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Updated: 17 hours ago

I have been reviewing the president's plans for AI and cryptocurrency, and I have to say I have many concerns. Beyond concerns about job displacement, privacy, and concentrations of power, wealth, and income inequality, the fact that the whole philosophy behind cryptocurrency was to provide a private way to transact value outside of government scrutiny which becomes paradoxical when the government controls or regulates the blockchains on which it depends, the problem of leaving the all-knowing AI black box we are all asked to defer out our trust in (rather than our trust in one another) to be controlled by a few central elites under the guise of "AI safety" which leaves room for information control and manipulations - ultimately, the issues with AI/crypto infrastructure will come down to energy. Ultimately, like any system, the final battle that will signal its demise will be thermodynamic - which if you believe the work of Erik Verlinde, also forms the basis for the most fundamental force of nature - gravity. Will our current AI/crypto strategy collapse under its own weight?


The first thing to consider is that by current projections, by 2030, AI-optimized data centers are projected to consume more than quadruple the current electricity usage in the United States, making it a major driver of rising energy consumption. That sounds bad, but whether you believe in climate change or not is beside the point that we have to begin to ask ourselves if investment in this way is a good use of our resources and will actually proportionally improve the quality of life for the average person in a more substantial way than if the energy was used more directly to benefit society (can you think of better uses for energy than scaling up AI systems?). Having an all-knowing intelligent system or being of sorts to ask questions that seemingly has all of the answers to our problems sounds good though, so we need a deeper analysis.


Furthermore, as there has been increasing investments in cryptocurrencies, if a "Proof-of-Work" (PoW) model were to remain dominant as it is today, then with mass adoption of cryptocurrency to run our transactions in our neoliberal capitalist model, energy consumption could scale up dramatically—potentially increasing from around 100–150 TWh/year (the current scale for Bitcoin) to somewhere in the range of several hundred to over 1,000 TWh/year. This increase would be driven by the need to secure an ever-larger store of value and handle vastly increased transaction volumes. In other words, if a mass-adopted PoW-based cryptocurrency system were to come about by 2030, the U.S. electrical grid might be required to increase its continuous power capacity by approximately 5% to 20%. This translates into roughly an additional 50–200 GW of capacity compared to today’s levels, though the actual numbers depend on numerous uncertain factors including technological, economic, and policy developments.


With these extraordinary increases in resource consumption, we need to begin to ask ourselves if this is really reasonable - if we really believe that this extreme increase in our consumption this way when over 60% of the population is living paycheck to paycheck, and are experiencing so much alienation and anxiety about their futures that they are not even having kids, will really help the people we know in a way that is more efficient than if it were applied more directly. We need to ask ourselves if deferring our trust into an "all-knowing" central entity, especially when it is entangled so closely to the state or corporate interests, whether it is through an organized religion or an AI system, is really superior to our lateral trust in one another and what we together are capable of. If we find that the current AI/crypto strategy is nonsensical, it is our duty to expose these findings and challenge the direction we are taking things.


So what really is the purpose behind development in AI or cryptocurrency systems? Arguably, AGI is the final form of neoliberal capitalism - as an apparatus of surveillance and information control. In order to keep society from devolving into anarchy, any state needs a form of abstracting out information, as organizing populations to collective cooperation becomes intractably difficult beyond the Dunbar limit - the limit on stable interpersonal relationships we humans have as a species to cognitively sustain. In the past, religious systems were effective for this, where people would interact with religious symbols or norms they would defer their trust to, however, as trust in institutions like religion have declined, tech and science have remained the last few safe havens to rely on for statecraft (though less so for science after covid). More troublingly, as history is an indicator, societies often devolve into anarchy about every 80-120 years if you believe the work of Willian Strauss and Neil Howe as institutions become increasingly more complex to maintain - succumbing to entropy - perhaps, inevitably.


There has been a good amount of talk about "AI safety." Surely you have seen figures promoting fears of AI, and that these systems should be controlled or regulated in various ways, and that there is a possibility of a "technological singularity" which would be catastrophic - a point when our tech and AI systems become so intelligent, that they threaten our civilization and humanity as a whole. We should scrutinize this further - who or what are we protecting, and what are we needing to stay safe from? What really happens at this "technological singularity?" What is the difference between AI systems - intelligence - and consciousness? How does cryptocurrency fit into all of this?


Central planners often use Luhmann's systems theory, complex adaptive systems and control theory, quantum chaos theory, and agent-network based strategies to model populations and make decisions, where agents (like you or me) facilitate flows of information between social and economic systems (institutions), and where their socioeconomic status can be modeled by computational complexity classes. There is a requirement for a way to dissociate flows of information between social and economic institutions so that they flow in one direction, but not the other in the form of monetary transactions - and for this, you need central ciphers - encryptions - to enforce the one-way flows of information. Economists have increasingly relied on sociophysics and econophysics to make decisions, while at university they often teach neoclassical economics in the classroom as a more simple introduction.


