The Universal Rules Of All Existence

1   The First Universal Rule (the ‘Living Growth Rule’):

1. Constant Exponential (compound) Growth, composed of cyclical periods of Hyperbolic growth & decline, is the normal & average growth throughout the Universe. This is because ...
2. Structure is equivalent to accumulated memory, the discrete storage of information received from experience (this discreteness yields Planck's Length among other quantisation factors). The sum total of accumulated memory in the Universe is always increasing through an increasing fineness of structure detail which is identical to the progression of time. This means that ...
3. Every part of the Universe is to some extent alive because it experiences the progression of time – it all depends on how & where you draw the boundaries – which means that ...
4. Memory is never passive, it is always useful & actively reshaping that with which it interacts plus itself to generate exponential growth through a process of incremental & step-change innovations. This culminates in ...
5. In the long term, given the never ending innovations & exponential growth, most failure happens through success (i.e. long term failure comes from too many short term successes). Long-term success is actually all about failing successfully because in the long term 99.9% of everything attempted fails (species, firms etc).

2   The Second Universal Rule (the ‘Binary Rule’):

1. Many boundaryied systems are composed of binary opposites, two diametrically opposed kinds of experience which give forth to one another. This is one of the results from everything in the Universe being relative to something else (Wikipedia:General_Relativity).
2. Such systems often undergo period doubling, whereby a lesser or finer second duality will become overlaid upon the dominant or harder duality to yield a four state system (e.g. DNA, qubits, harmonics, quantum charge + spin etc).
3. The presence of mutually repulsive duality is an excellent sign of the generation of internal stability, which signifies the externalisation of instability into a dissipative structure’s surroundings (in order words, a dissipative structure creates and maintains a low entropy internal state by externalising disorder into just outside its boundaries i.e. it "pumps" entropy to outside of itself). Instability passing through a structure causes disruption which speeds up its rate of innovation and thus effectively speeds up its passage of time relative to others (relativity again). In other words, we define the passage of time as identical to the experience of the dissipation of entropy: the more spatially concentrated the dissipation, the faster the experience of the passage of time.
4. Creativity which begets Innovation is the duality feedback loop of structure modifying process and process modifying structure and so on unto itself forever (dissipative structures <=> autopoesis). This fundamentally works via the cognitive signalling reinforcement (do this), dampening (don’t do this) or dispersion (don’t know). As time progresses, the net amount of dispersion decreases, which is equal to the net increase of entropy in the Universe.
5. One of the most important binary dualities is the step-change versus incremental innovation as this drives the process of time itself. Of all change in most systems, generally around four fifths derives from incremental improvement and one fifth from step-change improvement. This notion of incremental and step-change corresponds to Erich Jantsch’s terminology of hypercycles of confirmation (incremental) and novelty (step-change).

Most step-change (novelty) is the result of a memory/structure exhibiting signalling dispersion (a don’t know) as a result of two conflicting internal mental representations of external reality. Most incremental (confirmation) is the result of a memory/structure exhibiting signalling reinforcement (do this or don’t do this).

3   The Third Universal Rule (the ‘Combination or Bridge Rule’):

The first two rules above, when combined, simplify down to the third and fourth Universal Rules. Simplifying them down whilst wearing a ‘structural’ hat gets you the third universal rule which simply states:

• Knowledge specialises. Understanding unifies.
• Understanding generates simplicity. Knowledge generates complexity.
• Simplicity is Power.
• Aim for Education, not Regulation.
• Aim for Internal Discipline, not External Control.

Western society has become sick with too much knowledge (complexity) and too little understanding (simplicity). The source of our early success has undoubtedly been our expressive power – European language (especially English) was unusually composed of simple primitives which could be flexibly recombined in highly powerful ways – just like the mathematics based on the Arabic numeral system we used to make all the great advances of human kind for the last few centuries.

