On Purpose

Look up to the stars.

When I was a child I remember thinking the stars might be holes through which you can peer into the real world. In my fantasy, this “realness” was made up of pure, vibrant light, with our universe hanging like a veil in front of it, hiding the light except where you break through to it.
I played with the thought that all high-energy events like explosions or flames make small rips in that fabric and allow you to peer briefly into true cosmic energy before it closes in on them again, and stars just create these nearly perpetual slits where the light breathes through towards us, which we can convert into other energy even after the slits have disappeared.
In my childhood idea, we live in a complex assembly of mirrors inside a shoebox diorama with flickering peepholes to the real outside world.
While a visual idea, I feel now that it doesn’t bring anything useful to the table.

There are of course billions more stars in our galaxy than the ones we can see above us, and billions more galaxies like ours, some of which we can also see.
It is a wonder that our eyes are sharp enough to see a few of them, considering there is so much we can not see.
Why a few, why not none, or one?
Why not closer to the billions of them that make up the entire electromagnetic cosmic dome?
How strange is it, to see only a dozen or a hundred, out of the billions that are there? Even in the middle of the desert, we can only see a fraction of the stars in our own galaxy, or other galaxies. It’s not much, it’s really not much, yet it’s not nothing. (There’s actually a paradox related to this called “Olber’s Paradox” — which goes into why the night’s sky is dark rather than white)

Sure, the amount of stars we can see is non-linear to how distant and bright they are and to the conditions you have to see them in, so you would indeed expect billions to get notched down several orders of magnitude.
Yet, it still feels wondrously “constructed” that they are there at all — a little like the unfathomable coincidence that the size of a human cell is just in the center order of magnitude of the smallest and the biggest things we know of in our universe.
Could it be that some old evolutionary gain has benefited organisms that can spot only some of the stars? Perhaps organisms were fitted to darkness at night, benefiting their circadian rhythms in such a way that we are now only sensitive enough to see just this amount of stars?
How important has the tease of stars been to us, really? Would we have ever built telescopes or even tried to stand up straight, if we had not been able to even see anything in the sky with our bare eyes? How would our religions and metaphysical thoughts have looked, without stars in the sky?
How important is the threshold in the Earth’s atmosphere to make them observable at all within the confines of biological evolution?
Eyes can after all not develop to an infinite amount of sensitivity, regardless of which aggressive evolutionary path was taken.
Like so much in life, there’s a remarkable coincidence that the amount of information we have access to, the amount of stars we can see, seems “just right”.

The easy answer is that old adage of Hindsight: the Anthropic Principle.
This principle states reality is the way it is because it allows conscious beings to observe it — anything else would go unobserved and I for instance would not talk about it, let alone would you read it.
So, coincidences, careful balanced states like this are what they are, simply because any other way we would not be talking about it.
It is possible that this grasps the full truth, although I sometimes feel this may as well be called the Claustrophobic Principle.
There is after all no limit to how far you can take this principle and the element of free choice quickly becomes cornered and more religiously inspired than you’d expect from a tautological concept as this.

It’s amazing we have no days where we just remember the stars, but we do have a World Emoji Day. We have such a profound lack of expressed respect for the things that really matter, for the real magic around us. It is almost as if we are afraid to mix our human world with the ethereal world above. Perhaps we have problems to express gratitude for things that we cannot influence — yet it is strange that religions revolve around such constructs all the time.
Perhaps we are simply more afraid of the stars than of our own Gods, because the stars are real.

There’s one star we can all see, though not at night because that is the definition of night: the Sun. You’re supposed to write The Sun, by the way, although I will use “the Sun”.
What strikes me, getting older, is how little appreciation I have really shown the Sun.
I have never prayed to it (although, apart from romantic prayers, I have never prayed for anything), I have never really palpably admired it for what it is, have never shown it heartfelt gratitude..
This is dramatically misaligned with the true role of the Sun in my life, and in yours — and the comparably rather tiny role of anything else we might be thankful for, or of things we openly admire.

