Emergence from Noise

Thursday, November 7

For today, a quote from Greg Egan’s short story collection Oceanic:

Mathematics catalogues everything that is not self-contradictory; within that vast inventory, physics is an island of structures rich enough to contain their own beholders.

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I’ve always been fascinated by a line of thought in many of Greg Egan’s books that maybe there is no difference, even in principle, between mathematics and physics. In fact, maybe mathematics is all that truly exists — there is some platonic realm where information is scattered randomly across conceptual space, and that every more-specific arrangement of facts (like our universe, or my consciousness, or any action that I take) is just a particular subset in this space of possibilities. And so I emerge, like a computer twitching randomly until it stumbles across a simulation of my mind, or an infinite library which contains all such information (and in which I find myself, miraculously emerging amid one of the many shelves). Lines of meaning amid cacophony.

Thinking about this is equal parts calming and terrifying — but it does put things into perspective. There’s a vast space of possibilities out there, and I am an almost infinitesimally small slice of it. This doesn’t make life meaningless, but it sure is humbling.