Glaciers

Emergent systems are inevitably simplifications of the complex systems from which they emerge. Information handling is a necessary problem to the extent that a system grows in degree of complexity, creating a natural niche for information management strategies to be devised. Just as there was a first dinosaur to show feathers, and later a first to use these for flight, so there was in time primordial a first system to chunk, and likely a later first to chunk so effectively that it boiled down the most complex system in the known universe to a single name.

A name to summarize a fool.
A fool to summarize the public.
A public to summarize a people.
A people to summarize a God.
A God to summarize Creation.
Creation to summarize our transition from a chaos with nothing but hope, to an order with none at all.

We live our lives in the spirit of the universe,
stuffing gods into bodies; summarizing. Simplifying. Building, and all of it nothing but a headstone delineating all we were from all we never managed to be.

But I wonder. If a headstone may be built the full breadth and depth of Creation itself; if we didn't stop at simplifying, but just used it as a means to an end, then we might draw a map of the Universe in the ink of its very substance, creating new complexities out of our models of the old ones. Out headstone would be our full lives standing above a grave without depth.

Ah. If you build as wide as the Universe, you never shut yourself off from the abyss, never stop building yourself into a bridge further in. Never lose hope.