Loading...
When looking at a particle system from a macro scale, there are simply too many parts to track - we are essentially blind to the micro. We can only observe the aggregate dynamics of the system: the coffee cools, your body ages. Unconstrained, these things only move in one direction — the energy was here, now it's a little less here — entropy increases, time marches forward.
In the Game of Life, each level of the system is similarly constrained by a fundamental blindness.
To a Particle, nothing exists beyond its own Charge — ON or OFF.
Each fieldState exists as a discrete totality, completely cut off from anything beyond its own static configuration.
However, as these static configurations cascade through the rules of the program, higher-order dynamics arise — movement, continuity, interaction. These dynamic patterns exist outside of any possible state. They are patterns that arise over the relationships between states.
Each state leads deterministically to the next, multiple configurations can converge into the same outcome, and the previous state becomes unrecoverable. The process can only be meaningfully understood in one direction. This asymmetry creates the arrow of time.
Two different initial configurations converge to the same pattern, their prior differences are lost.
Time emerges at the level of abstraction where virtual structures exist—gliders, oscillators, patterns that persist across states but remain unknowable to the particles and field states that compose them. Time is relational. Time requires entropy: informational in the Game of Life, thermodynamic for us.
In this program, the useful work being performed isn't the creation of hot and cold chambers. It's the emergence of temporal sequence itself, mediated by the demon bridging these forms of entropy. The demon computes the rules and in doing so, enacts the relational processes between discrete structures—enabling the possibility of causation and change; in other words, time.