What is a beautiful concept or idea that continues to blow your mind?

For me it is Cellular Automata, and more precisely the Game of Life.

Imagine a giant Excel spreadsheet where the cells are randomly chosen to be either “alive” or “dead”. Each cell then follows a handful of simple rules.

For example, if a cell is “alive” but has less than 2 “alive” neighbors it “dies” by under-population. If the cell is “alive” and has more than three “alive” neighbors it “dies” from over-population, etc.

Then you sit back and just watch things play out. It turns out that these basic rules at the individual level lead to incredibly complex behaviors at the community level when you zoom out.

It kinda, sorta, maybe resembles… life.

There is colonization, reproduction, evolution, and sometimes even space flight!

fiat_lux,

People working together to solve problems without personal profit as the main incentive.

Djangofett,

Open source software

fiat_lux,

Dear God, it's beautiful. (And genuinely seriously important)

KoboldCoterie,
@KoboldCoterie@pawb.social avatar

It kills me how much more of it there’d be, and how much better off we’d be in general, if we weren’t forced to spend so much of our lives working for other people.

speck,

Now we're at a top 3 idea which haunts me. We have everything to make life so amazing now, but we just can't let go of these defunct paradigms that drag us down into a lower common denominator existence.

Grimlo9ic,
@Grimlo9ic@kbin.social avatar

Part of the beauty and awe I get whenever I reread that famous excerpt from Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot is the sense of how ephemeral and delicate our existence, and even the very human concept of "existence", is. We are infinitesimally small and yet, through no fault of our own, our days, how we fill them, and the people we know hold some measure of importance to us. And it will all be gone - eventually. It's a very somber note yet it makes me feel a certain sense of peace.

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

codyofficial,

This is a beautiful quote—thank you for sharing.

distractedcactus,
@distractedcactus@beehaw.org avatar

Several things are regularly in my “ponder and wonder” list, the most recent being:

  • Chaos theory
  • Higher dimensions (>4)
  • The actual scale of space versus our normal human scale
  • The idea of social/societal evolution (how can we be better together as a species)

I can get lost for a while in any of these topics.

skillissuer,

thermodynamics. it sets hard physical boundary to what happens spontaneously and what can’t, how much energy you need to pump in or can recover from process, but not only that - it’s very broadly applicable, including large parts of chemistry, biology, information theory and more, like this en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissipative_system

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