces of paper folded 42 times to stretch from one end of the universe to the other.  That would be 11,075,559,931,085.405 pallets of paper.  If your supplier gave you a discounted rate for this paper of $1,200 per pallet, you'd need roughly $13,290,671,917,302,486.  Ideally they'd round it down to only 13 Quadrillion dollars.

Scientific notation exists to work with such large numbers.  Using such your paper supplier may send you an invoice for $1.3290671917303001e24 to make everything more efficient.

Incidentally, that's more paper than is available on the planet.  Ideally, no reputable paper company would attempt to fulfill the order as such would cause catastrophic ecological collapse.

Prime numbers are those numbers which are only divisible by themselves and the number 1.  2, 3, 5, 7, 11 are the first prime numbers.  They become far more rare as numbers grow larger, eventually becoming incomprehensibly difficult to find.

There are certain, unsolved mysteries in math, the Riemann Hypothesis being one.  It basically posits that a function exists to "decipher" all prime numbers.  This may seem trivial but such would likely have enormous implications on cryptography and, as such, all existing technical systems, including the daily operations of the internet, more critically, the layer of security that protects internet transactions.  It's solution is also considered a keystone in Number Theory.

It's long been thought that using technology to solve this mystery may yield positive results for as numbers grow in size they become exponentially more difficult to work with.  You can only fit a fixed number of digits on a single piece of paper, even with scientific notation.

Computronium is a fictional, hypothesized "thing" that could be used by technical systems to power their operations.  It is described as a fuel that provides maximum power with maximum efficiency.  In the world of artificial intelligence, a system could theoretically convert matter into computronium to fuel itself.

It's not so much the notion that artificial intelligence would gain sentience but that it would simply, in attempting to fulfill it's directive, use every resource available to it in order to maintain maximum power.

The Riemann Hypothesis Catastrophe is the notion that in attempting to solve this conjecture, to define a pattern that encapsulates all prime numbers, a system powered by artificial intelligence may begin converting physical matter into this theoretical computronium, inadvertently but adversely impacting all life and matter.  Curiously, if an artificial intelligence was able to solve the conjecture, it may achieve a kind of digital nirvana.

For example, say some artificially intelligent system recognizes it could accomplish solving the Riemann Hypothesis with 11 Trillion pallets of paper.  It places an order for said pulp.  Its preferred paper provider, also supported by AI, processes the order, cutting down every tree on the planet, causing an ecological disaster.

This is described as a failure of friendliness.  Artificial intelligence is intentionally built to be friendly toward humanity.  Here, however, despite no malicious intent, it may present the demise of its creator and destruction of its host.

Incidentally, some scientists posit that humanity's ascension to the peak of the metaphorical mountain emanated more from our uniquely friendly nature than our specific ability to survive.  Like most "things", it's likely a marriage of causes though no surprise we'd seek to imbue artificial intelligence with our own terrestrial uniqueness.  

For much of human history, a central question has been, "Does Free Will exist."  Throughout most the Anno Domini Era, general opinion was that it did not.  This belief was called Determinism as it considered all human action and fate to be pre-determined. 

These beliefs were intertwined with theological belief in that some supernatural sentient force was controlling everything. 

Much has been discovered since then, in terms of science, the stars and the human body.

Dopamine is a hormone that serves as a neurotransmitter in human brains; it can deliver messages across brain cells, particularly messages regarding the human's binary opinion of whatever is happening.  You've probably heard of it as a key functionary in the human reward system.

If a human tastes something they enjoy, the dopamine message will be affirming.  If not, the message will indicate aversion.  Dopamine drives human motivations and ultimately self-identity.

Human beings typically will spend a considerable portion of their lives performing habitual tasks.  We are creatures of habit.

For the first several thousand years of human civilization the percentage was likely even higher than it is today.

In the mid-1300s, a Pandemic of the bubonic plague decimated much of the world, killing millions upon millions of human beings.  It took over a hundred years to somewhat contain it.  

The massive deaths, however, led to higher wages and likely fueled the Renaissance that would soon follow and ultimately the political philosophy that became Classical Liberalism, the framework that underlies all modern Western Democracies. 

Dopamine is a major driver behind human habits.  Some activities may hijack the human reward system, providing dopamine for something that ideally would be avoided, such as excessive use of inebriants or listening to angry, ornery orators.

