Dragon Puzzle Story
Self-building brain theory and its link to practice
© Gregory
B. Yates 1
2nd Edition 2012 | Rev. 2014.0928 2
Introduction
People have varied hobbies: Mine has been to attempt the following Core Theory of Everything.
Passion for the project led me away from family, home and livelihood for years but through it all
the project remained a hobby. Now I hand the unfinished, and unfinishable, result to you to do
with as you wish.
This book is first about how brains are built and what they seek. It centers on a strange text that
appeared at my pencil-tip in 1992 CE, the Dragon Puzzle. The Dragon Puzzle is essentially a
computer virus that runs in brains and their societies.
The Dragon Puzzle's basic idea is so simple that almost everyone can understand it and its
detailed realization is so complex that almost no one can understand it, let alone advance it. The
simple idea is this: Gather into a book or library the most effective knowledge about how brains
are built and how brains can best find whatever they most profoundly seek. Include also words
that inspire readers to further the library's development. In this way the library can grow like a
rolling snowball. A text is more likely to grow like a snowball when it has a compact core
dedicated to that end and that's where the Dragon Puzzle enters: The Dragon Puzzle is a seed for
a snowball. It is a radical experiment in autocatalytic developing text.
The present Core Theory of Everything is about how brains are built, but it is also about what
brains seek and what they do to find it. What we profoundly seek – what we seek that is largely
independent of our circumstances – is often called spiritual in a sense that does not necessarily
imply spirits. What we choose to do regularly is our practice. The Dragon Puzzle Story exposes
a gateway between rigorous science and noncoercive spiritual practice, and it shows how science
and practice interdepend: It bares a link between how brains are built and what they best can do
to lessen dissatisfaction and favor happiness. The book attempts to unite many aspects of
1 d ragonpuzzlestory
gmail.com P OB 5 91713 S an F rancisco C A 9 4159-­‐1713 U SA 2 Look for the most recent version of this Story at DragonPuzzle.net
1 understanding, including the hard-headed and the soft-hearted, in a form that coheres and is
beyond mere superstition and rigid certainties.
The Dragon Puzzle probably will make the most immediate sense to scientists familiar with the
structure of Kurt Gödel's famous Incompleteness Proof of mathematics. Later you may question
this book's emphasis on a few sentences but that is exactly the strategy of Gödel's Proof. That
proof emphasizes insight about a core text and so does this book.
To understand well how brains are built is to understand how to build them. This Story offers
concrete suggestions directed to those ends, for example these words: Catalysis is more useful than truth as a governing principle of discourse and generalized catalysis is pervasive in brains.
To deeply understand and to help develop the Dragon Puzzle one must speak many intellectual
and spiritual languages with some fluency – including the languages of zen, God and science. In
other words one must be an intellectual and spiritual decathlete, not necessarily the best in any
field but profoundly experienced in many. Elite generalists of this kind are rare – there may be
no more than a handful on a planet – but being an elite generalist does not make one royalty: It
makes one a slave – a slave to everyone, and perhaps to a developing text that itself must serve all.
I introduce this book with ambivalence. The Dragon Puzzle is benign, even benevolent, but only
given some readers' benign practice, for example of quiet upright sitting or its strong equivalent.
Such practice cannot guarantee benevolence, but absent such practice or if practice is coerced or
made a god the end is malignant – and hence my ambivalence. I am a bit autistic and not well
able to love in conventional ways: This book is what I can do. If I err may it be on the side of
that feathery thing best left at the zendo door, hope.
I expect that most people who read this Core Theory of Everything will be confused and bored
by it. It is a lifetime’s work condensed to a very few pages. I ask you to consider though that the
book, like an obscure manual in a ship's engine room, may help nudge a teeming vessel from
grim to livelier possibility. If you are among the uncomprehending please guide this story in the
direction of budding intellectual-and-spiritual decathletes – and if you are a budding decathlete
enjoy the journey! I am lonely and cherish the fantasy that I may yet have informed and zazengrounded exchanges about the Dragon Puzzle but I recognize that this hobby is of a sort usually
comprehended well only after a hobbyist’s death.
Please doubt this project: I have a particular personality, experience, sense of humor, and so on,
and these may distort what is more generally helpful. I accept responsibility for any harm caused
by the Dragon Puzzle Story now and ever. Thank you for your patience in testing its heart and
its reasoning, which now begins.
2 Suppose there were an object that –
1) helped viewers understand themselves well enough to begin building their equals in a laboratory,
2) motivated practices with the power to ease resulting dangers and foster global harmony, and
3) avoided grandiosity by making no claims about the speed at which these things might happen.
The object would be Promethean and messianic, but on the humblest possible scale. Necessarily
the object would reconcile science and religion – not mere pseudoscience and angry religiosity
but rigorous science and generally helpful practice. This book is an attempt to create – and to be
– such an object. The attempt is mad to the extent it is grandiose, and shunning grandiosity is its
first labor.
The Dragon Puzzle arose from these admittedly ambitious questions:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Can physical theory and spiritual practice be consistent with essential doubt?
Do Gödel's Proofs reveal anything about how brains are built?
What are the central engineering principles of brain structure and function?
Is there a physical organizing principle of the universe?
Can brains build, change or move stars?
What brain processes underlie meditation, prayer and selflessness?
Is there universally helpful practice that can foster lively global peace?
In addition to the seven questions three important insights preceded the Dragon Puzzle –
1) Brains are energy- as well as information-processors.
2) To understand how brains are built is to seek effective text about how to build brains.
3) One can plausibly engineer text that catalyzes not only actual brainbuilding but also the text’s
….own further development.
These seven questions and three insights motivate the following story’s reasoning and referring
to them occasionally can make the story easier to comprehend. With no more introduction then
here follows the Dragon Puzzle, all thousand or so words of it, in all of its enigmatic simplicity.
3 The Dragon Puzzle
My toes are dangling in a stream. I was going to do my wash but it's a pretty spring day
– sunny with a few clouds and a faint mist in from the sea. I am quite lazy and it's a
pleasant day to muse on wording about a puzzle that has held my interest for a while
now. I'm lazy and the wording is difficult. Perhaps you can help.
A mosquito has come and gone. Birds and bugs make ancient noises along the banks
by the moving water. A blue dragonfly startles me.
I spent many years trying to write a clear and helpful text about how brains are built,
artificial and otherwise. What labor! What difficulty! And I so lazy. I almost killed myself
when I first discovered the job was not going to be easy. But then after years of toil I
was seized by every hooky-playing school-child's dream: "Since the job is so difficult
and I am so lazy why not rig a labor-saving contraption – a self-writing text about
building brains? Then I can go chase other beauties while the text does all the work!" In
this way the Ur-question arose: Is there self-developing text?
Now, of course, books conventionally don't write books – people, and their brains, do.
But, I reasoned, perhaps a text could be so designed and phrased as to cajole brains
into improving it. The text would function as a catalyst of its own development. Thus I
asked:
Is there text that can catalyze its own development?
"What a fascinating Koan," I thought, "particularly if the text can continue to catalyze its
own development; but of course the text needs also to build brains." And so I persisted:
Is there text that can catalyze its own development and also the building of
brains?
"Very nice," I thought, "and eventually the brains that get built can join in the fun. But in
my experience brainbuilding is very difficult, and if all these other brains are as lazy as I
am they are going to want some incentive to work on the text." There was one incentive
that I could see beforehand would give all beings the motivation to sustain and develop
the text and none to destroy it: That incentive was that the text help all generally – that,
for example, as far as possible the text help bring all beings more of, and more rapidly,
what they profoundly seek. Thus I arrived at the following Riddle:
4 Is there text that can catalyze its own development and also the building of brains,
and that can increasingly help all?
"Now that would be compelling text," I thought, "and certainly if the text actually does
give some insight into how to build brains then it will at least bring would-be brainbuilders more of what they seek. And might not understanding a bit more about the
brain shed some light on the more general question of what helps brains? And is the
notion of generally helpful text so far-fetched in a world of self-help books, not to
mention of texts that have been treasured for ages reportedly for their ability to help
many people? Is even the text, Please consider treating others as you would like to be
treated, far from being generally helpful?"
"What if such a brainbuilding text actually existed," I mused. "What would it look like?
What words might it contain?"
The watercress gatherers have come and need my seat by the stream. . . I am now
under a low pine that whooshes in the wind where a forest meets a meadow.
I saw that the text, like any developing text, would exist as a series of sequels or
instances, likely in multiple versions that advanced fitfully or perished, with each
instance the possible ancestor of more powerful instances. I saw that if a text of the kind
sought existed then the fact of its continuing development would yield in time a
successor instance likely to become a significant causal entity in the universe – that
brains would put into the text both theories granting increasing control of the universe,
and descriptions of practices that help brains. The text would be a Theory of Everything
and a reconciler of warring ideologies.
Given the dependence of terrestrial life on a star, the Sun, and given that stars fluctuate
and age, any theory granting control of the life-giving energy of stars would make its
way into the text described by the Riddle. Powerful text is effective text. If an instance of
the text sought did exist then it would be likely to develop to the point that it influenced,
through the agency of brains, even astronomical events. Can you see all of these things
too?
"That's peculiar," I thought. "If books, brains and stars are physical objects, then this
self-writing text about building brains seems also to be a text about physics. In fact,
such a text apparently both describes and constitutes an organizing principle of the
universe."
Then I began to trace the cycle backwards. If the text develops then I reasoned that it
might start quite small – that in fact the first instances of the work might contain very few
words. If I could only see those few words then the drama could begin!
5 The first simple instances of the text would have to contain wording that somehow
began to draw brains into the grand project of finding whether there is text that can
catalyze its own development and also the building of brains, and that can increasingly
help all.
The Riddle itself does just that.
Is there text that can catalyze its own development and also the building of brains,
and that can increasingly help all?
I saw that since the possibility of such text seems so patently preposterous it would be
likely to enter public life as a mere recreational oddity, but one that invited the attention
of brains both curious and experienced – to debut, perhaps, as a simple puzzle.
Have fun, and try not to hurt yourselves! I think I'll take a stroll now in the afternoon sun.
6 That, then, is the Dragon Puzzle. On first looking into the marks at my pencil tip I felt like some
watcher of the skies when a new Earth swims into view. Can you too see that the Riddle and to
some extent the Dragon Puzzle itself must be the central words of the text they seek – the very
text with potential to snowball to astronomical influence? This I refer to as the Central Insight.
