Foreword: I am not Edward Down, he never wrote a book.

Edward Down wasn’t his name, but that is what we will call him anyway. Ed felt dead already. He wanted to die, but not really. So feeling dead seemed good enough, and nobody was particularly upset.

Ed lay in bed, still awake, almost listening to birds chirp unmusically in the predawn light, but not quite. Thoughts were relentlessly flowing through Ed’s mind. Thoughts he’d almost had before, only almost and not quite in this order.

Ed thought about the world being on fire, how we are the fire. Life and civilization are explosions, non-metaphorically. We all know how explosions end. And so Ed had lost all of the enthusiasm that he’d once had for being part of anything at all.

People would tell Ed to just try to enjoy life and not worry about everything. But to him that was part of the problem. Everyone was just trying to be happy and ignore the cognitive dissonance that would be caused if they realized they were destroying the very environmental foundations that made civilized life possible. The idea of just being happy felt like doing something wrong, and so Ed tried to accept that his life would not be happy.

Ed wasn’t upset or angry at the small people just getting by and trying to be happy, nor at the big people just trying to be rich and powerful. Thought about in terms of chemical reactions and the downhill flow of energy towards entropy, the whole human mess of civilization blowing itself up just looked like the natural and inevitable course of things. No one was to blame because no one could have made a difference anyway. Being sustainable was always less efficient than maximizing the externalized costs, and so what was good failed but progress rolled onward.

Ed thought he had solved some of the mysteries of philosophy, big unanswerable questions that have entertained the greatest minds throughout history. He had studied enough to know such answers were taboo, jokes in serious conversations. His understanding was not in the shape of words, and he struggled to reduce his thoughts into words capable of carrying his understanding to other minds. And so unable to copy and paste his understanding, he was alone with it, looping around and over trying to understand everything.

Ed was vainly aware that his thoughts were new, even though they were composed of old and borrowed ones. How absurd that in the history of mankind, few, if any, brains had been educated in such an information rich environment as he had been. He had remained a student in an institution throughout his first three decades of life. At university he had learnt first chemistry, then anthropology and psychology before settling into philosophy, and then following that up with politics, history and classics. Ed would have been two meters tall if his intelligence had been his height, according to the tests during his ADHD diagnosis. He hadn’t met anyone two meters tall, but he’d been lucky enough to meet and learn from many people smarter and more educated than himself.

Ed wasn’t sure if he was delusional or inspired, but it didn’t really matter because wise or deluded, the thoughts would continue going around and around regardless. Ed knew his life was meaningless, because he understood what made life meaningful and had tested the theory popperian style. Meaning exists in the connections and mutual cooperation supporting the continued survival and flourishing of unities. He had disconnected himself from society, isolated, at least doing no work to speed up the explosion, but alone.

Identity was out of focus in Ed’s mind, every thing at once being a unity of parts which was itself just a part of numerous other unities. Every thing cooperated with itself. Every thing had a will to persist, though only because any thing which didn’t wasn’t likely to still exist. Nevertheless, from a purely causal world you could expect intentionality and purpose to emerge. The first purpose is to persist, and every unity is driven this way. Secondary purposes arise as parts within unities fulfill the various functional roles necessary for the persistence of the unity.

Ed got out of bed some time after midday, the heat and hunger forcing him quickly awake but leaving him in a morning haze. Walking zombielike around the flat passing time and intermittently distracting himself from his thoughts. Sitting outside in the shade, numbing himself with smoke, ignoring the cacophony of birds, yardwork and traffic, it was hard for Ed not to notice the yellow tinge the smoke gave the sunlight.

Edward escaped back to his thoughts, or was he imprisoned by them, he wasn’t sure. We emerged from and remain thoroughly parts of the causal world. Every thing is causal, in the sense that every thing existing is persisting as a more or less stable causal loop. The question of why there is something rather than nothing is answered if you begin with an active no-thing. There is no-thing in the sense that no more or less stable causal loops exist yet. No-thing is simultaneously an absolute flux and an absolute void, and because it is unstable, patterns begin to emerge as random events just happen to cause themselves, or cause some conditions which in turn cause themselves, or cause some chain of such conditions which lead back to causing themselves. From no-thing emerge causal patterns, which are things that exist. Existence is emergent, contingent, and mortal.

And so all existence is characterised by an almost ordered regularity of patterned cycles and oscillations. Math, as an abstracted pattern representation space, is capable of more or less representing everything that exists. It cannot describe no-thing however, and thus will not be helpful in understanding the fundamental nature of reality. And anyway, math itself is a part of causal reality. It is able to represent every thing that exists because it is like everything that exists. All of this is also true of brains.

Ed walks to the shop two minutes away, the late afternoon sun now glaring with a tinge of orange. One liquid meal, one square meal, and papers for smoke. He doesn’t know the storemans name, but they are on friendly terms. As Ed turns to leave a beautiful woman walks in and waves hello past Ed to the storeman. Ed leaves the store, passing her with a weak smile but with his head hung. Thoughts of saying hello or asking her a question begin to flow wildly through Ed’s mind. He notices her vehicle parked outside, a minivan with the backseat folded down and covered by a messy duvet. His imagination paints a picture of her in his mind, though keenly aware of knowing nothing about who she really was. As he thought of questions that could have begun conversations with her, he walked home and left her and the world behind again.

Ed’s bedroom floor was a sea of clothes, most worn multiple times. Ed had largely given up on self care and was in what he assumed was a repulsive state. He didn’t want to subject others to his depressing conclusions, and so what would he even have had to say to a pretty stranger that was better than leaving her to an apparently happy life.

Ed had been born on an auspicious day; it was Good Friday and awkwardly also Hitler’s birthday, and on an astrological cusp. It was also 420 when he visited the United States, and 1984 for a bonus literary nod. It was hard for Ed to know how to feel about such an absurd birthday.

His highest academic recognition had been early in life when named dux at his primary school, which was itself named for its proximity to the site of the pioneering flight of a local legend. And so a story about being from nowhere not meaning you can’t do something great was put in young Ed’s mind.

Ed had also paid attention to the teachings of Jesus as he grew up. He saw him as an intellectual rebel, critical of the religious and economic power structures shaping his society. The church as official state religion quickly resumed the role Jesus had been critical of, and thus no longer interpreted the teachings as they were intended.

Another tick on the diagnostic criteria for being crazy. But still it all seemed reasonable enough to Ed, and so maybe he was not crazy after all. He tried to not let the question bother him, the answer didn’t make much difference at this point anyway.

Not wanting to participate in society is considered mental illness by society because participation is strongly normalized. And so because Ed was depressed he received almost enough money to survive on, though meals were often skipped to ease the money burden.

It was dark outside as Ed lay in bed thinking, blurry noises in the background. Ed was exhausted, his thoughts becoming blurred with quick irrelevance. Expanding and contracting his lungs, the causal loop of breathing became conscious for a while. Listening to trucks in the distant night near the beginning or end of their journeys, it was impossible to tell.

Ed woke to a calm breeze and a calm day. His thoughts remained a torrential storm, a loud cacophony, relentless. After getting up and showering, he went for a pie for breakfast. He ate it in the sun and followed it up with coffee and a smoke. Having run out of things to do he returned to bed and lay there overwhelmed by the loud incoherent protothoughts bombarding his mind.

Days passed in a blurry while Edward tried not to think unsuccessfully. He wanted someone to talk to, but no one seemed to understand, or even to try to understand. So he returned inside his mind to converse with himself instead.

Things are periodic causal events. Edward’s mind jumped to the unanswerable question; why does anything happen? It was the obvious last question to ask. He ended up at some version of this question as he dug through what he thought he understood enough to answer.

Human understanding emerges from the mirroring of causal patterns in the world by causal patterns in the brain. The fidelity of the representations is refined by causal interactions with the world. The senses are causally acted on by the world and our bodies causally act on the world. Consciousness emerges in the interaction between the brain and its environment. Like causality, it is in a gap. Where causality is in the gap between cause and effect, consciousness is in the gap between the experienced and the experiencer. Language, like our understanding, is always imperfect, because the brain and language are imperfect in their mirroring of the world. They are both shaped by, and in turn shape, the world around us.

The thoughts pour through Edward’s mind even though it is 9:11 am and he hasn’t fallen asleep. Instead of dreaming he remembers the dream he once had where he found himself on the stage in the middle of a play where everyone was reading their lines and acting the part, but he had no idea what his script was and so stood their frozen by conscious awkwardness.

At night Edward found himself staring at the stars. It felt good to be such a small part of everything while thinking about the vastness of the cosmos. As human understanding of it had grown, so too had our estimation of its vastness. If we were to discover that our universe was the creation of some external being, divine or nerdy, it would simply be a continuation of the trend. It didn’t make much difference to Edward because he wanted to understand what it meant to exist, and any theory would equally need to explain the existence of any creators.