The currently accepted origin story is that the Sun formed from a massive collapse of “stuff”: gravity inside stuff created a vicious cycle of compaction of more stuff, ultimately compacting it down to levels that fuses protons together and creates a crazy, fundamentally self-supporting, release of energy.
The Earth is formed, a little “later” — there’s a phase in between both states where we handwave across the discrete semantics after all, — from the stuff that started swirling around the newborn gravity field of this new Sun, all of it to ultimately become a system that finds enough equilibrium so you can start naming things inside it: the solar system with planets, moons, planetoids, …

Basically, gravity and time worked together in stages on an uncountable mess of gaseous stuff, to strangely create “objects”, which we can count on our hands, with features, materials, mountain ranges, lakes that are all somewhat countable.
The fact that there is this stepwise “countable structure” to things at all — briefly, at least, since one day it will all explode or otherwise change back into stuff — this fact is truly rather odd and perhaps one other tenet of our Anthropic Principle that can only be explained away rather than ventured into.
The fact there is “something at all” is often more bizarre than what this stuff really is doing. The fact that there are only 8 planets and not millions, feels to me a rather profound proof that space is discretised for instance and not smoothly continuous.

Now, I want to talk about purpose, but I can’t talk about purpose without talking about influence. Also, I want to talk about us, humans, but I can’t seem to talk about us, without talking about the Sun.
So, what carries the Sun’s influence? What is its influence?
Let’s consider the two main things that we associate with the Sun’s impact: its rays, and its gravity.
One day, it might be possible that these both belong to the same “concept”, but right now they seem to be two entirely different things, that each propagate through space — or can be interpreted to propagate through space — at the speed of all massless things: the so-called “speed of light”.
So, it takes just about eight minutes for either the rays of the Sun or its gravitational effect to reach us. The influence of the Sun reaches as far and timely as these things reach.

For gravity it is not very trivial that there is this delay, and it is easy to make a calculation mistake here when you’re trying to build a scale model of the solar system with this delayed “carried” gravity. You might end up with a completely different set of orbits — or, non-orbits, unstable orbits with planets flying off — when you try this. The calculations are a little more tricky than simply adding a delay, in such a way that the delay of gravity kind of “cancels” out into the effects — in stable conditions anyway.
This, incidentally, is why people back in the Middle Ages were able to work out very accurate orbits for the planets even though they had it “all wrong” and assumed gravity was an instantaneous effect, when it is not.

The rays of the sun are fairly intuitively known to arrive with a delay of 8 minutes. They propagate through the seesaw of electromagnetism, a bootstrapped wave that moves through the vacuum because it gets propelled by itself.
If this seems magical, that means you’re doing it right, because it’s quite strange to think of something that gets propelled by its own existence. It feels wrong, like something should at least have started it. I guess something did and all electromagnetism around us can be thought of as a long messy echo of one single loud bang that happened eons ago. At least, there are not a lot of problems thinking about it that way.

One thing you can already see is that it is seemingly easier to block the Sun’s rays than it is to block its gravity. You can just put an object between yourself and its rays, and as it interacts with them, none — or, only a very very small amount — will still reach you. A parasol will do this, or a wall, or the Moon on a full solar eclipse.
The main event that happens here is a reaction of photons with atoms, or at least that’s the way our science language has abstracted away the process. They get absorbed, and scattered in various ways, which is why you have translucent, dull opaque, or reflective materials. Still, something has got to give and you cannot really get rid of the energy of the Sun’s rays, it just goes somewhere else: to heat, to kinetic movement, or to new rays when they’re being reflected — which can be thought of as an emission.
It will be difficult to make sure this indirect transferred energy does not affect you at all — and funnily, gravity will make it even harder to escape these effects fully.
So, it’s actually less easy to block the Sun’s rays than you might think. Ultimately, it’s what fridges are trying to do.

