notes on existence
quantity is forever the most underrated quality
‘Sometimes I don’t know what to say
It’s a genuine miracle I woke up today, so I got up to pray
But my BBM was pinging when my Android started singing then
I missed all of the glory for technological luxuries
And just like that I forgot all of the trees
And the flowers and the breeze carryin’ seeds across the seas
Extra honey in my tea but pay no to homage to the bee
Whatever happened to us and will we ever let the magic come and tap into us?
We preach apocalypse written by John the Revelator
But won’t even speak to a stranger ridin’ on the elevator
Or step to the side when we standin’ still on the escalator
The planet earth is a hospital, we on the respirator
I don’t regret the haters’
i.
this is pingo.
has about ten followers, owns about 12 toys, is about one and half years old. he is my dog. very famous in my neighborhood.
this is sam altman.
has a bunch of million followers, owns definitely a lot of sick toys, is about fourty years old. i don’t know him personally but we have some mutuals. very famous in the world.
i have written about sam mostly in passing. this is no different. feel free to replace sam altman with a billion different people. i am sam. love for sam.
ii.
question.
who exists more sam or pingo?
that is a weird question.
maybe an unknowable question.
or maybe not. maybe we just haven’t thought about what existence means.
most people think existence is not understandable.
but we already know this isn’t true. we already know life has degrees.
life exists.
we talked about fattie boom battie vs the pup at length.
christopher alexander tells us one forest is more alive than another dying forest. is the pope catholic? do bears shit in the woods? of course some things are more alive than others.
so im saying something here.
if existence = life, and life has degrees, then the question who exists more is not a weird question.
it’s a big question.
coordinationprotocols baby, we are doing gods accounting.
iii.
anyways, who is more alive.
sam or my baby pingo.
and remember: what exists is information that has been integrated. life exists. my big idea.
this means who exists more = who has integrated more information.
now the question becomes measurable. in theory.
but we need to be clear about what integrated means because this is where everyone gets confused. integrated doesn’t mean distributed.
integrated doesn’t mean mentioned. integrated doesn’t mean famous.
tononi’s whole thing is that integration is calculable.
it has a measure called phi (φ). a pile of sand has low phi. your brain has high phi.
integration means coherent, closed-loop, calculable. not scattered, not symbolic, not lossy.
this distinction is everything.
okay so back to the question.
quantity is forever the underrated quality. this is a thing i say a lot.
if we’re asking who exists more, we’re asking who has more life.
the obvious answer is sam altman exists way more than pingo.
sam has millions of followers. his information is distributed across millions of minds. openai touches billions of people. his decisions ripple through policy, through technology, through the future itself.
the man is integrated into everything. when people think about ai, they think about sam. when people think about the future, they think about sam. when people think about silicon valley, they think about sam.
pingo has maybe 50 people who know him. probably less. he’s integrated into the property. that’s it.
so sam exists more right? more quantity = more existence?
iv.
well hold on.
remember what integrated means. coherent, closed-loop, calculable phi. not just distributed.
let’s think about sam’s integration. millions of people “know” sam. but what does that mean. they know a representation of sam. they know sam-the-ceo. sam-the-visionary. sam-the-guy-who-got-fired-and-rehired. sam-the-agi-prophet. these are compressions. abstractions. symbols.
most of sam’s “existence” is people holding lossy representations of sam in their heads. like a jpeg copied a billion times. each copy loses fidelity. each representation is missing most of the information. chatgpt, what happens when you compress an image over and over.
when you repeatedly compress an image, especially using lossy compression methods like jpeg, the image quality progressively degrades with each iteration. fine details disappear, colors shift, artifacts accumulate, and the image becomes increasingly distorted and blocky, ultimately bearing little resemblance to the original.
right. so sam is distributed across millions of minds but each instance is compressed as fuck. the information is “there” but is it actually integrated? can you calculate the phi?
now some accounting.
pingo lives maybe 15 years. every moment of those 15 years = full integration. every morning, every walk, every nap in the sun, every bird he sees, every tree, every smell, every scratch behind the ears. full phi. calculable. coherent.
