An aggregation of several big ideas about Energy, Computation, and Value — starting with a particular historical narrative, through Quai Network, Active Inference, Wolfram Physics, and applications. Integrating all frameworks together in one operating system.
This playlist traces the unfolding of reality through nested stages — energy, matter, life, mind, culture, and technology — and asks: what comes next? Each conversation adds a layer, from the physics of phase transitions to the engineering of proof-of-work money.
The following is an aggregation of several big ideas about Energy, Computation, and Value. It starts with a particular historical narrative. Then Quai Network. Next, Active Inference. Finally, Wolfram Physics and applications.
The point is to integrate all my frameworks and ideas together in one operating system. This should help explain the evolution of energy from big bang to now and how blockchains fit into that inevitable story.
It appears that physical reality unfolds (and has in fact unfolded) in a series of nested stages. Each stage is a special case of the stage prior to (and "below") it — but presents an entire set of emergent, novel possibilities.
For example, the most basic, foundational stage is the "energy" stage that follows directly from the mystery of the Big Bang. The energy stage is governed by a set of constraints (i.e., the "laws" of physics) that produce a set of possibilities for what can happen at the level of energy. For example: quarks can form and can combine into more complex entities like protons, electrons and neutrons. These in turn can (and will) combine into the various atoms on the periodic table of the elements.
So, given energy and the laws of physics (and time) you will ultimately end up with simple chemistry. This is a stage of reality, the "energy stage." It is the basic and foundational stage, but it is not the only stage. Instead, under certain conditions, the conditions of the energy stage pass through a critical transition (which Henriques refers to as "joint points") into the "matter" stage. Which, in turn, provides a foundation and a context through a joint point into the "life" stage. Then the "mind" stage and, ultimately so far, the "culture" stage.
We are going to be spending most of our time on the culture stage, but first I want to pause here and focus on some foundational characteristics that seem to show up throughout the unfolding stages of reality and then walk through a few of these different stages and the critical transitions between them to see how they work.
Note — I'm going to be talking about physics and chemistry in a very abbreviated way. I'm aware that I am coarse graining and brushing over a whole heap of details. That isn't the point — what I'm specifically focusing on is the key set of concepts that we are going to be using for the rest of the essay and I'm using some early examples to help make the concepts clear.
There seem to be two major classes of constraint within which everything else happens.
At the bottom are the laws of thermodynamics. These "iron laws of energy" fundamentally constrain all events and show up at every level. Everything physical is ultimately grounded in a gradient of energy and is haunted by the scythe of entropy.
At the top is the "space of possibility" or the "phase space" that constrains the probabilistic dynamics of a given environment. This one is a little tricky, so let me frame out a toy model.
Imagine that you are dropping steel balls on a flat steel plate and then mapping where they end up. A ball lands, bounces, rolls a bit. The result is going to be pretty random. Now imagine that the steel plate is cone shaped. Suddenly even though you are still dropping them more or less randomly and they might bounce around a bit — we know that the shape of the space will result in all of them settling at (or near) the bottom of the cone.
OK, now imagine that the original flat plane was more like a trampoline. After a few balls have landed on it, their combined weight begins to pull the formerly flat plane into a slightly cone shape. The more balls that you toss onto the trampoline, the more tend to cluster around this cone and the more extreme it becomes. This is, of course, a standard metaphor for gravity and for how stars form: first a cluster of basic particles (hydrogen and helium) happen to be relatively close together. This produces a gravitational well which has the effect of (ever so slightly) increasing the probability that some given random atom that happens to come by will hang out in that location. This, of course, produces a "deeper" well and that increases the chances of yet more atoms sticking around.
If the conditions are right, this process will continue, producing a locally escalating level of energy enabling a variety of novel effects. Entirely within the bounds and constraints of the laws of thermodynamics, the shape of the space of possibility called a "star" allows interactions that in ordinary space are effectively impossible to become likely: fusion and the "discovery" of more complex kinds of matter (carbon, oxygen, etc.).
The core concept here is this: in any given stage of reality we see stochastic fluctuations that bias their own local environment, leading to feedback loops that reduce entropy locally while increasing it globally and when a locally improbable event alters the phase space in a way that makes further such events more probable, you've crossed into a kind of thermodynamic bootstrapping to a new set of possibilities.