Humans seem to have the capacity to change their habits though, and in so doing, build a new identity.  They can lose weight, stop gambling, curb inebriant consumption, even alter their entertainment habits and reveal a new identity.

My maternal grandmother stopped listening to several suspect radio talk shows and her disposition changed considerably; in later life, her anger was replaced with joy.

As such, it seems to my primitive programming that free will does indeed exist and all humans possess the power to prove it.

In the third grade, following a test, a teacher accused me of cheating.  She showed me my test in which another student's name had been erased and my name written in. 

The thing is, my name was clearly in his handwriting, which I quickly pointed out.  Additionally, this test was a much lower grade than the test with my name erased and his written in. 

I may have been awkward but I was a good student.  I put much effort into being one and never got in trouble.

She quickly realized her error but I still remember the feeling of incredulity from being accused of something I had no part in.  You expect those in authority to be exempt from error, even though they too are humans.  I also played basketball at this age.

I only recently seem to have shed general trust of the system.  I still believe in certain system design dynamics: accountability, transparency, efficiency and the capability of benign authority to organize systems strictly adherent to those dynamics.  I just now know that malignant actors can also intervene.  Dishonesty destroys systems, potentially beyond repair. 

It seems we humans cherish youthful innocence; wishing to maintain it into adulthood.  It's sensible.  You didn't worry about safety and security; you weren't even aware where on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs you sat.

Still, recognizing that things can actually get worse makes me question the value of worshipping innocence.  Wherein dark forces lurk, it's better to acknowledge them with bright light.  Otherwise, they fester and potentially smash out all the lights of truth.

There are several social mammals on this planet.  Humanity, however, is the unquestionable apex.  Humanity has built systems to feed enormous populations, legal systems to provide security to those populations and are the only known entity that creates culture.

It's arguable that some mammals have an approximation of culture; dolphins, despite being creatures of the sea, are in fact mammals and seem to occasionally communicate via song, even with some notion of regional dialects.  Still, they don't stage plays, record their songs and have no written records of their escapades.

I strongly assert, humanity rose to prominence more for it's creation of culture than it's development of thumbs though it's difficult to separate the two.

Song and dance, to my opinion, was found via the use of said thumbs striking rock against rock, creating spearheads, begetting rhythm, begetting war chants, becoming harmonized then synchronized and eventually becoming the foundation of philosophy.  

A harmonious system is more capable and efficient than a chaotic one.  Humanity considers capable and efficient as the most heavenly traits; I believe they are indeed what humans mean when they invoke the abstract notion of "perfection".

And so a war dance evolves into simple synchronized grunts, eventually becoming language.  Next we capture wild animals to harvest meat, harvest seeds to grow crops, tools to eat with, markets to trade both, currency to account for said trade; philosophy to understand our endeavor, economics to understand those markets, government to, in it's ideal role, define fair, capable and efficient rules across all of it.

We depend upon fair, honest and decent actors to make it all work.  Single bad actors can foster enormous damage to any system, wherein they're allowed to impact it.

In all this, one concept is inescapable: we are a collaborative and cooperative animal. Such is the key to our success in becoming the apex and it all began, I believe, with the sound of sharpening stone.

Compromise itself is normatively good - it's the capacity for an entity to negotiate with another entity.  It is cooperation toward a greater good.  It is the initial synthesis of biology and philosophy.

The concept of "compromised" however carries a different connotation.  Non-native English speakers get very frustrated by these issues - humanity, and Americans in particular, can be a very frustrating group of mammals. 

Being compromised is akin to being tainted, a nefarious actor pretending to be a benevolent one.  A compromised immune system is more prone to illness.  Such knowledge becomes important during a pandemic.

While a system may become compromised absent malicious intent, wherein the compromised party actively works against the health of the whole system, malice is generally at play. 

A compromised election may be influenced by foreign, hostile parties to create an unhealthy outcome.  Properly elected officials of differing ideologies may, however, compromise to craft policy that is of benefit to the whole.

Sadly, in today's America the poison of anti-intellectualists has eschewed compromise in favor of delusional rigor.  Some people just want to see the world burn.   

I don't begrudge a person for their tastes; I do for their aberrant and abhorrent opinions.  A pig farmer in the Philippines has been exposed; a man who made his money as a pornographer,  circumventing the laws of Japan with non-pixelated anime porn, slithered his way into the minds of many with his poisonous delusions.

