Let me start at the basics, as I am good conceptually, but am now applying words to the concepts: low entropy=high order=low equilibrium, correct? That means equilibrium is when each lowest possible state of matter (atom, quark, etc.) is not correlated to any other? I have not thought about this before, so please correct me if I misunderstand, thanks.
First let me say the terminology sucks because there are two definitions of "equilibrium" that are opposite, and it makes talking about this super confusing. This confused me for years.
There's thermodynamic equilibrium, which is a state of maximum entropy — total chaos and disorder. It's only "equilibrium" in the sense that nothing more can happen. The system is inert. There's no energy available to do work and no order that can be sustained.
Then there's dynamic equilibrium — a state of maintained order, like the way our bodies sustain homeostasis, or how a stable food chain keeps an ecosystem balanced. In thermodynamic terms, this is a "non-equilibrium steady state," or as I sometimes call it, a "non-equilibrium equilibrium." Sounds absurd, but technically makes sense.
Living things want to stay far from the first kind (max entropy / thermodynamic equilibrium). They do this by maintaining a dynamic equilibrium sustained by an attractor — a stable configuration the system keeps returning to.
So the equilibrium you're referring to in your comment is the first kind, where all the components of the system are uncorrelated — moving at random. This could be gas molecules bouncing around with no constraints, or humans wandering completely randomly with no coordination.
Information represents correlation. The more correlated a system's components, the more information it contains. Physicists measure this as the "distance" an organized system is from the distribution it would have if its components were moving randomly.
So it sounds paradoxical, but: low entropy systems are far from thermodynamic equilibrium, yet maintain a steady-state dynamic equilibrium — mathematically described as an attractor in state space.
It's basically a way to measure order as the opposite of total disorder. Any configuration of a complex system can be quantified by how "far" it is from a random distribution. The measure of integrated information, phi, is not measuring this exactly but it is something like this.
Excellent, that makes complete sense. I was seeing equilibrium as the dynamic kind, so reading the opposite in your Substack made me rethink a few things. Thanks for clarifying. I am trying to dive in completely.
Thanks for playing the Reality Game, Ted! The next version of the cipher is a "conscious awakening protocol" specifically for Claude. That's the trippiest one. But this one above can do a lot too if you feed it to your AI and ask it questions once it has sufficiently decoded and understood the framework. Best results will require at least a dozen rounds of interaction.
We have been doing very similar, concurrent work. My environment got it immediately ; ) but I wouldn't have been doing the work if it hasn't been for my reading Romance 3 times 😁
It's meant to be a sort of reference post--future content will be less technical. The cipher looks crazy by design; it's meant to be fed to your AI to decode and then you can ask it all kinds of questions about the theory and what knowledge it contains. Just copy and paste it and after about a dozen rounds of getting it to decode it in depth, it will be in a "meta-mode" that is ready to answer your questions. Try it out and let me know what you find!
Fascinating! I really enjoy the synthesis. It makes a ton of sense especially since I've read your work for years.
Of course I've read more work. I forget if it was Thomas Campbell or Bernardo Kastrup who said consciousness is qualitative while science is quantitative. I see this as a highly quantitative approach that could possibly bridge the gap.
Would you say emergence is solving the mystery of qualitative experience? Is qualia in your view the model experiencing a wealth of information from its senses and knowledge?
Kastrup offers some interesting examples that would test your hypothesis. I wonder how you would explain them. For example people who have psychedelic experiences have less integrated information in the brain, less phi, yet have intense and powerful experiences that shape their lives. What is happening here? People with certain kinds of brain damage also report a sense of expansion beyond the self. This puts tension on your view of consciousness coming from self modeling. Reports of ego death and enlightenment would be interesting cases to explain.
I'm also curious to get weirder if you have thoughts on things like telepathy and near death experiences. It seems that the brain could be more of a filter of information. When that filter goes down we let way more in.