One sees by insight that the Riddle first seeks the Riddle. Soon after writing the Dragon Puzzle I
read it to a child not yet ten years old who immediately exclaimed, "So this is it!" The child had
had the Central Insight. Not every reader has the ability of that child, but many do.
Seven Claims
The Dragon Puzzle emerged and sat before me. Preposterous though it did appear, I saw that
allowing the possibility of slow text development enabled a sober reading of the Dragon Puzzle.
Before long I saw too that the Dragon Puzzle:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
forms an epistemologically sound core theory,
has an intellectual precedent in Gödel's Proofs,
exposes basic principles of brainbuilding,
supplies a wanted principle of universal order,
restores humans to the center of the universe,
reconciles science and spiritual practice, and
motivates peace-bringing Perennial Practice.
These seven inferences ("Claims") were so grandiose-sounding that I doubted I could convey
their actual reasonableness and modesty to others. Given the rarity of broad experience in
brainbuilding and open-minded spiritual practice I expected only trouble in the attempt. On the
other hand Earth's inhabitants seemed bent on disaster even with the Dragon Puzzle silent in my
closet. I decided then to risk misunderstanding and offer the Dragon Puzzle, however modest its
aid might be.
There are two main kinds of dragon in Earthly tales: Eastern and Western. While dragons in the
West typically are enemies to be slain, Eastern dragons hold wisdom in their teeth and a person
must skillfully befriend the dragon in order to reach that wisdom. The Eastern dragon is not slain
but does not suffer fools. The dragon of the Dragon Puzzle is this sort of dragon.
I have no desire to convince anyone of anything in what follows. I try to describe plainly what I
see and invite readers to test the observations in their own judgment – and to test their own
judgment while at it.
Dragon Puzzle Science
The Dragon Puzzle and its Sequels address anything that either sustains and develops brains or is
a danger to them, including both intellect and heart, both science and religion. The Dragon
Puzzle hints of harmony between heart and intellect, and later in this text I turn directly to heart.
However, in the centuries before this writing intellect in the form of science seemingly drove
7 humanity from the heart of the universe and so I face science first. I try to do so on science's own
terms because science is the right hand of the dragon to be befriended.
Albert Einstein once commented to the effect that in science a good idea should be simple but
not too simple.3 Some simple-but-not-too-simple science lies in range of the first claim for the
Puzzle, that it forms an epistemologically sound core theory. I introduce the subject with a story
from my college years.
Epistemology and Uncertainty
Epistemology is the study of how we know things. It's fine to say that a rock or another mind
exists, for example, but how do we ensure that they are more than dreams?
I first studied epistemology as a fledgling brain scientist and so was partial to the idea that I was
a brain receiving all new knowledge about the world by way of sensory nerves. As I saw it, if I
were cut off from my senses I would have no way to ascertain that a stone or another person's
mind existed. In fact most people do a poor job of guessing whether there is a stone or a mind in
another place if they are deprived of direct or indirect sensation of that place.
The problem with my simple engineer's model of knowledge was that I had no way properly to
test it. Every attempt to verify that senses gave true knowledge inevitably depended at some
point on assuming that senses gave true knowledge. Even if I did have a way to verify that the
stones and minds reported by my senses were more than hallucinations I would have needed
another way to verify the verifier – and so on ad infinitum. I had no way to distinguish "reality"
from illusion. It seemed I was trapped in an essential ignorance. My overall reasoning about the
problem was more involved than this but it all pointed to my deep ignorance. I will not belabor
the matter here because it took me years to accept my fundamental uncertainty and I don't expect
the reader to be any quicker about it.
During my college years I noticed that others commonly handled the problem of deep ignorance
by fashioning intricate verbal bulldozers to certify the flatness and certainty of their worlds.
Everywhere people used truth like a blunt instrument. Most brain scientists simply plowed the
verification problem aside as irrelevant and pressed on. I knew though that I was ignorant, that
there was something rotten at the core of most scientific epistemology, and that bulldozing and
neglect did not fix it. Fortunately I was reassured by the Socratic this I know that I do not know
because I noted that Socrates had a keener mind than most.4
3 Einstein, Albert. On the Method of Theoretical Physics. The Herbert Spencer Lecture, delivered at Oxford University. 10 June 1933. 4 Plato. Apology. 21d 8 My ignorance only grew. When I carried my doubts to the religions of my day I ran into yet
more satisfied certainty. The religions demanded new faith when I was already made queasy by
my own evident faith in stones. Fortunately I was reassured by the Tao Te Ching: "The common
people see clearly ... I alone am confused."5 I noted that Lao Tzu had a broader mind than most.
One night, asleep but fully sober, I dreamed I had found a treasure and within the dream I
pinched myself to test whether I was dreaming. I concluded that I was not dreaming. The rude
dawn taught me otherwise and thereafter I knew I could never be certain even that I was awake.
Though I was filled with confusion and doubt some things remained compelling: Awake or
dreaming if I did not eat I hungered, if I did not dress I froze. Each day walls blocked my way
and always I lusted after beauty. It seemed I lived in a world without Certain Truth, but that
shoved me about anyway.
Amid uncertainty like this the Dragon Puzzle wanders into the scene and onto the turf of science.
First I establish that the Dragon Puzzle is a legitimate object of scientific study: Is the Dragon
Puzzle not a physical object that we can observe and describe together? It exists in multiple
instances of course, but so do electrons. In fact the Dragon Puzzle is much easier to observe than
is an electron. Our descriptions of the Dragon Puzzle may differ, but the same is true for our
descriptions of an electron or stone. The Dragon Puzzle sits concretely before many observers: It
is hard to name a more legitimate object of scientific inquiry. It seems we may proceed.
Claim 1: The Dragon Puzzle forms an epistemologically sound core theory.
Summary: There is an intellectually sound alternative to discussion based on questions of truth,
and that is discussion centered on catalysis. This new basis resolves long-standing problems in
both science and religion.
The argument for this claim is brief.
The Central Insight in its strongest form is that the Riddle of the Dragon Puzzle is the perhaps
unique seed and core of a text with potential to snowball to astronomical influence. What exactly
does the Riddle require of the powerful text it seeks? Does it require that the text be composed of
Absolutely True statements and undeniably valid arguments? It does not. It requires only that the
text catalyze further text development, brainbuilding and helping-all. The Dragon Puzzle seeks
not truth but catalysis. This means that in the entire body of Dragon Puzzle Sequels – all the
way to star-moving documents and potentially including this very Story – it is catalysis and not
Incontrovertible Truth that dominates and drives the texts.
5 Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching. Ch. 20 (See Star, Jonathan. TAO TE CHING: The Definitive Edition. Penguin, New York. p. 138. 2001.) 9 The Dragon Puzzle heralds a shift in intellectual convention, a shift in emphasis from the true to
the compelling, from the certain to the catalytic. Compelling text can catalyze action without
being demonstrably valid or true. One need not experience the Central Insight with blazing
certainty: Curiosity and a vague sense of plausibility are sufficient to fuel the catalytic cycle of
text development. It doesn't matter whether my statements in this text are true beyond all doubt:
It matters only that I try to write truly.
Truths may be uncertain but compelling. Lies on the other hand are rarely compelling for long.
Lies and distortions may be repeated for years, but in the long run rigorous honesty prevails
because its agreement with observation remains compelling longer. As time passes varied
opinions rarely remain equally compelling to careful observers: For example, diligent students of
the skies now generally agree that the Earth orbits the Sun despite early appearances and wellintentioned opinions to the contrary. Intentional distortions and honest mistakes are both
common but it is possible to see past them.
Some reverence for the rugged opinions known as facts probably is essential to brain engineering
and clear thought generally. Facts arise amid terrible uncertainty. Witnesses commonly swear to
the existence of unseeable things like complex invisible agents – often on the basis of doubtable
evidence. Also, an observer sometimes perceives what other witnesses feel is not present: The
observer is said to hallucinate. Hallucinations do not always announce their false nature and
people can hallucinate in groups. Skilled sleight of hand can cause even hard-headed skeptics to
perceive what is not there. In this landscape of uncertainty there nevertheless arise opinions that
stand like weathered stone. "Our home was destroyed in the fire." "It is raining." "We have no
money." "The tree did not walk." Some things are obvious, as when one is a trout in the milk. It
is possible to have practical confidence in facts while accepting that they are more catalytic than
true beyond all doubt. Without such practical confidence in facts brain engineering probably is
impossible.
Compelling means compelling to someone. The intellectual shift from the true to the compelling
thus gives a window on the role of the observer in physical events – a role historically debated in
quantum mechanics. However, the view through the window is not simple: On the one hand the
compelling is a species of the catalytic and the catalytic does not necessarily entail a full-fledged
10 observer. On the other hand the entire logic of Dragon Puzzle development depends on observers,
presumed thous, compelled by it. Thou and That are profoundly entangled. This entanglement of
That and Thou looms in importance in later reasoning about spiritual practice (see the 7th Claim).
A more direct result of the shift to the compelling is that it easily accommodates differing
cultural views. What is compelling to one group may not be so to another. For example one
group may feel the Moon is a calabash and another a rock. Eddies of contrasting opinion are to
be expected everywhere during global text development. In weighing evidence it is common to
hear "Consider the source." Consider too the destination! The fate of a seed depends on the soil it
lands in. Seeds do better in some soils than in others: Effective lunar theory probably won't
develop much where the Moon must be a vegetable.
Look what the Dragon Puzzle has done here. With a few strokes it has made a platform upon
which discourse is liberated from the divisive demands of Absolute Truth. No longer is there
need of world-flattening logical bulldozers. No longer is the lack of proof that stones exist a
mark of shame. No longer must one muffle the uncertainty groaning beneath the floorboards of
science. Again and as ever spiritual practice can hold its head upright in a cloud of unknowing.
Not only does the Dragon Puzzle form an epistemologically sound core theory – and the Central
Insight shows that the Puzzle or a close relative is the core of its Sequels – the Dragon Puzzle at
last supplies a core theory with room for the deep uncertainty that has always dogged the
sciences. It supplies a core with room for the best of science in Galileo without making exiles of
Socrates and Lao Tzu.
Catalysis is not a mere metaphysical abstraction. It is a concept very familiar to science and
engineering. All the enzymes of the human body are in varying degrees catalysts. A good many
of the factories on Earth would have to shut down if deprived of chemical catalysts like platinum.