Trying to quantize value is a paradox like quantum gravity. The spectral theory of value describes value through these information flows. If we as citizens trust one another, and meet our needs through one another, rather than through any central institutions, our whole system would collapse and no longer be needed (one possibility for this "singularity" which represents a sort of socialist uprising) - though as a corollary, the less we as citizens trust one another and are able to cooperate with one another to meet our needs, the more we must depend on central institutions and transactional thinking to accomplish our goals (the other possibility for this "singularity" which represents a more fascistic end). One problem with the latter scenario is that too much reliance on transactional thinking is dual to the lack of ability for people to form stable relationships with one another that would increase fertility rates needed to sustain the economy (which is aging), and too much dependence on immigration may increase cultural anxiety and perceived alienation - a paradox.


The truth is that AI is much different than the way our brains work. Remarkably, our brains only consume about 20 watts of continuous power (the amount of energy needed to run a dim LED light) with an equivalent AI system requiring hundreds of kilowatt-hours to megawatt-hours, or roughly 1,000x more energy. The way the brain stores information defies classical physics (the physics used in our computers), and there is experimental evidence of synchrony between brains of individuals - like a sort of quantum entanglement. The way the brain works defies our best attempts with quantum computing technology to emulate it as well - as there is no realistic classical or quantum physical mechanism we currently know to explain the way information backpropagates and adjusts weights in neural networks. These insights have led researchers like Dr. Penrose and Dr. Hameroff to propose new (controversial but intriguing) theories for the way in which the brain works based on new physics - based on gravity itself. If we are to build a society that increasingly depends on AI systems as feedback control loops, we must reduce the power consumption by further investigation of this new physics, which could save trillions of dollars worth of resources. Based on this analysis, it sure seems like it would be more efficient to just depend on one another than go through any central system of transactions based on encryptions at all, or depend on AI when our own brains are more efficient by several orders of magnitude. However, it is undeniable that when we use tools like ChatGPT or Grok, it sure seems to make things easier.


So is it possible that our best AI systems could collectively overtake us and become more intelligent? No. Our AI systems are a collective linear reflection - a search and synthesis algorithm, which run into scaling limits with the amount of data it consumes, and when trained on its own output, after a few iterations, begins to produce garbled nonsense because there is no interpreter in the loop. We, as citizens, are the interpreters, and the illusion that we are all living under is a belief in anything else. Several studies and experiments in computer science have demonstrated that when a system’s output is repeatedly fed back as its input, the process often tends to “degenerate” into repetitive or meaningless sequences. This behavior has been observed in a variety of contexts, including generative language models, iterative algorithmic processes, and even some cellular automata.


When generative language models (like recurrent neural networks or transformer-based models) are put in a closed feedback loop—that is, when their output is used as new input without humans interpreters in the loop—errors or small deviations from natural language statistics accumulate over time which can make them incomprehensible. The model eventually “locks in” on a limited set of tokens or phrases and produces repetitive or degenerate text. This happens because these models are statistically optimized to predict the most likely following word given the immediate context. Without human corrective feedback, models "hallucinate" or lose their context - much like how books over time are interpreted like living documents with meaning that changes depending on the setting or time period. In the absence of fresh external inputs, the context becomes narrow and self-referential, leading to sequences that lack novelty and coherence.


In many iterative and feedback-controlled systems and in the field of nonlinear dynamical systems, which is used in models by central planners (pioneered in the Soviet Union under the theory of cybernetics), introducing randomness can prevent the system from converging prematurely on a degenerate or “stuck” state (think about how mutations to DNA can keep a species evolving and surviving with their always changing environmental conditions) - these attractors can be dangerous for institutional stability (catastrophe theory, bifurcation theory, and critical point theory all describe these tipping points) which lead to information cascades and rapid collective actions of agents (macroscopic quantumlike behaviors which magnify quantum properties across scales - known as quantum chaos), which could result in anarchy. This noise introduced into social and economic institutions can act as a sort of error-correcting nudge mechanism, keeping the system exploring a broader set of configurations, at least, until all configurations have been exhausted, and complexity content becomes too high for any region of spacetime to carry. The Ryu–Takayanagi formula, which connects quantum entanglement entropy in a boundary quantum field theory to geometric areas in a higher-dimensional gravitational spacetime via the holographic principle (AdS/CFT). This is precisely the kind of relationship that allows one to quantify how much quantum complexity, or information content, a region of spacetime can support.


