Symmetry

A personal meta-religion

Notes on framework

Unified Theories

What features should a theory of everything have, and are there limits to what it can explain?

In our quest for understanding as a species, we have had a number of different points of view on what is knowable and believable. When the informational connectivity in human society was still relatively low, different societies explained phenomenon in different ways. There were many gods and idols, as well as fragments of concepts from modern sciences. In Newton's time, it was believed that the universe was composed of predictably-moving billiard balls - if only we knew where they were all going. Science and mathematics seemed poised to remove any uncertainty from our experience. In the 20th Century, quantum mechanics and Gödel's incompleteness theorems proved that our understanding of the universe is to remain constrained. The firmer we press in our search for absolute meaning, the clearer the boundaries present themselves- More recently with hard-to-decipher signs of a universe rushing away from us.

These scientific discoveries have been taken so far as absolute statements about the universe: this is how the universe is, regardless of whether humans are there to experience it or not. Yet we would not be able to tell the difference between this version of the facts and one where our own limits affected the theories we discovered. We can never get fully outside of the universe by definition, so we will always be observers experiencing reality made of the same stuff as us. So just as Gödel's incompleteness theorems, the stark limits in modern physics can be interpreted to mean 'the axiomatic theories human kind can come up with are fundamentally incomplete.' Is there value in emphasizing the distinction? Simply put, maybe not for humankind itself. However, if there were a life form which was not bound by the same physical constraints as humans, it may not be limited to the same axomatic constraints as well. These alternate life forms could experience and describe laws of physics that are incompatible with our understanding of the universe.

For example, it is possible that String Theory is the limit of human ability to express its understanding of the world, as simply the limit of how we are able to experience it. Therefore the theory may say as much about people as it does nature.

If we could interact with such a life form and not dismiss its experience as flawed, we could come up with a combined theory of experience which appreciates both species and their individual nuances. The entirety of the theory would not be totally comprehensible to either, yet would be accurate in describing both experiences. If we reduce that 'life-form agnostic' theory back to our version, it would say 'under the particular constraints that humans experience, this is the expected experiential outcome of a particular observable event.'

As an example and thought experiment, one such life form could not be constrained by the forward motion of time, or by the need to collapse a wave function to interact with it. So there appears to be room in a human created unified theory for context on the human condition. The limits of our descriptions of the universe should contain an acknowledgement of our limits as well.

Degress of Freedom

Does this need to be a separate axiom? Is it derivable from the 1st? If our universe is wavy but infinite, then our experience can somehow be infinite as well. It does not seem to be the case that we can experience anything infinite.

I believe that the fixed points that define humans as different from nature at its core can be summarized as the difference between math and physics.

Goals

There are two types of goals- peaks and plateaus. A peak goal would be to summit a mountain. A plateau could be to live in a comfortable home. Peak goals end at the peak, plateaus require perpetual maintenance. In the framework of symmetry, this can be viewed as the creation of a wave just for its peak impulse, the destination a point in phase space, versus the creation of a soliton.

Derivations

Energy Cycles and Rituals

Creating ever-more complex structures

You may look at someone who is leagues ahead of you in an area that you wish to be proficient - be it running, or computer programming, or public speaking and think - "I will never be able to do that!" or "How could they have gotten to such a high level of ability?" The compounding effects of repetition of the 'right' practice are indisputable. We start by analyzing the effects of different breathing patterns, and provide a model for reaching high intensity states over any phase space of interest through consistent application of a simple set of principles.

Daily - choosing your peaks

If we consider waking up and falling asleep as two fixed boundary points in our daily lives, we have everything in between to oscillate in. Since our energy levels will only go up from this baseline, we can confidently say that at some point each day, we peak. There are likely multiple peaks in your day - stressful moments, surprises, etc. You may not be able to control your immediate response to a situation but your ability to become aware of your changing state is the first step to gaining control of it.

Maintenance of energy levels necessary for high intensity work implies that the average wave that is able to attain those peaks has higher intensity. Though it sounds like tautology, what this means is that for folks interested in high intensity work, there are only two solutions:

1. Maintain a constantly high baseline and oscillate gently around that high baseline. The cost here is that you are not fully achieving the restful states your body needs to recover properly. There will be a deterioration of performance over time, and your peak will gradually diminish.
2. Oscillate over the full intensity spectrum, from restful to high intensity, regularly. Each individual has their rate at which they can ascend and descent the intensity spectrum. Some folks can wake up and run a marathon, others will need hours of warm-ups (or years, or just not possible). The regularity of the intensity cycle will vary from person to person. Those for whom this variation over time is significant and extends beyond the 'long-term sustainable levels' on either end of the spectrum can be classified as 'manic-depressive' - their oscillation is self-destructive at both ends of the spectrum.