With gravity then, there’s nothing you can really put between yourself and the Sun to block the gravitational waves, there’s no escaping or absorbing them before they get to you, they do not get “obstructed” by electrons or atoms that absorb or scatter their effect. It’s not possible to shield yourself from gravity, at least not as far as anybody knows.
You could put another object between you and the Sun that affects gravity and muddles the whole thing — but you will need huge things to have any nullifying impact, or very tiny dense things such as black holes, and you are not really blocking gravity but just counteracting it. This feels fundamentally different than blocking rays with a thin dense mesh of atoms although this difference may end up being less fundamental than it seems — I’m not going to go into that now and I also wouldn’t know how to go into it properly.
While points in the solar system exist where gravity is “cancelled out”, and you can briefly float inside these points without visibly being affected, these points are never stable and are never perfect: “some” gravity will always be affecting you.

So, how far does the Sun’s influence carry? Certainly, gravity becomes smaller the further you go. Does it “peter off” to such a low amount that you can ignore it?
Actually, it doesn’t look from anything right now that this ever becomes “too small to still be there”. There is no discrete maximum amount of gravity, or doesn’t seem to be.
What does happen is that at great distance, the gravity of the Sun becomes so small that it becomes statistically insignificant as an influence on faraway objects, because there are other things — as, other sources of gravity — that will dominate it.
Can you really ignore it? As a mathematician, you probably can’t. As a physicist you should, or you will no longer be able to calculate anything.

What about the electromagnetic waves, the rays of the Sun then, do these ever just… “disappear”? Again, it doesn’t look like they do: the Sun’s energy through EM waves reaches infinitely far and there’s no real way in which they diminish.
However, the photons-as-a-wave get more and more dispersed the further they travel, which means less photons-as-particles are in a certain area per second. If that doesn’t make sense, you’re again doing it right.
Each photon carries the same energy, but there will be less of them. Furthermore, they get a higher probability of interacting with stuff, of the path becoming obscured by stuff that comes in between.
However, much like with gravity, you can never really bring this “diminishing” down to zero — or at least, it doesn’t look like it, not even in the weird quantum realm where all of this has any palpable effects and things may suddenly become discrete in terms of allowed energies.

There are however two things that limits the range of the Sun’s influence.
The fact that each influence, be it direct or indirect, has a speed limit, means that faraway places cannot be affected by the Sun and will never be able to know of its existence, for instance because they were too far already when the Sun came into existence (which happened only 1/3rd of the age of everything ago). This is the so-called “cone of influence” that stretches out from the Sun in time. Things exist outside of this cone.
To corroborate this, the Universe is expanding, faster than this speed, which causes the Sun’s range to diminish even more, relatively speaking. The cone is bent, in a way that disfavours the Sun’s influence.
Because of this expansion, the rays it produces also get “red-shifted” as they travel to meet a target, becoming lower in frequency and energy — although again this is not something you can bring down to zero, you do run into limits with the amount of “allowed energies” in quantum mechanics.

Influence can happen in a complex set of interactions. The way we usually know the world and talk about things, is by objects that carry the effects of something and “pass them on” to other effects, in a chain of imperfect energy conversions. The dinosaurs being wiped out by an asteroid that was ultimately affected by some object’s gravity.

Indirect transfer of energy is the way we experience life “happening”, it’s the way we engineer things, it’s the way everything works, and, most crucially, it is also how life creates an “edge” compared to what the Sun is capable of, or at least to how we can have a higher purpose than it.
The Sun after all, with all its grandeur, does not seem to have a purpose. It heats stuff, and attracts stuff.
Certainly, it has played a key role in the creation of life, so it could be a superset of any purpose we have, but there is a subtle difference where life seemingly “branches off” from inanimate objects like the Sun. I struggle to find where precisely life branches off, but much like Zeno’s paradox I can tell that it has indeed branched off by the time it has reached a certain point.

Left to its devices, the Sun co-creates (together with the stuff that created it) planets, rocks, the atmosphere and ultimately it co-created the seeds of life. But it’s important to note that all the Sun really seems to do for us, is have a (non-trivial) impact on the local entropy here on Earth.
Say what, “local entropy”?

