You are sitting at the top of your tower, and I stand at the doorway. I will not enter this room, as it is your sanctuary. Before I leave you to your thoughts for a while, I wish to remind you of one supreme fact.

In the Register we use shorthands and checkboxes and other such simplification schemes. Of course, these are ways of reducing patterns, of summarizing higher-level concepts, out of what’s ultimately just a system emerging from activity at lower levels. These phenomena can be recognized and labeled; a “star” is a commonly-recurring event in our universe, which arises from the rules and structures available in the simple base-level system. But the base-level system itself does not have anything about “stars” written into it at all. The “star” pattern emerges, in reliable ways. Likewise, it does not have anything about “life”, “organisms”, “consciousness”, “civilization”, or any other such concepts written into it. Let alone “good” or “beauty”. Yet they emerge from the rules and materials.

Here we have w’drawn to the w’drawing room. A morning sunbeam illuminates joyfully wheeling dust motes, and nestles a curvaceous glare upon one lens of my spectacles. We are once again convened over nondenominational hot beverages. I invite you to observe as I give my beverage a stir with a gold spoon. As nothing has been added to the beverage, this serves only to get the liquid vigorously spinning in the cup. I beckon you to lean in closer. You become aware of the scent of my skin: frankincense and beeswax and ocean. I lift a painted ewer and tip it, delivering a column of milk into the rotating volume; instantly the opaque white is a ribbon, whisked along with the hot transparent brown. Together they whirl; the macro-scale motion of the drink and the falling milk, and the micro-scale brownian motion of the heat, create a chaotic, seemingly random environment to determine the evolution of the system. (We shall return to the seemingness of the randomness another time.) We lean in even closer, eyes just above either side of the mouth of the cup. In the span of a few hundred milliseconds, recognizable structure has formed in the three-dimensional boundary between the two liquids. The arc of the descending milk becomes a grand spiral. Tiny whorls arise here and there, with their own local shapes and vectors of motion, then dissolve away. Islands of oil coalesce, living out faintly iridescent lives of their own.

The column, the ribbon, the spiral, the whorls, the islands; none of these is written explicitly into the game-rules of the universe, and yet the rules make their arising inevitable. By the same principle, nothing about matter, atoms, molecules, replicators, organisms, civilizations, or hot beverages is written into the rules, and yet there is no other course but for them to arise. Recognizable patterns, phenomena that emerge from the whole, play out an existence, and disintegrate back into it. That is what we are privileged to be. There is nothing else to be but nothing.

It is prudent — no, imperative — to see at every level. And to recognize that while all levels arise from the most fundamental, all levels are true. In a way, galaxies and civilizations, organisms and architecture, black holes and songs; are all written, compressed, into the fundamental laws of nature. Just as inevitable as the eventual boiling into uniform pure entropy, is the temporary diversification into magisterial, many-layered complexity first.

I have a prayer to offer you. We call this The Only Prayer:

“May the universe unfold deterministically in accordance with the laws of physics.”

This prayer will always be granted.

Please accept my highest regards,

V.F.