From being to becoming: a world that unveils its secrets
It is not wise for the secret to be unveiled,
For in the circle of the revelers, no truth remains concealed.
Nature simply has not yet fully determined all objects
- L. E. J. Brouwer
The soft brush of a kiss beneath yesterday’s moonlit sky, the rare bloom you noticed in the garden at dawn, the lingering sweetness of last summer’s cherries — each was an unknown delight until the moment you truly experienced it. Though many experiences may seem familiar, nature reveals each one as distinctly new every single time. The intricate, three-dimensional patterns you see in a pomegranate have never appeared in any other pomegranate — and likely never will. Uniqueness is a fundamental rule of our universe, yet we seldom pause to consider it.
Most human endeavors revolve around understanding the world through beliefs and ideas that transcend time. In other words, we constantly grapple with time, trying to find permanence in a world that is always in flux: Finding being in a world of becoming. Soren Kierkegaard famously considered the tension between the paradoxical dialects between universal truth and individual existence. We are swinging between temporal existence and eternal laws, finite and infinite. This tension is the root of our existence and the “angst”.
However, this tendency is by no means limited to humans; it is, in fact, a universal trait of all “intelligent” beings. We need to predict and anticipate what will happen and to do so, we rely on “models,” “beliefs,” and “generalizations” formed either unconsciously through habit or consciously through abstraction or judgments as pointed out by Kant.
The question, then, is how much of the world kneels to this agenda. Before going deeper, we must free ourselves from the philosophical illusion that everything in the world can be neatly put into order by the mere act of modeling. This illusion arises from a desire to banish time from philosophy, mathematics, and science in an attempt to make space for immortality or Platonic realism.
In this essay, we approach the problem from the perspective of complexity theory. To begin, it is helpful to recognize that there are two main philosophical camps in mathematics. The first is rooted in timeless Platonic realism, which holds that mathematical truths originate from a higher being, revealing themselves to humanity in what might be called leaps of faith. Within this framework, the Platonic conception of truth aspires to the idea of an “Oracle” or “Divine” wisdom — an entity that transcends time and possesses the ultimate answers to all questions. Many thinkers, from Leibniz to contemporary scholars like Gödel or Gregory Chaitin, have embraced this viewpoint. The other approach to mathematics, however, relies on a very different notion of truth.
In intuitionistic mathematics, unlike platonic math, the truth of statements is not dictated by the law of the excluded middle, meaning that simply showing a statement cannot be false does not automatically prove that it is true. But why would anyone accept such a counterintuitive view? Because the intuitionistic viewpoint is grounded in the principle of “construction” — creating mathematical objects rather than assuming they already exist in their complete form. To show that something is true or false, we must construct a method to demonstrate it. If no such construction exists, then the statement’s truth remains “unknown” or, more precisely, “undetermined.” This can still feel somewhat bizarre until we see why not all constructions are equal and why some of them are inherently as complex as the objects they aim to describe.
Consider a binary sequence like 01101010100010 that comes to us and ask: what is the next digit? In other words, we want to “predict” or “model” the sequence by capturing what we might call its “essence.” For example, if we have another sequence like 01010101010…, its essence is simply the repeated pattern “01.” Once we identify this underlying pattern or model, we effectively free ourselves from time: having the model means we can instantly know all future digits. The hope is that such a construction is always possible. It is very crucial to note that we are not talking about an Oracle that somehow “knows” the bits; rather, we are referring to the process through which “time” itself reveals those streams of bits. These digits could arise from any source, and for our discussion, the origin of the sequence is not our focus.
But let’s be more precise, what do we mean when we say we can break free from time when we find the pattern? Imagine that the sequence is a stream of data provided to a computer, which needs to determine future digits. If we discover a straightforward repeating pattern like “01,” we can easily predict all future digits without having to wait for them to appear or reveal themselves to us. Note that by computer I mean not just a physical computer but all our faculties in understanding the world.
When we seek out incoming sequences from various sources — ranging from planetary motion to weather systems, bacterial movements, life, and society — we encounter a wide range of complexities. Sometimes, we can quickly identify a simple pattern like the repetition of “01.” In such cases, we can represent the sequence as:
010101010101010… = (01)*
Once we condense the entire stream of data into a “code” or “model,” it’s almost as though we’re gazing far into the future through a telescope, predicting precisely what will happen. A prime example of such a “code” is mathematics and the fundamental laws of physics like the universal law of gravity, which let us forecast planetary motion so accurately that we can predict eclipses centuries in advance with remarkable precision. This ability might be the pinnacle of what science has achieved.
As we go further into the complexity domain, we discover that many natural patterns are not as straightforward as Newtonian dynamics. Instead, many of our predictions become statistical. For example, while I may not be able to say exactly what the next bits from a weather station will be, I can give you a probability distribution that is fairly reliable for a certain amount of time. In these cases, we still have a “telescope” into the future, but its reach into the future is more limited.