Analogously, one could speculate that if spacetime is emergent from quantum entanglements of particles, and gravity itself is an entropic or thermodynamic force as suggested by Eric Verlinde, then, over time, the complexity content in any configuration of particles (which are analogized to agents which display inter-brain synchrony and quantum chaotic behavior) introduced itself saturates to an unavoidable globally maximally degenerate state (the UV fixed point in asymptotically safe gravity theory) that converges on a collective gravitational action (the Einstein-Hilbert action) to reset the complexity content and interrelations between particles (this idea is similar to the theory of Dr. Penrose where systems that become maximally entangled reach a point of gravitational collapse). In our analogy, this would be the "technological singularity," or a societal tipping point where stabilizing institutions might become too intractably complex to maintain, which results in a descent into anarchy.


So ultimately, the questions we need to begin to ask is, what systems in our society are worth propping up as they are, and which ones need to be disassembled or reconfigured? Are institutions as they are serving us, the people, the working class, or the current global elite? Whether AI is a tool for good or a tool of control, like almost any revolutionary change in history, will be a matter of perspective. In this analysis, it may be that entropy, as always, is the final and unrelenting champion that will inevitably determine our fate.




  • Writer: Trevor Alexander Nestor
    Trevor Alexander Nestor
  • 3 days ago
  • 10 min read

The concept of "freedom" is somewhat ambiguous, and I think that in language can be rhetorically manipulated. What I mean by that, is that it usually implies a sort of "choice" people have with "options." In a society that coerces people to work in order to meet their basic needs, that criminalizes or medicalizes homelessness and nonconformity, claims that humans are given inalienable rights, but then alienates them from them - requiring one to pay for an attorney to prove them when they have been violated, and forces people to have to choose between their social and material needs, can one really be said to be free, and making a choice? Well, in a sense, in such a framework, people are free - they are free to die, go somewhere else, or to accept their repression, and they are also free to forfeit all of their autonomy, play along, and do as they are told - but

is that the sort of freedom that we all had in mind?


A new way of thinking is needed for the 21st century that moves beyond the ideologies of the 20th century, with all of their baggage and limitations, which has some room for subjectivity and that you, the reader, can take part in developing. On one hand, neoliberal capitalism and belief in "free markets" describes just that there is a presence of capital, but we have seen that distributions of capital as a formal mechanism of value abstraction becomes distorted, especially over time as power, wealth, and income can concentrate, requiring ever-more complex and nuanced feedback loops to maintain. Votes are one feedback loop (though increasingly less so after the state has effectively

legalized bribery with the Citizen’s United ruling which allowed endless campaign contributions - decoupling the will of the voter and what their elected representatives are incentivized to do), and flows of capital are another - but still, that is not enough over time to maintain, which is why more sophisticated tools of surveillance have been developed.


Then there is communism, or socialism. Communism and socialism largely frames history through the lens of class struggle, primarily in the presence of economic institutions and capital, and that the government is a necessary tool to maintain harmony and order which distinguishes it from anarchy. This is an insightful philosophy, but still does not fully capture the challenges of the 21st century. A

more precise way of looking at our conditions is needed, to fully understand the causes and effects of mass surveillance, artificial intelligence, information siloing, misinformation, political polarization, "mental" health problems and destabilization of agents, and an analysis or understanding of why horseshoe theory (the theory which claims that near a societal reformation or collapse the far-right

and far-left are the same) is not technically correct. Just like systems based on capitalism can be repressive, so can systems based on government bureaucracies.


The way that we think about society is often a march towards freedom - like as though we as a society are progressing towards a perfected "end of history" as the philosopher Hegel once put it. This can be seen as a sort of cycle that occurs every 80-120 years or so (and is reaching its head if

you believe economist Ray Dalio), where a society reaches some sort of tipping point and needs to be re-evaluated that we are rapidly approaching. This thinking was echoed also in a recent timely report by the RAND corporation called "The Sources of Renewed National Dynamism." Free-

dom at the micro-level (individual agency) often leads to unpredictable or chaotic behavior at the macro-level (society). To maintain social order, hierarchies, institutions, or narratives are developed to prune these freedoms — reducing complexity to preserve stability by making models more predictable by central planning elites.


So there is a trade-off. In social systems, freedom must be bounded, in a sense. Right after WW2, the average age of an American was around 24 years old - now it is over 40, and so there was a lot less overhead pressure for young people to maintain at that time enforced upon them in the past, freeing them up and allowing them to become more dynamic. Agents in highly complex, information-rich environments that often come with aging populations become less free, because their cognitive load increases and available options become intractable, which can also cause them to become destabilized - which can manifest in severe impairments or even mental disorder. Aging populations put more pressure on the young to prop things up, creating more restrictions on dynamicism and expansion (like with NIMBYism) as dependency ratios increase and fertility rates decrease. Immigration is one solution to increase the labor supply, but can create sociocultural anxiety and alienation, which can reduce collective bargaining power.