If entropy confuses you, it’s usually because it’s so trivial and fundamental that it doesn’t seem like a concept should be coined after it. A bit like explaining the word “is”.
Entropy is really an expression of “disorder”. If you mix coffee and milk, and then wait, or apply some kinetic energy to its content by shaking it, you will increase its entropy, and the coffee and milk will blend.
From an intuitive view, it feels like the situation where the coffee and milk were separate, allowed for more “useful” work to happen, and now that they’re mixed, it is harder to put anything to use. It also has some implication on how much information you would need to describe the coffee and milk before they were separate and once they started mixing, although this is relatively non-intuitive — I actually think a problem in academia is that they pretend it is intuitive.
This happens with everything: any structural integrity gets overcome by disorder: the total entropy of any system will always either remain constant or increase, increase — until it reaches a certain bound of disorder, but that would lead me too far away from a topic that is already becoming a dim star.

Your body can be considered a “low entropy pocket”, because it has a lot of structure, meaning it has less disorder than for instance the air around you, and this structure defines its functionalities. Blood vessels are made of highly organised proteins that form walls to carry more disorganised liquids around. Your skin and other structures basically protect your body from the disorder outside and from any disorder inside trying to break free from it. From a hierarchical point of view, your body is itself a foam of billions of lower entropy pockets that can each be conceptually coined and examined for their own entropic evolution.

Now, there is something very uninteresting that happens as I put my coffee with milk out in the Sun. The Sun just stares at it, and ultimately will watch it mix slowly, or watch the milk go stale and the disorder on a molecular level slowly increase as any cells or structures break down inside it, slowly creating a new low entropy pocket (as the milk starts separating again into some organic phase change), and only perhaps later will this low entropy pocket dissolve again and join the disorder of the air — by evaporating.

Yet, there is something that we as humans can do, that the Sun is incapable of in its silent “omnitude”.
We can examine the coffee, carefully, and we can make quick decisions to create different configurations of it.
We might for instance look at it, and centrifuge it, extracting it back to components, using a machine for doing so. This machine will expel heat and will probably increase the entropy around it by creating a more disorganised air, but with some care on how the machine works, the coffee system itself can be considered to have a lower entropy afterwards.
The machine also required materials and constructions to make, that we selected carefully and put into a careful, lower entropy pocket: the machine’s structure — to do this, we probably increase the environment’s disorder; something always has to give.
As humans we can basically use our “intellect” to dynamically assess a situation and create lower entropy events. Nature can also do this, sometimes, but it can only rarely do this consistently, and only highly rarely will have the power to do this in a very dynamic manner, judging situations carefully. The river will not polish a rock by examining the rock, it simply doesn’t work in that informed manner.
Humans do these very rare events all the time. Natural systems like the Sun are too big, too constant, to be able to make different actions based on different situations. They are not nimble enough, while we are, although we are relatively weak as a trade-off.

So you can see, with intelligence, with life, we can make decisions, make carefully selected changes to create new lower entropy pockets. It seems that with higher intelligence, and higher collective intelligence, we can create bigger, more dense lower entropy pockets and we can do this faster.
We might be able to build huge starships, or Dyson spheres that cover the Sun to use its energy.
We have another deep set of lower entropy pockets that are less material yet omnipresent; education, language. We leave low-entropy artefacts behind like books that allow others to create lower entropy pockets inside their brains to refine the structure and become smarter, and more capable at creating more unlikely lower entropy pockets in the future.

When did this start, this process? It is impossible to pin down exactly — much like Zeno’s paradox there is only a point at which you know it is there, — but somewhere, life started from these lower entropy pockets, to create an increasing amount of new ones. New life was created, it adapted through various selection mechanisms, and diversified, into mechanisms that beat the odds of unlikelihood by simply selecting things using information so new lower entropy pockets were created.
While the elephant holding a pencil in its trunk will create a slightly disorganised drawing, it is still extremely lower in entropy than the statistical mess of an exploding star.
The modern human artist can create photorealistic drawings by just applying a charcoal layer onto a piece of paper that some other humans made from the lower entropy pocket that is a tree.

When I was thinking about this, I had a main thought creeping up.
What is the price for all of this?