In our opinion, what truly made European civilisation greater than others is one very simple precept which we tend to downplay: we, far more than other cultures, handle failure better. In most Eastern cultures, failure is associated with loss of honour and thus a cause for shame – this causes officials to cover up their mistakes and obscure them to such an extent that others can never learn how to not repeat such mistakes – thus, overall learning in society diminishes. Europeans were far more fractured into tiny, competing splinters who took delight in conquering one another – thus, failure became revealed through warfare & conquest and the whole benefited. However, this was a lucky accident resulting more from our brutishness than our superior natures (and a very tolerating European ecosystem), and we as a people do not tend any more toward openness than any other people. Note how the Americans are the world superpower because their processes and structures allow successful failure - most Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have experienced bankruptcy at least once, yet bankruptcy is severely punished in most European countries (e.g. the Germans never allow a Director of a bankrupted firm to ever be a Director of a firm again).

You cannot impose better behaviour on people and expect success without their prior request – which requires their prior understanding. No person, no matter how learned or accomplished, knows the full consequences of any action or decision – but even if they did, even if they had the vision & understanding of God Himself, to deny another person the right to choose, their very freedom itself, is a most grevious sin. One cannot but deny another's right to choose if they are too ignorant to understand the choice which they are making.

This is why God never, ever denies anything their right to choose despite all the prayer in the world. This is why we have wars, disease, pestilence and evil – because WE CHOOSE to have these things in our world. We do this because we do not yet believe we deserve any better and until we do, and make it happen, we shall continue to give forth to a world in which we inflict suffering upon ourselves and many more hundreds of millions will needlessly die in agony. God will never intervene, unless asked to do so and only then when it will not remove the free choice of another – and then God rarely gives you exactly what you ask for but rather something much better. Too often we react by being too prejudiced to thank Him for the gift of answering our prayers with something better than we wished – it is sad how people say that ‘prayer does not work’ and so therefore a loss of faith in God is justified. This is total bunk: ask and you shall always receive, but never at the expense of the freedom of choice of any other thing animate or inanimate. How else could an infinitely merciful and loving God behave but to grant every single thing irrespective, big & small, its own liberty and freedom to choose for itself?

Let me tell you this: our ideal & perfect society is not one without bad things ever happening. It is in fact one where every one of us carries the power to destroy the Universe and yet does not. It is a world where every citizen is capable of the most despicable acts of evil at the same time as the greatest acts of good; where our most evil child rapists & serial killers have unrestrained power to do as they like and yet they choose freely to not perform such acts of evil. This is not achieved through repression, coercion or denial, it is achieved through understanding which requires education, NOT regulation. It is achieved through inspiring simplicity, not deadening complexity.

4   The Fourth Universal Rule (the ‘Touchy Feely Rule’):

As mentioned above, the first two rules when combined simplify down to the third and fourth Universal Rules. Simplifying them down whilst wearing a ‘process’ hat gets you the fourth universal rule which simply states:

• Thinking (cognition) is identical to being alive and vice versa.
• Emotion is how living organisms respond to stimuli.
• Therefore the first choice any organism makes is whether & what to feel.
• Everything we perceive started with a feeling. All life can recognise the experiencing of emotion by another according to their own self-referential viewpoint.
• Maths and logic are a language for describing structure or process. However doing logic or maths is an emotional process. Numbers are discrete emotional reactions.

What is described by the fourth universal rule is very similar to Wikipedia:Santiago_Theory_of_Cognition, however it applies the process of cognition to all material structure rather than to just organic structures. Indeed we define a cognitive structure (i.e. a mind) as anything which transforms the nature of energy passing through it, so a rock which reflects, refracts, directs and converts electromagnetic radiation is a cognitive system.

Regarding the fundamental emotionality of maths depicted by this universal rule, we recognise that this statement is not orthodox in the Western tradition so allow us to explain: it is generally said that two thirds of higher maths capable university students will get full marks on an exam using calculus, but two thirds will dislike doing calculus: this implies that one third of people are perfectly capable but have the emotional reaction of (often intense) dislike while doing them. Needless to say, such people don’t tend to go on to do a numerate discipline which means that such disciplines are stacked with people who enjoy doing maths or at least aren’t bothered by the process, and these people tend to like pretending that maths is a non-emotional experience. For most of the population, anything past calculus – and most especially, anything involving statistics – is utterly tainted by feelings of frustration, inadequacy and even self-hatred for feeling inferior due to perceived incapability.

