Haha yeah that’s pretty terrifying.. I’ve managed to escape the loop now thankfully but great article nonetheless.
The ant thing made me look up on other evolutionary “glitches” - evidently there’s an Indonesian wild pig whose tusks never stop growing, curve round and can eventually kill it by impaling its own skull. Nice.
We never really stop, is perhaps part of the problem — stability is an illusion of sorts, neh? (I guess by the same logic we never really start either, so, uh, say hello to The Infinite? 😋)
Hah, yeah, the line between life and non-life is blurry, I don't think there's an important fact of the matter of whether we consider them life vs like life.
Lol I was about to say that this was a very "Hofstadter" essay when you just come out and say at the end that it was inspired by GEB (one of my favorite books of all time).
Given that I've read and thought about this subject a lot, I feel like I might know the answer to this question, but I'm not sure I see it in your post here. You say:
> for something to persist while still being dynamic, it has to cycle back to where it started
Why "back to where it started"? I'm not sure it's obviously clear why returning in some sense to where it "started" is important.
Yeah I recently reread The Mind's I and remembered how much I love Hofstadter. Such a fun writer and thinker.
> "Why "back to where it started"? I'm not sure it's obviously clear why returning in some sense to where it "started" is important."
So it depends a bit on how pedantic we want to get here, but I was thinking along the lines of the Poincare recurrence theorem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poincar%C3%A9_recurrence_theorem). In any bounded dynamic system, it must return to (get arbitrarily close to) the start state.
The "arbitrarily close to" does some work here -- in a chaotic system, it's not true that getting close to the starting point means you'll repeat the same/similar cycle, because small changes in initial conditions will mean dramatic changes down the line. But in the sorts of cases I had in mind here (biological ones, for example), there are attractor dynamics tend to pull towards specific states, so there's enough robustness that if you get close to the same conditions, you're going to go for another loop.
Anyways, maybe that was a bit too fast and loose to work either technically or as a rhetorical hook.
While reading it, memories of when I used to be a Fluid Mechanics lecturer popped unbidden into my mind. First, I'd show students Bernoulli's equation in its closed conservation-of-energy form (inviscid, incompressible, perfectly steady flow). It would always balance beautifully, as it should. Then we'd look at turbulence, where the mathematical beauty has to be supplemented with empirical friction factors.
You're saying that living things stay ordered by exporting entropy to their surroundings. The loop doesn't quite close in either case, propped open by turbulence or life itself.
Thanks again for a great read. (There are so few these days who provoke these seemingly unrelated revelations, but yours always do.)
The line “we don’t want to be quines” lands with particular force from a clinical seat.
Patients with chronic illness often return with what sounds, at first, like the same story week after week. The temptation, especially under time pressure, is to treat the repetition as a quine: same input, same diagnostic label, same prescription, the program simply running again. But the loop is rarely closed. The wording shifts. The order of complaints changes. A detail appears that was not yet sayable last time. Something the patient assumes I already know turns out to be information they have never actually given me.
The cycles that look identical from the outside are often where the small drift is doing the diagnostic work, if anyone is willing to track it. Premature certainty turns the encounter into a quine. Sustained attention turns it into an imperfect loop, one in which the deviation is not noise but meaning.
The same danger exists for the clinician. Seeing fifty patients in a day can make medicine feel like repetition: the same questions, the same patterns, the same narrowing of possibilities. But the patient who does not quite fit is often the thing that prevents the practice from becoming a copy of itself.
There is something humbling in your framing that perfect fidelity can be a problem, not simply an ideal. Much of medicine assumes the opposite.
The story of the Stone cutter reminded me of the Rats marrying off their daughter.
To shorten it Mr. Rat 1st asks the Sun the Sun demurs saying, the cloud can block him and so is greater, the cloud declines sighting the wind, the wind declines saying a wall can block it and the wall says a rat can chew threw it. There are two continuations of this story: the first I heard the rats concludes that since a cat is greater than a rat, which ends with the bride's party getting eaten at the wedding; looking this story up I find the more common ends like the tail of the stonecutter, they have their daughter marry a rat.
Sources for the story of the rat's daughter getting married:
The theme of characters returning to there starting position much changed is common in fiction, in this case the progression for the stonecutter and the rat's daughter seems closer.
"the limited number of repetitions we make around the loop is what gives the whole process value. If our time was infinite, how we choose to spend it wouldn’t have meaning."
