The DNA of any two people on Earth is supposedly 99.6 percent identical. If such biological uniformity flies in the face of all of our supposed uniqueness as people, could there also be a universal algorithm determining the course of each of our lives?
While the concept of Karma is often used in pop culture as a synonym for punishment based on an entirely subjective concept of deservedness, I believe it to be a description of the infinitely interwoven complexity of causes and conditions in our shared reality, like a universal algorithm churning out most likely results based on combinations of inputs. Under this logic, this very moment, our present selves, are the cumulative result of every decision and choice that we have ever made, that everyone has ever made, of everything that has ever occurred in the universe in an unbroken sequence since the dawn of time. It is not personal, nor does it care about intention any more than it being a lever of probability for certain outcomes.
Similarly, identity and individuality has become precious in our culture, but contrary to this popular mythos of self, I often wonder just how few human stories are actually playing out. Swap out a few details of an identical plot or zoom out wide enough and the argument can be made that we are all treading through remarkably similar trauma loops and life trajectories, chasing the reunion of psychological wholeness through universally shared archetypes, like the “more-human-than-the-humans” android hosts of Westworld.
A loss for our ego-based individualism, but, oddly, a win for our deepest spiritual truths of empathy and unity.
So while our default psychological programming seems to be mostly myopic, I believe you can take a hyperopic look around and see yourself in anyone, because at our base psychological or karmic level we are all more similar than we’d like to believe, perhaps merely living out minutely subtle variations of a cybernetic formula so vast it becomes opaque to our biologically limited perception.
"society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part."
–Norbert Wiener
Influences and Inspirations
Cybernetics is a wide-ranging scientific and philosophical field concerned with circular causal processes such as feedback, where the observed outcomes of actions are taken as inputs for further action in ways that support the pursuit and maintenance of particular conditions or their disruption, forming a circular causal relationship.
In other words, actions, consequences, and lessons learned.
algorithm
[ al-guh-rith-uhm ]
noun
Mathematics. a set of rules for solving a problem in a finite number of steps, such as the Euclidean algorithm for finding the greatest common divisor.
Computers. an ordered set of instructions recursively applied to transform data input into processed data output, such as a mathematical solution, search engine result, descriptive statistics, or predictive text suggestions.