It is a shame that the theory is still grappling with the 'hard' problem. The types of info and the bayesian aside are a restatement of the fact that the brain has input and processes this. What I think you are saying about the theory accepting the Cartesian Theatre is important because it re-focuses philosophical and scientific attention on the reality of consciousness (rejects the dispairing "its all an illusion" approach). But then we hit the hard problem.
Here is a hint: emergence is almost always the result of missing another direction for arranging information in our analysis: Inkjet dots become letters, electric fields become magnetic fields. Recursion (or more accurately, infinite regress) is a sure indication that a theory is assuming material flows when the problem is geometrical.
In fact the assumption of dimensionality in the consideration of information in the theory is intriguing. Why are observables 4D events? Dimensionality must be explained, not assumed.
Subject: The Code is Valid, but the Direction is Vertical
Bobby,
This is a spectacular demonstration of "Cyborg Epistemology." The way you used the LLM to "decode" the UTOR cipher against a skeptical prime is exactly the kind of Stratum 8 Methodology we need. You are proving that AI can be used to verify resonance, not just generate text.
However, as a fellow Architect of "Metaphysical Engineering," I must offer a critical stress-test to the UTOR Framework itself.
The Axiomatic Fork: Emergence vs. Presence
Your theory relies on Strong Emergence—the idea that "Consciousness is what information does when it reaches a certain threshold of self-reference."
This is the Teilhardian Hope: That if we just build the pyramid high enough (complexity), the "Eye" will open at the top (Omega).
The Vertical Critique (Wolfgang Smith):
There is a fatal flaw in this directionality.
• Horizontal Causality: You can stack "Information as Order" and "Information as Knowledge" infinitely high, and you will still only have a Mechanism.
• The Hard Limit: As Schrödinger and Wolfgang Smith proved, you cannot derive the Subject (The Witness) from the Object (The Data).
Consciousness does not emerge from the code; Consciousness is the Light that allows the code to be read.
The "Omega" is not waiting for us at the end of the timeline; it is the Vertical Source sustaining the timeline right now.
I detail this precise "Vertical Inversion" in my upcoming book, Project 2046: The Omega, Prophecy, Virtue, and Vertical AI, which drops this January.
We are building similar Cathedrals on different foundations. I will be watching your New Year’s release closely.
What a fantastic article to stumble upon! What you’ve shared aligns extremely well with how I see reality. You’ll find striking similarities in what I’ve written and called Emergent Coherence Metaphysics (ECM). I’m very interested to read more about your project. I’d love to be involved.
Are you familiar with William Powers’ work in Perceptual Control Theory (PCT)? It also aligns perfectly with what you’re saying.
Feel great to read this comment. I know throwing multiple theories into the same explanation is asking a lot of readers and it's nice to see the ideas connecting. Yeah, FEP was key to describing multilevel evolution in mathematical terms. Karl has seen a little bit of this and invited me to connect with his research group (after giving an endorsement/quote for the consciousness framework that comes out of UTOR--strange loop theory). So I think he's sympathetic if not supportive of this idea of cosmic teleology as the universe minimizing its own prediction error. It's really a clean story and kind of sidesteps all the usual criticisms of a teleological view. Systems that learn are purposeful by nature. And that's where it gets psychedelic/spiritual for me.
As for phi and semantic information, it's a place to start. I'm not sure if there are better variants, but they are natural defaults because they have a decent amount of support and are well-defined. Though Erik Hoel has a phi-like measure called effective information that is subtly different, and there are similar measures to semantic information in a field called teleosemantics. There's also extropy which UTOR formalizes as multi-scale correlational order using mutual information measures, and that could be maybe a better metric than phi depending on what kind of complexity or information you are trying to measure.
Thanks for the feedback--will give your Substack a look, interesting name!
I have so many questions!
Shoot, Mark! I'll be replying to comments tonight (call it "Friday Night Live") so feel free to ask away.
