The World Is a Ramshackle Stage: Every Discipline Shares One Essence, and Yet There Is a Formula

The World Is a Ramshackle Stage · Every Discipline Shares One Essence · And Yet There Is a Formula is a cluster of mutually interlocking propositions in Beyond-the-Algorithm thinking, posed to answer the paradoxical question of whether the world has any fixed laws at all. At its core lies a tension. On the one hand, the world is more like one vast ramshackle stage, a round of single-player games each sealed inside its own console — there are not nearly so many things nailed down for certain, and you can never fully know what another person is thinking. On the other hand, the inner workings of every discipline turn out to share one and the same essence; the world really does have a formula to follow, and people are all too easy to sort into types. The two ends do not contradict each other. The ramshackle stage speaks of the randomness and the impassability of the phenomenal layer; the formula speaks of the structural sameness and inducibility of the being layer. As for “right and wrong,” it lies neither in the phenomenal nor in the essential, but in the standpoint and the identity of the observer.

Every Discipline Shares One Essence: Jargon Is an Industry’s Dialect

The proposition begins by exposing the illusion of “a forest of separate disciplines.” On this view, the reason the myriad fields seem walled off from one another is largely an effect of jargon, not a difference of essence. Terminology comes into being chiefly to describe things precisely and to let an industry communicate efficiently within itself; but once a person peels away this layer of trade-talk, they find that the inner operating mechanisms of different disciplines are in fact one and the same set, merely showing up as different phenomena.

A great deal of jargon arises mainly for the sake of precise description, so that those inside an industry can communicate efficiently. But the truth is, the inner operating essence of many disciplines is the same; only the phenomena differ.

This is the very gaze that Intuition Knows in an Instant: Seeing Through to the Essence Is a Rare Gift insists on when it speaks of “seeing through to the essence”: phenomena shift in ten thousand ways, yet the essence can be threaded across them all. To treat jargon as a dialect rather than a barrier is precisely the first step from the surface of the ramshackle stage toward the formula — for once the essence is structurally identical, transfer and induction across disciplines become possible.

The World Really Does Have a Formula: People Are Easy to Sort

If the essence is structurally identical, then the world is not wholly random but “has a formula.” The abstract judgment lands on a concrete observation: after a single month of doing social media, people online turned out to be extraordinarily easy to sort into types.

This world really does have a “formula.”

After a month of doing social media, I found that people online are easy to sort into types.

The conclusion is methodological in character — the formula does not sit a priori inside a book; it surfaces inductively out of a great mass of individual cases. When the sample grows large enough, individuals that once looked free and unique collapse into a finite handful of types, and the pattern reveals itself of its own accord. This line of thought — many varied cases converging into a finite set of patterns — shares a common root with the treatment of life as a solvable algorithm in The Algorithm of Life: The Law of Attraction and the Coupling of Many Causes, and with the sorting logic of “role is set by the mind” in Cognition Constructs Reality: Both Danger and Role Are Set by the Mind. The existence of a formula means the ramshackle stage is not without order; it has merely hidden its order beneath the clamor of phenomena.

The World Is a Single-Player Game: The Impassable Beyond the Formula

And yet the formula cannot abolish the other face of the world — that it is, at bottom, a single-player game. Drawing on Einstein, the proposition points out that no two different places can ever have exactly the same thing happen; pushed to the limit, you can never fully know what another person is thinking.

This world is a single-player game. You can never fully know what another person is thinking… just as Einstein said, no two different places can have exactly the same thing happen.

This face supplies the epistemological grounding of the “ramshackle stage”: every consciousness is sealed inside its own perspective, and the interior of any other is, to you, a permanent black box. The formula can induce “types,” but it cannot pierce the “individual”; it can predict the statistical shape of a crowd, yet it can give no certain answer for any single, particular consciousness. This runs in one line with The Senses Are a Finite Survival Decoder, and the World Is What They Render — the world is the way each set of senses renders it for itself, and so there is no objective bedrock that all people share and that is fully passable between them. Formula and single-player game thus coexist: the essence can be induced, the individual cannot be reached.

Right and Wrong Depend on Standpoint and Identity

Since the world is a ramshackle stage pieced together from sealed-off perspectives, “right and wrong” is no longer an absolute scale hanging above the phenomena, but a relative quantity that slides with the identity of the observer. The example of a doctor punctures this: one and the same act is, for different objects, diametrically opposite good and evil.

When a doctor cures a patient, he also kills the harmful cells. To the patient he is an angel; to the bad cells he is a demon. Different standpoints. Is there really such a thing as right and wrong? Or does right and wrong depend entirely on your identity and your cognition?

This proposition carries “the ramshackle stage” from epistemology into axiology: the world has no unified arbiter of right and wrong, because any arbiter stands within some identity. It answers to Appearance Arises from the Awaring: Inner and Outer Spring from One Essence — the form one sees is born of the position from which one views it — and it supplies the underlying basis for the judgment in The Sucker Mindset: You Yourself Are the Golden Finger that “standpoint decides who fleeces and who is fleeced.” The relativity of right and wrong does not lead into nihilism; rather, it demands that a person first see clearly which square they are standing in, and only then speak of good and evil.

Four Dimensions Looking at Three States: Beyond the Formula Lie Other Dimensions

This cluster of propositions points at last to an open question: is the “formula” that humans induce only a local law within one particular dimension? A thought experiment drives the problem to its boundary — how would a four-dimensional being explain the three states of matter: gas, liquid, and solid?

How would a four-dimensional being explain the three states of matter: gas, liquid, and solid?

Within human three-dimensional experience, gas, liquid, and solid are the basic states of matter, things nailed down and written into the formula. But viewed from a higher dimension, these three states may be only different cross-sections of one and the same object projected onto a lower dimension — just as a two-dimensional being cannot grasp why a sphere passing through its plane should “out of nowhere” swell and then shrink. This question relativizes once more all the certainty that came before: even the structurally identical “formula” may itself be no more than the ramshackle stage of the current dimension, and change one dimension, the law is rewritten. It is the obverse of The Senses Are a Finite Survival Decoder, and the World Is What They Render — the so-called objective three states are nothing but the rendering handed over by one particular decoding system. The proposition is left open here, refusing to force itself shut: a formula exists, but whether above the formula there is a still larger formula lies beyond what the present dimension can verify.

Sources

Manuscript — “the inner operating essence of many disciplines is the same; only the phenomena differ” (every discipline shares one essence; jargon serves efficient communication)
Manuscript — “this world really does have a ‘formula’… after a month of doing social media, I found that people online are easy to sort into types”
Manuscript — “this world is a single-player game. You can never fully know what another person is thinking… no two different places can have exactly the same thing happen”
Manuscript — a doctor is an angel to the patient and a demon to the cells; “right and wrong depend entirely on your identity and your cognition”
Manuscript — the four-dimensional perspective’s question about the three states

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