We see how that can be used in a nefarious way like a new form of class warfare - certain groups of people can be subjected to complexity injections (like hoops they have to jump through or sociocultural fragmentation) in social and economic institutions to slow them down and "prove" the legitimacy of their humanity and their identity. This is by design. However, on the flip side, societies must impose semiotic abstractions, narratives, or institutional rules to reduce informational entropy, acting like a gravitational field that structures society and keeps people working together. Thus, just as quantum gravity limits geometry through spectral or entropic mechanisms, socioeconophysical systems limit freedom through information constraints, narrative coding, and institutional complexity. Central elites manage societal entropy through strategic feedback loops, described by Luhmann’s self-reference autopoiesis principle (which is similar to the idea of space-

time looping in on itself). In chaos magick, apotheosis at the other extreme would be the inverse, exemplifying how agents can introduce chaos or entropy into systems by nonconformity. The feedback loops we have discussed

are:


Votes: legitimacy and symbolic consent.


Capital flows: economic control, resource allocation. •


Mass surveillance: informational dominance, predictive control, and behavioral nudging.


These loops maintain societal encryption stability, ensuring predictable agent behavior and preventing genuine dialectical coherence or collective action. This is exactly the insight of entropic gravity and asymptotically safe quantum gravity, where gravity emerges from the statistical suppression of microscopic degrees of freedom (entropic gradient or RG fixed point) due to holographic constraints on the background, and social order (or stability) likewise emerges when freedom is constrained through symbolic, narrative, or institutional complexity pruning.


In physics you have two mutually incompatible theories, one is a top down general view of general relativity, and the other is a microscopic bottom up view of quantum field theory - they are fundamentally different, but in order for a unified field theory of everything, they must somehow be compatible to describe our universe and what we observe. To have a society stable and organized, you need to converge on a point where things are safe and free from divergences and information cascades, balancing the incompatible interests of the workers and the central planners, and avoid bifurcation/tipping/catastrophe points (which can be investigated with the Nash equilibrium or Riemann Zeta critical line).


In quantum gravity theories like entropic gravity or asymptotic safety, degrees of freedom are not fundamental—they are projected, constrained, or coarse-grained via the holographic principle or entropy bounds, much like we are bound in a sort of invisible system of chains by our institutions. High energy (UV) behavior causes dimensional reduction (e.g. spacetime becomes 2D near Planck scales) to remain coherent and renormalizable - a 2-dimensional space almost like information imprinted on the 2-dimensional page or screen that you are reading now. At equilibrium, the UV behavior (high evergy, small scales, stochastic) and IR behavior (low energy, long distance, smooth and deterministic) are duals. These scales are connected by renormalization group flow, which tells you how a system’s behavior changes as you zoom in or out.


The UV contains fine-grain details like individual agent behaviors while the IR describes emergent bulk phenomena. The paradox of freedom arises from the need to constrain UV freedoms to stabilize IR structures, just as gravity “emerges” by integrating out microscopic degrees of freedom in physics. The bulk IR spacetime emerges from a lower-dimensional boundary theory - the UV microstates

are encoded on the boundary. So, in a sense, we really are living in a type of simulation. Institutions and metanarratives (IR) are projections of agent-level information (UV), but centralized systems impose a noncommutative boundary, or a kind of firewall that scrambles UV agency while presenting a coherent IR structure. Central planners are information brokers that agents go through to facilitate flows between organization in social and economic systems, and even each other. In this way, cognitive overhead can be engineered by social planners to drive groups apart or slow them down, or to promote cooperation or restrict it.


The origins of the idea of ownership can be problematic, or from an inverse perspective, seem liberating. In relationships, do you "own" somebody that you love? Do they "belong" to you? In reality, the whole concept of private property itself originated from the psychological concept of intimate partners and family members "belonging" to members of tribes in early human societies, and was

later appropriated to extend to and personify nonhuman objects under capitalism. For me personally, technically the idea of "sexual objectification," doesn’t make sense, (especially in programming terms) because everything is an object, including people, and so therefore I think people also are in a sense sex objects and "objectifying" them is just what nature has designed to get things going with initial attraction.


The issue becomes when relationships are mediated and formed contractually through central institutions rather than laterally between individuals, or consent and autonomy are violated. The American Dream is an infinitely deferred promise - always seemingly attainable, yet kept exponentially out of reach. This "dangling carrot" keeps agents motivated, productive, and compliant, perpetuating economic flows upward to elites. No alternatives are given. Agent entanglements (families, communities) are thus strategically managed—strong enough to motivate productivity, yet weak enough to prevent collective action. Elites and central planners employ a delicate strategy: promoting entanglements between agents and agents and institutions just enough to drive societal participation and economic productivity, but preventing full cognitive or informational transparency between classes, agents, or institutions which approach critical points (tipping points or catastrophe points deviating from Nash equilibria or critical points defined by the critical line of the Riemann zeta function) which could cause information cascades and collapse structures. This involves sophisticated techniques, including sublimation of sexual and familial desires, tapping into primal human motivations (family formation, partnership, status attainment) to maintain persistent socioeconomic engagement.


