The Occult Game of Life

[sdi]

There is a game, called the Game of Life. It was invented by the mathematician John Conway in 1970. “Game” is perhaps a bit of a misnomer, since one doesn’t really “play” it: it’s more of a set of rules that, applied repeatedly, give rise to interesting patterns of behavior.

The gist of it is that the rules act as a sort of abstracted simulation of a petri dish: one has a grid, every square of which may possibly be occupied by a “cell.” The rules governing these cells are simple:

1. If a cell has too few neighbors, it dies of loneliness.
2. If a cell has too many neighbors, it dies of overcrowding.
3. If just the right number of cells surround an empty space, a new cell is born in that space.

It turns out that these rules can give rise to very complex behavior. At the very low end, “creatures” made up of groups of cells can be made that “walk” around: the best known of these is called a glider. At the very high end, though, it’s been demonstrated that we can build a universal computer: this means that the Game of Life can carry out any algorithm we know how to make. (It turns out that the Game of Life is not “special” in this regard: simple systems of rules that can “do anything” are actually pretty common.)

How does this work? Well, the Game of Life provides a gridded substrate, a “universe” in which “creatures” made up of various combinations of cells can exist. We can build a more sophisticated substrate atop this one, though, using, say, some group of “creatures” repeated indefinitely across the grid, making a “meta-grid” made up of “meta-squares.” By pretending the new “meta-grid” is our normal grid, we have now made a new universe with new rules more amenable to whatever task we were trying to accomplish; the tradeoff, however, is that the original abitrary and freeform behavior of the old grid is gone, and replaced with a more fixed, clunkier, more sluggish meta-grid. An elegant example of this is a version of the Game of Life built within the Game of Life: it works exactly the same as the Game Life does (or any other game with similar rules, in fact), but it takes two thousand times as much space and thirty thousand times longer to do it.

And, of course, this process may be repeated, building a “meta-meta-grid” on top of the “meta-grid” you just built, and so on and so on: making ever more sophisticated universes, but also ever more fixed and sluggish.

Does this sound familiar? It reminds me an awful lot of the universe as described by occultism! There is an ultimate root reality, analagous to the pure rules of the Game of Life; but on top of that root reality, are various, denser “planes” of existence (each corresponding to a “meta-grid” or a “meta-meta-grid” or so on). These planes all give rise to the next, and so in a very real sense they overlap or interpenetrate each other. Very sophisticated beings at one level can mess with the building blocks used to create levels further down, thereby causing “miraculous” occurrences. Since they are made up of simpler parts, these “higher” beings—operating much more quickly—don’t experience time the way “lower” beings do. Indeed, “lower” beings have pieces on the “higher” planes, and once those pieces are self-stable, the scaffolding on the “lower” planes may indeed be pulled away without damaging the core structure within. This strikes me as a way where creatures within these planes slowly but surely modify the rules that the planes are subject to.

I should step back a moment and say that these—the Game of Life and occult metaphysics both—are merely metaphors for an underlying reality. But it's interesting and suggestive to me that convergent evolution is at work: that these metaphors, coming from very different civilizations and domains of study, highlight similar properties.

As I mentioned earlier, these properties are not unique to the Game of Life: there are very many systems in computer science that exhibit similar properties. Stephen Wolfram, a well-known mathematician, is presently exploring even simpler games to accomplish the same thing. He says he’s trying to find the fundamental laws that underlie physics—and, naturally, physicists hate him for this, saying that what he’s doing has nothing to do with physics. I agree, in that it strikes me that he’s actually working on meta-physics.

Comments

[sdi]

Still on my reading list! I'll get there eventually! :)