By definition, order is the condition in which everything is in its correct or appropriate state. That is just one of the many meanings of the word, and a misinterpreted one. Our love for symmetry, our desire to complete the picture, created an expectation of order not held up by reality.

Just as you can’t point to something and declare that’s the color blue, but you can easily identify all the blue objects in the room, you can’t describe natural order, which is elusive, chock full of obfuscating exceptions and impossible to maintain, but you can find endless examples of it working through every aspect of reality.

Reality is Motion

That’s one of the few statements we universally accept as true, and one which, faithful to the paradoxical nature of reality, starts throwing exceptions before it leaves our lips. But what about the state before the Big Bang? But what about the heat death of the Universe? What about them?

In the endless motion of existence, order equals high probability, events whose predictable nature yields relatively stable states.

We consider those states permanent: planetary orbits, chemical elements, states of matter, the speed and direction of time, even if upon further analysis we immediately notice they are nowhere near unchanging. We need to hold on to high probability states as permanent in order to function.

This thinking shortcut makes our life easier, but also blinds us to the true nature of reality and denies us the deeper understanding of its laws.

No Absolute Truths

In the reality continuum things get reshaped and transformed into other things all the time, especially the things we take for granted, like our bodies, continents, or stars.

Elementary particles, light, spatial geometry, time, there isn’t one among them that yields to our concepts of order.

Our mathematical models are exclusively abstract. A perfect circle is an impossibility, if there is such a thing as the impossible in existence. I’m not so sure about that either.

Science begrudgingly lowered its expectations of order to indulge the whims of a natural world, which, for lack of proper instruction, constantly disregards its laws, but it did so only out of necessity and steeped in frustration.

To reconcile two states of organization that seemed incompatible, science conceded there is such a thing as a self-replicating blueprint for nature, but stubbornly denied it the status of order and relegated it to a quasi-mythical state between dimensions we call fractal.

Flaunting Order

If order is the state where everything is in its right place, we live in absolute and perfect order at every point in time. Everything is always exactly where it’s supposed to be, otherwise it wouldn’t be there. You can’t let go of a glass and expect it to stay suspended in thin air, it will fall to the ground, shatter and make a mess: that is the perfect order for that object and that circumstance.

The ironic thing is, the sun, which was held as the standard of perfection for thousands of years, is an object lesson in chaotic behavior, albeit self-contained.

So, if absolute order is not available, what can we rely on?

Skeleton Patterns

In everything there is, from the smallest to the largest scale, there is an underlying skeleton pattern, an organizing diagram.

These patterns form a giant library of reality blueprints, which display significant similarities, such as evolving from the simple to the complex, comprising simple repeatable units which allow for great flexibility of assembly, a tendency to decay, commonality of substance, and requiring a threshold of energy, which is never zero, in order to function.

These tendencies and characteristics are not bound to the pattern they belong to, they flow freely between systems and make the endless reshaping of reality possible.

Energy Expense

Change happens at an expense of energy, and that energy can come from various sources, ranging from nuclear power or sunlight, to good old fashioned elbow grease.

Reality is parsimonious with its resources and never uses more energy than it needs. The rest gets recycled into other actions, not necessarily desirable from our point of view, like an overflowing bucket that spills on the floor, for instance. Reality has no outcome bias and puts all leftover energy to good use, yielding perplexing arrays of unintended consequences.

It doesn’t care what energy source kicks it into action either: energy is energy, neither good nor bad. A black hole and a supernova are two states of the same exchange system and running around in circles will work just as well as a battery when it comes to turning your gears.

Cut From the Same Cloth

We extract energy from animals and plants all the time, and plants extract it from the earth, which extracted it from the sun, and we can go all the way back to the beginning of time this way, the point is all these substances and energetic patterns are compatible with each other, their substance is more or less the same, and they all coexist in a harmonious approximation of order we call nature in ways we find beautiful and awe-inspiring.

Energy and matter, action and potential exchange signals and turn into each other all the time through the play of probabilities, but those, as we know, rely on the law of large numbers to make sense.

Playing the Odds

There is no such thing as the probability of one instance. In individual instances we concede defeat and throw ourselves at the mercy of chance, and that’s where the crazy stuff starts to happen. How many tosses do you think it would take for a coin to fall on its edge? For the fans of the impossible, would it surprise you to learn it is only 1 in 6000? What will happen if you toss it just once? I guess we’ll never know.

Some things are highly unlikely, of course, and not something we feel the need to dwell upon, but nothing is impossible.

Everything in reality works at this level of precision, as far as we know, of course. (We may be surrounded by intelligent life which exists in the seventeenth dimension and vibrates beyond the wavelength of gamma rays for all we know. How are we going to check?)

If you give up the expectation of precision, reality is pretty dependable in its approximate outcomes, and its patterns work consistently in all directions of time, which is why we can make predictions of future states based on past events.

Black Swans

There is no such thing as zero probability: given enough repetitions of an event, the most bizarre, unthinkable outcome is likely to occur.

What are the odds the sun will not come up tomorrow?

Not zero.

That’s all there is to it.

We are always unprepared for these occurrences, not because we don’t believe them possible, but because their sheer craziness is so far out of our range of reasoning, we can’t think them at all.

As an example, imagine people who had never seen a tsunami before, walking on a beach on a beautiful day, in disbelief the ocean had retreated hundreds of feet, leaving behind a treasure of marine life.

This unreal image doesn’t trigger the fear response, as we all wisely want to believe, rather a frozen state of awe in which the brain struggles in an infinite loop with an option that wasn’t part of its programming.

Assume Nothing

Faced with things that are just too improbable to have happened, we adapt by creating looser structures for organizing knowledge.

Our minds, which are wonderfully plastic, construct logical systems that allow for options beyond true and false, free associate between things that seem to have nothing to do with each other, except for our perception of them feeling the same, create hierarchies based on frequency of events rather than abstract rules, prioritize response speed over accuracy.

Our mental libraries get dumped on the floor in a giant messy pile and we scramble to re-shelve their contents based on cover color and frequency of use. If it sounds schizophrenic is because it probably is.

In Conclusion

After the geocentric model of the universe failed to bear true, biology disappointed us by endlessly mutating the building blocks of life and making sure no two are ever the same, and fluid dynamics turned out near impossible to model, after we deemed Euclidean geometry unusable even for basic things like creating accurate maps, and after reality darkened the pristine waters of physics with such unnatural stuff as the dual slit electron experiment and quantum tunneling, humanity finally saw reason and gave up its fairytale of mathematical precision.

What are the points worth remembering?

1. There are underlying patterns to reality which work in the large and in the small, at low and high resolution, they are common to all systems, living and non-living, and energy flows freely between these systems, in a way which maintains reality in a mostly stable and cohesive state.
2. The building blocks of being are the same for humans, rocks, plasma nebulae and empty space. Everything is made of the same material.
3. Nothing is impossible, nothing is guaranteed. Everything exists in a range of probabilities greater than zero and less than one, but equal to neither.
4. There are realities out there we can’t know, because we don’t have the tools to observe them or verify them, and also there are realities which may be too strange for us to know but which, based on our perplexed observation outliers, turn out to exist.
5. When encountering the bizarre, assume nothing. Falling back on previous wisdom in such cases is akin to trying to use a compass in the Bermuda Triangle.
6. All change comes at an expense of energy. Energy is morally neutral.
7. No truth is absolute. The second you make a rule, several exceptions will instantly jump at you to contradict it.

Welcome to the realm of magic.

Wait! What? But there is no such thing!

Here we go again.

Let’s take this from the top, one more time.