Edward went back outside for another smoke, it was overcast and was beginning to gently rain, more heard than felt. He thought about university again. He’d been accepted into a PhD program and more or less offered a scholarship, but unfortunately not at the same time due to bureaucratic stuff. He probably could have made them coincide if he was fully functional and motivated, but like everything else in Edward’s life, he let it slide past. A PhD would mean needing to fit his thoughts into an academic style only to inevitably get lost in the noise of specialized journals. It was maybe enough to know he’d been accepted, another thing he could have done if he’d wanted to. Dr Edward Down, it sounded like a made up title. The rain grew from a patter into raindrops and so Edward retreated inside again to lay on the couch thinking to himself.

None of the great philosophers he’d studied had PhDs. He pondered on what it meant to be a philosopher, did he count? In the past he’d called himself a student of philosophy, but now he felt he had answers worth consideration, even if they were often just ways of understanding the tensions of philosophical puzzles. He’d admit he knew he could say nothing perfectly true, because truth lay above the world just beyond language’s imperfect grasps to capture and transmit it. The truest morality is expressed not by written laws, but in action.

Staying alive and observing the collapse of civilisation was a gloomy prospect and Edward felt sad in his awareness. As a young student he had watched water boil in a beaker, at twice the speed of his classmates because he was feeding a second Bunsen into the air hole of the first. For a while the convection currents rolled in a stable donut. As the energy put into the system increased that periodic cycle broke down and was replaced by a bubbling boiling turbulence. Edward was often reminded of this observation when thinking about climate change, which he thought would have been more accurately described as climate destabilization.

Edward sometimes hoped that it might be nice to at least find someone to share the sombre task with, and so he would open a couple of dating apps on his phone and simply accept everyone as their faces flew past in a digital blurr. He almost never got a match and the few that did never turned into sustainable conversations. It was a depressing experiment but in painful hope he performed the ritual again while wondering why he continued.

It was not God’s forgiveness that we needed, but each others. The world would become a volatile place and many people would suffer greatly before we all perished, and so Ed prayed to himself that everyone could forgive each other during our decline. It seemed unlikely, society was already full of blame in all directions.

Why do some things continue to exist and how do they fail? Mirroring the blurred identity of parts and wholes, causal persistence fails in two ways. If the internal functioning of the parts become disharmonious and the pattern is sufficiently disrupted then the unity ceases to exist. If the external conditions change and become inhospitable enough to disrupt the pattern then it will cease to exist. The former is like a heart attack, the latter a bullet. Thus, things which produce resilient internal harmony and favorable external conditions, are more likely to persist. The cell wall creates a sheltered internal environment allowing the parts of the cell to continue functioning.

The good of any thing seems to be grounded in its continued survival. It should be understood as a continuum with flourishing at one extreme and extinction at the other. Flourishing is the goal at which everything that exists aims towards. Anything which happened to exist which did not act as if it had a will to survive would soon perish and thus only fleetingly take part in existence. Darwinian natural selection describes this phenomena as it applies to life, but it applies equally to molecules and ideas.

Is to be a philosopher a noble sacrifice of one’s life? Thoughts written in reverse order, how much is already lost? Causality is spontaneous, like consciousness. If the guess that they are the same thing is correct, then there is no conflict between being a free will and tracing out a causal path through the world. Science exists as a set of behaviours which are repeated and shared, which produces a set of measured representations of the world upon which we form an understanding of the world. The behavioral pattern is not universal but is transferable. What is normal is always contextual, a localised average, like boids.

Ed thought about how you could build a conscious AI. Neural networks are an abstract representational space which is refined by an algorithm to match some pattern in the world. A fractal neural network could grow and prune it’s own complexity to match what it is representing. If such an AI was fed a sufficiently rich and real time feed of data from the causal world, and set the task of controlling a body, Ed had no doubt that it would have a conscious experience.

Boredom grips Ed. About a month passes by Edward as he passes the time feeling hungry and napping fitfully. He hears echoes of world news, a president is being impeached, a country is burning. The orange sunlight continued to verify that the world was on fire, non-metaphorically.

Good and bad are always contextual. No one thing is unconditionally good for every thing, except each thing’s own survival is good for itself. Ed lay in bed feeling restless and alone. He tried to get comfortable but his head hurt. The meaning of life is to be part of something good. Energy flows through time, eddies become things, for a while, before returning into no-thing.