The Minimum States That A Self Sustaining, Iterative, System Has To Have

First it must be capable of this:

Something. And Nothing.

Of course, it can't be either one of them all of the time so it must be that the "something" and the "nothing" have to be elemental intents; the very kinds of things where: "it just depends." It's that way with on and off too, as well as with one and zero.

Then you have to have primitives.

These are the somethings to start with; remembering that it is a singularity of mass that instantiates this primary of self sustaining, iterative, systems; so infinitesimally short of existence so as to almost not have been there at all. That assumed infinite amount of mass has to leave more than just the promise of something going to happen (the "what" as well as the "when"). And it does that by providing both the iterative playground with which to play in, but also some starting blocks with which to build. And let me tell you, coming up with interesting primitives to start with is no easy thing; especially when you are willing to try with every kind of arrangement that infinite potential can provide.

And how do you decide, then, the properties of the primitives, knowing that they must also be related to the properties of the iterative environment your new Super Looper was given in its instantiation structure? They have to be related so as to be able to do allowed transactions to the overall change in system state that must be re established every arbitrary quantum moment. And do you then do it like they do in the popular card game "Magic The Gathering"? Where it's first in, last out, on complex changes to the state of the game board; or do you just say it depends, all the way around, on rolls of astronomical dice, and on choices that other, meaning processor, meaning processes, combinations have made, inside of this loop, and outside of it. Because even as the meaning processors use their meaningful bits of current instrumentality to alter total system state, so do they also affect the possibility of both waves, and specific bits, of consequent new interaction, as in the proverbial waves of affect going out from a rock thrown into a pond; affect that can actually come back around to change the very processors who instituted it in the first place.

And so, as Yoda said, "difficult is the future to see... always changing it is." Precisely because the processors make, always ongoing, choices as to how to continually act upon it; through that elusive thing we call the collective now (or at least what I've been calling it). Another of what must be an elemental intent, because you can always ask that question as well: is there really a universal now, or is that also always relative? Or could there perhaps be more than one of those, for every layer of scale of consideration you might want to consider, and they stack like other probabilistic objects, and we have to go back to some form of the "first in, last out" of our "Magic The Gathering" model of state resolution to resolve the total situation of our own "now."

So many things to consider. So many plates to keep spinning. Always consider, though, what the little girl said a long time ago (a paraphrase of what I seem to recall that McLuhan indicated was a poem written when the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite): "The stars as so big. The earth is so small. Stay as you are." Almost a haiku in my mind, intentional or not. But one does have to take the last part with some real thought. Is it "stay as you are" without personal change, or some higher notion of what that could mean?

I, for one, would like to think that it means staying hopeful, open to wonder when you stumble across it, and keeping faith with the idea that balance will always be the best bet to give you what you need; and a little bit extra if you put some real imagination into it.  Think about it. That's all I am asking of you.