how many moments is that? let’s say pingo is awake and integrating for 12 hours a day. that’s 43,200 seconds per day. times 365 days. times 15 years. that’s 236,520,000 moments of full integration.
sam lives maybe 80 years. way more time. but how many of those moments are full integration? how many moments is sam actually there, fully integrated with environment, not computing about non-local information, not performing, not managing representations?
maybe 1% of moments? maybe less? i know im at like 1%.
when pingo is at one of our waterfalls, 100% of pingo is there. the birds, the other dogs, the grass, the sun, me throwing the ball.
zero gap between what pingo is and what pingo experiences. no abstractions, no representations, no thinking about what other dogs think. just pure integrated information loop with reality.
when sam is at a board meeting, where is sam? he’s thinking about what the board thinks. he’s thinking about what to say. he’s thinking about agi timelines. he’s thinking about twitter. he’s thinking about what people will think about what he says. he’s computing representations of representations of representations. his mind is always processing non-local information. information about other contexts, other times, other people’s minds.
sam cannot be fully present because his computational load is non-local. he’s always integrating across too many contexts simultaneously, which means he’s not fully integrating with any single context.
pingo in each moment = complete integration with environment. birds singing? full integration. breakfast time? full integration. nap on the couch? full integration. walk on the property? full integration. 70 acres of trees and grass and sky? full bandwidth phi calculation with every blade of grass, every bird, every cloud.
sam in each moment = partial integration at best. always computing about non-present information. always managing his distributed representations. always performing some version of sam-the-symbol rather than being sam-the-actual-integrated-system.
so even if sam has more moments (80 years vs 15 years), pingo has more integrated moments. more actual phi. more actual existence.
let’s be conservative. let’s say sam achieves full integration 1% of the time. that’s generous. that’s 25,228,800 moments of full phi over 80 years.
pingo at 100% integration over 15 years = 236,520,000 moments of full phi.
pingo exists nearly 10 times more than sam altman.
but here’s the thing. we can’t register this.
v.
stalin said one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. you love your son infinitely more than a stranger but you can’t calculate that infinity. our brains cannot register massive quantities. we cannot compute these differences.
so we look at sam and pingo and we think sam exists more because we can see the distribution. we can count the followers. we can feel the impact. the information about sam is everywhere. but we cannot register the actual integrated information over time. we cannot sum up pingo’s 236 million moments of full phi. we cannot feel the weight of that quantity. because we cannot register quantity but also because we are disintegrated.
this is the thing about quantity. you cannot register it. we cannot register intensive quantities the way we can register extensive quantities.
sam’s existence is extensive. spread wide, thin, lossy, symbolic. easy to see, easy to count, easy to feel. millions of followers, billions of dollars, global impact. we can register this because it’s distributed. it’s extensive. it’s out there.
pingo’s existence is intensive. concentrated, full bandwidth, complete. impossible to see from outside, impossible to count, impossible to register unless you’re there in the moment with him. billions of full-phi moments compressed into 15 years. we cannot register this because it’s not distributed. it’s intensive. it’s right here.
quantity is forever the quality but the quality of quantity is whether or not it can be registered, calculated, summed up into something we can feel.
if existence = life = integrated information (in the tononi sense, meaning calculable phi, meaning coherent closed-loop), then pingo exists more than sam altman.
sam has more fame. more impact. more distribution. but distribution is not integration. mention is not existence. symbol is not life.
pingo is fully alive in every moment. sam is scattered across a million lossy representations and maybe, maybe fully alive in a few moments when he’s not performing, not managing, not being sam-the-symbol. maybe when he’s with close friends. maybe when he’s alone. maybe never. i don’t know the man. but i am also sam.
a million people holding compressed jpegs of you in their head is not the same as you actually integrating information with your environment.
pingo lives less time. pingo is way less famous. but pingo exists way more.
the dog on the beach vs wall-e fattie boom battie. one is fully integrated with environment. one is subjugated by it. one exists. one is existed upon.
existence is not about how much information mentions you. existence is about how much information you actually integrate. and integration is not about distribution. integration is about coherence, about calculability, about closed loops, about full bandwidth, about actually being there.
sam altman i am more famous. pingo is alive.