Size Doesn't Matter

We are obsessed with size. Bigger is better. Supersize me! Consider the Universe: from Planck scale to Cosmos - 60 orders of magnitude! 

You and I, dear reader, are about 25 orders of magnitude short of a Cosmos (I’ve been called worse). But that means we’re 35 orders of magnitude larger than Planck. From the perspective of a subatomic particle, the human body is approximately the size of the Cosmos. From the perspective of the Cosmos, you are the size of a subatomic particle. Feeling a bit ‘lost in space’? That’s how an electron ‘feels’ inside your body. 

In less than 500 years, we’ve gone from a privileged species on a privileged planet at the center of the Universe to a speck on a speck on a speck. It would take your breath away…if it were not all BS. Our notion of size is a function of our 4 linear dimensions. But these dimensions are simply axes on which events are conveniently arranged, like ornaments on a 4D Christmas tree. 

Theoretically, events could be arranged in any order whatsoever, or in no order at all, but most folks hang their larger, heavier balls on the tree’s lower limbs. To do otherwise would require a great deal more energy (kinetic and potential)…and it would look like Hell. Is Beauty negentropic? You bet it is!

Events happen! They are sui generis. They are a response by what is not to what is in pursuit of what might be. Events happen by alternately inheriting and rejecting various elements from their environment before synthesizing the ‘survivors’ into a single Actual Entity; that process (called ‘prehension’ by Alfred North Whitehead) generates entropy (heat). 

The synthesis of elements itself (i.e. ‘concrescence’) is negentropic: it creates an island of relative order in a sea of chaos. It is relatively beautiful (heavy ornaments are at the bottom). Because it is a ‘cool’ energy trough relative to its ‘hot’ environment, it is stable; it would require a significant input of energy from an external source to dislodge it. But where would that ‘new’ energy come from?

“Heavy ornaments on the bottom!” my mother always said. We instinctively minimize the inexorable increase in entropy. Against a backdrop of ever encroaching disorder, the Whole attempts to conserve and curate order (e.g. Beauty, Truth, and Justice) wherever and whenever possible. That is the origin of process. We are the Universe reacting to itself. We are that reaction per se. Therefore, we are Recursion; we are Consciousness, period.

Note: We are not organisms who happen to be conscious; we the Consciousness itself. This is not necessarily what we mean by terms like ‘mind, spirit, soul’, etc. We are talking about pure recursion, pure process. “I seem to be a verb.” (Buckminster Fuller)

The negentropic process of concrescence does not violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Looked at globally, entropy still increases. Local increases in order are more than offset by the global increase in entropy. The so-called order of events is the arrangement that corresponds to variations in global entropy. Spacetime orders events along the path of lower to higher entropy; we call that path, time. 

The concepts ‘big’ and ‘little’ have no fixed meaning. Their sense is entirely relational. The fundamental structure of the Universe is fractal; it is self-similar across all scales. Big and little have no fixed denotative meaning. A 4 year old is called a ‘big boy’ in certain contexts while his 8 year old brother may be referred to as a ‘little boy’ in others. 

Both characterizations are true. Each is true relative to its context. However, neither is true relative to the other. Think about it: calling a 4 year old ‘little’ and an 8 year old ‘big’ conveys zero information; plus it’s demeaning...to both. 

Sidebar: The relationship of a 4 year old and an 8 year old within a family (or other social unit) is an example of non-Archimedean geometry at work in everyday life. Each child must be measured on its own terms, with its own metric, in its own context. They cannot be compared, one to the other. 

There is no common metric, e.g. calendar age, to relate them. That metric exists but it applies only at the meta-level, i.e. only to the family unit. In the family’s terms the ‘big boy’ is only half as old as the ‘little boy’ but that is not relevant to either boy’s subjective experience of himself. 

Switching back to an Archimedean (Euclidean) framework, events can be represented by spacetime coordinates (i.e. a common metric). To the extent that those coordinates define a contiguous region, we refer to the measure of that region as the ‘size’ of the event (its domain, range, depth, duration, volume, etc.). The coordinates themselves encode information as pattern, and we can compare children based on their ‘size’ (above). 

From spatiotemporal coordinates we calculate size. But size has no absolute significance. Big is only ‘big’ relative to ‘little’. Our 4 year old is ‘big’ compared to a toddler but our 8 year old is ‘little’ compared to a tween. The 4 year old bestrides Nursery School like a colossus; the 8 year old cowers in the corner of his K-8 Primary School.

Sidebar: IRL 4 year olds and 8 year olds are rarely compared; they’re perceived to have nothing much in common. Exception: when dad yells at the elder, “Stop acting like a 4 year old.” – a high compliment, but probably neither meant nor understood as such.

Events create spacetime; they are not made of spacetime. Events are holistic. As Richard Feynman demonstrated, spacetime breaks down at the event’s horizon. In this sense, every event is like a black hole - minus the massive gravitational attraction. 

Patterns scale! Spacetime configurations are stackable. While every event is unique, patterns tend to repeat…like Russian nesting dolls. In 10^th grade geometry we called this ‘congruence’: the Bohr model of the atom is roughly congruent with the Copernican model of the solar system, etc. 

While scientists search for causal sequences, philosophers search for congruent patterns. Congruence (pattern) is just another way of encoding order. But what about those causal sequences? We say that ‘A causes B’ to the extent that the transition from A to B is ‘the least dirty shirt’ (i.e. the event that would generate the least entropy). 

Causation minimizes information. It collapses the wave function at its apex (most probable value). Congruence, on the other hand, preserves the wave function (and all its potential values). Causation : Congruence :: Atari : Quantum Computing. In a fully determined world, events would convey zero information. 

In fact, there would be no discrete events at all. Subsequent states would simply be encoded in prior states. Pierre-Simon Laplace (c. 1800 CE) believed that everything is caused by something else; his contemporary, William Blake, maintained that everything is congruent with everything else: “To see a world in a grain of sand…and eternity in an hour.” 

Information is ‘difference’ and differences are the raw material of pattern. Sentences are patterns; music and art depend on patterns; software is a pattern; DNA forms a pattern. Even molecules are ‘patterns’ of elements.

As spacetime is an ordering of events, the fractal structure is a way of conserving that order by stacking those events on top of one another based on ‘self-similarity’ (aka pattern). It’s a bit like zipping up a computer file. Everything works toward one goal: the conservation of pattern encoded information. 

The Universe has a Prime Directive: Minimize incremental entropy by maximizing Beauty, Truth, and Justice. Spacetime, scale and pattern are tools we use to fulfill that mandate. Size, on the other hand, doesn’t matter!

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Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915, oil on linen, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Malevich’s stark reduction of form to a single square reflects the essay’s claim that “size” has no absolute meaning, only relational context, and that true order emerges from pattern rather than scale.