We are able to carefully select the processes that create unlikely outcomes, and we increase our own abilities at doing so, which gives us an edge, so with what price does this edge come?
Like mentioned a couple of times already, there is no way to escape disorder: we can create local lower entropy pockets, but to do so we will always increase — or in the case of reversible adiabatic processes, keep constant — the entropy of the “larger” system.
However, there is nothing that guarantees that we would do a worse job at this than for instance the Sun system did before us: there is no guarantee that we would be destroying the environment around us any faster with our intelligent decisions than anything that came before us — while this seems to be happening right now, there’s no real reason why it needs to continue to happen.
So, destruction of the environment is not really the price we are paying. Never believe someone who says that human progress “must” come with a price for the environment. It’s not true, if anything we can save the Earth from the Sun and are the only ones who are able to.

One obvious answer to the “price” matter is the peril that we are putting ourselves in, day by day, as we create bigger and bigger lower entropy pockets. What if one day, we do something very very big, that drastically alters our own future, perhaps eliminating the entire concept of life, with a mistake, or a destructive intent?
It seems at least that this “peril” is increasing daily, and it is hard to see how we could eliminate it — although certainly there could be attempts to decentralise, isolate parts of humanity from each other, this would also run into the risk of no longer being able to scaffold on top of a cascading power of creating unlikely lower entropy situations because we break internal communication bonds.
We might in fact increase this risk with decentralisation as well.
I am an optimist, but I cannot feel optimistic about our continued progress not coming with a shadow variable that slowly increases the risk that this progress must come at an unexpected stop. The ideal solution would be for the margin of error to increase, but I feel that it is difficult to see any topology where this margin of error does not exponentially decrease. That does not mean this is impossible, and perhaps the main road forward will be to constrain the amount of entropic decision paths, so we stay away from the very risky ones.

The other thought I had, thinking about the idea of life being defined by the way it can choose entropic paths more dynamically than inanimate things are able to: does this help define our purpose?

“Purpose” itself is the type of concept that is very hard to define because it seems to be defined by the very KPI (Key Performance Indicator) that it wants to represent.
Suppose we tie a KPI number to purpose, does this definition of life as an entropic path chooser help us?
We could experiment with the idea of the purpose of life being to create more and more unlikely lower entropy pockets. The more unlikely things become: the better the KPI!
I think this is a fun way to define progress, but ultimately it will also guarantee us to become “stuck” in strange situations where we cannot evolve from.

So, a better KPI is to choose the path that allows us to choose more paths.
The path of highest continuation probability, the path that will allow us to keep perfecting our abilities to create unlikely events. This of course requires speculation, and small bets, because some paths will only open up at later stages.
This speaks for interstellar dispersion of the human race, and it speaks for social cohesion. I believe anyway, that this is the path that will be perpendicular to autocratic societies since the child that is born should be given every opportunity to live, to increase the amount of paths the whole society is taking.

People often think progress is about creating the space traveling machines, the gigantic opportunities and bets, the social structures that allow for them, but there’s another place where lower entropy pockets can be created, developed through a careful selection process, continuously and with great detail: it’s inside your own brain.
You can study, and think, carefully, and separate the milk from the coffee inside your head, if you spend the time and energy necessary for it.
If you sit still, quietly, and observe the thoughts in your brain, you can select some of them, reorganise thoughts, memories and create a brain that is more capable at understanding itself and what it observes. You will spend heat, air, to do it, and will increase the entropy around you, but inside will create a more structured machine.

The Buddhist goal of coming to terms with a non-dual self, might be perfectly compatible with the KPI of human progress.
This idea might help you to take mindfulness, and Dzogchen, Vipassana meditation techniques seriously, as literal processes to create lower entropy pockets inside your own brain, eliminating disorder for structured realisations.
It is a difficult path I am not mastering, but ultimately feels rewarding even in its small progress.

Defining the path of progress of humanity as the path of increasing the plurality of creating unlikely events in the future, both inside our own brains, and outside in our creations, allows a possibility that we may be able to objectively define ethical rules for an honest, good society, including a society that creates an artificial intelligence that carries out this path.
Up to you to challenge this idea!