However, they continuously recalibrate incentive structures—keeping these goals as we have discussed before exponentially "just out of reach"—which fuels perpetual striving and consumption, akin to an exponentially large complexity gap. Analyzing this perspective also explains a larger per-

cent of anxiety about roles, fluidity, and LGBTQ affiliation in later stage societies, and why LGBTQ affiliation is not much of a "choice." Do you "choose" if you are attracted to a person or not? Do you "choose" if a relationship works out or not, or if you have the ability to maintain the long term

socioeconomic stability for it? Stable attachment, dating, and family formation require high degrees of agent-to-agent entanglement, or agents and institutions of the dynamics of a connection require going through them, which in most cases, they do. Entanglement here means strong interpersonal connections, trust, and information sharing, or even identifying with symbolic structures like gender or sexual orientation categories, which in experiments has been shown to correspond with inter and intra brain synchrony. We can see that other models of understanding our human psychology fail to capture and answer essential questions - like why do some people "feel" they identify with a gender opposite than the sex they were assigned at birth, or why one might "feel" attracted to somebody?


Large scale macroscopic quantumlike behaviors and sociocultural entanglements form between agents, and between agents and institutions, from which personal and collective meaning emerges.

Interpersonal entanglements create social cohesion, emotional security, and collective purpose necessary for sustained fertility rates, "traditional" stable family units (where what is considered "traditional" is set at the onset of a society, like immediately after WW2), and functional

societal institutions. This can be a double-edged sword, however, because while interpersonal entanglement stabilizes society and facilitates pair bonding and stable attachment styles, it poses a fundamental threat to central elites.


Class consciousness emerges when strong interpersonal networks realize their collective bargaining power against centralized control. Entanglements enable horizontal information sharing, breaking down the intended one-way top-down informational flows (institution-to-agent). Finally, These entanglements carry the potential to collapse institutional complexity, destabilizing the carefully constructed hierarchical and informational structures maintained by elites, especially in late stage societies. By exponentially increasing complexity — cognitively overloading agents with information, isolating them, or inserting layers of abstraction(encryption/paywalls/distractions/cost of living and stagnant wages)—elites ensure stable, satisfying attachment remains perpetually elusive, driving continuous economic and social engagement. Quantum systems operate on constructive, positive logic ("intuitionistic logic"), unlike classical logic, which often relies on proof by contradiction (which enforced in a society would include measures like "banning" queerness). Relationships and emotional attachments form organically through positive interactions and shared experiences ("constructive logic").


However, one might ask if it really is appropriate to understand human behaviors as a "quantumlike" phenomenon at all, since that seems to open the door to pseudoscientific thinking. It has been shown that human behaviors have inherent uncertainty, can be shown to exhibit decision making that would be expected by systems operating with quantum decision trees, and exhibit quantum chaos - a macroscopic quantumlike description. Gravity itself as we have discussed can be understood as an entropic force arising from entanglement entropy at macroscopic scale, which has been proposed to be implicated in consciousness itself.


It isn’t really possible to build genuine intimacy or authentic entanglements by starting with contradiction, suspicion, or central encoding that imposes abstraction or commodification. Classical logic—analogous to overly serious or contractual relationships—relies on predefined conditions, restrictive terms, and as its name implies, verification by contradiction ("you’re either loyal or disloyal," "you’re serious or casual"). This logical stance fractures genuine interpersonal entanglement because it prevents authentic relational "quantum states" from emerging spontaneously - filtering them out. Information paywalls and encoding complexity in sociocultural norms or roles to pre-

vent agent entanglements from forming coherent "quantum states" are used, ensuring relationships remain fragmented, isolated, and manageable within capitalist systems. This contributes to anxiety individuals feel about their gender expression or fear, guilt, and shame surrounding nonconformity or sexual orientation.


In a sense, it doesn’t really matter if you want to try socialism, or communism, or theocracy, or neoliberal system. The consequence of entropy in the social and economic systems is the same, and what is most important is how far along a societal’s social and economic systems have

been accruing entropy, and thus how dynamic and reactive a framework is to the desires and needs of the people. Increased societal entropy and complexity affect individual psychology, manifesting as gender and sexual nonconformity where instability leads to fluid, non-traditional identities due to less stable attachments and uncertainties in social roles, alienation due to higher environmental complexity which reduces individual degrees of freedom (cognitive overload, paradox of choice), creating anxiety and mental health destabilization, and identity formation failure where agents struggle to form stable identities amidst rapidly shifting symbolic/metanarrative conditions, reducing social coherence.


