Facing Entropy

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The ultimate creativity machine would create everything. Its purpose: “create everything”. And that must be the universe

And within that universe …

An ocean, low tide. A long flat dry sandy beach, children running around. The tide starts coming in. It moistens the sand and the children converge and start playing, creating sandcastles. They know that the tide is rising and will take the castle away, but let’s join them; we have a few hours still till high tide.

In this moment, we can build a moat, filled with water. And within that moat we can build a castle. We’ll make it beautiful with bridges, and windows, and towers. And inside the castle, we can store a precious shell, and if we listen to it, it’ll whisper the secret of the universe.

But as the tide rises, we have to work harder to keep the walls from falling. The moat eventually overflows, the waves undermine the walls, and at some point the tide is too high and the castle is disolved, spread thin through the cold brine. Where’s the castle now?

Entropy is what you don’t know.

And we created a moment of reversing the tide.

We built the castle, something known, ordered, complex (shaped from the emerging entropy). Interestingly, we needed a bit of the tide and a bit of sand. Breathed into existence with the energy, a dream and engaged joy to create something new and sustain it; The novelty and beauty signifying that it is only temporary. And it was meaningful because it was a temporary success against the tide.

The other day I was imagining this all: The flow of time towards entropy.

What gives us our urge to create these pockets of reverse entropy?

It’s almost as if we’re trying to reverse time, working against it, like a sort of cosmic mining. The cosmic dwarves must have come to us in wild lucid dreams and whispered to us: ‘Let us seek that cosmic treasure together’. And upon releasing that golden dust into the snoozing nebulous air, they must have whispered stories as we slept, prompting dreams of glory, resolution, pleasure gardens and happy children – all dreamed in the rapturous moments before we wake. Prompting us to rise with urgency and agency, eager to look for clues, eager to do something.

And with that fleeting question as we look in the mirror, what were those dwarves looking for in those mines in that dream? Love, intricacy, intimacy?

What’s our role?

Our compulsion to create some kind of dreamed future by mining directly against the rising tide of entropy. Turning our back to the howling unknown and the fearful knowledge that everything turns to dust clouds and brine, including ourselves.

But not now.

We can do something about it. We’ve stumbled across some kind of trick that got us this far, it’s precarious, so let’s get intimate with the potential future we want. But where’s this treasure, and how will we know when we’ve found it: It’d surely be beautiful and vulnerable and we’d be moved to sustain it. And of all the things  we can do, how do we know we’re facing the right direction when we’re mining, uncovering, creating the treasured stuff? It’ll feel meaningful: the pursuit of novel forms of complexity and intricacy, revealed in ever deeper meaningful manifestations of the universe. And the universe must somehow want this as well by allowing the complexity to emerge from this sweet spot between order and disorder, at every level: universal, global, local and psychological, as entropy increases, so too does the potential for complexity to emerge, for everything to be created. When all of those levels are aligned we’re balancing and dancing with the ultimate creativity machine, and part of it.

It’s still only temporary, but it’s meaningful and treasured …

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