How to Understand the Universe When You’re Stuck Inside of It

Imagine that eat a banana. The contents of your stomach change. You have assumed a new identity. If you grasp/accept this, you are perceiving yourself as having mutated after eating the banana, because you are in temporal lockstep with your stomach. Most of what we consider to be "fact" and "how the world works" is a matter of perception. But I don't mean that in some hippy dippy way. I mean it in the Cartesian sense, roughly speaking, but at the mechanical level not the cognitive level, partly because I don't want to get trapped in the Cartesian circle but mostly because my idea of perception is any matter whose input function is the state of all other matter, conscious or otherwise, and thereby that the arrow of time arises from an evaluative process.

If I had a spare lifetime I'd probably want to pursue this at postgraduate level at some reputable philosophy department, if there is one. But essentially the thesis is that state is coterminous with identity, and mutation of state therefore creates a new entity, and my interest is in the fundamental processes behind that.

Hence the suggestion: we are all value objects, all matter is information, all information is functional, and perception is therefore the lazy evaluation of the universe.

Note: this is especially important when you are the banana.

You have, er, nailed it

Imagine any given configuration of the universe. Of all possible changes to a new configuration (think Levenshtein distance) from that configuration there’s a large set of “equivalent” (in the aggregate) configurations, let’s call those the future. There is a smaller set of configurations which we would ascribe some special character too, such as being somewhat orderly let’s call those the past. the set of possible configurations encoding a broken pot are larger then the set encodings an unbroken one. But the state brokenness of the pot is entirely a subjective things, without that interpretation of the encoding they are equally random

Now if you are a “process”, a kind of pattern that can be identified as the same entity in several of those configurations, it would seem necessary for that pattern to follow some rule in which most of those “future” configurations would retain its unique characteristic.

So if you throw a dart into this mess of configurations and hit such an entity, selecting any direction to move from that point at random would most likely give you a configuration with higher entropy, but in which this particular pattern would be retained.

Some patterns would have a higher chance than other of being traceable along those changes, perhaps they encode a kind of anticipation of likely futures yielding a rules set which a higher likelihood of existing from one configuration to the next. Let’s call this patterns “living”