We know that most mathematicians fall into two types (the geometric and the semantic, though 75-80% are the former) and attempting to teach ‘the wrong kind’ to a particular student tends to generate a very negative and intense emotional reaction which puts them off maths for life. Interestingly, and entirely due to sociocultural factors, it also causes people so afflicted to think that people who are relaxed with maths are somehow ‘more intelligent’ than they are which is a classic example of a social stereotype in action. Politicians, most of whom are pretty useless with maths, will simply accept what an Economist says because he uses fancy math equations – when any Physicist would be appalled at the assumptions, contradictions & simple bad maths in the standard Neo-Classical Economic models. Statisticians get even more power because even most mathematicians dislike stats because you never get the automatic feeling of whether it’s right or not like you do with geometry or algebra. And of course, it’s very easy to make terrible mistakes in stats: there was a famous case in Britain a few years ago where a very eminent expert on child mortality had testified in many legal cases that a mother had to have shaken her child to death because he had calculated it as being several million to one that it could be otherwise. It turned out after dozens of mothers had been wrongly imprisoned that he had made a simple, first year undergraduate mistake in his stats – all these mothers were freed, and hopefully all eminent experts learned to always get a statistician (NOT a normal mathematician) to check your numbers before the court date!

The lesson here is that a good working maths knowledge is very strongly correlated with civilisation: and our failure to have every single citizen comfortable with maths is a great stain. We ourselves hold that maths is far more important than reading or writing – a controversial viewpoint we know – but one we push to the limit in our education reforms.

The second thing to take from this rule may seem unimportant, but it is vastly more important than everyone being comfortable with maths: this rule says that body & mind are one & the same. This is utterly opposed to the Western tradition of a Cartesian division of mind & body into separates – ‘I think, therefore I am’ becomes replaced with ‘I think because I am’. Healing ‘the Cartesian split’ would solve most of our social & environmental ills in one fell swoop – it is implied as a given throughout this Wiki.

All organisms choose whether to react to external stimuli. A loud bang may make one person jump and another not. However, the organism may through its memory structure have an associated emotional response, so if the last time a bang occurred and the organism suffered greatly, chances are it will react with anxiety to a loud bang. Equally, a dog may associate a loud bang with its owner returning from work and begin salivating with the prospect of impending food. The lesson here is that we choose whether and how to react to events – a ‘bad’ event is never, ever bad in the absolute sense, it is bad relative to us, our prejudices and past experiences. Your family getting killed, all your possessions being destroyed and all your friends turning against you is probably pretty bad but if it turns you down a path during which one good thing happens which otherwise might have not, it is not entirely a bad thing. In a nutshell, we are saying that you will be as happy or sad as you choose to be – a person with a positive ‘can do’ attitude towards life is far wealthier than most ever will be.

5   Other relevant notes and observations taken from the Freeing Growth book first draft

Emotional reactions of a cognitive system are rather like being in a hall of mirrors: there are reflections upon reflections like multiple ripples moving in a pond. Most of the external stimuli we ever experience is filtered out by our cognitive apparatus because it is too much information to process, and it overwhelms you to the point of uselessness. LSD interferes with that filtration system, so taking a lot of LSD is approximately the same as turning the filter off and you directly experience the true reality of the Universe. Most modern people are unprepared for such a revelatory experience – traditionally, people in more primitive societies had to undergo years of preparation beforehand which was very wise of them. Having such chemicals illegal as at present simply guarantees a trip to the mental hospital for a small percentage of those who indulge – as indeed I personally found out.

If you would like to know what the voice of God is like, it is when the quiet random emotional static noise at the back of your mind takes on a specific direction – a kaleidoscope of emotional states, abstract representations and very occasionally a single human language word or two. It is so quiet because our mental framework tries to exclude what it thinks isn’t pertinent, so the voice of God tends to get drowned out. However, in certain circumstances (i.e. highly emotionally charged situations either occurring naturally through circumstance e.g. a death of a loved one, severe lack of sleep – or induced artificially through drugs) the mind & body become open enough to hear the full roar of the voice of God. It is a humbling experience, rather like the difference between standing under a shower (normal existence) and under the full force of Niagara Falls (voice of God).