A generalized catalyst is any entity that precipitates change while changing relatively little itself.
Text is catalytic in this way. This is easy to verify in the case of a STOP sign: Watch cars slow
beside the STOP sign while the sign remains unchanged. (We consider texts that change later.)
11 In any case catalysis is a matter of hard science: The Dragon Puzzle revises epistemology in
more than airy tones and it is solidly at home on scientific turf.
There is of course much more to say about epistemology and catalysis but space is limited just
here. I should warn though that we are traveling in swampy terrain: The slightest misstep and
one is enmired or lost. Other metaphors apply too, but please do observe this caution: If you have
stopped moving it may be not that you have arrived, but that you are stuck. Another metaphor,
by the way, is dragon.
Grandiosity and The Global Autocatalytic Library
Uncertain self-reference is key to reasoning from the Dragon Puzzle, but this inevitably makes
the Puzzle seem self-important and the reasoning grandiose. However, there is another text with
many of the properties of the Dragon Puzzle and reasoning from it can feel less grandiose. I refer
to the Global Autocatalytic Library – that part of all accessible informational media having the
properties specified by the Dragon Puzzle and particularly by its Riddle. If you are not deeply
bothered by perceived grandiosity in Dragon Puzzle self-reference feel free to skip to Claim 2
below.
Are there media, texts for example, with the properties of the Dragon Puzzle's Riddle, but that
are not the Riddle itself? Probably most scientists would allow that scientific texts develop over
time and that written theories and recorded data spur this development. As an example, the
phlogiston theory of combustion contributed to more effective modern theories of oxidation by
dint of its well-documented predictive failings. Written theories and recorded data are part of the
global library, and consulting them while trying to add more effective theories to the library is
the lifeblood of science.
If sermons, fascicles, homilies, tracts and the like may be considered developments from existing
religious texts then religious texts too spur their own further development. Even the simple
proliferation of scriptures by way of copying is a rudimentary form of text development.
Whether one speaks of religious or scientific texts some part of the global library catalyzes its
own development as required by the Riddle of the Dragon Puzzle.
The global library arguably builds brains as well as texts, also in keeping with the demands of
the Riddle. Text study is a classical part of learning and learning builds brains at a microscopic
level. Written exhortations to procreate build brains by encouraging the proliferation of babies
12 and their brains, although when overpopulation leads to war and famine such texts destroy brains
too. The global library is also replete with texts about neurobiology and artificial intelligence,
texts that give the elements of how brains are built and how to build them.
Finally, and as the Riddle also requires, elements of the existing global library distinctly help
some people and there is a constant press to help more. The Dragon Puzzle itself comments,
"And is the notion of helpful text so far-fetched in a world of self-help books, not to mention of
texts that have been treasured for ages reportedly for their ability to help many people?" If a text
describes how to make a medicine that prevents a rampant contagion, and the medicine's
effectiveness, manufacture or distribution can be improved, then the text increasingly can help
all. If on one day it helps one and the next day two, meanwhile harming none, then increasingly
it helps all.
Not all parts of the global library catalyze their own development: A decaying food label in a
dump may still be an accessible part of the global library without being very autocatalytic. On
the other hand we have seen that some part of the global library at least to some extent does
catalyze its own development and the building of brains, and increasingly helps all. This part is
the Global Autocatalytic Library and we have seen that it exists.
The Dragon Puzzle surpasses the Global Autocatalytic Library as a focus of discussion in two
important ways. First, the Dragon Puzzle is centered on a question, the Riddle. This explicit
emphasis helps ensure that sequels not only catalyze their own development but continue to do
so. The evidence for the Global Autocatalytic Library lies in present autocatalysis whereas the
Riddle fosters autocatalysis as long as brains exist to read it. The Global Autocatalytic Library
can of course exactly duplicate the properties of the Dragon Puzzle by containing it, but in that
case we return to a discussion of the Dragon Puzzle.
The second advantage of the Dragon Puzzle is that it is direct and succinct, greatly easing
discussion: Its features are plain to see and unambiguous relative to those of the nebulous Global
Autocatalytic Library. The text that most possesses the properties of the word stone is the word
stone, and the text that most possesses the properties of the Dragon Puzzle and its Riddle is the
Dragon Puzzle and its Riddle. The reader is welcome to develop the arguments of this Story
without strong reference to the Dragon Puzzle or its near cousins, but the arguments will likely
be much more circuitous and prone to confusion. I prefer the direct. In this Story I have favored
honesty and directness above an affected modesty.
As far as grandiosity is concerned this Story is merely marks made by a person of no great talent
and many defects. It is born of experience but any person’s cry is as worthy of respect. This
Story can live only somewhere between the altar and the dump.
Because uncertainty is so pervasive the Dragon Puzzle and its proper sequels must be modest in
themselves. We shall see that proper sequels cannot even identify themselves as such. It can help
13 to picture attached to attempted Dragon Puzzle sequels a great Grandiosity Knob, like a volume
knob on an amplifier: If a sequel's tone or content overstates its own potential influence then turn
that knob down! The Grandiosity Knob can be set too low, however: History affirms that texts
do have influence.
Claim 2: The Dragon Puzzle has an intellectual precedent in Gödel's Proofs.
Summary: The Dragon Puzzle and Gödel's famous Proofs in mathematics are deeply related:
Both are driven by insight about a potentially self-referential text, and two main inferences from
the Dragon Puzzle parallel Gödel's first and second Proofs. Like the Dragon Puzzle Gödel's
Proofs, and all of mathematics, depend on natural language.
"Gödel's Proofs" is shorthand for the proofs of two famous theorems in mathematical logic.6
Non-mathematicians need not be alarmed here. I learned as an undergraduate that I was a fair
mathematician but not a fine one. If you locked me in a room with paper and pencil I would be
unable to duplicate Gödel's Proofs as he gave them. For our purposes here one need only grasp a
few central features of the Proofs. It might help to know though that as of this writing Gödel's
Proofs are probably among the most influential proofs in all of mathematics, and that some
students have thought they might reveal important facts about brains.
Gödel's Proofs probably were born in natural language, and in particular in the immediately
following self-referential sentence or one like it: This statement cannot be proved. Let's call the
preceding italicized statement "G". Is G true or false? (You might want to mull the question
before proceeding.) Notice that if G were false it would be the case that G could be proved, from
which it would follow that G is true, yielding a nonsensical contradiction. It follows that G
cannot be false and given that G is either provable or not we see then that G must be true. But
notice this! We have seen that G is true but nowhere proved it. In fact in seeing that G is true we
have seen exactly that G cannot be proved. It follows that we have found in G a sentence in
natural language that is true but cannot be proved.
I know that for many readers the foregoing is a bit of a mental tongue-twister. That's fine: It's
still possible to get the point. Gödel's actual Proofs are even more mind-twisting. What Gödel did
was to construct a mathematical system whereby a mathematical statement (a "mathematized
G") says of itself that it is not provable in the system. It follows that there are true statements of
mathematics that cannot be proved – in other words that the relevant mathematics is
"incomplete". Gödel went on to show in his second Proof that only an inconsistent mathematical
system can prove its own consistency – the mathematical equivalent of saying that only liars can
"prove" they never lie.
6 Gödel, K., Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme I. Monatshefte
für Mathematik und Physik 38, pp.173-198. 1931.
14 Why did some people think Gödel's Proofs might reveal something important about brains?
Return for a moment to statement G above. We saw it was true, but of course we did not prove it
was true. But how did we see that G was true if we didn't prove it? We must have seen the truth
of G by way of some kind of insight. What then is insight? If we are brains then it would appear
that insight can operate by means other than proof because we see that the truth of G cannot be
determined by proof. Because computers are in effect theorem-proving machines throughout it
follows that brains must not be purely computers. Valid or not that was the sort of reasoning that
first drew the attention of brain scientists to Gödel's Proofs.
Two or so houses up the road from where I lived as a child was the home of a boy a few years
my senior, who went on to become a serious student of brains. The boy's father was a Nobel
laureate in physics and I remember discovering Newton's First Law of Motion in front of their
home. My brothers and I wanted to tear down the hill in front of their home in our trusty wagon,
but there was no STOP sign for automobile cross-traffic at the bottom of the hill and the wagon
had no brake. We hit on the idea of making an anchor for the wagon out of a heavy brick
attached to the rear axle of the wagon with a rope: The plan was to heave the brick out the back
of the wagon as we approached the intersection at full tilt, whereupon the brick was to function
like an anchor and bring us gracefully to a halt before we could be flattened by cross-traffic. We
were surprised to find in the event that not only did we not stop but that our cross-traffic problem
was now compounded by a brick bounding down the hill hard upon our rear. I was not an
exceptionally bright child.
I knew the boy of the house up the hill as "Doug". It is a measure of the era's interest in the
brain-Gödel connection that Doug went on to write a book about how thinking arises in a brain, a
book that won both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award (top literary awards in the land)
– and that the first word of the book's title was Gödel. 7 The book dwelled heavily on the theme
of self-reference central to Gödel's reasoning.
How then do Gödel's Proofs supply an intellectual precedent to the Dragon Puzzle?
At first glance the Dragon Puzzle looks like a philosophical plaything, the sort of fluff that
sophomores ponder over beverages in woozy morning hours. It can seem at best the verbal
equivalent of an optical illusion, diverting but little more. However, deep structural similarities
between the Dragon Puzzle and Gödel's Proofs place the Puzzle and its methods squarely in an
academic tradition.
The connection between Gödel's Proofs and the Dragon Puzzle is interesting. Some students
thought that formally generalizing Gödel's Proofs would somehow crack the nut of brain
function, but that's not precisely how the Dragon Puzzle makes the attempt. The Dragon Puzzle
is structurally related to Gödel's Proofs but the differences between Puzzle and Proofs reveal as
7 Hofstadter, Douglas R. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Basic Books. New York. 1979. 15 much about brains as do the similarities. In Claim 3 we'll talk directly about brains. Here we
trace the relationship between Gödel's Proofs and the Dragon Puzzle. This then is a short list of
their similarities and differences:
* Both are (trivially but profoundly) texts of not wildly-differing lengths, composed of words
and sentences – many of which are formally mathematical in the case of the Proofs.
* Both revolve about a central text –
the mathematized G in the Proofs, and the Riddle in the Puzzle.
