The Unknown

We don’t know most things. We start from before birth by knowing practically nothing, but are curious to find out and quickly make purposes to discover things.

Very soon (often within a few months), something we didn’t know will have hurt us. From that point, we live fearing “the Unknown”. As we gain experiences, this compounds as we discover new forms of the Unknown that may hurt us. If we don’t, our recklessness will tend to get us killed while we’re still young.

Most of our efforts in life are in conquering the Unknown. Most of our creations are either attempts to make us feel things more accurately about the Unknown, or to minimize pain from what the Unknown may bring. Science is a powerful method of reducing the Unknown.

We can never completely defeat the Unknown. Death is the greatest Unknown, and also one of our greatest fears for that reason. Every religion is an attempt to answer the Unknown, and all aspects of theology are attempts to make sense of God(s) that are the very essence of that Unknown (since we certainly know very little about the entirety of anything that is God).

Even complete understanding isn’t exempt from the Unknown. As time deteriorates memory, all we understand becomes more of that Unknown. Habits become the Unknown across time as we forget the decisions that drove them, but we deceive ourselves to be certain of it because the consequences feel familiar.

We are stubborn, though, and we constantly conquer the Unknown. Most of our stories are the conflict between the Known and Unknown, with “good” stories being the ones that expanded the Known or defeated the Unknown. We also embody the Unknown as a symbol of a monster, with the hero as the one who defeats the Unknown.

Frequently, how the Unknown is conquered is a pattern the creator is attempting to communicate as a portion of living the good life.

Artists tend to draw from the raw Unknown. Analysts tend to make the artists’ works into more ordered things to make them more useful.

Chaos

We believe something to have order when we’ve distinctly separated values in our mind, especially as we perceive our environment.

We interpret anything we don’t directly understand as chaos. It may be from a lack of information connected to a purpose that affects us, or the story we perceive conflicts with our expectations (e.g., a messy room or a cluttered sentence).

We treat completely unordered chaos as bad, but it’s nothing more than pure randomness that sometimes works against what we want, and it can work in our favor just as much.

Our minds naturally repel chaos and strive for order when we perceive, but this is often impossible from the inherent state of nature. Anytime we develop “two” things instead of “one”, it forms some degree of unknown by the strict necessity of our need to divide it.

While it’s not inherently obvious, we find meaning in making order out of chaos, proportionally to our openness to experience. Complete order is boring to us, and complete chaos overwhelms us, so there’s always a balance that leads to living correctly.

Nature itself is inherently chaotic, with a semi-maintained semblance of order contained within it (e.g., how rivers form). We, in our humanity, are the opposite: inherently ordered, with a semi-deconstructed chaotic element contained within it.

Severity

Contrary to what many people imagine, chaos isn’t complete disarray. We can generally group chaos into a few broad classes as we observe it:

1. Unknown Order – the order that was created elsewhere beyond our comprehension, such as the mechanisms behind technology, or whatever we envision God to have created.
2. Natural Chaos – the natural state of reality, which has large-scale general rules but is completely disordered on the small-scale. For example, sand and sticks on a beach will be in disarray, but a desert won’t show piles of blood, stones, fish, and snow.
3. “Cthulhu” Chaos – complete disorder, with no rules to define things.

Partial chaos doesn’t work well with us, and we tend to treat any chaos with distrust, even when we know of the Unknown, and that uncertainty frequently interferes with rational decision-making. The nature of mnemonics and symbols is our mind’s attempt to impose patterns onto things without patterns, and language is how we harness the unknown.

Interestingly, as we perceive chaos, Cthulhu Chaos doesn’t actually “exist”, but our perceptions tend to deceive us to where our feelings define Natural Chaos as Cthulhu Chaos.

We tend to demarcate between “man-made” and “natural” by how much order we interpret something to have. A rock is natural, but a statue is man-made. However, everything possesses some base sense of order behind all the chaos, as science can demonstrate.

Ordering

Amazingly, we’re so good at making order out of chaos that our self-made patterns and symbols are often very reliable in the face of complete chaos.

Unfortunately, we equally run the risk of building superstitions that have no bearing in any legitimate statistical reality.

The only way to differentiate between finding superstition and truth in the fog of what we don’t know is to wait until we have a clearer view of it. At that point, we can scientifically prove whether we were deriving a reliable pattern or not.

Further, when we form order incorrectly, there are only two ways to fix it:

1. Adhere to another form of order instead.
2. Dismantle the order we had built, which is emotionally difficult because we’ll feel we pursued a wasted effort and invites back the chaos we had formed the order to avoid in the first place.

Time

Time is a unique element of the Unknown that perpetually interferes with our daily existence:

1. Things happen and we vividly remember them.
2. We slowly forget what happened, but hold on to information that might be useful later.
3. We use that information to craft what we perceive into the future, correcting errors as we get more reliable.
4. Eventually, we can live our daily lives with the well-known present, alongside the fading past and imaginary future.

How we prioritize these 3 perspectives (past/present/future) affects almost everything in our lives:

Our personality dictates this balance, but those personalities are driven by how we frame the risks of the different parts of the Unknown:

1. The Present is the most known we have, and the basis for all phenomenology and anything we can actually call reality, but also isn’t very useful by itself.
2. The Past is the second-most known we have, proportional to how near it is to us in time and how reliable our memories are. It also represents some of the worst qualities that we need to change, and we run the risk of falling behind the trends.
3. The Future is the least known possible, and represents many possibilities based on many parts of what we don’t know. However, it’s also where we accomplish things and find the most meaning. Unfortunately, it’s also devastating to our relationships with others and too much focus on it can destroy society.