What I must write next I apologise for writing because it is offensive to many religions, but I must tell you this: every scripture, every holy book is the word of God after conversion into human language during which it loses accuracy, meaning & purpose. In particular, God usually speaks in universal emotional truths but human language is utterly relative to us and us alone, so scripture necessarily becomes relativised to the time & place in which it was written. There are far, far too many people in the world who take scripture far, far too literally: they read the text but they do not read the meaning and thus they misunderstand the word of God. Every world religion is guilty of this most grievous sin and they should feel ashamed for such perversion of a gift from God. I will tell you something else: if a truly pious & non self-serving person who is fully open to God undertakes to modernise and keep on modernising scripture in order to keep it as relevant to now as possible, they will discover something truly wonderful.

Before we can achieve that though, we need our population to be comfortable with maths. Maths is much more universal than human language, but like any axiomatic formal system it will always require a leap of faith to make it true and thus it becomes relativised to us and our present condition. Our society currently pretty much universally believes that numbers are cold, hard rational things which carry no emotional content – yet clearly, they must be discrete emotional states because for a number to carry any significance, it must evoke some kind of meaning – otherwise, it’s just some meaningless number. Indeed, we know that the very best mathematicians definitely ascribe emotions to numbers: many find Pi to be extremely beautiful and if you corrupt one of its digits even several hundred digits down, the number suddenly ‘feels’ wrong.

I should clarify what I mean by numbers being discrete emotional states. Everyone will agree that numbers which mean something specific do of course carry emotional context: witness how many women currently get upset come their fortieth birthday. However my point of contention is that any number, any number at all is a discrete emotional state.

We already know from our logarithmic timelines (Relativity Is Absolute) that there are about forty levels of significance perceivable by the human cognitive system and the recent past is disproportionately weighted against the distant past (time heals all wounds!). This implies a more emotionally laden ‘recent space’ than ‘distant space’ because the nearer it is, the more it is perceived as likely to be important (i.e. perceived importance is clearly indicated by the lengths to which a person is prepared to go to affect an outcome). Not dissimilarly, we are much more at ease with smaller numbers: try making a list of all things related to the number fifty-two and compare the length of that list to one of all things related to the number fifty-two thousand. Now compare that to a list of things related to 5.2e52 and I bet that even the most educated among you would struggle to find more than five related items for such a large number.

What I mean about numbers being discrete emotional states is that there is a definite attachment to each of the smaller numbers for a whole host of reasons: our society, our culture and our personal histories mark out various numbers as significant in some way or other which distinguishes them from their neighbours e.g. we all ‘feel’ the difference between five and six vastly more than between 100,005 and 100,006 even though the difference in numerical terms is identical. Even more interestingly, we draw more of a parallel between 5 & 6 and 100,005 & 100,006 than we would between 5 & 6 and 100,000 & 100,001 because the 5 & 6 repeat: the equal difference of one doesn’t seem to matter as much as the digit repetition. Such pattern matching ensures that even the most random of numbers still carries a discrete emotional state: how else could it be when we delineate ALL our numbers using just the first ten 0-9? The emotional state for each of these digits is fixed – now larger numbers are patterns of emotional states, which therefore according to my argument becomes an emotional state in itself. As dissipative structure theory would have it, a new form of order emerges when you combine the first ten numbers to describe something larger than nine.

Once you place mathematics into a context, you get a computer program: maths without context is simply a set of relations which is useless except as an aid to the human mind, whereas a computer program can specify operation quite independently of a human in perpetuity and therefore is extremely useful as an autonomous entity while temporarily separated from human interaction. The future of human language looks far more like a computer program language than anything else I can relate it to in the present – not that it is mind; today’s computer programming languages are extremely primitive but they are a start in the right direction.