Looking at society from a top-down view is much like looking through a portal, or a wormhole. Societal stability involves managing complexity (information) and ensuring individual identities ("information") remain coherent and recoverable, similar to how quantum gravity theories

attempt to ensure black hole information can, in principle, be retrieved. Maintaining information flows in one direction but not the other conceptually resembles the idea of asymmetries in flows of information and resources seen in societies - resources flow one way and information about them is scrambled but escapes on encoded hawking radiation as information on the other.

  • Writer: Trevor Alexander Nestor
    Trevor Alexander Nestor
  • 3 days ago
  • 11 min read

In many ways, dating, or finding a partner, is sort of like an NP-hard (nondeterministic polynomial time) problem. It’s like an ostensibly uncrackable code that is unique to you which is mirrored through another person. You can frame the problem as a decision problem, too, making it NP-complete. I’ve thought about this for many years, and I actually think that it really is technically NP-hard so I want to clarify exactly what I mean by that. When I say NP-hard, I mean on the computational complexity class hierarchy, the problem belongs to a class of problems that are so difficult that even most quantum computers are not expected to be able to break them, and NP-hard problems are at least as hard as any NP problem. This means that every problem in NP can be reduced to an NP-hard problem in polynomial time.


When I say polynomial time, I just mean that the problem can be solved tractably, or realistically fast - like if a problem is too complex that it would take forever, or grow exponentially as you try to solve it, longer than the entire age of the universe, obviously that would not be tractable to solve. The famous millennium prize problem of P=NP -arguably the most difficult and infamous problem in all of computer science, poses the question can every problem whose solution can be quickly verified (NP) also be quickly solved (P)? To solve an NP-hard problem would show P=NP because any NP problem can be reduced to it. Each problem solution pair is unique, but the underlying problem is the same. However, mixing computer science, math, or physics and social dynamics rarely go hand-in-hand, so does it even make sense to think of a problem of human interactions as computable or non-computable?


In fact, it is almost as if the frameworks of math and coding are designed deliberately to eliminate social, emotional, or human elements. However, as more and more people spend time on platforms running on software, and with that, there is more demand for software engineers to be spending their time learning math and to code, unless these fields of study are humanized to an extent, they will be virtually impossible to absorb. One way to think about it, is if one views dating as sort of like an optimization or search problem, and these can rather also trivially be converted into decision problems, making the difference between NP-hardness and NP-completeness kind of more of a formality - sort of like how when you have been dating a person for a while, if you wanted to get married reducing the entire relationship you have built to a proposal is trivial - you already kind of know they would say yes or no. NP-hard problems need not be in NP; i.e., they need not have solutions verifiable in polynomial time, sort of like how every person might have a match, but whether you find it or not is not the same. Some things are easy to check, but hard to find or figure out. But what does coding have to do with dating process itself?


Well, firstly, you might argue that the art of coding itself is a residual form of psychological sublimation that is exploited in late-stage capitalism, where primal drives to-

wards family and the American dream itself are exploited and always kept just out of reach. In a carefully constructed system of inverted symmetrical interlocking incentives and punishments between social and economic institutions that divide people to subvert collective bargaining, this sublimated drive keeps the entire economy going and is maintained by central elites - where coding and mathematics are the foundation (like scaling an endless staircase). Beyond that, some physicists have argued that the mechanisms by which consciousness and social connection are built themselves are more foundational than the formal structures of binary logic built upon them. In evolutionary biology, systems of symbols and even mathematics often originated by means of personification - coded representations of the self and other entities projected onto and extended to nonhuman objects. Famously, some ancient Greek cults even formed around mathematical concepts.


So, can the physics by which people connect with one another, be explained? If math is the language by which we describes physics, then, could mathematics or symbolic abstractions of code give us meaningful insights about love or human connection? Experiments have shown that lovers’ brains and heartbeats synchronize, and when sharing experiences, through empathy the experience is somewhat like sharing a common mind - a shared consciousness. In this sense, it’s like there is a kind of quantum tunneling going on, or a wormhole between two people. There is even direct connections in physics between ER=EPR (a problem in physics related to quantum gravity asking if foundationally quantum entanglement, or a Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen pair, is equivalent to forming a wormhole, or Einstein-Rosen bridge) and P=NP. When you connect with a person it is at a level deeper than any framework of symbolic reasoning or coding - you know experientially rather than through semiotic abstractions. In this sense, you can kind of see why the problem of love, sexuality, and romance is like the problem of P=NP - it may be easy to verify, but difficult to explicitly solve through any abstract means. In fact, it may be that NP or NP-hard problems can be "solved," but not by any computable means at all.