Our stars have been hard at work, using fusion to climb the periodic table of the elements and (particularly in the event of novae and supernovae) spewing these forms of matter out into space. Over time, still under the constraints of thermodynamics and gravity these elements collect and start to relate with each other outside of the context of superheated stars. We now begin to see planets.
Zooming over to a local planet which happens to have a supply of sodium and chlorine atoms floating about, we see another version of thermodynamic bootstrapping.
The stable ions of sodium tend to lose an electron and become positively charged and the stable ions of chlorine tend to gain an electron and become negatively charged. As a consequence, in a saturated solution, as sodium and chloride ions are randomly bouncing around, every once in a while, by chance, a few happen to align just right to form a stable configuration (sodium chloride — salt). This is rare. It's entropically costly to go from dispersed ions to an ordered arrangement. So the formation of the first few units of a crystal is the bottleneck.
Once a seed forms, though, everything changes. The electrostatic geometry of the existing crystal lowers the energy barrier for more ions to attach, orients them correctly via field effects, stabilizes them by the existing lattice, and starts "recruiting" neighbors just by sitting there.
This is autocatalysis via geometry, by a change in the space of possibility.
Before the seed, ion pairing was rare and randomly oriented. After the seed, it's biased toward growth in a specific configuration. This is not just more of the same. It's symmetry breaking: now there's a preferred orientation in space, a preferred local order, and that local order exerts influence over time. Thermodynamically, the system is still dissipating energy — heat is released as bonds form — but it is channeling that dissipation through an organized pathway.
This is the core concept:
In the transition from matter to life, we are moving from complex chemistry to organized biological systems. In the earliest stages of this transition, we see increasingly complex chemical systems utilizing a variety of catalysts as thermodynamic operators to discover more and more "unlikely" (or complex) chemical configurations. In particular where there is an unusually high availability of energy (e.g., around heat vents in the ocean) these processes sort through a wide variety of available possibilities at the level of matter — in a sense searching blindly for the right combination of pieces to produce a biasing agent in phase space that enables a self-similar, self-extending process to kick off.
When the chemistry that ultimately resolves to RNA, DNA, ribosomes and the mitochondrion is finally stabilized, the joint point has been found. These particular structures radically change the shape of the space of possibility in "chemistry" enabling the emergence and, then the exploration, of an entirely new stage: "life".
The mitochondrion, of course, is the "downward" facing binding agent ensuring that all of life can operate within the constraints of the "iron law of energy". By enabling the orderly, regular conversion of a wide variety of potential energy inputs into a standard and highly available single form of energy (ATP), the mitochondrion essentially takes the very unique circumstance of a heat vent and makes locally concentrated energy available in more and more environments.
For their part, the protein synthesis triad (RNA, DNA and ribosomes) radically change the space of possibility of complex chemistry. In a sense, they form a "general purpose crystal". Where, for example, a salt crystal biases phase space to drive the potential of the production of salt, the genetic machinery is a "programmable" biasing agent that drives the reproduction of itself and can change itself in an orderly fashion.
Combined these pieces of structure form the thermodynamic operator that "opens up" the stage of life and the new variation on how reality explores its constraints — biological evolution.
Amazingly, the same basic situation unfolds as we move to the far edges of biology and into the emergence of the next stage of reality: Mind/Behaviour. Life always, of course, responded to its environment, but these were slow-time morphological adaptations coded at the genetic level and tuned over evolutionary time. But just like in our previous examples, there was a particular location in "biology space" (neurology) that, once discovered, began to warp the shape of possibility into a joint point from slow-time morphological adaptation to fast-time behaviour.
Behaviour involves a major shift in the nature of an organism. On the one hand, it involves the development of specialized organs for increasingly nuanced sensing of the state of the environment and internal modeling of the results of this sensing towards proper action. On the other hand, the transformation of the interior environment from a relatively homogeneous entangled whole into a meaningfully more distinct set of organs coordinated via the neural system.