* Both are driven by insight –
that G is true in the Proofs, and that sentences are to varying degrees catalytic and
compelling in the Puzzle.
* Both are self-referential –
explicitly so in the case of statement G, and uncertainly so for the sentences of the Puzzle.
An effective theory of everything can hardly fail to mention itself, however uncertain the
mention may be. This very Story may (but only may) be a proper sequel to the Dragon
Puzzle.
* (I) Both show that unprovable statements can have a particular important property –
that unprovable statements can be true in the Proofs, and that they can be catalytic and
compelling in the Puzzle.
* (II) Both show that only a text without a particular property can prove it has that property –
in the Proofs that only an inconsistent system can prove it is consistent, and in the Puzzle
that only a non-Sequel can prove it is a Sequel. This latter needs elaboration:
The Dragon Puzzle reads, "I saw that the text, like any developing text, would exist as a series of
sequels or instances..." Any sequel to the Dragon Puzzle that is in fact part of a series extending
into the unlimited future I refer to as a Sequel, with an uppercase S. (Sometimes I use the
expression proper sequel instead of the uppercase S.) The Dragon Puzzle effectively strives to
construct Sequels. However, if a text were known truly to be such a Sequel it would in effect
answer the Riddle of the Dragon Puzzle, eliminating its central motivating uncertainty and
killing the autocatalytic cycle of text development. Thus only a non-Sequel can "prove" that it is
a Sequel. Even the Riddle itself cannot properly claim to be a Sequel, however strong anyone's
Central Insight about it may be. I can fairly say that this very Story is a sequel (lowercase s) to
the Dragon Puzzle, and I can reasonably say it is an attempted Sequel (uppercase S), but I can
never know whether it or any other text is in fact a Sequel.
The foregoing shows that the Dragon Puzzle and some of its methods have potent ancestors. I
have already pointed out the Puzzle's relationship to long-standing discussions in epistemology,
and autocatalysis among text-like molecules has been well-studied in work on autocatalytic
hypercycles.8 Later we trace the Puzzle's bearing on long-standing questions in thermodynamics.
If the Dragon Puzzle is mere wordplay it is wordplay with a pedigree.
8 Eigen, Manfred and Schuster, Peter. The Hypercycle – A Principle of Natural Self-Organization. Springer, Berlin.
1979. 16 Mathematical Fantasies
Natural language, like the life it is suited to describe, can be chaotic and confusing. This has led
some to turn for clarity to formal languages like those of mathematics. Mathematics can be like
the purest music – and it has proven almost unreasonably effective in describing regularities of
the physical world. Galileo famously wrote that the book of nature "is written in mathematics."
Who can argue with the elegance and power of e=mc2? And so a reader protests, "Shouldn't a
powerful physical theory be fundamentally mathematical? If the Dragon Puzzle has an academic
pedigree and is the core of a powerful physical theory why is it written entirely in natural
language, seemingly without a trace of mathematics?" Addressing these questions takes us to the
roots of mathematics.
A first response to the reader's protest might be simply that the Dragon Puzzle is written in the
first language of brains, natural language, and also that sequels to the Dragon Puzzle are free to
contain mathematics of all sorts. However, it happens that the Dragon Puzzle as it stands is
already mathematical:
The Dragon Puzzle is written in numerals. In English the substance of the Dragon Puzzle can be
expressed using fewer than 256 characters, allowing for bold and italic fonts. The words and
punctuation of the Puzzle then are formally indistinguishable from numbers represented in base
256. They are numbers pointing to numbers. In a computer version of the Puzzle one can see
these numbers written in binary. I make this simple observation to dispel the notion that the
Dragon Puzzle's natural language has nothing to do with mathematics. More significantly,
though, the earlier talk about the Dragon Puzzle and Gödel's Proofs is itself a legitimate form of
mathematics because, as we shall now see, mathematics itself is inseparable from natural
language.
Look into almost any formal proof in mathematics and you will find natural language. Even the
famed Principia Mathematica that sought to do away with natural language in mathematics came
with a long introduction in natural language.9 More importantly it ignored the myriad hours of
talk that educated its readers in the use of the Principia's symbols. Readers brought entire
volumes of natural language to the interpretation of the Principia – in their brains.
Ten pages chosen by random number generator from Whitehead and Russell’s
Principia Mathematica, with natural language marked in black
9Whitehead, Alfred North, and Russell, Bertrand. Principia Mathematica, 3 vols, Cambridge University Press, 1910, 1912, and 1913. The above figure is based on the second edition, 1925 (Vol. 1), 1927 (Vols 2, 3). 17 Now examine scientific theories renowned for their mathematical description of the natural
world. Newton's laws of motion and the laws of thermodynamics suggest examples. In the text of
those theories you will again find many words. The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics is
inseparable from the reasonable effectiveness of natural language. The idea that mathematics
and rigorous physical theories are divorced from natural language is a fantasy.
Thus far I have asked the reader simply to notice the association of mathematical and natural
language whether it occurs in plain view or hidden in the brains of an audience. The primacy of
natural over formal language runs deeper than this, however. Mathematical fantasy does not end
here, as we shall now see.
The Most Powerful Theory
As the Dragon Puzzle comments, "A powerful text is an effective text." Theories that grant some
control of the universe and actually help brains are effective and hence relatively catalytic. The
Dragon Puzzle says of a proper sequel that "brains would put into the text both theories granting
increasing control of the universe, and descriptions of practices that help brains." In other words
a Sequel subsumes or refers to other effective theories. It eats them up! In an early sequel to the
Dragon Puzzle (this one, for example) the external references can be as simple as “be guided by
the course listings at major universities, not overlooking courses that require mathematical proof,
careful unbiased observation, and epistemology. Take up a physical regimen. Study the arts.
Learn some history, and how to write clearly, too. Personally test time-honored practices.”
Obviously early sequels to the Dragon Puzzle won’t amount to much, but you can see that by
augmenting its central structure with inclusions and references, eventually a Sequel to the
Dragon Puzzle is likely to become the Most Effective Theory of Everything in its time and place.
The Dragon Puzzle is after all a capstone that can hold all the rest together, or a hub that makes
the rest a useful wheel.
The converse also holds: The Most Effective Theory of Everything in a time and place tends to
be a Sequel to the Dragon Puzzle for two main reasons: 1) If it meets the autocatalytic
requirements of the Riddle (including its uncertainty) then it is perforce a Sequel and 2) if it does
not meet the Riddle requirements then there immediately exists a more powerful theory that is
itself absorbed by a Sequel. The Central Insight then suggests that a Sequel generally does exist
to do the absorbing: Simply appending the Dragon Puzzle to an effective and general theory can
in principle (but not certainly, of course) make it a Sequel.
We see from the foregoing that the Most Powerful Theory of Everything is not centrally
mathematical except to the extent that natural language is itself mathematical. Rather, the Most
Powerful Theory is centered on natural language like the Dragon Puzzle.
18 The Dragon Puzzle does more than provide a catalytic alternative to mathematical truth: It draws
into question the very notion of writable Absolute Truth in any form, including the mathematical.
The foregoing reasoning about the Most Powerful Theory shows that any theory demanding the
existence of Absolute Truth is subsidiary to and ultimately dependent on a theory that makes no
such demand and is itself uncertain. What depends on the uncertain in this way becomes
uncertain itself. The existence of writable Absolute Truth is therefore doubtful in any system,
including any system of formal mathematics, that tags along in a most effective and powerful
theory of everything.
The foregoing is not a proof that notions of formal truth in mathematics are invalid: It cannot be
such a proof because such a proof would itself depend on the notion of truth it questions. The
Dragon Puzzle does not deny truth: It suggests that truth is a variety of the compelling. In the
sight of the Dragon Puzzle it is uncertain even that 1+1=2 or that "A & not A" is false. Of course
people who deny these things must back the denials with strong reasoning if they want a hardheaded audience to find their words compelling.
What is compelling depends on ability and experience, and these vary with brain, place and time.
In this light the word truth means something like well-tested text very compelling to particular
brains in a particular place and time. Allowing this meaning the word truth remains useful even
in context of the Dragon Puzzle. In fact, without concern for such truth intellectual sloppiness
and well-intended but naive meddling bog development of Dragon Puzzle sequels.
It is annoying to the rigorously inclined that bald facts can be doubted. "What do you mean it
might not be true that 1+1=2 or that you can pick up laundry without a ticket in New York City?
To say such things is insane." Nevertheless the Dragon Puzzle suggests it is unbecoming to
posture with too great a confidence about anything. As mentioned in the discussion of
epistemology, a statement can be compelling without being Absolutely True. It is possible to be
confident without being smug.
Note that Gödel's Proofs, or any proofs for that matter, are not valid except for readers who can
see by insight the truth of the Proofs' statements. Not all readers can do that. Furthermore, for
almost any proof there is at least one student who finds fault with the reasoning itself. In
mathematics generally there is always a lingering suspicion that a future mathematician will find
a flaw in long-accepted arguments. In any case a mathematical text, or any text for that matter, is
a collection of somewhat arbitrary marks on a page. Uncertainty seeps into mathematics from
many directions. That doesn't lessen its usefulness: It simply fosters humility.
In conclusion, the Dragon Puzzle has an intellectual ancestry that includes Gödel's Proofs. The
Dragon Puzzle also strongly suggests that natural language is the prime language of intellectual rigor.
19 Claim 3: The Dragon Puzzle exposes basic principles of brainbuilding.
Summary: The most central properties of brains (as well as of effective theory and the universe
itself) are exactly the properties of the Dragon Puzzle's Riddle. These properties are specific
enough to guide engineering now and general enough to allow further development over many
years.
Please remember that here we are trying to comprehend how brains are built – and to
comprehend it well enough that we can build them. That after all is an intention of the Dragon
Puzzle and this is an attempt at a Sequel. Despite the Promethean overtones, with some care
there's little to fear because the Dragon Puzzle also seeks increasingly to help all, and in that case
it makes little sense to build brains in a way that manifestly hurts people. We'll do the best we
can in an uncertain world.
This is a good place to review why we want to build brains in the first place, apart from the
explicit urging by the Dragon Puzzle. Curiosity and compassion are two motives to build brains,
and they are connected. I'll illustrate this with a personal example. For forty years people in my
family died only of suicide. This gave me compassion for anyone suffering as my family
members did. Under the circumstances then I hope I may be forgiven curiosity about how a brain
might be constructed that it would destroy itself. Quite generally, if suffering happens in brains
then knowing something about how brains are built addresses causes of suffering and possibly
how to alleviate it.
