Embracing The Patternless Uncertainty of Being

And that's the problem. That perennial quest to solve all creative tensions, that good old-fashioned pattern-seeking brain of ours, is going to kill us if we aren't careful. One must stop chasing after butterflies and cease trying to reduce uncertainty and embrace it instead. Or keep chasing after butterfly patterns in the wall-paper if it helps you sleep at night.

That was what I have been saying all along, the perils of too much abstraction, of abstraction for the sake of abstraction. What happens when you craft a message that has zero uncertainty?

Let's put it this way. You have a two-sided coin (unfair), with both sides being Heads. With regard to the results of a coin toss with this two-headed coin, there is not uncertainty, hence there is zero entropy. Unless you are betting against an adversary who always chooses Tails, then tossing this coin will always result in now new information. A pointless exercise?

I see that as involving the same kind of dangers as being right all the time. My predictions with this unfair coin are always right. It is always Heads, exactly as I predicted, every time. My predictions are valueless, however. There was no real uncertainty to begin with.

Finding a set of patterns and then seeing those patterns repeat themselves everywhere is a very perilous game to play, if you ask me. As I said in the beginning, one should not always seek to reduce uncertainty, one should embrace it instead. I could go on and say the same thing about Noise, because it can be just as valuable. When all you are left with are beautiful signals, then call me. I am the noise-maker, I will fix those signals stat, render them inert, unrecognizable. I will take out the pattern and leave only the patternless uncertainty of being. Embrace is, or keep chasing after butterflies.


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