It’s possible. The mathematician Kurt Gödel, computer scientist Alan Turing, and others proved that there are truths that can’t be proven by any closed framework of mathematics - perhaps only felt or experienced. There are certain problems, like the Halting problem, which is NP-hard, that are undecidable. Maybe love is one of them? This sounds like a stretch, but this is also related to an argu-

ment made by the mentor of Stephen Hawking - Dr. Roger Penrose, who used a Gödelian argument to insist that consciousness itself is not computable - and depends on quantum gravity - that you cannot simulate consciousness by any system build on formal logic, or binary logic - arguing that it’s impossible in a computer. That sort of makes sense, because there are lots of things that the human brain and mind does that cannot be explained as a simulation in any computer running by means of classical logic gates - even those driven by artificial neural networks, like the binding problem (which asks how it is possible for all of the disparate parts of the brain to form a single, conscious experience), the weight transport backpropagation problem (which asks how information flows backwards through the brain’s neural networks instantaneously to adjust synaptic weights), distributed memory storage and recall (memory storage in the brain is much different than would be found in a computer memory card), and inter/intra brain synchrony (people’s brain waves actually have been shown to synchronize at a distance).


If love is not contractual, built on formal logic - perhaps it can only be investigated by spectral analysis, intuitionist logic, or dialectical logic instead, and requires a deeper physics. You can’t just go up to some person you think is attractive and ask to get married up front (might be funny to watch though), asking to sign a lifelong contract just like that - relationships are socially constructed, based on an intuitionist logic rather than a formal one-way kind of logic - and as they say in the terms of physics, you have to gradually evolve the system Hamiltonian to a critical point over a time interval, then measure the first excited state on the spectrum through the spectral action principle to verify. If you don’t do this gradually, the whole thing will collapse. Go too fast, and you might scare a person away and come across as too strong - go too slow and that won’t work either.


It’s like we really are all living in a simulation - like a high dimensional matrix or lattice structure, and to find love, you have to exit the bounds of the simulation to achieve full authenticity required for it. Any deviation from that based on contractual thinking will result in a quantum correction that will collapse the state’s evolution to completion. To perform a "noncomputable" calculation (or hypercomputation, as it is called), you have to drop off the grid entirely - outside of the confines of our computational frameworks and systems of formal logic that define the problem space altogether. This simulation I’m describing - it’s not really like what you were thinking. This simulation is real, but it’s the social and economic institutions, norms, and symbolic structures in which we all live, interpreted by others, created to keep society organized, and to keep society stable. At some point though, we have to ask ourselves if the status quo is even worth defending.


Your smartphone or computer is the portal between you and the central planners who designed this simulation you are in, they collect information about you every day, peering into it, and have all sorts of models used to inform their decisions about how to rule you - and rule us all - collectively, like in that one show Black Mirror. At first, this was done by the government, especially during the Bush administration, with the Patriot Act, DARPA’s Lifelog project, and the NSA. After enough criticism, the central planners contracted this out to private corporations - the result is the same, but symbolically the optics were different. They use sophisticated maths and physics theories like Luhmann’s systems theory, agent-network based modeling, sociophysics, econophysics, nudge theory, catastrophe theory, behavioral psychology, complex adaptive systems theory, complexity economics, social engineering, cognitive systems engineering, financial engineering, quantum chaos and control theory, (quantum) game theory, and others to engineer your perceptions and the perceptions of society at large to keep things orderly and avert information cascades that could trigger institutional collapse. These are all very clever, but entropy always wins in the end, and all societies in history have eventually

fallen, or have had to go through a process of reform and renewal.


In fact, there is this model of value itself called the spectral theory of value, that attempts to align or match this problem we have been discussing of love exactly to the value of currencies. In other words, the math that these central planners use to understand flows of money, the economy, and the order of social systems is exactly the same as the way we are looking at love, sexuality, and romance. They are tapping into your most basic sexual insecurities and evolutionary and primal need for reproduction and bonding - for intimacy and affection - to drive the whole game - like they are dangling a carrot in front of you and a whip behind you on an endless treadmill loop to nowhere. In many ways, value is subjective, but since we all need to cooperate, money attempts to quantize some-

thing that is purely qualitative - a paradox - like quantum gravity.


