WARNING: This is not intended for a large audience. If you stumble upon this page by chance, please keep the sharing to a minimum.

TIP: It's always work-in-progress. Things come and go. Or change. Who knows?

Three things

[mid/late 2020]

All things in the universe take the shape of one of approximately three things. If you had Hoogle for the entire universe, you'd probably find that one of them is fmap.

There might be a few more, or a few less (or some may have been deprecated), but you get the idea. I guess five would be a good number.

Free energy principle

[mid/late 2020]

Karl Friston wrote:

The free-energy principle says that any self-organizing system that is at equilibrium with its environment must minimize its free energy.

Or, somewhat paraphrased:

Any Markov blanket capable of modeling its environment aims to reduce its level of surprise by either adapting its model, or through other action.

Seems reasonable to me.

More bizarre universe

[many years ago]

Douglas Adams wrote:

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

Alpha decay

[late 2022]

Finance people say:

Alpha Decay is commonly referred to as the loss of prediction power of a trading strategy over time. As a consequence, the profitability of a strategy tends to gradually decrease. Given enough time, the strategy converges to having no superior predictive power and returns when compared to a suitable benchmark.

A market is a big optimiser. Any successful trading strategy adds friction in a place that the optimiser wants to remove.

Alpha decay is unavoidable without changing and adapting the strategy.

Optimising universe

[late 2022]

(thanks edef for helping me think through this one!)

Assume that the universe acts as a giant optimiser, and consider that the three things above are related and specialisations of more generic ideas:

1. Every delineable entity in the universe (i.e. every Markov blanket) attempts to reduce its level of surprise (the free energy principle).

2. The universe needs replacement (a more bizarre universe) if global surprise drops to a minimum¹.

3. Without improvement that outpaces the optimiser of the universe, any strategy leading to (2) will get eroded by alpha decay long before.

4. We don't know if it is possible to outpace the optimiser from within.

On a personal note, it seems to me that achieving (2) is likely undesirable. It probably takes god² a lot of resources to create an ever more complex universe and this process might be much less enjoyable than "running" (for lack of a better word) a universe. Under this assumption, a universe that achieves (2) faster than others might be a failure, and on a higher level conditions leading to its creation might be subject to another optimiser.

Or it could be the other way around, but this seems more likely to me personally.

Superintelligence

[late 2022]

Under the previous assumption, achieving superintelligence is likely a bad idea for anyone feeling some kind of attachment to this universe.

Or it might be the exact opposite, but I don't think so.