Enough people asking about Taoism and cellular automata that I feel compelled to flesh this out.

So: CAs teach you to reason about the relation between the thing-in-time and the thing-over-time. This duality is at the root of a lot of mystical thought across traditions! https://twitter.com/mykola/status/1221847322725961728

When we refer to a given state of a session of Conway’s Game of Life, we are choosing to look at a snapshot. The thing we are seeing IS NOT THE WHOLE THING.

Interestingly though it encodes aspects of its past and all of its future within it!

Game of life, like all CAs, is less about the state in time than it is about the state over time.

It’s only over time that we get concepts like a glider, because the whole point is emergent complexity based on the intersection of simple relations over time.

But we can’t ever see it all at once over time - our brains are narrative factories, and the way we try to contemplate the totality is by imagining all states lined up in order. But this is reductive, we can’t do this accurately for any meaningful complexity!

And so: the state that can be expressed is not the cellular automaton. The CA is the relation between all states, including the recursive mereotopological relations between cells and gliders and etc.

The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.

Our brains don’t allow that.

Taoism, or at least my bastardized understanding of it situated thousands of years and miles away, is that there’s wisdom in moving up and down along these dimensions.

What we mean when we say “I” is a lot like what we see in the game of life - am “I” the glider or the cell?

The sage knows that the truth is that I am both, even (and especially!) when the two seem irreconcilable.

Wisdom lies in navigating life by balancing the infinite perspective (the universe is one single glorious relation) and the physical one (you gotta eat and poop).

CAs, like the best Taoist jokes, play in the space between the irrelevance of an individual cell and the way each cell collectively defines the future.

All we can control, sort of, is how we choose to understand what we see.