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content/exeunt/Response to Levin's Ingressing Minds.md

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+## Are Physical Systems Haunted by TOET?
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+**Tl;Dr** *This brief, nonspecialist response proposes a naturalistic teleology that explains the proposed "ingressions" of "patterns" into the development of biological and physical systems. In this telling, the bootstrap capacity of a transcendental object at the end of time (McKenna) acts as a unified source of constraint on morphological histories. Rather than agential forms, "patterns" become knots of mechanical necessity (or perhaps Novikovian self-consistency) in a class of worlds shaped by self-causing systems.*
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+Suppose a landscape of Everettian many worlds, expressing a "universal wave function" seeded in the early moments of the big bang. The unfolding of events in these different branches are constrained by the initial conditions, but the observers find that the "baggage" of those initial conditions include physical laws and nonzero cosmological constants which transcend and dictate rather than participate in those initial conditions. In the thermodynamic flux of this "monster of energy" there are walls of fixed determination with no clear source. The best available explanation is an infinite ruliad (Wolfram, Tegmark) in which this multiplicity reaches ever farther back into an axiomatic seed from which all physical universes, under whatever conditions, are physically expressed. In this case, in a movement known as the anthropic principle, the mystery is reduced to a matter of observational necessity. 
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+In a mirror of this problem, Levin (and a host of complexity scientists before him) find both organic and inorganic systems tendentially charged with anomalous preferences that again seem to transcend the blind statistical propagation of natural selection. Levin, if I have understood correctly, poses this apparent transcendence as the result of network effects between organic and inorganic systems and invisible actors, "patterns" - similar to Platonic forms - "which ingress into the physical world," animating material systems with morphogenetic preference. Put otherwise, what appears as morphogenetic preference is rather signal response to subtle forces that interact from a nonphysical space.
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+Rather than ghosts in the machine, what if there are **guide rails in morphospace?**  
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+## Observational Effects of TOET
+It would seem that an anthropic counterpart to the problem of physical laws and constants could be extended to include Levin's morphogenetic preference - but what if a naturalistic explanation existed that could manage the multiplicity of Everett's many worlds, but avoid slipping into the positing of infinities in order to neutralize away anomalies in both cases?
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+After a multiweek hallucinogenic break from reality in the Amazon in 1970, Terence McKenna (in mysterious concert with Philip K Dick and Robert Anton Wilson) spent decades giving rational form to a vision of a Transcendental Object at the End of Time. "All of biology," he writes in a short piece called ["Approaching Time Wave Zero,"](https://www.fractal-timewave.com/articles/approaching_twz.htm) "is in a sense, a conquest of dimensionality. That means that animals are a strategy for conquering space/time." If the terminus of biology is a breaking out form the boundary of spacetime, then it is possible or likely that that future event is exerting uncanny influence upon our present: "The universe is not being pushed from behind. The universe is being pulled from the future toward a goal that is as inevitable as a marble reaching the bottom of a bowl when you release it up near the rim."
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+Consider a map of our pocket of many worlds, starting as one worldline branching out into many. Why branching? The plurality allows for degrees of freedom *within certain broad boundaries*, informed by **a telos which instigated the timeline in the first place**. As the worlds complexify, broad boundaries in the shape of cosmological constants and physical laws become more minute, taking the form of **knots** in morphospace, like breadcrumbs left by TOET to ensure arrival at terminus. Rather than the trace of forms exerting agency, the "surprising competencies" or tendencies of physical systems are their interaction with the natural boundaries of a hyperobject with predetermined shape. 
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+The inhabitants of proposed platonic space, from mathematical forms all the way to Levin's "intrusive thoughts, archetypes, works of art" could be understood as necessary waypoints along the path to the Transcendental Object at the End of Time. Because these boundaries are in this telling *impersonal*, there is no necessary anthropecentric bias at stake. It need not be humans or any given physical system that generate TOET for them to be subject to its most minute pressures, so long as the cumulative effect of these ingressions and boundaries upon all inhabitants of a universe gets all worldlines over the threshold. 
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+Like strings pinched together at two ends, the indeterminate flowering of the worldlines is, in this model, flanked on both sides by TOET. Rather than a diversity of forms exerting agency into physical systems, this would entail a unified source of morphogenetic preference/constraint, the binary accomplishment of a single technological event. In the language of Sara Imari Walker's Assembly Theory - in the context of which she once described the human brain as "one of the largest objects in the universe" - TOET would be the universe itself: what observers experience as boundaries upon or anomalous invitations into certain behaviors, would be seen from an external observer as merely the shape of the Thing *sub specie aeternitatis*.
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+As a personal note, I should say that I like Levin's system better, as I think it points to more practical utility and creative permission, whether it's Levin's own work in medicine, the political injunctions of the analogous hauntings of inorganic life seen in Mark Fisher's Flateline Constructs, or the magical ordeals and exercises of Carlos Castaneda in his system of inorganic agencies. In other words, it is active and ontologically open. The TOET framework easily slides toward a passive and closed eschatology (which I loathe) rather than the creative and robustly populate hypermaterialism that my own work in the web3 space explores. Nonetheless, the bootstrap model has what strikes me as a clean parsimony that I couldn't get out of my head. Consider this an unburdening.