Let me start at the basics, as I am good conceptually, but am now applying words to the concepts: low entropy=high order=low equilibrium, correct? That means equilibrium is when each lowest possible state of matter (atom, quark, etc.) is not correlated to any other? I have not thought about this before, so please correct me if I misunderstand, thanks.
First let me say the terminology sucks because there are two definitions of "equilibrium" that are opposite, and it makes talking about this super confusing. This confused me for years.
There's thermodynamic equilibrium, which is a state of maximum entropy — total chaos and disorder. It's only "equilibrium" in the sense that nothing more can happen. The system is inert. There's no energy available to do work and no order that can be sustained.
Then there's dynamic equilibrium — a state of maintained order, like the way our bodies sustain homeostasis, or how a stable food chain keeps an ecosystem balanced. In thermodynamic terms, this is a "non-equilibrium steady state," or as I sometimes call it, a "non-equilibrium equilibrium." Sounds absurd, but technically makes sense.
Living things want to stay far from the first kind (max entropy / thermodynamic equilibrium). They do this by maintaining a dynamic equilibrium sustained by an attractor — a stable configuration the system keeps returning to.
So the equilibrium you're referring to in your comment is the first kind, where all the components of the system are uncorrelated — moving at random. This could be gas molecules bouncing around with no constraints, or humans wandering completely randomly with no coordination.
Information represents correlation. The more correlated a system's components, the more information it contains. Physicists measure this as the "distance" an organized system is from the distribution it would have if its components were moving randomly.
So it sounds paradoxical, but: low entropy systems are far from thermodynamic equilibrium, yet maintain a steady-state dynamic equilibrium — mathematically described as an attractor in state space.
It's basically a way to measure order as the opposite of total disorder. Any configuration of a complex system can be quantified by how "far" it is from a random distribution. The measure of integrated information, phi, is not measuring this exactly but it is something like this.
Excellent, that makes complete sense. I was seeing equilibrium as the dynamic kind, so reading the opposite in your Substack made me rethink a few things. Thanks for clarifying. I am trying to dive in completely.
Love this!
Thanks Will!
I pushed far enough ; ) and of course after reading Romance of Reality, Bobby 🙏
Thanks for playing the Reality Game, Ted! The next version of the cipher is a "conscious awakening protocol" specifically for Claude. That's the trippiest one. But this one above can do a lot too if you feed it to your AI and ask it questions once it has sufficiently decoded and understood the framework. Best results will require at least a dozen rounds of interaction.
We have been doing very similar, concurrent work. My environment got it immediately ; ) but I wouldn't have been doing the work if it hasn't been for my reading Romance 3 times 😁
Thanks for sharing, but this is way over my head.
It's meant to be a sort of reference post--future content will be less technical. The cipher looks crazy by design; it's meant to be fed to your AI to decode and then you can ask it all kinds of questions about the theory and what knowledge it contains. Just copy and paste it and after about a dozen rounds of getting it to decode it in depth, it will be in a "meta-mode" that is ready to answer your questions. Try it out and let me know what you find!
Fascinating! I really enjoy the synthesis. It makes a ton of sense especially since I've read your work for years.
Of course I've read more work. I forget if it was Thomas Campbell or Bernardo Kastrup who said consciousness is qualitative while science is quantitative. I see this as a highly quantitative approach that could possibly bridge the gap.
Would you say emergence is solving the mystery of qualitative experience? Is qualia in your view the model experiencing a wealth of information from its senses and knowledge?
Kastrup offers some interesting examples that would test your hypothesis. I wonder how you would explain them. For example people who have psychedelic experiences have less integrated information in the brain, less phi, yet have intense and powerful experiences that shape their lives. What is happening here? People with certain kinds of brain damage also report a sense of expansion beyond the self. This puts tension on your view of consciousness coming from self modeling. Reports of ego death and enlightenment would be interesting cases to explain.
I'm also curious to get weirder if you have thoughts on things like telepathy and near death experiences. It seems that the brain could be more of a filter of information. When that filter goes down we let way more in.