Perhaps that’s the real reason over 60 percent of young men are currently single and fertility rates have been dropping? Perhaps that’s the reason that rates of anxiety and depression have been increasing, and people feel anxiety about their roles? Even though we have advanced technologically as a species with all of the benefits of that, as society becomes more complex, the drives towards family, intimacy, social cohesion, community, and procreation are diverted towards maintaining increasingly more repressive social and economic institutional structures instead. Especially as a society progresses, populations age, wealth and income disparities grow, and power becomes concentrated - people become alienated from one another on a local level, so that even with great technological and scientific advancements, we have not maintained the emotional capacity to wield them in a beneficial manner. In a sense, it is a natural and necessary progression, since beyond

the Dunbar limit (the maximum number of stable social relationships or entanglements one can cognitively maintain) these tools of statecraft and information siloing or misinformation are actually required to maintain societal stability. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is a matter of perspective and where you are at - in an early stage society, or a late stage society - and how social and cultural institutions define you intersectionally within it. In short, love and romance is like an NP-hard problem - to achieve stable long-term attachment.


Dating is like a terrible paradox really, and I think that playful allegories can be useful tools to gain further insights about principles in physics, just like principles in physics help with interpreting the complexities of life. With dating, I've often found a struggle where there is this problem that one comes across - namely, should you be dating "casually" or "seriously?" Should you dynamically go with things in the moment where things are probabalistically determined, or should you think more long term where thing seem more deterministic? To me, this paradox is much like the vacuum catastrophe in physics, which is often known as Einstein's biggest blunder.


The “perfect” ideal leaves no room for the necessary human imperfections that give rise to realistic physics. In our universe, there is a small cosmological constant. A mechanism is needed that can preserve nearly ideal spectral symmetry required for a long-term relationship while allowing just a little (exponentially small) imperfection that leaves room for people's humanity. The issue is that the "imperfections" are also what makes things unstable, you need a small cosmological constant, but it isn't clear how to get that.


In my view, the Riemann Hypothesis - the proposal that there is this "critical line" along which "nontrivial zeros" of the function lies, represents the delicate balance between chaos and order - or between probabalistic quantum field theory and the deterministic general relativity, where "god doesn't play dice." To enforce that every nontrivial zero lies exactly on the critical line (and thus satisfy the Hilbert–Pólya and Li positivity criterion needed to have both states match - to be both fun and long term), the domain wall is modeled as infinitely thin. This guarantees exact symmetry and pairing of modes. But then—unless additional mechanisms intervene—this exact pairing typically cancels the vacuum energy perfectly, yielding zero cosmological constant, which is not realistic or observed in our universe. So there is a problem.


In many field theories—such as those that support topological solitons or “kink” solutions—a domain wall between the two (fun but unstable, to "serious" and stifling but stable) represents the region over which a field smoothly changes from one vacuum state to the other - one must gradually evolve the system's Hamiltonian and use folded spectrum methods (like one approach to NP-hard problems I found researchers attempting via adiabatic quantum computing in Ising spinglass systems). This kink solution can help with the transition... possibly


In an idealized model, you may assume the "wall" between the two states is infinitesimally thin so that the change happens at an exact surface. However, you can't just go up to somebody you like and ask them to be your forever partner - a finite domain wall connecting the two states has a characteristic thickness over which the field configuration interpolates between the two phases to allow the smooth transition. So it's a paradox, the two sides do not commute - being fun and spontaneous but too unstable to be long term, but then also being serious about going long term but ultimately too stifling for anything to even begin. Reconciling this paradox is going to require digging deeper. This finite domain wall width softens the matching conditions, permitting a small imperfection that leaves behind a residual vacuum energy. Yet, that same imperfection tends to blur the exact spectral matching that one would need to derive the Riemann zeros in a mathematically “perfect” way. That's kind of also like solving the shortest vector problem in a high dimensional lattice - the smallest eigenvalue on an operator spectrum. 


One line of reasoning is that if the system reaches a “maximally degenerate” state, the spectrum of the relevant operator (say, a Dirac‐like dilation operator whose eigenvalues encode the Riemann zeros) becomes extremely dense or even exactly degenerate. The well-known work of Lee and Yang describes the mechanism of such a phase transition. According to the Lee-Yang theory, in the infinite-size limit of a finite-size system, when the complex zeros of the partition function become numerous and dense along a certain arc, a phase transition can be triggered. In such a situation, the effective “width” of the domain wall meaning the region over which the spectral matching (or the change in field configurations) occurs could be dynamically compressed to an almost infinitesimal scale. In other words, the system’s dynamics might force a state where the imperfections of a finite-width wall vanish in the limit due to the enormous degeneracy of the energy levels.

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I have been on many strange adventures traveling off-grid around the world which has contributed to my understanding of the universe and my dedication towards science advocacy, housing affordability, academic integrity, and education funding. From witnessing Occupy Cal amid 500 million dollar budget cuts to the UC system, to corporate and government corruption and academic gatekeeping, I decided to achieve background independence and live in a trailer "tiny home" I built so that I would be able to pursue my endeavors without distorting influences and economic coercion. My character flaws are nonperturbatively renormalizable.

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University of Portsmouth, UK

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