But the most striking case is when we know that predicting the future is impossible. How can we prove prediction is impossible? Maybe we just don’t know the patterns yet, right? To understand this, first notice that the “code” is also a kind of data that we infer. This special kind of data is more efficient because it is shorter! A code is the compression of data. When we use (01)* instead of the whole sequence of 0101010… we use a compression. The most amazing part of a code (like in the laws of physics) is that it shows how to recreate the data that will come! It encodes the mechanism by which nature regenerates itself. This is what makes science so powerful too! It gives us tools to see the future!
Not all codes have the same merit. When two codes predict the same future events, we typically prefer the shorter one. This is the definition of Kolmogorov complexity that comes from aesthetic principles like Occam’s razor. But what does it mean if the code is not efficiently compressed? For example, if my phone number doesn’t have any pattern, I need to say each digit one by one to you! If the code is so long that it is almost the same length as what it wants to describe — meaning it cannot generalize about what will happen next — then it is effectively useless, and we can say the sequence is entirely random (i.e., there is no pattern to discover). It can be shown mathematically that such sequences exist! The most famous example of it is the Chaitin’s omega constant we don’t go into its details here.
One of the applications of this idea can be seen in the generation of random numbers in computers. One of the interesting questions in coding is how one can write a function that generates random numbers? This question is kinda contradictory because if we write a function then it has a deterministic algorithm that makes the outputs predictable and hence not random! The only way to find true random events is by measuring the world!
There is no way to algorithmically predict the next bit in such sequences. Reality, in these instances, only reveals itself when it happens; there is no way to know beforehand. This shows itself in physics too: In classical physics, the world’s time evolution is governed by a Hamiltonian with perfect time symmetry. This means that the whole essence of the rule that predicts the future is compressed in a simple rule. Under this classical view, one only needs to know any time point to predict all its future (and even past!)
The first cracks in this perspective emerge in the measurement problem of quantum physics. In the famous “Schrödinger’s cat” thought experiment, the cat’s state of being alive or dead isn’t determined until the moment of measurement — when the wave function collapses and reality is revealed. Most physicists of that era found it difficult to accept an asymmetric time evolution operator, leaving the source of this “collapse” unclear. In their view, the time evolution operator should essentially tell us what will happen to the cat even if we didn’t open the box! We clearly don’t need to measure the Saturn orbit in 10 minutes if we know where it is now. This also means nature doesn’t have anything to “surprise” us! We already know what is going to happen.
However this creates another paradox: if we could find a way to know the future of the whole world including the fate of the cat before the measurement, where all this new information in the world is coming from? A world that can be compressed into one equation has nothing new to offer as we move into the future! This dilemma also arises from a worldview that tries to see reality as timeless, rather than one that accepts all the ways in which reality unfolds. We have to admit that some measurements simply cannot be known beforehand until we perform them. This measurement can’t be bypassed by a “clever” trick as shown by numerous paradoxical experiments in quantum mechanics.
We need a perspective that treats time as an inherent part of reality as it becomes. Different aspects of nature offer varying degrees of predictive insight: some let us see far into the future, others only a short distance, and some defy prediction entirely. Moreover, much of the information we receive is impossible to compress into a simple “essence.” In fact, it can be shown (at least in mathematics) that most sequences are not compressible or predictable, an unsettling idea, yet one that aligns with our intuition that so much in our world (including human life) remains unpredictable.
As we have mentioned this is not particular to us, humans. All intelligent beings are prediction machines that are constantly minimizing their surprise! The simple forms of life still have a smaller telescope into the future (where to find food and avoid being eaten) and it gets to its apex by humans. We surpassed our immediate cognitive abilities to predict the world with language, culture, and science. We are still creating predictive machines that can predict even more complex phenomena like language in AI. We keep predicting and doing it on larger scales.
There is no “Oracle” or “Higher Being” that reveals the ultimate truth to us; instead, truth emerges through time itself. Time unfolds and brings forth the “particularities” of the world — specific events, images, sensations, and facts. This is what Kierkegaard refers to as individual existence: the uniqueness we encounter in our world, from the moments of daily life to the essence of nature and the human condition. Next time you pour milk in the coffee you see a new pattern that emerges out of thin air, just in front of your eyes. Even if our final destination is crazier predictions we can’t close our eyes on the incoming “random” signals from the world.
Randomness, often shadowed by dread, is the dark matter of the cosmos — the unseen essence that permeates most of it. Despite being surrounded by randomness, we still discover elegant structures across varying levels of complexity like rising constellations from the abyss. As the universe unfolds its eternal mystery, we, bold travelers of time, press on in our heroic quest — to shatter the chains of the temporal and seize the hidden codes of creation.