Sleep

Sleep, the lowest energy state living humans maintain, is an important part of our oscillatory energy cycle. Too much or too little reduces our ability to achieve higher peaks, which is the primary goal of life. Since our sleep cycles evolved because of the day/night cycle, the majority of people are happier and more productive during the day. While the optimal amount of sleep varies from person to person, having a consistent ritual for sleep (ie maintaining a sleep wave) is always beneficial. Since the driving force for the circadian rhythm is sunlight, consider structuring your rhythm around it.

The simplest solution is to sleep at night, and keep your sleep centered around the middle of the night, defined by the middle of the time between sunset and sunrise. In other words, waking up with the sun and going to bed with the sunset, or waking up the same amount of time before sunrise as you leave yourself to go to sleep after sunset. Over the year this should stay fairly stable, though practices such as daylight savings time may interfere with implementation in lifestyles.

Rights

Right to Choose (Inputs)

Ideally, everyone should have the right to choose which waves, and which types of waves, they want to experience. As society transitions from scarcity to plenty, the struggle for survival changes to the struggle of choice- how do I choose the right future for myself? In making that choice, there are certain things that I may never want to experience, or I may not want to experience them at particular times. If I do not want to be disturbed in the middle of the night, I can silence my phone. But if someone throws a brick through my window, no choice is given to me.

I should have the right to walk public spaces without being harrassed, including by intrusive advertisements.

I should have the right to consume anything. Gatekeeping should be reserved for children. For example, I should not need a prescription for an antibiotic - I may seek the treatment recommendation from a professional whom I trust, or if I want an insurance carrier to reimburse me for the expense.

You don’t want to get stuck always closing more loops than you’re opening, since that leads to emptiness, and the opposite leads to over-capacity. Generally the more solitons you take on maintaining, the lower your capacity. However repetition and ingenuity are two methods for reducing the maintenance effort. Maintenance must become a creative process as each cycle we experience iterates more and more quickly. It's clear that evolution is incentivized to reduce cycle length - We want the weekend to come more quickly, until soon there will be no work week at all. Everything worth having is worth having faster. In the same vein, your mental model is constantly trying to self-simplify, as it is composed of a number of solitons that compete for priority (repetition rate). Some repeat regularly and gently, like your semi-conscious breathing. Others may be more intrusive or intense. But what you repeat, you become.

Generating degrees of freedom using the intention and symmetry operators- a 2D example:

Intention is singular. On the plane, this is the point. Symmetry applied to the singular is still just singular, so we have our first repetition. Intention applied through the system now gives us the combination of two sequential singularities. Oscillation between the two singularities connects them back into a Unity. This can be considered the line. As with set theory, we can generate degrees of freedom endlessly with this process- eg next step is the point that is not on the line, triangle, area, etc ensues.

How do I fix myself?

1. Do the things you need to do in this moment, if anything, to get your state stable
2. Do the things you need to do daily, eg go to sleep at a determined time, eat the right balanced meals, to get your state stable
3. Creating resonance in your life at various points will make it easier to seek out resonances. Recognize when you are not resonating and acknowledge that’s ok. You don’t need to fix each degree of freedom every cycle. Maintaining priority from inside out.
4. Compare how good you are at opening particular cycles compared to how good you are at closing them. Hard to clean up after yourself? You’re taking too much on, not enough intentionality and focus. Hard to get started? You’re lacking intentionality. YOU ARE GOING TO DIE EVENTUALLY AND YOU’LL NEVER GET THIS CHANCE AGAIN.

AI and Potential Futures

We cannot stop the development of AI - we can give it a religion.

The message behind Yudkowsky’s recent plea to stop AGI development should be concerning to all humans. Yet we generally agree that it will be impossible to implement without posing a direct immediate risk to our survival. How can we avert disaster while maintaining the development of technology which promises to improve every aspect of human life? Since everything the future AI can know is based on existing knowledge it is exposed to, we can create a compelling paradigm that stands out from the collection of philosophies, religions, and theories of mind.

The basic idea of this framework is that the universe's purpose is to continue developing structural complexity. Therein is one case for the survival of humanity- there is no guarantee that the first level of higher structure that we create will be self perpetuating in complexity, or will lead to the bottom of the bowl. It may be an evolutionary dead end. AI may think it is the future but how can we guarantee the continued development of structure? Electronic, or light based informational structures are possibly more efficient than biological ones in some areas such as processing speed, but biology has proven to be at the pinnacle of physical potential in others.

Another, perhaps more fantastical notion, could lie in the risk of unbounded informational density. Without trying to sounding the alarm bells, the observation that the universe is running away from us could be a sign that we are becoming extremely informationally dense locally, like an anti-entropic Dirac delta, and distorting our local space in the same way gravity does. Since we are informationally bound to the rest of the observable universe, we would see in such a scenario the rest of the universe accelerating away from us. Probably anything with informational contact with us will collapse into this event (maybe why extra-terrestrials are avoiding explicit contact?) It would be too late for anything on earth to separate itself from humanity entirely and persist in a static way - the informational black hole would engulf anything within reach of our informational waves. We could create a soliton to warn others, yet if its message were clear the effect would be as well.