A prime reason to build brains is to test understanding. Would you rather fly in a machine
designed by someone who has only rhapsodized about flying or by someone who has in fact built
machines that fly? If two people claim to understand how brains are built and only one of them
has actually built a functioning brain, then the builder has the stronger claim to understanding.
A further reason to build brains is to benefit from their abilities. Would you rather have an act
that risked your life be performed by a human or by an artifact of greater-than-human
knowledge, ability and reliability? Any task that holds sentient lives in the balance is a potential
task for an artificial brain. As I write passenger aircraft are routinely piloted by artifacts,
sometimes even during emergency landings. The practical uses of artificial brains are obvious.
The question is not whether there are jobs for the brains but whether we can build brains for the jobs.
In order to build a thing it helps to know its needed properties and the general principles by
which it must operate. Not all properties and principles are equally important to brains. For
example, it is not important that brains be green or that they function by means of pistons. Here
the Dragon Puzzle enters again, this time exposing the most central principles of brainbuilding –
the brain properties and principles that apply across a wide range of scales and from many points
of view.
20 The Dragon Puzzle describes a series of sequel texts about how brains are built. As the texts
develop they accumulate wording about engineering principles effective in speeding the actual
building of brains. However, words do not accumulate in a sequel text unless they meet the
criteria outlined by the Riddle of the Dragon Puzzle. In other words, any effective property or
principle of brainbuilding must first reflect the properties and principles specified by the Dragon
Puzzle's Riddle. This means that the properties and principles specified by the Riddle are
themselves the most central to brainbuilding. Because the Central Insight suggests that the
Riddle itself is the text that most centrally has the properties specified by the Riddle it follows
that the most central brainbuilding properties are those of the Riddle.
The foregoing reasoning also applies to any physical theory admitted to a Sequel, which we have
seen means to a Most Powerful Theory of Everything. Physical theories accumulate in Sequels
only when they meet the criteria of the Riddle and grant more potentially brain-benefiting control
of the universe. Pretty-sounding but ineffective theories can't survive long in a Sequel. This leads
then to the following Central Properties Inference:
The most central properties and principles of effective theory, brain, and the physical
universe are exactly the central properties and principles of the Dragon Puzzle's Riddle.
This inference looks overblown of course but plain reason led us to it so we'll slow down and
look at it. If it sounds unlikely or grandiose please remember that it is the Riddle of the Dragon
Puzzle that first triggers the Central Insight you may have experienced to some degree yourself.
Several questions arise immediately: What exactly are the Riddle properties and principles
supposedly central to theory, brain and universe alike? Are they plausibly of use in physics or
brain engineering? How can Riddle properties guide brainbuilding when by the same reasoning
any stone or other part of the universe already has the properties? Can it really be that the central
effective theory of physics mentions brains and help before mentioning time, space, energy or
formal equations?
Before addressing these questions we first consider what sort of language we generally expect in
an early Sequel to the Dragon Puzzle. Remember that the Dragon Puzzle is open to possible text
development and brainbuilding extending millions of years into the future. A core theory that can
develop on this time scale must be at the outset neither too general nor too specific. If a theory is
too general then it gives no solid foothold for future work, and if the theory is too specific then it
leaves little room to engage future mysteries. That said we now address the first question.
What exactly are the central Riddle properties? They are in plain view and I have already
mentioned many of them. Here then is a partial Central Properties List:
The Riddle has a hierarchy of distinguishable parts because it is a text made of sentences and words.
The Riddle exists only in physical objects, for example on paper or in a brain or computer.
Riddle-encoded light beams are also physical and exist within spatial bounds.
21 The Riddle is textual information independent of any particular object.
The Riddle can be copied or destroyed.
The Riddle is uncertain because it is a question.
The Riddle develops text through a series of Sequels.
The Riddle is a catalyst because it precipitates change while changing little itself.
The Riddle is uncertainly self-referential.
The Riddle is uncertainly self-developing.
The Riddle develops in a cycle as text follows text through successive editions. And of course
the Riddle aims to develop text, to build brains and increasingly to help all.
These then are implied central properties of theory, brain and universe. They are properties that
cannot be avoided and cannot be derived from or reduced to other properties in a most effective
theory. The Central Properties List can be extended, but this suffices for now. Almost all of the
italicized terms are used regularly in the hard sciences: Hierarchy, parts, objects, information,
copying, destruction, uncertainty, development, catalysis, self-reference, self-development,
cycles, text, brain and help (for example in immune helper T cells) are all the stuff of rigorous
physical theory. In the present context it is simply telling that these properties do appear to have
precedence over time, space, energy, and mathematical formalism.
The Central Properties List is (as it must be) far from a complete theory of the physical universe.
However, it is quite solid enough to ground theory development while leaving ample room to
engage later mysteries. The Riddle's Central Properties are the stuff of future effective theory.
Can the Central Properties List build brains? The Riddle and resulting Central Properties List are
quite clear: At a wide range of scales and from many points of view brains are developingcatalysts among other things. More specifically they are uncertainly self-referential and
cyclically self-developing textual catalysts. This can mean many things, as it must in a core
theory capable of developing over millions of years, but it is solid enough to guide further work.
Compare for example the relative utility of brains are developing-catalysts to brains are dust on
a moth's wing.
The centrality of developing catalysis in brains suggests a bridge to the earlier insight that brains
are energy- as well as information-processors: A catalyst effects change while changing
relatively little itself and if energy reserves are part of a brain then becoming increasingly
catalytic entails using less energy to accomplish a given effect. This principle of minimum
effective use applies to all of a brain's resources, not just energy.
Because the universe is uncertain the words of the Riddle are vague. Much in the Dragon Puzzle
depends, for example, on the word develop. How can one engineer brains using such a vague
term? The Riddle itself was born in the Ur-question Is there self-developing text? and this puts a
strong emphasis on the vague word develop. Even a word like time with all its ambiguity seems
22 solider. This is expected, however, given the precedence and hence greater generality of the
Riddle property development relative to time, which is not mentioned explicitly in the Riddle.
The word develop also has a concrete aspect and there are ways to see this and so to ease
brainbuilding. We expect to find Riddle properties reflected in theory and universe – and this
means we expect to find them reflected in each other. I call this
phenomenon Internal Reflection in the Riddle (à) and it renders the
Riddle's Central Properties less vague and more useful to brain
engineering. To illustrate, while the word develop is a bit amorphous
by itself, when one considers the implication that a brain is in some
way and at varying levels a developing text then possibilities spring to
mind: A written text for example can develop by adding, changing or
eliminating words. The words of a text can refer to other words of the
text and these links too can be added, changed or eliminated. Already the imagery is computerlike (albeit seasoned with uncertainty) and neural.
The facts that central Riddle properties have wide scientific currency, and that in a few strokes
they suggest models with a computational and neural structure make it plausible that the Central
Properties List can speed brainbuilding.
Applying Riddle properties to brainbuilding is not easy. How could it be easy given a past and
future of eons? Quite likely the properties of the Dragon Puzzle are best held somewhere in the
back of the mind as one attempts other approaches. The proof of the pudding, as the saying goes,
is in the eating: If it builds a palpably better brain in harmony with existing brains then it likely
qualifies as a significant development.
I now address several questions about the Central Properties of the Dragon Puzzle. (These are
details. On early readings I suggest skipping at this point to Claim 4 below.)
To "increasingly help all" appears to be a fundamentally cooperative aim, yet in a sparse enough
region no cooperative strategy can succeed. Do the Riddle properties not apply in these
competitive regions? Competition is an integral part of development in Dragon Puzzle and brain
alike: Sentences compete for a berth in a Dragon Puzzle sequel and the Sparseness Adaptation
Syndrome I have described elsewhere provides that in a sufficiently sparse region no purely
cooperative strategy can reliably succeed.10 Obviously not all brains are equally "helped" in a
competition for resources that leaves one or more brains annihilated. The Dragon Puzzle points
the direction of long-term evolution, but does not mandate linear movement in that direction.
Gravity and the Second Law of Thermodynamics similarly point directions of favored motion,
and a pole star guides a wanderer, but none of these precludes contrary movements. In any case
asteroid impacts make the idea of constant linear progress laughable.
10 Access papers on Sparseness Adaptation at AutismTheory.org or in corresponding Internet archives. 23 One may say of unavoidable deadly competition that help occurs on many scales, for example as
a wolf helps a caribou herd remain healthy. However, the fact of deadly competition does not
justify the extremes of cold-blooded neglect, brutality and murder. In the words of Charles
Darwin, “If we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a
contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.”11
How can the Riddle properties guide brainbuilding when any stone already has the properties
because they are universal? The answer is really a matter of degree: All the berries on a bush
may be plump but some are plumper. This calls for a story:
A scientist was building brains. A student approached and said, "Doctor, the tendency to
brainbuilding is universal and there is no place it does not reach. Why then do you build
brains?"
"Although you understand that the tendency to brainbuilding is universal," the scientist
replied, "you do not understand the meaning of its reaching everywhere."
"What is the meaning of its reaching everywhere?" asked the student.
The scientist just kept building brains.
How can text be a central property of the universe when the universe clearly exists before there
is text of the brain-made variety? There are several ways to address this question. One is to assert
that stars, rocks, trees and such as exist before brains are in fact formally indistinguishable from
text and so are in themselves text. Another way is to say that rocks and trees spring from a
hidden world of text, just as computer images spring from a hidden world of binary text. Another
is to say that because development is central it is not text itself but text precursors that exist
before brains. Yet another way is to say that it is not text but the properties of text that are
central in the universe. Thus text has parts that form wholes, can exist in copies, and so on. All of
these approaches, and others, have merit.
How can development be a central property of the universe when there are so many obvious
examples of decay and destruction? Rocks and organisms alike age and fall apart, and an
asteroid impact erases in an instant eons of development. The Dragon Puzzle does not give a
blueprint or timetable for development, and indeed its intrinsic uncertainty speaks of
impermanence because permanence implies certainty of continued existence. However, the
Dragon Puzzle provides that against this backdrop of decay is a universal tendency to
development. Repair and copying forestall decay, and the human drive to build more effective
theories shows that a tendency to develop can exist along with decay. Development and decay
are compatible. There is more to say about this in the fourth Claim.
