Parasimplicity

"Nothing is itself alone."
~ Oscar Wilde

 

 

 

 

And so we come, by a commodius Vicus, to parasimplicity.

 

The first formulation of parasimplicity that visited me was this:

 

"Everything that exists, exists in order to exist more."

 

This is what I now call the teleological principle of Parasimplicity, which later evolved into the ontological "everything is itself and something else" and the epistemological "transcendental truth is the whole greater than the sum of subjective truths." All of these say the same thing in different paradigms, but the teleological principle is going to be my focus today.

 

The closest thing orthodox science has to a teleological principle is probably the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This essentially states that, in any system, heat energy is transferred from a hotter to a cooler system; in the limit, the thermodynamic system of the whole universe tends towards maximal entropy - what is sometimes referred to as 'heat death.' Entropy is the property of thermodynamic equilibrium; maximal entropy occurs when that equilibrium is at zero. Since temperature is an indirect measure of mean particle velocity, maximal entropy correlates to the system in which all its particles are entirely without energy. Among other important consequences, the Second Law of Thermodynamics disproves the possibility of the perpetuum mobile - but we'll come back to that later.

 

An entropic system is arguably the simplest possible arrangement of elements in a system. In a system of maximal entropy, nothing changes. It simply is what it is, and cannot be anything else. There is no way in which any element of this system can have any knowledge of any other element, or of itself - there can be no information transfer within such a system as information transfer is impossible without energy transfer, and energy does not transfer in a maximal-entropy system. Max-entropy is not only the death of heat: it is the death of Consciousness; and it is the death of Time (there's room here for an interesting speculation as to whether Consciousness and Time are somehow functions of one another, or whether this is mere coincidence; another time, we might turn our consciousness to that question).

 

In any system short of max-entropy, energy causes particles to interact with one another. Energy transfers between particles; information passes between them too. A thermodynamic system short of max-entropy exists in several states - we can view these states as occupying successive instants of Time, or we can view them as superimposed probabilities, or we can view them as notional sectors of a putative Block Time - but what matters is that its existence (its transcendent existence) is not the unitary existence of max-entropy (of Nothingness) but the plural existence of thermodynamic systems. This is what we mean by the ontological assertion of parasimplicity - because each state, while representing a real systemic entity, also represents only a part of the whole system of possible thermodynamic states (and each state is a necessary part of that system, requiring itself and every other possible state - a very important consequence of quantum theory). Only the ground state of max-entropy exists on its own, separate from all other states. One can present the analogy of a system permutating through every possible energy state on the course towards max-entropy; equivalently, one can speak of a system summing all its possible energy states to achieve max-entropy, which is merely to consider every successive instant as itself a necessary element in a whole. It also, of course, provides another paradigm of the All-in-None (which is the transcendent: the formless void, the fundament from which all matter and energy springs).

 

Equating this to the teleological principle is somewhat counterintuitive; it helps if we take our existing view of a thermodynamic system evolving through all its possible energy states towards the simplest, most elegant, max-entropic Nirvana "one step beyond." Let us postulate that the max-entropic state is not, after all, entirely devoid of energy: let us postulate that, as a perfect summation of all possible energy-state dispositions of the thermodynamic system, it incorporates a perfect balance of opposed energies acting on every particle (this isn't so far-fetched as it might seem; the apparent stability of macroscopic matter is revealed at the quantum level to be the result of a perfect summation of quantum probabilities in which 'quantum interference' mitigates against the seeming instability of a system in which every particle has a positive probability of existing in every place). We can now consider each of those summed energy states in isolation, and say that in the max-entropic system that state has no discernible existence but nevertheless exists. It exists both to sustain max-entropy and to negate it; in its existence, it necessarily gives rise to the existence of counterbalancing energy states. Everything that exists, exists in order to exist more.

 

We'll be coming back to this, because in this exploration we are not bound by the monodirectional river of Time - and because this discursion is itself a parasimplex, but that should by now be apparent.