A Modern Theory of Everything
Meta-Primes Are Real
What primes a surprise?
Anything that exists, be it from isolated experiences to the universe at large, can be classified as a “surprise”: the beginnings and endings of many stories, the people we meet, and things we see throughout our lives.
It’s as if expectations exist in a state before surprisal — a primal, boring state — where our beliefs are imprinted and primed in accordance to an observed pattern.
The following usage of the term “prime” can be defined as ‘the beginning of expectations meant to be broken’. So basically, a prime can be thought of as “a flimsy assumption”.
Primes are the antithesis of surprises, as they build patterns in our beliefs, instead of breaking them….
So, the totality of surprises and primes constructs the universe: a machine designed to self-generate a gargantuan amount of breakable patterns on the basis of prediction and self-automation.
Patterns create tension in the fabric of the universe, surprises occur when that tension is broken, thus, what we expect to happen — what we can know exists — follows a prime-surprise dialectic; this is how we learn; how we derive fact and meaning from reality; how we feel emotions….
“Meta-primes” are technical instances of the intentional genesis of surprising things — i.e. jokes (build-up to a punchline), stories (narrative arc), songs (arrangement), poetic schema (AAABC), visual art (context and composition) — that prime individuals expectations in order to surprise them with something new.
Meta-primes are worlds of ideas — of emotions — behind heavy curtains of their own creation.
Surprisal has a very powerful influence on individual, collective, and universal rationality because the brain is a system linking its given properties to the environment in which it resides.
So, the unsurprised mind involves logic, memory, and importantly knowledge, all of which are designed to be expectable.
And, if each person’s brain interacts between the same individual sets of relations, it becomes possible to represent those interactions in useful symbolic terms. What that means in practice is:
