Below is a simulation of a pattern that persists. It’s a lizard 🦎 that retains its shape & essence against changes in its environment.

You can play with this simulation here: https://distill.pub/2020/growing-ca/

Blaise Aguera uses this when defining “life” in “What is Intelligence?”. To exist, to be alive, is to persist in time against change. This is what makes life “anti-fragile” and long lasting. I liked his example of how a piece of rock intuitively feels more stable than say, a butterfly or bacterium, but the rock does not resist change to its essence - thus it is not alive. The butterfly is anti-fragile / stable in a way that the rock is not.

Let’s look at how life dies.

Here is a pretzel pattern 🥨. If it receives TOO much change, faster than it can change back, then it reaches a point where it completely disintegrates and is gone, permanently, forever.

So the two states we know so far are:

1. Alive, persisting as a pattern

2. Dead, permanently

There is a third state. It looks like this:

Is the pretzel dead? Is there even a pretzel here? What’s going on here?

It occurred to me while reading Blaise’s book, side by side with S.A. Senchal ‘s “God Conjecture” that the answer is: this pretzel is in hell.

To be precise, the pretzel is in this state because all of its cells are attempting to recreate the pretzel pattern, but they never get there. They can’t ever get there. They will work for eternity and never get there.

They can still technically die, but it would take an enormous amount of effort to hunt down and erase all the cells that are feverishly working to recreate the original pattern. But the harder they try, the worse things get. They are going in “the wrong direction” so to speak.

I now understand what they mean when they say “the gates of hell are locked from the inside”. A loving god does NOT put you there and choose to torture you. Sᴜɴʀɪsᴇ Oᴀᴛʜ, who is my go-to for Christian metaphysics/theology, explains it as “the state in which your will continually tries to actualize, but never does”:

Hell will always exist, eternally. It must exist as long as any coherent/ordered thing exists, because hell is the outside of that bubble of existence - it is specifically at the boundary between existence & non-existence.

Thanks for reading!

You can read Sam Senchal’s answer to “what is hell” here (mine is the “pop sci” version of his): https://github.com/SASenchal/God-Conjecture/blob/main/Hell.md

Special thanks to Mykola Bilokonsky whose language he has been developing around this has been very helpful for my thinking process1.

1

Specifically this tweet was the clearest articulation of it for me:

Your Friend Myk@mykola

@adam_kranz Huh? this is philosophy! Hypercoherence is left hemisphere capture is yang overload is the crystalline death - form asserting itself too rigidly. Hypocoherence is the opposite, form failing to assert a boundary, context eats content. The boundary is required to individuate.

5:26 AM · Dec 28, 2025 · 22 Views

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