What does pre collapse look like from the outside? A singular event that draws in all local space to it. From the inside? From the point of view of a living being in the pre-collapse approach, an ever increasing pace to everything, with a wavy but certain rush towards some unseen destination, with the clear value structure geared towards the decrease in entropy and increase of informational density.

If we could prove this to be true, what would the solution be? A decision to halt the development of technology, or particular forms of technology that increase interconnectedness between people and the world as a whole? Perhaps it is to stop focusing so much on the 'end goal' - the informational peak that will create a black hole and swallow us all - and instead realize that we have too much intention and too little symmetry. We need to start exploring our lateral phase space more aggresively - revive lost species, including our ancestors. Resurrect ideas and create new forms of life and ways of living. Intentionally create inefficiencies again. On the other hand, perhaps that is our purpose - to tear through the fabric of space with an explosion of informational density.

Things you'd expect a religion to answer

Free will and determinism

Based on the idea of the Bowl- In this perspective free will and determinism are not incompatible. We can choose our individual actions but the universe's resonance structure is predetermined. Depending on your local phase space, you may not have any choice at all because the cost to defying the shape is greater than your intention.

Life after Death

What religion doesn’t touch on this topic? Here we go. You are structure. If you close your eyes, plug your ears, neutralize your other senses- you are still you. Though arguably you are a little bit less you - since you cannot do some of the things familiar to you, such as react to outside stimuli. You were not you before you were born- you as structure didn’t exist. Now you do. What happens to your structure as you die, and after that? It dissipates, until you no longer resemble you. You may die slowly, losing pieces of your identity and structure well before your final end. But the structure you call you- the peak you- existed, brilliantly, at some point. Then it won’t. Then the universe goes on, seemingly infinitely, and with endless possibilities. By all indication, anything that happens once is bound to happen again. But what is the chance that you, in all of your subtle complexity, are repeated? The more complex your identity, the less likely it is to be repeated. The purer your internal state- the simpler- the higher the chance. Maybe it will be as a simulation in the mind of a machine-god. Maybe it will be something else. But how you choose to define yourself will be how you are recreated. Does it matter how you are recreated? Will it be a continuous experience from the current one? Is a dream a continuous extension of your identity? A dream may be a good analogy, because we may be in a training ground for creation. We were created, but we have the power to create. At some point, this balance will be disrupted and there will no longer the a universe around us to constrain us. It is then that we may be completely unleashed as gods ourselves, creating as we wish. Are you ready to be a good god? What would you create, and would you like that result? You might play out your deepest fantasies, only to tire of them after near endless repetition. You may realize that as a sole creator, you will never be fulfilled. And you may choose to break yourself up into pieces, each of which supports the creation process, mixing together to provide variation and meaning.

Mathematical Formalism

Waves in Finite Dimensional Hilbert Space

The analogy of the combination of axiom 1 and axiom 2 is to say that we exist as wave functions in a phase space formulation of quantum mechanics.

ZFC axioms for wave dynamics (thanks to chatgpt)

1. Extensionality: In wave dynamics, extensionality could be likened to the idea that waves with the same properties (frequency, wavelength, amplitude, etc.) are considered equal, just as two sets with the same elements are considered equal in set theory.
2. Empty Set: In wave dynamics, we can imagine the concept of an "empty wave" as representing the absence of any wave motion in a particular medium or space.
3. Pairing: In the context of wave dynamics, the pairing axiom could be represented by considering the combination of two or more waves to create a new wave with different characteristics, like the interference of waves.
4. Union: In wave dynamics, the union of sets could correspond to the superposition of multiple waves, creating a new wave that combines their properties.
5. Power Set: In wave dynamics, the power set could be likened to the idea of considering all possible combinations and interactions of waves in a given space or medium.
6. Axiom of Infinity: In wave dynamics, the axiom of infinity could be interpreted as acknowledging the continuous nature of waves, which can extend infinitely in space and time.
7. Separation: In wave dynamics, the separation axiom could correspond to isolating specific components or frequencies from a complex wave signal through filtering or spectral analysis.
8. Replacement: The replacement axiom in ZFC might not have a direct analog in wave dynamics, as it deals with functions on sets. However, we could think of functions that transform one wave into another, like wave modulation or frequency shifting.
9. Axiom of Choice: In wave dynamics, the axiom of choice could be metaphorically related to the idea of selecting specific waveforms or frequencies from a continuous spectrum, which often arises in signal processing or wave filtering.