Tron

Saw Tron: Legacy last night. Interesting movie, with some interesting concepts behind it. The evil character, 'Clue' attempted to create a perfect world in digital form - eliminating imperfections and random events. Problem is, there's no way to know what 'perfection' is; it's unknowable. Moreover, it can be seen all around us.

Look at the sun, the trees, the mountains. The water. All of it is perfect. Now look at you. You are perfect. Not in the sense of holiness or physical physical perfection, but in mathematical terms. According to a prominent theory about how the universe works, there are infinite numbers of possibilities that stem from every action and reaction. A billion events can proceed from the birth of just one human being, or one political movement. Only a few possibilities actually make it into the real world BECAUSE so many counter-actions happen.

Look at it this way; you could have been so many things when you were a kid. You wanted to be a painter, maybe, or an astronaut, or a racecar driver. All of those COULD HAVE happened. But external influences made it so that you wouldn't. Maybe your parents weren't able to help you study enough, so you couldn't get the grades necessary to become an astronaut. Maybe you never had a good art teacher as a kid. Thus, your actual career ends up being something... boring. Like a cashier or an accountant. Yet the potential was there at the start, AND - given the right circumstances - you could change your career at any given moment.

Whatever makes you YOU is the sum of the possibilities that came true. A trillion things were potentiated and eliminated, and you can observe what's left. And because of that, you and I are mathematically ideal.

That doesn't mean you don't have any room for change ;)

One last thought: as you approach total order in a system, random acts of chaos spring up. Conversely, as you approach total chaos, random units of organization occur.

Food for thought.