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A batch of the best highlights from what Tristan's read, .
This process of information accumulation and modification is a probabilistic computation. The reason it works is simple. Very small changes are usually not at all improbable. The smallest possible changes are of the yes/no, up/down, either/or type. Such choices are typically characterized by 50/50 odds of one or the other possibility happening, or of one being better than the other. In contrast, undirected large changes are wildly improbable.
The Engine of Complexity
John Hollenbeck and John Mayfield
Our ego is a fiction of stable self-hood which maintains itself by perpetuating the distinctions of "what I am/what I am not, what I like/what I don't like", beliefs about ones politics, religion, gender preference, degree of free will, race, subculture etc all help maintain a stable sense of self. - Hine, Phil (2009a). *Condensed Chaos: An Introduction to Chaos Magic*.
Chaos Magic - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Taken together, the artifacts comprised a giant sculpture, spanning more than a quadrillion dimensions. The Transmuters had built a structure that dwarfed universes, but touched each one only lightly. They hadn’t turned whole worlds to rubble, they hadn’t reshaped galaxies in their image. Having evolved on some distant, finite world, they’d inherited the most valuable survival trait of all. Restraint.
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