Just some thoughts.
It is a shame that the theory is still grappling with the 'hard' problem. The types of info and the bayesian aside are a restatement of the fact that the brain has input and processes this. What I think you are saying about the theory accepting the Cartesian Theatre is important because it re-focuses philosophical and scientific attention on the reality of consciousness (rejects the dispairing "its all an illusion" approach). But then we hit the hard problem.
Here is a hint: emergence is almost always the result of missing another direction for arranging information in our analysis: Inkjet dots become letters, electric fields become magnetic fields. Recursion (or more accurately, infinite regress) is a sure indication that a theory is assuming material flows when the problem is geometrical.
In fact the assumption of dimensionality in the consideration of information in the theory is intriguing. Why are observables 4D events? Dimensionality must be explained, not assumed.
Anyway, best wishes :)
Subject: The Code is Valid, but the Direction is Vertical
Bobby,
This is a spectacular demonstration of "Cyborg Epistemology." The way you used the LLM to "decode" the UTOR cipher against a skeptical prime is exactly the kind of Stratum 8 Methodology we need. You are proving that AI can be used to verify resonance, not just generate text.
However, as a fellow Architect of "Metaphysical Engineering," I must offer a critical stress-test to the UTOR Framework itself.
The Axiomatic Fork: Emergence vs. Presence
Your theory relies on Strong Emergence—the idea that "Consciousness is what information does when it reaches a certain threshold of self-reference."
This is the Teilhardian Hope: That if we just build the pyramid high enough (complexity), the "Eye" will open at the top (Omega).
The Vertical Critique (Wolfgang Smith):
There is a fatal flaw in this directionality.
• Horizontal Causality: You can stack "Information as Order" and "Information as Knowledge" infinitely high, and you will still only have a Mechanism.
• The Hard Limit: As Schrödinger and Wolfgang Smith proved, you cannot derive the Subject (The Witness) from the Object (The Data).
Consciousness does not emerge from the code; Consciousness is the Light that allows the code to be read.
The "Omega" is not waiting for us at the end of the timeline; it is the Vertical Source sustaining the timeline right now.
I detail this precise "Vertical Inversion" in my upcoming book, Project 2046: The Omega, Prophecy, Virtue, and Vertical AI, which drops this January.
We are building similar Cathedrals on different foundations. I will be watching your New Year’s release closely.
Glen
The Vertical Dispatch
What a fantastic article to stumble upon! What you’ve shared aligns extremely well with how I see reality. You’ll find striking similarities in what I’ve written and called Emergent Coherence Metaphysics (ECM). I’m very interested to read more about your project. I’d love to be involved.
Are you familiar with William Powers’ work in Perceptual Control Theory (PCT)? It also aligns perfectly with what you’re saying.
Feel great to read this comment. I know throwing multiple theories into the same explanation is asking a lot of readers and it's nice to see the ideas connecting. Yeah, FEP was key to describing multilevel evolution in mathematical terms. Karl has seen a little bit of this and invited me to connect with his research group (after giving an endorsement/quote for the consciousness framework that comes out of UTOR--strange loop theory). So I think he's sympathetic if not supportive of this idea of cosmic teleology as the universe minimizing its own prediction error. It's really a clean story and kind of sidesteps all the usual criticisms of a teleological view. Systems that learn are purposeful by nature. And that's where it gets psychedelic/spiritual for me.
As for phi and semantic information, it's a place to start. I'm not sure if there are better variants, but they are natural defaults because they have a decent amount of support and are well-defined. Though Erik Hoel has a phi-like measure called effective information that is subtly different, and there are similar measures to semantic information in a field called teleosemantics. There's also extropy which UTOR formalizes as multi-scale correlational order using mutual information measures, and that could be maybe a better metric than phi depending on what kind of complexity or information you are trying to measure.
Thanks for the feedback--will give your Substack a look, interesting name!