Henriques specifically calls out "behavioural investment theory" at the joint point: behavior is an investment of biological energy into the environment, regulated by nervous systems to maximize adaptive outcomes. Or, to put it another way, behaviours that don't ultimately yield more energy than they cost don't last very long.
We have moved "up the stack" from raw energy all the way through to animals with increasingly sophisticated capabilities of sensing and responding to their environment. We are now at the edge of the fourth joint point and the fifth stage: from behaviour to culture.
As animals explored the possibilities of behaviour, a particular new kind of organism began to emerge. By means of specific behaviours (body language, facial expressions, vocalizations, chemicals) animals took advantage of their capacity to sense and respond to begin the journey to a new and powerful possibility: communication and coordination. The emergence of the social organism.
Social organisms unlock a whole variety of capabilities that upgrade their capacity to respond to their environment. The ability to distribute widely in space and yet share perception produces an enormous improvement in sensing. While hives, schools, flocks, herds, packs and troops produce myriad new ways to respond. In particular, social organisms allow for synergistic specialization.
Enter the fourth joint point: systems of justification. Systems of justification are a particular form of communication that enable highly generalized coordination and provide for an enormous possibility for tapping into the power of a new kind of flexible, rapidly changing and complex social organism: cultural organisms.
The leap to systems of justification introduces something entirely new: the ability to provide reasons, to give accounts of actions, beliefs, and norms that can be debated, transmitted, and revised. It is not just that cultural organisms can coordinate — it's that they can coordinate on coordination itself.
This shift enables symbolic abstraction, normative alignment, recursive social cognition, and transmission and critique. These properties explode the possibility space. Where a troop of baboons might coordinate a hunt or a hierarchy through gestural and emotional signaling, a cultural organism can coordinate the building of a ship, the crafting of laws, or the composition of an epic poem.
This technique proved revolutionary and enabled the explosion of humanity out of Africa and into every nook and cranny in the world in a mere 60,000 years (essentially instantly in evolutionary time).
As cultural organisms spread throughout the world, filling niche after niche and rapidly establishing humans as the peak of any niche they occupied, they began to encounter a novel problem: each other.
The answer was found in scale. Technological civilization is a new approach to the problems of coherence, coordination and conflict resolution characterized by formalized, abstracted, and, as a result, scalable solutions. These include technologies such as written language, explicit legal systems, monetary systems, bureaucracies and structured hierarchies.
If you move from a village of 10,000 to a town of 20,000, per capita wages increase by 15%, sort of "automagically". Double population again and those wages increase by 15% again. After a few doublings, the wealth and innovation gap between the "tiny village" and the "big city" is quite large.
While history has developed a variety of civilizations with a diversity of particular approaches, the power of superlinear scaling proved decisive. However, while technological civilization vastly expands scale and power, it introduces a new set of catastrophic instabilities that have not yet been resolved:
Our current circumstances are novel. The singular triumph of neo-liberalism has produced the first truly global meta-civilization and has produced a level of technological power that is many orders of magnitude greater than anything ever before witnessed. A repeat of the ordinary process of technological civilization in the contemporary environment would result in an unprecedented collapse both in terms of scope and intensity. There is every reason to believe that it would not be meaningfully survivable.
What is needed is a solution to the problem of civilization that is able to benefit from the leverage of superlinear scaling while extinguishing all of the failure conditions.
This places us firmly at the fifth joint point and the thesis of this essay. We are currently sitting in a location roughly similar to that faced by complex chemistry just before the mitochondrion and the protein synthesis triad was established or that faced by life just before neurology was stabilized. All of the history of civilization has been a search for a thermodynamic operator, a stable biasing agent in phase space that simultaneously grounds this new form of reality into the iron law of energy and forms a "general purpose crystal" that drives the reproduction of itself and can change itself in an orderly fashion.
Below, I will argue, somewhat astonishingly, that Proof of Work Blockchain is some and perhaps all of this thermodynamic operator.
The next paper formalizes the thermodynamic operator — connecting Boltzmann distributions, Shannon entropy minimization, proof-of-work consensus, mutual information, and the Free Energy Principle into a unified framework. Read the full paper: Thermodynamic Operator V5 →