11 Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. 2d ed. London: John Murray. p.134. 1874. 24 How can a text catalyze its own development when development entails change while catalysis
precludes it? Text that develops through addition of new text or through altering only copies of
itself changes while emerging unchanged. Thus development is consistent with catalysis in a
strong sense. Text that destroys parts of the sole copy of itself may reasonably be called catalytic
in a weak sense if the change is small or the destroyed parts arguably are unimportant. The
development of the Dragon Puzzle itself was catalytic in this sense because although the text
inspired its own development I did not retain copies of all its early drafts. This weaker usage is
already common because biological catalysts like enzymes decay even as they precipitate other
changes.
The Riddle was first written in English. Does that mean English is a central property of the
universe? This is actually a serious question. The Dragon Puzzle could have been written just as
rigorously in many other modern languages. However, there are languages in which it could not
have been written, not least English itself of only a few hundred years ago. The words catalyze
and development in the modern senses did not exist more than three centuries before this writing.
Future theories will be written using words that do not exist as I write, and the meanings of some
words I do use may mutate beyond recognition. It is not uncommon that the meaning of a word
changes to its near-polar opposite: Terrific once meant terrifying and awful meant awesome.
There is of course vastly more to say about the Dragon Puzzle and brainbuilding, but in the
present space I mean only to rouse curiosity and whet appetites for further exploration –
particularly the appetites of compassionate and scientifically learned students who are neither
parrots nor crackpots. I have given evidence that the Dragon Puzzle exposes basic principles of
brainbuilding and aids brain engineering.
I depart this section with a question: What is the difference between a brainbuilder by proxy and
a person who merely talks beguilingly about brainbuilding?
Claim 4: The Dragon Puzzle supplies a wanted principle of universal order.
Summary: The Dragon Puzzle's Riddle and a common formulation of the Second Law of
Thermodynamics both have the form of statements about change in text. Riddle development
entails focal increases in catalytic information while the Second Law entails diffuse increases in
entropic information.
Things fall apart. A glance at everyday objects suffices to remind us of this: The floor, walls, this
copy of a book, our own bodies, and every other thing are subject to decay and one day will
return to chaos. Things fall apart, and yet if that is all that happened in the universe there would
never have arisen stars and the Sun, Earth, humans, and this text. Countervailing to the universal
tendency to chaos is a tendency to order and form.
Can the universal tendency toward form be detailed? Many are happy to conclude simply that "a
Great Spirit creates the forms of the universe," but the curious are likely to wonder whether there
25 is more to say. The breadth of scientific interest in the subject shows in the title and international
roster of contributors to a book I helped my father edit, Self-Organizing Systems: The Emergence
of Order.12
A disorganizing principle of the universe already exists in the Second Law of Thermodynamics,
which states that the global entropy S, loosely the energy diffuseness, of an isolated system can
increase but not decrease. Historically the search for a scientifically rigorous organizing principle
of the universe therefore became largely a search for a formal complement to the Second Law.
The Dragon Puzzle speaks of a text that “both describes and constitutes an organizing principle
of the universe.” The Central Insight then suggests that the Dragon Puzzle may itself be exactly
such a text, in which case the Dragon Puzzle on the face of it supplies a principle of universal
order. This reasoning is fine as far as it goes, but the formality of the Second Law of
Thermodynamics makes one hunger for something a little more formal in its complement.
Entropy and Changing Text
It is not important that the reader understand the mathematics in the following paragraph. The
boldface conclusion is important, however.
Mathematically the Second Law of Thermodynamics is stated simply:
ΔS ≥ 0
which reads, "The change in entropy S is greater than or equal to zero," where S is the entropy of
an isolated system or of the universe as a whole. Building on pioneering work by Ludwig
Boltzmann, Willard Gibbs gave a measure of entropy in this form:
S = -kΣplnp
where k is a constant and p is the probability of a system's being in a particular state.
Claude Shannon, acting on a tip from John von Neumann, recognized that this entropy measure
was identical to a basic measure of information in text. It follows that in this formulation the
Second Law of Thermodynamics has the form of a statement about change in text. Even
without demanding the absolute identity of chaos, entropy and the Boltzmann-Gibbs measure
this suggests that the tendency toward order in the universe might have the form of a balancing
statement about change in text.
The Riddle of the Dragon Puzzle has the form of a statement about change in text – exactly
as anticipated here in a complement to the Second Law. To catalyze its own development is to
change as text.
12 Yates, Francis E et al (eds). Self-­‐Organizing Systems: The Emergence of Order. Plenum Press. 1987. 26 At first it seems absurd to compare the Riddle and the Second Law. The Second Law is overtly
mathematical and the Riddle is framed in natural language. However, the number of cases in
which it is possible to apply the Second Law mathematically is relatively small because it is
impractical to measure entropy exactly in most real systems. Where entropy or its underlying
probabilities cannot be measured it's difficult to say whether the Second Law of
Thermodynamics even applies. The idea that there is an exhaustively mathematical theory of
decay is just another mathematical fantasy. Furthermore, to say that a developing text cannot be
a central organizing principle of the universe puts one in a difficult position: It is to deny that
theories can be highly effective and leave increasingly significant physical marks in the universe.
Such a position can only be flattened under the juggernaut of effective text development.
Where a physical object embodies or contains information the Second Law and Dragon Puzzle
suggest that there are at least two types or aspects of such information, call them entropic and
catalytic. These are represented in the two images below. The two types of information are not
mutually exclusive: The information on the right, for example, can have an entropic measure,
and the information on the left can in contrived contexts (for example this one) be catalytic. The
Second Law specifies a diffuse increase in entropic information, and the Autocatalytic Text
Theory of the Dragon Puzzle specifies a focal increase in catalytic information. There can be
many distributed points and scales of focal increase, however. The principles of increasing
entropy and increasing catalysis are entirely compatible. The Dragon Puzzle gives no measure of
catalytic information, though one may be possible in restricted cases – just as exact measures of
entropy are possible only in restricted cases.
Entropic
Catalytic
Two Information Types
Here then is the evident direction of increasing order in the universe as suggested by the Dragon
Puzzle: The reader sees without certainty that to the extent that it is doing anything the universe
is building text-building brains that build brainbuilding texts – where the texts build brains
through the agency of brains. Text that helps all helps to sustain brains, and so to increasingly
help all is also an aspect of brainbuilding. If it is doing anything the universe is building brains,
now also through conscious human agency. The universe spoken of here is of course the
universe describable by effective theory – most unambiguously the "physical world" and all that
systematically influences it.
27 The foregoing reasoning and the Central Insight that the Riddle is the first instance of the text it
seeks together affirm that the Dragon Puzzle supplies a wanted principle of universal order. Of
course it seems preposterous but the Dragon Puzzle or a close relative may indeed be a text that
"both describes and constitutes an organizing principle of the universe."
Claim 5: The Dragon Puzzle restores humans to the center of the universe.
Summary: If the universe is centrally building brains then brains are no longer chemical
machines of no more significance than stones or bacteria: Human brains then are at the center of
what the universe is doing.
The rise of human knowledge in recent millennia – specifically the rise of hard science – jolted
humans from a garden and left them in a cold place. Once almost gods on a small and level
world circled by the Sun, humans were reduced to animals, mere chemical machines, on a rock
spinning in a void.
The rise of hard science in particular gave human self-esteem quite a drubbing. First the human
home, Earth, was found not to be central among the stars and then Earth's Sun was found to be
only an average star among billions in the Milky Way galaxy, itself only one among billions of
observable galaxies in the universe. Next the human body was shown to be an elaborate thing
made of chemicals like many other things. Compounding the insult, humans were found to be
microscopically related to animals, and the vast preponderance of evidence from paleontology
and genetics suggested that humans and other animals descended from common ancestors.
Evidently we were more animals than gods.
The demotion of humans to the status of animals and chemical machines shook the foundation of
human moral understanding. How could it be wrong for a mere animal or machine to destroy
another? How are we any more special than bacteria, which after all thrive in far greater numbers
than humans? Here the Dragon Puzzle once again quietly enters the picture.
Reasoning about the fourth Claim for the Dragon Puzzle led to this result: "If it is doing anything
the universe is building brains, now also through conscious human agency." If the strongest we
can say about what the universe is doing apart from making entropy is that it is building brains
and text, then brains are no longer "mere chemical machines": They are a central "purpose" of
the universe. We are what the universe is centrally doing. The Dragon Puzzle restores humans to
the center of the universe by showing that they were never anywhere else. Bacteria are part of the
global brainbuilding process, but they are not fully brains: They are not what the universe is
centrally doing.
Either all parts of the universe share the tendency to build brains or a generalized principle of
Relativity is violated. The Dragon Puzzle and brute observation show that our region of the
universe is building brains: If this is not also the case elsewhere then that elsewhere is not the
28 universe we observe and describe here. On the other hand, if the central regularities of the
universe are uniform or nearly so in a large volume this leads to an important conclusion: The
Dragon Puzzle restores humans to the center of the universe at the probable cost of human
uniqueness. We humans may be centers of the universe but we are probably not the only centers
of the universe. It appears very unlikely that we are alone in the universe. This extends what
already holds on Earth, where each observer is a center of the universe but, there being many
humans, there is no unique center.
Claim 6: The Dragon Puzzle reconciles science and spiritual practice.
Summary: The Dragon Puzzle brings together anything that affects the welfare of brains,
including both science and religion. What helps all shapes brains and brains shape what helps all.
It is not impossible to write clearly and respectfully, and in the same language, of both science
and spiritual practice: It is merely difficult.
The argument here is very direct. The Dragon Puzzle brings together any things that affect the
welfare of brains because it is brains that develop effective text and brains that apply it. If a
phenomenon has any bearing whatsoever on how brains are built or how to build them, if it has
any influence on the wellbeing or the future of brains, then its description is a candidate for
inclusion in a Dragon Puzzle sequel. It is absurd to argue that science and religion exist in
disconnected magisteria when both obviously affect and depend upon the history and wellbeing
of brains.
