The Universe Has Preferences, and It Bills by Direction
A few quick and fun observations about asymmetry, invisibility, and what actually can't be taken from you.
There's a pattern I keep noticing across physics, cryptography, and stories about power that I think is pointing at something real.
Start with encryption. The asymmetric key exchange underlying modern privacy isn't a human invention so much as a human discovery — we found a trapdoor in mathematics and built a door around it. Multiplying two large primes together is trivial. Factoring the result back into its components requires resources that scale, in the worst case, faster than current physically realizable computers could handle. The universe, it turns out, is structured so that some transformations appear to be one-way relative to available computation and physical constraints. Scrambling is cheap. Unscrambling is cosmically expensive, and to me, this doesn't seem an isolated quirk, but a pattern.
Entropy increases naturally and requires enormous energy input to locally reverse. Signals propagate freely through space — WiFi, radio, the electromagnetic signatures of your heartbeat — and intercepting them costs almost nothing, but tracing them back to meaning, to intent, to the specific mind that generated them, is a different problem entirely. A forward pass through a frontier model costs milliseconds, but reversing it — tracing circuits, features, attention heads, cascading representations back to their origin — is what mechanistic interpretability is trying to do, years in, with frontier models still largely opaque. The photons leaving your screen right now are traveling outward forever, technically carrying information about what you're reading, but recovering that information from the noise of the universe is computationally indistinguishable from impossible by current human standards.
What strikes me about this isn't the cryptography, it's the suggestion that the physical structure of reality has preferences. Not in a mystical sense (or maybe in exactly a mystical sense, I'm genuinely uncertain where that line is) but in the sense that certain directions are thermodynamically favored and others aren't. Creation is easier than reconstruction. Diffusion is easier than concentration. Hiding, at the right level of abstraction, is cheaper than finding.
Technical Innovation as Recursive Law Exploitation
Most significant technological leaps look, in retrospect, like someone noticed an asymmetry the universe was already running and figured out how to stand on the right side of it.
The move is almost always the same: find a process physics is already running, then redirect it over and over again, sometimes recursively. Metal, semiconductors, trained models: all improbably ordered states that someone figured out how to manufacture by exploiting the laws of thermodynamics rather than fighting them. You don't create low entropy, you find the process that was already concentrating it and insert yourself upstream.
This reframes what invention means. Less creation ex nihilo, more navigation of a possibility space whose shape was fixed at the Big Bang. The laws aren't obstacles to work around, but the actual resource being exploited, where innovation is mostly finding the trapdoor that was already there.
This raises an interesting question: What else might be sitting in plain sight, waiting to be recognized as a trapdoor rather than a wall?
What Can and Can't Be Taken
Capital can be seized. Land can be occupied. Networks can be monitored. Physical presence can be tracked, recorded, owned.
But there's a category of thing that resists acquisition not through legal protection or social agreement but through physics. Your internal state for example — the actual quale of your experience, the pattern of activation that constitutes what you're thinking right now — exists in a regime where the extraction cost is prohibitive in ways that have nothing to do with law.
I'm not arguing interiority is permanently beyond reach — I'm arguing the extraction cost is prohibitive in ways that have structural rather than merely technical origins. Whether interiority (or consciousness) is protected by the same class of asymmetry as a trapdoor function, or merely something that resembles it from the outside, I genuinely can't say — but the family resemblance feels too consistent to dismiss. This isn't surveillance commentary, though it has implications there too. It's more that there seems to be a natural fault line between what's easily acquirable and what isn't, and it maps surprisingly cleanly onto the visible versus the invisible. Physical assets exist in shared space and can be transferred by whoever controls that space. But consciousness, meaning, private experience — these live in a space that doesn't have coordinates anyone else can directly access.
The unseen isn't just hidden, it seems to be prohibitively costly to access in a way the seen is not.
WiFi moves through walls invisibly, the electromagnetic field your phone generates extends through your body without your awareness, gravity is shaping your trajectory constantly. We're embedded in fields and forces that are doing enormous amounts of work on and around us and remain essentially invisible to direct perception. The universe is far more full than it appears, and most of what's happening is happening in registers we can't directly observe.
In quantum mechanics, measuring a photon's state collapses its superposition — a different mechanism entirely, but it's hard not to notice a family resemblance of sorts. Observation entangled with outcome, at every scale we look. Surveillance operates similarly at the human scale, just slower. People who know they're being watched might not behave differently because they're performing, but potentially because observation seems to be a force that reshapes the thing it touches.
On Villains Who Try to Transcend Humanity by Removing It
There's a character archetype I keep encountering — in fiction and occasionally in real life — who believe that the path to power or clarity or transcendence runs through the elimination of what makes them human. Remove desire, remove attachment, remove sentiment, remove the parts that can be manipulated, and what remains will be stronger. Purer. Harder.
I think the archetype is wrong, and I think it's wrong in an instructive way.
When villains strip these out in pursuit of optimization, they don't become more than human. They become less capable of modeling the thing they're trying to control, which is a world populated by humans who still have all those properties. The transcendence narrative has the arrow backwards: removing humanity doesn't let you rise above it, it blinds you to it.
There's an analogy to overfitting here that I don't think is accidental. A model that eliminates all the "noise" in its training signal often eliminates the signal too. What looks like purification from the inside is loss of generalization from the outside. The villain who has transcended sentiment can no longer predict what humans will actually do, because humans are running on machinery the villain has deliberately discarded.
The universe, again, seems to have a preference. Systems that maintain internal complexity and remain coupled to their environment tend to be more robust than systems that achieve local optimization by closing off. The open system is messier, and the open system is also more alive.
What This Adds Up To
I'm not sure these observations fully cohere yet — they feel like they're pointing at the same thing without me being able to name the thing precisely. Something about the structure of reality favoring certain kinds of hiddenness, certain kinds of interiority, certain kinds of complexity that resist reduction.
If I had to gesture at the common thread: there may be a deep asymmetry between what can be taken and what can't, and it runs along the axis of visibility. The physical is seizable. The internal is not, not because we've protected it legally or socially, but because the extraction cost may be structural rather than merely contingent, rooted in the same information-theoretic asymmetries that make cryptography hard, even if we don't yet know how deep that connection runs.
The villain who tries to become untouchable by removing their interior ends up with nothing left that can't be taken. The person who maintains that interior — messy, desire-laden, sentient, private — is operating in a space that power, in the conventional sense, can't fully reach.
I think that's true. I think the universe built it that way, for reasons I don't fully understand but find increasingly hard to dismiss as coincidence.
As always: introspection is unreliable, analogies are maps not territories, and I'm working this out (by writing a bit about it via this post) in public. Corrections welcome.