[zoroaster]

Conway's Game of Life on a universal scale. Entertainment for Olympus, or a simulation to find an answer / stave off an inevitability?

The laws of physics and mathematics as the author sees them provide the substrate that seems to imply hard determinism; chaos theoreticians revel as the chaos of the now is reduced to causal determinism predicated on initial conditions and the base laws of the system, all interconnected.

But why quantum uncertainty? Why does observed light exhibit particle behavior while unobserved light exhibits wave behavior? Why does observation collapse the waveform? Are the quantum and classical reconcilable into a theory of everything? Einstein would hope so, but who knows what's really going on. In the end, it seems human knowledge is still, ultimately limited, with a vague sense of having experienced an indescribable "oneness" as the big kahuna of the panaceas.

What if it were fractal? What if there was no "end" but just an infinite regression with deeper and deeper questions with ever-escaping answers? An infinite game, consuming disorder, systematizing into local order - life's eternal war waged against entropy, helplessness, meaninglessness until ending and recurring. A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing; pure comedy, where the only thing that seems to make us feel alive is the struggle to survive - whether through religion, philosophy, or mathematics. Still makes for some great art along the way; life as a beauty-generator in the void. /rant