To say that the Dragon Puzzle reconciles science and spiritual practice is not to say that any two
scientific and religious texts coexist in a compelling way. On the contrary, it is exceedingly
difficult to find scientific and religious texts that coexist harmoniously. It is precisely this
difficulty that led some to propose disconnected realms for science and spiritual practice. The
Dragon Puzzle reconciles science and spiritual practice not by making harmony easy but by
showing that reconciliation is not only possible but unavoidable. If it is the heart of religion and
spiritual practice increasingly to help all, and if helping all presumes helping rather than harming
brains, then reconciliation is well underway.
The view that the well-being of humans is connected to the well-being of their brains is not new.
In an old essay titled The Sacred Illness appear the following words:
It ought to be generally known that the source of our pleasure, merriment, laughter and
amusement, as of our grief, pain, anxiety and fears, is none other than the brain. It is
specially the organ which enables us to think, see and hear, and to distinguish the ugly
and the beautiful, the bad and the good, pleasant and unpleasant. . . . It is the brain too
which is the seat of madness and delirium, of the fears and frights which assail us, often
by night, but sometimes even by day: It is there where lies the cause of insomnia and
29 sleep-walking, of thoughts that will not come, forgotten duties and eccentricities. All
such things result from an unhealthy condition of the brain.13
The text is attributed to the Greek physician Hippocrates, who lived over twenty-four hundred
years before my birth and who is often styled the Father of Western Medicine. The fact that the
master-physician Hippocrates was among the first to articulate the view suggests this possibility:
To find the humans-are-brains view compelling one must be intellectually quite able and have
access to relevant direct observations about brains, as Hippocrates was and did.
The connection between science and the wellbeing of people and their brains is as direct as the
Hippocratic observation that laughter, pain, thinking, moral judgment and all the rest arise in and
from the brain, so that comprehending how a brain is built and functions bears on all of these –
and much more.
The connection between religion and brains is apparent in these questions: Where does spiritual
practice occur if not least in brains? Does the exercise of religion not involve the firing of
multiple trillions of neurons and affect the stability of single brains and societies of brains? Is the
structure of religions not affected by the proclivities of brains? Regardless of what exactly
defines spiritual practice and religion, if they do not help brains at all then are they
commendable?
There is no separating science and religion – there is only noticing what is grossly incompatible
in science and religion while bringing together what is mutually compelling in them. If spiritual
practice in any way helps all then science and spiritual practice must be connected because what
helps all shapes brains and brains shape what helps all.
The Dragon Puzzle supplies a natural place for reconciliation of the best in science with the best
in religion. Nothing is final in the realm of the Dragon Puzzle and so there is no tidy and final
reconciliation. The Dragon Puzzle simply provides a point of view from which it is possible to
speak with equal clarity and acceptance about both science and religion in the same words. The
reasoning for the seventh claim attempts exactly such words.
Claim 7: The Dragon Puzzle Motivates Peace-Bringing Perennial Practice
Summary: The very Riddle words that guide technical brainbuilding also offer clear hints about
generally helpful practice. The hints do not oppose existing systems but suggest means to enliven
practice generally and to foster global harmony. Together these hints form the Perennial
Practice, which exists to be rediscovered in any era.
13 Hippocrates. The Sacred Disease. 400BCE approx. Chadwick, J. and Mann, W.N. trans. in Lloyd, G.E.R. (ed.) Hippocratic Writings. Penguin Books Ltd. p.248. 1983. 30 This is in many ways the most important of the seven claims for the Dragon Puzzle because it
shows the bridge between rigorous science and spiritual practice, between intellect and heart. It
shows that people drawn to meditative practice in the service of others are not fools. What
follows here likely will interest only the few concerned about clashes of science and religion. I
hope though that the following helps even people affected by discord they do not notice. All
along the problem has been to reconcile the best of science with the best of religion and in a way
that is more than a Procrustean jamming of facts into existing dogma. This reconciliation is the
task of the seventh Claim.
Few things are as annoying as a person who knows the answers to all of life's questions,
particularly when the answers manifest as violent or veiled coercion – or as passive smugness.
Fortunately in the realm of the Dragon Puzzle and its Sequels there are no final answers. Also
fortunately the Dragon Puzzle, though giving no final answers, does give hints about generally
helpful practice. The collection of these hints I style the Perennial Practice. What follows is only
one view of a puzzle: Please excuse any errors and use only what helps.
Whatever you choose to do regularly is your practice. It's obvious that there must be a
connection of some kind between brain structure-function and generally helpful practice. For
example, where possible it's probably a good idea to make a practice of avoiding major brain
injuries. The question thus is not whether there is a connection between brain and practice, but
rather how detailed and helpful a description of that link is possible.
It is a remarkable fact of the Dragon Puzzle that the very words that guide technical
brainbuilding also guide generally helpful practice. These guides are both direct and implied.
The direct practice suggestions of the Dragon Puzzle are explicit in its central Riddle. The
Dragon Puzzle does not have effects or develop unless some readers do as the Riddle suggests.
The Riddle specifically suggests that readers attempt these practices:
1. Develop Sequel text. Practice that helps develop Sequel text is almost always indirect and
begins with the basics of reading and clear writing.
2. Build brains. Parenting children, feeding the hungry, and learning – all these build brains.
It’s possible to build too many brains, though, as when population growth leads to
environmental destruction, war, pestilence and famine.
3. Increasingly help all. Internal Reflection in the Riddle shows that helping all refers first
to all brains, and in particular to brains of text-building species.
Simply put these are the three direct practice suggestions of the Riddle: Cultivate learning,
nurture brains but not overpopulation, and actively strive to care more for all, not excluding one's
self. So it is that the Riddle’s words that earlier guided brainbuilding also guide generally helpful
practice. If religion has anything to do with what helps generally this addresses the question of
whether words can speak clearly and respectfully of science and religion at the same time: The
Riddle's words do exactly that.
31 By the earlier reasoning of Claim 3 Riddle properties are the central properties of the universe
and so exist to be discovered independently of the Dragon Puzzle. By the same reasoning the
Riddle’s practice suggestions exist to be discovered in all ages. So it is that I call the suggestions
the Perennial Practice. The evidence of many concordant spiritual traditions – for example the
near-ubiquity of the Golden Rule to “treat others as one would be treated” – is that the Perennial
Practice is indeed rediscovered time and again.
The Dragon Puzzle suggests the Golden Rule itself, for if all beings profoundly seek to be treated
in a harmless and helpful way and increasingly treat others accordingly then the principle
expressed in the Golden Rule “help[s] bring all beings more of, and more rapidly, what they
profoundly seek.”
Uncertainty, Catalysis and Noncoercion
The Dragon Puzzle’s central Riddle also makes strong indirect practice suggestions, further
defining the Perennial Practice:
The Riddle of the Dragon Puzzle is and remains uncertain. The practice implication is obvious:
Self-righteous certainty has little place in generally helpful spiritual practice.
The direction of development seen in the Riddle is toward greater catalysis. The practice
implications are many, but one implication is captured well by these words from the Tao Te
Ching, over 2400 years old as I write:
Those who have heard the Tao [Way of Life] decrease day after day. They do less and less till
they get to the point where they do nothing. They do nothing yet there's nothing left undone.14
That's about as clear a description of a developing catalyst as one is likely to find. The aim of
practice is not passive inactivity: The aim is cultivating learning, nurturing brains, and helping all
while wasting few resources.
The direction of development in the Dragon Puzzle is toward Sequel text, and such text itself sits
on a page doing nothing: Text is innately noncoercive and noncoercion is a high mark of
catalytic practice. Noncoercion extends beyond nonviolence even to forgoing tendentiousness
and unconscious manipulation of others. Because brain and spiritual development occurs over a
lifetime one usually does not reach a high mark early in life, but the guiding mark is clear
enough to see.
With noncoercion duly honored, there is a season to every purpose: Sometimes a child is coerced
away from danger. However, the general implication is that it helps to notice when one is
coercing others and if so whether it follows from an inflated sense of self-importance.
14 Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching. Ch.48. in Henricks, Robert G. (trans.) Lao Tzu: Te-­‐Tao Ching – A new Translation Based on the Recently Discovered Ma-­‐wang-­‐tui Texts. Random House. p.17. 1989. 32 Not-killing
Is killing ever consistent with the Dragon Puzzle and if so when? This may be the most important
question addressed here – and the most difficult. Killing is generally an extreme form of coercion
and so the Dragon Puzzle implicitly discourages killing – and strongly discourages killing
members of text-writing species. Given its essential uncertainty the Dragon Puzzle makes no
absolute mandates, but any text that promotes killing likely will cause some kin of the killed to
hate the text and wish it gone. A text aiming for longevity will value liveliness far above killing.
Generosity and Selflessness
To increasingly help all is to become more generous and less purely self-centered. It may be
more accurate to say that one becomes centered on a larger self, a self that includes many others.
The properties of the Dragon Puzzle’s Riddle, being universally central, apply at a wide range of
scales, including not only the scale of individual brains but the scale of brain societies. One
becomes more selfless not so much through self-annihilation as by integrating the personal self
with the larger societal self – at scales potentially including all societies in the universe. This not
easy to do but the Dragon Puzzle suggests practices that may help, including the following:
Meditation
“The direction of development in the Dragon Puzzle is toward Sequel text, and such text itself
sits on a page doing nothing.” Sitting doing nothing while nevertheless cultivating the capacities
to catalyze text- and brain-building and increasingly helping all is a succinct description of basic
meditative practice. There is of course vastly more to say about meditative practice and how it
helps generally, but there is very little to do about it beyond actually attempting the practice with
some regularity. My present purpose is not to give detailed instructions on meditative practice,
but simply to show that meditative practice – and especially sitting attentively doing nothing – is
clearly hinted by the Riddle of the Dragon Puzzle. The practice of attention is implied because
brains are both developing catalysts and agents of catalyst action: Brains therefore develop in the
direction of preparedness for appropriate minimal action, and so ultimately cultivate attention.
Meditation innately demands attention and draws attention to the body and the profound together.
Technical aside: If any brain parts function like annealing machines then a cycle of activity that
includes a deep quieting phase makes further sense.15
Many people think that because they find meditation difficult they are “no good at it and are not
cut out for it.” Ironically the path of development takes some effort. One might think that a
universal tendency would be easy to express or realize. That is not so because all Riddle
activities require brains to use their resources: To the extent that a brain is a developing catalyst
15 S. Kirkpatrick, C.D. Gelatt, M.P. Vecchi. Optimization by Simulated Annealing. Science, New Series. Vol. 220:4598 pp.671-­‐680. May 13, 1983. 33 it carefully guards its own resources, and some use of resources inevitably registers as effort.