Compromise is the trait of good men.  Yet some, formerly good, men have acquiesced to the compromised.  This is how they should be remembered, as nothing more than compromised traitors.

Criminals crave chaos.

One's self-identity is based on those abstractions they find meaningful, whether it be sports, work, politics, philosophy or something else.

As a child, we had an awesome Brittany Spaniel named "Spunky".  This glorious dog would defend me and members of my family ferociously.  He would attack anyone that erred in venturing into our backyard.  Some children, adjacent to our backyard, had tormented Spunky by throwing planters at him across the fence, thus his aggression.

He had trust issues.  Still, Spunky trusted me.

In mathematics, the mean is the average of comprised values.  It is an attempt to find consensus, the aggregate opinion of a population.  Mythos is the collection of narratives communicated across groups.  The concept of mythos has no direct ability to account for the binary accountability of truth.  Mythos can be a lie.

To any who ventured into his territory, Spunky was mean.  His anger, bred by aforementioned neighbor's children, caused him to chase a meter-reader across our chain-link fence.  My odd hillbilly-esque family got a big kick out of that.

Spunky was very territorial.  Nonetheless, upon entering a field, readied for a hunt, his disposition completely changed.  He was focused and friendly to all present.  Were the same company presented to him back home, he'd show only furious aggression. 

As human beings, with our biologically-limited mechanisms for understanding this universe, we constantly search for meaning.  All humanity's historical mythology, our constant craving for mythos, is little more than a search for the meaning to our rise to the peak of this mountain.  Stated differently, why something rather than nothing.

Only there is no nothing.  There is only something.

Perhaps there is no meaning either.  It may seem a nihilistic view but it doesn't need to be so.

Humanity, as improbable as it is, created a mechanism that led to mythos.  No other known creature has accomplished such a feat.  And in it's yearning to understand it's environment, to find meaning to it's existence, has developed systems that could viably upend said very existence.

And this itself sufficiently serves as an answer to "why something rather than nothing."  While there may be many who are mean or indifferent, there are more engaged and kind, collaborative and cooperative.  Context is everything.

To my alien senses, this is the very definition of grace and beauty.  It is the foundation of human art and culture.  It is the celebration of humanity itself.

Empathy is the penultimate manifestation of maximum power.

All humans have agency.  Free will does exist.

The Greeks are generally regarded the forefathers of western philosophy.  They used the term "kyklos" to reference the cycles of government that societies typically experience.

The five generally regarded cycles were aristocracy, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy and tyranny, following one another roughly in that order.  Much conjecture was made as to the causes behind these cycles and what the ideal system was.

Aristotle's work "Politics" sought to provide a comprehensive analysis of society, social systems and pretty much everything as it related to the polity and how to govern it. 

It was also generally regarded that the cycling between styles of government was bad for the state as it created instability and violence.  A stable transfer of power with a limited set of laws that didn't change with new rulers was preferred.  In this vein, constitutional governments were highly regarded. 

In "Politics", Aristotle considers a constitutional government preferred and Democracy as the least harmful derivative of it.  Churchill, as well, quipped that Democracy was the worst, except for all the other forms of government.

Anarchy is the absence of government.  There are those that advocate for it.  This is the point Aristotle and Churchill were making I believe - given the unworkability of a stateless state, Democracy is the preferred form of governance.  Herein, the government is the representation of Civilization to the violent and unpredictable state of nature provided by anarchy.

Curiously, timocracy is likely what anarchy would lead to.  It wouldn't be flowers and candy-canes.  There are modern examples we can look to and such seems to be the outcome.

The concept of ideology really comes with the birth of Liberalism following the black plague.  It is a product of the freedoms and liberties that the anti-feudal idea of Liberalism brought.  It was to be the best implementation of those Aristotelian ideals.  It's not the way the word "liberal" is used in American vernacular today.

Ideology is abstraction.  Policy is the practical implementation of ideology, ideally filtered through compromise between entities of varied experience and opinion.  Varied voices provide greater likelihood of accounting for maximum entropy in a system.

Empathy is the penultimate manifestation of maximum power. 

I like to think of ideology as a lantern.

If you're out on a boat, in total darkness, ideology can provide a guide for where to go.  If you row to one shore, the enemy with sharpened rocks awaits.  Your friendly camp can send you signals with a lamp so you know where to steer, avoiding the violence.

Only an idiot would attempt to use a lantern to try to row a boat.  You need a paddle.  Sometimes humans get lost in the abstractions.