Arguably it would still be meaningful, it just might not vary person to person (each person would in infinite time do everything that could be done in ever order). Also infinite need not mean exhaustive. Most obviously if there were a greater cardinality of things to do then the infinity we had to do them in we'd never be able to exhaust all the things we could. Even if they are of the same order we might systematical not do some section of that, thus rendering our list of activities not exhaustive and so on.
In any case the finitude of our choices give a significance and urgency to our decisions about what to spend our time on they might otherwise lack though, so sure.
> But each of these cycles is imperfect—they don’t lead to the exact same state that we were in before. And it’s a good thing, too.
Your observation that what's called "imperfect" is actually a much better condition that what would be "perfect," reminds me of modern economics. There's a device used in economics called "perfect competition/markets," but it turns out that this would be awful if it were ever to become real. It's the "imperfections" of the market competition -- the dynamism, people taking risks (and sometimes failing, or succeeding partially or in unexpected ways), that value is subjective (rather than objective), that people aren't hyper-rational and omniscient in their behavior, the unpredictabilities -- that make it so beneficial!
I'd say save telling him the way the cycle continues for the future. It might make a good speech someday. Something like:
"Remember, son, when you were a child and used to pretend to be a caterpillar who turns into a butterfly? And then you believed that, as a butterfly, you would turn right back into a caterpillar.
Back then, I didn't have the heart to tell you that the way the cycle continues is that the butterfly lays eggs and then dies. I knew you wouldn't understand that the butterfly's death is actually a good ending. The true tragedy would be if it died without ever laying its eggs at all. So make the absolute most of the time you have ahead of you.
We are each assigned our lot in life. It comes with duties and responsibilities that ask to be fulfilled. You have to think about yours, because yours aren't as simple as the butterfly's. But they are not too overwhelming either because the path reveals itself as you go."
Read this 3 times already, not sure when to stop
When you drop from exhaustion, like an ant in an ant mill
Haha yeah that’s pretty terrifying.. I’ve managed to escape the loop now thankfully but great article nonetheless.
The ant thing made me look up on other evolutionary “glitches” - evidently there’s an Indonesian wild pig whose tusks never stop growing, curve round and can eventually kill it by impaling its own skull. Nice.
We never really stop, is perhaps part of the problem — stability is an illusion of sorts, neh? (I guess by the same logic we never really start either, so, uh, say hello to The Infinite? 😋)
> In other words, becoming like life.
"Like" life? Are you softening this to avoid controversy? Everything that I know about biology points to von Neumann probes *being* life.
Hah, yeah, the line between life and non-life is blurry, I don't think there's an important fact of the matter of whether we consider them life vs like life.
It’s a good question, worth pondering. Though it can be controversial. Some of us can take being alive rather personally.
Yes but what kind? As we see from the story, even the rocks are alive in a sense! 😋
One "loophole" for "getting infinity bored" is "forgetting stuff".
There are whole lives in me I "forget" about, sometimes for relatively large swaths of time! Woohoo!?
I don't think rocks are alive. But I could argue that hills are alive...
With the sound of music!
Lol I was about to say that this was a very "Hofstadter" essay when you just come out and say at the end that it was inspired by GEB (one of my favorite books of all time).
Given that I've read and thought about this subject a lot, I feel like I might know the answer to this question, but I'm not sure I see it in your post here. You say:
> for something to persist while still being dynamic, it has to cycle back to where it started
Why "back to where it started"? I'm not sure it's obviously clear why returning in some sense to where it "started" is important.
Yeah I recently reread The Mind's I and remembered how much I love Hofstadter. Such a fun writer and thinker.
> "Why "back to where it started"? I'm not sure it's obviously clear why returning in some sense to where it "started" is important."
So it depends a bit on how pedantic we want to get here, but I was thinking along the lines of the Poincare recurrence theorem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poincar%C3%A9_recurrence_theorem). In any bounded dynamic system, it must return to (get arbitrarily close to) the start state.
The "arbitrarily close to" does some work here -- in a chaotic system, it's not true that getting close to the starting point means you'll repeat the same/similar cycle, because small changes in initial conditions will mean dramatic changes down the line. But in the sorts of cases I had in mind here (biological ones, for example), there are attractor dynamics tend to pull towards specific states, so there's enough robustness that if you get close to the same conditions, you're going to go for another loop.
Anyways, maybe that was a bit too fast and loose to work either technically or as a rhetorical hook.
I loved this one.
