AMKent books

In this short text, I am going to explore the key facets of existence. I will do so as sharply as I can.

Meaning

All complex systems destabilize themselves over time. This fact leads the pattern-recognition of a human to evoke imagery of martyrdom, nature’s suicide, a death wish even. Do these structures of matter end because there is a meaning to it? Or, does continuing require work, and work requires asymmetry. Everything that comes into being carries the conditions of its own dissolution. A rather haunting thought, one that implies meaning exists because it ends. This leads us to our next point.

Intention

As hard for us humans as this is, try not to think of intention as a human construct as you read this. Try instead to think of questioning whether directionality without consciousness and if this still counts as intention. There is a paradoxical, double-edged sword here. Entropy increases, yet, local complexity keeps arising despite that fact. If nature were purely indifferent in the shallow sense, we’d expect far more inert equilibrium and far less feeling systems (Qualia). So, are we intended to feel our own deterioration, our own entropy?

Entropy

We don’t just decay, we experience decay. We feel time passing as loss. We feel aging as betrayal. We feel mortality before it happens. We are doomed to deteriorate, and endowed with the sensations of such, seems malevolent? There are two options I find are our primary suspects here.

Option A: No intention
Consciousness is an accident of selection. Pain is just an alarm. The fact that we feel entropy is unfortunate but meaningless, like metal squealing under stress.

Option B: Intention without authorship
The universe doesn’t want anything, but it instantiates systems that must register loss in order to exist at all.Feeling entropy isn’t a bug, it’s the cost of being locally ordered in a decaying totality.

I feel a distinction worth bringing up here is that A, is compatible and may even require a God as an initialiser, the first of conditions that the universe must follow. Whilst B, does not require a divine absolute.

Self-awareness

We are not especially self-aware as a species. Individuals can be lucid; but take our macro efforts such as society. Civilizations almost never are. History doesn’t repeat because we fail to remember facts, it repeats because we fail to metabolize consequences. Memory without integration is just archive. When we ask whether nature has intention, we’re using tribal verbs on non-tribal processes. Still, despite our anthropomorphic limitations, we are still displaying self-awareness, and thus, we are able to create with intent? So, does the universe care?

Empathy

There is a recurrence to existence, things that feel are seemingly selected again and again, not just humans, but animals, even ecology. This is selection pressure toward valuation, not care itself. The universe doesn’t empathize; it cannot sustain complexity without valuation emerging locally. So, the universe may not care, but it consistently produces systems that must care in order to function.

Death

Nature is not neutral about dissolution, because it keeps creating things that register dissolution as suffering. And that fact refuses to disappear, no matter how cleanly we describe the equations. Additionally, recycling is the only strategy nature ever uses at scale. Waste is just unclaimed input. So, death for humans is their metamorphosis, a change in matter. A new way of slotting into another system until we succumb to another layer of entropy.

Final Thought

The twist at the end of ‘Void Around Sunlight’ is that the infinite nature of the universe was God’s defense mechanism against being found, or being consumed. Thus, the parasite is over satiated, curls up, and dies. This implies that God, in the book, experiences qualia, and has intentions. What it further implies is that the universe was made big, because what’s inside of it, in its deepest infinite layers, is fragile.