Scaling Order

Because order is a value, it can compound on itself to establish an elaborate system. However, we only interpret order when it accomplishes a purpose we expect. If that thing fails the expectation (such as a broken-down car) we tend to believe it’s “out of order”, even though it’s often still 99.999% in order.

Civilization is a type of social order, with inspiration, groups, and technology that all form from baser components. We can spend so much time engaging with it, though, that we forget the entire thing is built on nature. On the political spectrum, conservatives try to preserve order that has already been created while liberals try to create new order.

Destroying order without another type of proven order to replace it is often evil, and usually risky. We are prone to mistaking others destroying as mindless when they’re attempting to recreate reality differently. It takes humility and patience to understand others’ motivations, which is venturing into an unknowable domain because people lie.

Scaling Chaos

Every aspect of order also creates an aspect of chaos through the new domain of Unknown attached to the known domain.

For that reason, chaos can build recursively into systems as order builds. At any time, increases in order can bring about latent chaos to bring about a type of destruction of everything that had been established.

Application

We’re stuck with incessant chaos in our most mundane experiences:

• You have no idea what will happen today, and only presume it.
• Nothing you trust is entirely safe.
• No two of your thoughts are technically the same, since they travel down different neural pathways each time, and habits reinforce any thought that does repeat.

The Unknown isn’t “bad”, but it’s unpredictable. From our perspective, God and the devil come from the same place. However, we focus on the bad, so we group it that way.

Over time, as the Unknown becomes known, a society will prioritize the domain of predictable and controllable things over sending efforts into unknowable things. This means secular societies who abandon their religious background tend to lean farther into environmentalism and prioritize mathematical estimation over intuition.

We hate the Unknown so much that we constantly hedge our bets against it, even when it doesn’t make sense:

• People will play a game of pure chance more confidently against a dimwitted opponent, as if their opponent’s intelligence mattered.
• We trust the dice we control over dice others roll.
• Incumbent political figures have an unfair advantage over their rivals.
• We’ll take the answers to a quiz with trivial questions and no consequences over a candy bar, even though we imagine ourselves taking the candy bar beforehand.

Fear of the Unknown is good to a point. However, we must still manage it, or it’ll bury us. The easiest way to do it is through as much education as we can acquire on the subject, and accept what we can’t know.

We’re always stuck with the Unknown, so we must learn to accept it. This is terrifying, and people with an ambitious personality will often act without realizing how much they let the possibilities of the Unknown define their actions. These people are frequently the most successful, but also the most unaware. The converse of this problem makes intelligence create inaction.

We wish to find meaning in the Unknown so heavily that we trust things we probably shouldn’t:

• People buy lottery tickets because they hope that the improbable could happen to them.
• Even if a religion only has a few of its adherents achieving immortality, people still follow it out of hope that they could attain it.

We make sense of chaos as we see it. This is often good, but can backfire if we’re not careful:

• We may assume others’ order is the same as our own.
• Our obsession with what we’ve experienced may interfere with the ability to attain a good life.
• It’s easy to over-apply reasoning to the Unknown, which will make us overthink when it’s time to perform.

More information isn’t always better. At times, that extra information can cloud our judgment from other semi-aware information we would have otherwise observed.

Different cultures create order in different forms, which often builds along the patterns of what language provide (e.g., number of words to describe one specific thing) and frames itself through the myths, superstitions, and stories they share with each other.

Never disrespect creations that ever add value. While later creators make things that add more value, they required the original creator (or chain of creators) to draw from the Unknown.

If we feel dissatisfied with too much order, we might break something just to watch what happens. This is good for discovering reality scientifically, but it has risks if we break the wrong thing.

Chaos isn’t as bad as you think, even if it’s absolutely terrifying. You’re in the right to be afraid, but are more capable toward acting than you realize (and absolutely must).

The preservation of order is a natural impulse, and worth knowing to understand how others think. We must be mindful of what we destroy and what we’re using to replace it, but the Unknown is where we draw our creativity and where the social risks become highly influential trends.

Whenever we see any disorder, our impulse is to focus on it. In reality, that disorder is built on a ton of previous order, which could all be destroyed if we don’t observe its significance before making decisions.

The best way to prepare for what scares us is to think ahead of time. Risk management is a premeditated action.

If you don’t know and can’t know, wait and watch. Eventually, you’ll know. Even whether God exists will become clear to us all.

We often believe our memories are pristine. However, they’re open to failure and not very reliable as time passes. Thus, we should only partly trust ourselves about our perspective as a scientific reality, consistently cross-reference it with others’ to be as certain as possible, and quickly change our value system if we find we’re wrong.

The feeling of betrayal is uniquely devastating to us because it’s a deconstruction of the order we had imagined existed.

How we focus on the past, present, and future dictates how we prioritize the Unknown for our purposes. This represents itself in the way we choose to live and the groups we associate with.

Even if someone could predict the stock market, they wouldn’t be able to keep predicting it because their prediction would affect the stock market recursively.