While reading it, memories of when I used to be a Fluid Mechanics lecturer popped unbidden into my mind. First, I'd show students Bernoulli's equation in its closed conservation-of-energy form (inviscid, incompressible, perfectly steady flow). It would always balance beautifully, as it should. Then we'd look at turbulence, where the mathematical beauty has to be supplemented with empirical friction factors.
You're saying that living things stay ordered by exporting entropy to their surroundings. The loop doesn't quite close in either case, propped open by turbulence or life itself.
Thanks again for a great read. (There are so few these days who provoke these seemingly unrelated revelations, but yours always do.)
Aww, thanks so much :)
The line “we don’t want to be quines” lands with particular force from a clinical seat.
Patients with chronic illness often return with what sounds, at first, like the same story week after week. The temptation, especially under time pressure, is to treat the repetition as a quine: same input, same diagnostic label, same prescription, the program simply running again. But the loop is rarely closed. The wording shifts. The order of complaints changes. A detail appears that was not yet sayable last time. Something the patient assumes I already know turns out to be information they have never actually given me.
The cycles that look identical from the outside are often where the small drift is doing the diagnostic work, if anyone is willing to track it. Premature certainty turns the encounter into a quine. Sustained attention turns it into an imperfect loop, one in which the deviation is not noise but meaning.
The same danger exists for the clinician. Seeing fifty patients in a day can make medicine feel like repetition: the same questions, the same patterns, the same narrowing of possibilities. But the patient who does not quite fit is often the thing that prevents the practice from becoming a copy of itself.
There is something humbling in your framing that perfect fidelity can be a problem, not simply an ideal. Much of medicine assumes the opposite.
The story of the Stone cutter reminded me of the Rats marrying off their daughter.
To shorten it Mr. Rat 1st asks the Sun the Sun demurs saying, the cloud can block him and so is greater, the cloud declines sighting the wind, the wind declines saying a wall can block it and the wall says a rat can chew threw it. There are two continuations of this story: the first I heard the rats concludes that since a cat is greater than a rat, which ends with the bride's party getting eaten at the wedding; looking this story up I find the more common ends like the tail of the stonecutter, they have their daughter marry a rat.
Sources for the story of the rat's daughter getting married:
https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/type2031c.html#japan
https://pages.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/chin/chtxts/RatWedding.html
The theme of characters returning to there starting position much changed is common in fiction, in this case the progression for the stonecutter and the rat's daughter seems closer.
"the limited number of repetitions we make around the loop is what gives the whole process value. If our time was infinite, how we choose to spend it wouldn’t have meaning."
Arguably it would still be meaningful, it just might not vary person to person (each person would in infinite time do everything that could be done in ever order). Also infinite need not mean exhaustive. Most obviously if there were a greater cardinality of things to do then the infinity we had to do them in we'd never be able to exhaust all the things we could. Even if they are of the same order we might systematical not do some section of that, thus rendering our list of activities not exhaustive and so on.
In any case the finitude of our choices give a significance and urgency to our decisions about what to spend our time on they might otherwise lack though, so sure.
> But each of these cycles is imperfect—they don’t lead to the exact same state that we were in before. And it’s a good thing, too.
Your observation that what's called "imperfect" is actually a much better condition that what would be "perfect," reminds me of modern economics. There's a device used in economics called "perfect competition/markets," but it turns out that this would be awful if it were ever to become real. It's the "imperfections" of the market competition -- the dynamism, people taking risks (and sometimes failing, or succeeding partially or in unexpected ways), that value is subjective (rather than objective), that people aren't hyper-rational and omniscient in their behavior, the unpredictabilities -- that make it so beneficial!
I wrote about it from the economics standpoint in "Perfect Dangers": https://goodneighborbadcitizen.substack.com/p/perfect-dangers
One of my favorite Metric songs 🥰
It's a banger
I'd say save telling him the way the cycle continues for the future. It might make a good speech someday. Something like:
"Remember, son, when you were a child and used to pretend to be a caterpillar who turns into a butterfly? And then you believed that, as a butterfly, you would turn right back into a caterpillar.
Back then, I didn't have the heart to tell you that the way the cycle continues is that the butterfly lays eggs and then dies. I knew you wouldn't understand that the butterfly's death is actually a good ending. The true tragedy would be if it died without ever laying its eggs at all. So make the absolute most of the time you have ahead of you.
We are each assigned our lot in life. It comes with duties and responsibilities that ask to be fulfilled. You have to think about yours, because yours aren't as simple as the butterfly's. But they are not too overwhelming either because the path reveals itself as you go."