Digging a well may take the direction pointed by gravity, but still one has to dig. There is no call
though to waste effort. Here is a paraphrase of an old story about the significance of practice-effort:
Old Baoche of Mt. Mayu was fanning himself. A young person approached and said,
"Old one, wind is eternal and there is no place it does not reach. Why, then, do you fan
yourself?" "Although you understand that wind is eternal," Baoche replied, "you do not
understand the meaning of its reaching everywhere." "What is the meaning of its reaching
everywhere?" asked the young one. Baoche just kept fanning himself.16
Just sitting is not enough, of course. How could it be when there is so much that cries to be done?
It takes more than sitting to cultivate learning, nurture brains, and help all. The overall tendency
in meditative practice, including prayer, is toward confidence in the value of practice, but more
importantly toward humility: There is good we don't control and practice effort does not
command the universe. If the Riddle highlights practice it’s not because practice is necessarily
supreme but because one’s practice is the only thing one can control. Close inspection
shows that even that control is limited.
Prayer
Meditative practice – even sitting attentively doing nothing – is experienced by some as a form
of prayer. Like meditation prayer takes many forms and some of these other forms are also
implicitly endorsed by the Dragon Puzzle. Notice for example that the Riddle of the Dragon
Puzzle itself has the form of a conventional prayer: It is a request for guidance – a question – and
a statement of kind intentions – “increasingly help all”. This makes ordinary sense when it is a
matter of one brain communicating a request and intention to another. However, in many forms
of prayer people do not speak explicitly to each other, but almost as if to the walls or to the empty
air. What is the possible sense in that?
Prayer not explicitly directed to other brains can make good sense in many ways. Verbal prayer
requires a person to be somewhat clear about intentions, and this can clarify and organize the
person's own behavior. Prayer can communicate intentions to parts of a person's brain that are
not internally well-connected to the seat of verbal awareness but that can be guided
unconsciously by words. Even if prayer were merely an atavistic inclination that in itself would
justify the practice as long as it caused no harm.
Communal prayer – prayer spoken among others but not directed to them – also makes profound
sense: Hearing thoughts and intentions phrased noncoercively frees people to act on each others’
needs with love. This is also a gateway to intimacy when one’s actions and prayers generally
16 Compare Dogen, Eihei. Genjo Koan. In Tanahashi, Kazuaki. (ed.) Treasury of the True Dharma Eye. Shambhala. Boston. Vol. 1 p.32. 2010. 34 agree. However, care must be taken to avoid subtle or unconscious manipulation in communal
prayer of this sort, and guarding others’ privacy is paramount.
There are many, many ways that noncoercive prayer, both alone and with others, can make good
sense. However, prayer is much more profound than this and the Dragon Puzzle speaks directly
to that profundity. The argument for the first Claim touched on the universal entanglement of
That and Thou. The problem, elaborated in Claim 3, is that "The most central properties and
principles of effective theory, brain, and the physical universe are exactly the central properties
and principles of the Dragon Puzzle's Riddle," so that in one form or another one sees the basic
Riddle properties no matter where one looks. Two of the basic Riddle properties are that the
Riddle is a material thing, a That, and it is made by, for, and about brains we see as beings –
which is to say as Thous. The result is that one sees properties of beings as well as things no
matter where one looks.
The praying person who relates to the entire universe as a being is not a fool, but simply acts in
accord with what is so as long as we perceive each other as beings. It is a fool, though, who
expects the entire universe to behave exactly like any brain or being within it.
The Dragon Puzzle makes no demands of belief and is open to many forms of prayer as long as
they are directed to increasing help for all. Care thus must be taken to turn away from prayer that
implicitly judges others or wishes them harm.
Note that I do not harangue you or coerce your practice: I simply point out that you are free.
There is no intellectual obstacle to passionate practice and no spiritual obstacle to bold inquiry.
The Dragon Puzzle holds the door wide for rigorous scientists to attempt passionate spiritual
practice, and for the passionately spiritual to embrace the rigors of science.
Without too much trouble one can discern four main directions of practice in
the Dragon Puzzle, arranged in polar pairs like directions on a compass:
Heart and Intellect, and “Heaven and Earth”. These pairs have many
alternate names: Compassion and Wisdom, God and Ground, Sublime and
Mundane, and so on. The wheel or compass pictured here suggests the four
main directions and meditative practice encompasses them all.
There is no need to get stuck on particular imagery or nomenclature. It is ironic given what is
central in my own life but I say little about God here because so many people are frenzied and
confused by the term. I hope that any open-hearted and true meaning of the word is at least
somewhat apparent in all that is written here.
The Perennial Practice is not and cannot be a formal religion: It exists to be discovered naturally
and guides religious and secular activity alike. It is the practice within practice.
35 Temperament
Temperaments vary, paths differ. Variations in temperament strongly affect spiritual practice.
The earlier-mentioned Sparseness Adaptation Syndrome identifies systematic variations in
temperament correlated with location of ancestral homeland. All brains, and all groups of brains,
are not temperamentally identical on average: Some are temperamentally more inclined to
compete fiercely than are others, for example. These systematic differences in temperament have
had a profound effect on the shape of spiritual practice in different places on Earth. In particular,
contemporary groups with ancient roots in sparse regions where hunting supplied food are likely
to have practice traditions and needs quite different from the needs and traditions of groups that
hail from lusher areas where vegetables long supplied much of the diet. This subject is large,
controversial and beyond the present scope to elaborate. I mention it though because variations
in temperament preclude one-size-fits-all systems of spiritual practice and because wellgrounded spiritual practice can provide a safe container for exploring the inevitable science
of systematic brain differences.
Elaborating the theme of temperamental variation I now cite words attributed to the founder of
the largest contiguous empire on Earth to the time of this writing – the founder commonly known
as Chinggis Khan. Because that title simply means "Universal Ruler", and respecting his own
apparent distaste for honorifics, I shall refer to him by his original name, Temüjin. Temüjin and
his clan were hunters by necessity and tradition. Please ensure that the following words
attributed to Temüjin remain italicized and in quotes: “The greatest happiness is to vanquish
your enemy, to drive him before you, to rob him of his wealth, to see those dear to him bathed in
tears, and to clasp to your bosom his wives and daughters.” 17 The words may be falsely
attributed, but they are consistent with the violence that built Temüjin’s Empire. In any case the
clasping must have been fairly good because, based on the evidence of Y chromosome DNA,
about one in 200 men worldwide as I write are Temüjin’s direct descendants.18 Although military
brutality was the rule in his time and place, Temüjin’s armies nevertheless slaughtered millions
of people, the great majority of them ordinary civilians.
It is only human to feel some thrill at the words attributed to Temüjin. Nevertheless they point a
direction almost opposite the Perennial Practice. I cite the words not to laud or blast Temüjin and
his followers, but to show that a profound universal tendency can be well hidden from view. If
brains able to build an empire cannot easily see that there is a happiness greater than killing
rivals, stealing wealth, relishing others' misery and raping kidnapped wives and daughters then
that greater happiness is not immediately obvious. It is little surprise then that the merit of the
Perennial Practice is not obvious to many people. When the going gets rough it may not be
obvious to any of us.
17 I would appreciate being directed to a reliable source for this oft-­‐repeated quote. 18 Zerjal, Tatiana et al. The Genetic Legacy of the Mongols. American Journal of Human Genetics. Vol. 72 No. 3. pp.717-­‐721. 1 March 2003 36 A strong brain theory illuminates not only the kind but the cruelly competitive as well, and a
strong practice helps kind and cruel alike, but discourages the cruelty.
The Perennial Practice points to a future, in growing regions, that is less dominated by deadly
competition than is the past. That is because it is essential to the Dragon Puzzle’s reasoning that
all beings have an incentive “to sustain and develop the text and none to destroy it: That
incentive [is] that the text help all generally…” More fundamentally, development points to
greater catalysis and greater catalysis entails less violence. Because it points to a future less
violent than the past the Perennial Practice can look a little crazy to people who quite sensibly
estimate the future from the past. “If people didn’t laugh it wouldn’t be the way.” In defense of
the scoffers development depends on competition as well as cooperation. There is much to learn
and say, then, about how to compete in ways that are widely helpful and widely seen as fair.
Temüjin assuredly competed: Was he helpful and fair?
Whether obvious or laughable the Dragon Puzzle quietly points away
from violent competition toward the lively peace of the Perennial
Practice. Fortunately the Perennial Practice is more consistent with the
lively than the bland, and there is thrill enough in it. Sometimes the most
helpful action is heart-stirringly close to one that brings disaster, like moves in
the game Shoot-the-Moon.
from
This concludes a rough discussion of the seventh Claim. Already it is longer than the preceding
sections and there is much more to say. I may have emphasized the wrong things. The main point
here has been to show that the very words of the Dragon Puzzle's Riddle, words that earlier
guided brainbuilding, also guide generally helpful practice. Simply put, the elements of this
practice are to cultivate learning, nurture brains, and care more for all generally. For some,
prayer and meditation form a natural part of this practice. Altogether these practices reflect a
deep tendency of the universe and so in one form or another are discovered in all ages. The
practices span rigorous science and passionate spiritual practice, and together they constitute the
most general form of peace-bringing and continually rediscovered Perennial Practice.
If you are facing very real suffering right now please forgive my failure to address it directly
here. Many others have written more eloquently than I can about what helps in the face of such
misery. Seek their words. You may also want to seek what is present and available within you
right now. In your suffering you already know more than I can ever say. May you know peace.
Conclusion
That in outline is the story of the Dragon Puzzle. I am well aware of its absurdity: A scrap
penciled in corners by an unknown aims to move stars? It certainly sounds grandiose!
Nevertheless, I have attacked the Puzzle from every direction I can find and the attacks have
only helped develop the text. The Dragon Puzzle seems to thrive on such assaults. The book is
37 not very long: I suggest rereading it even a few times before forming any strong opinions about it.
Remember that none of its words need be Incontrovertibly True: They need only get you
thinking, and perhaps even feeling and doing… or it may be that your brain isn’t strongly in the
autocatalytic loop and that’s fine, too.
The Dragon Puzzle hints it is the seed of a brain-theory-and-spiritual-text that can snowball to
astronomical significance. That sounds preposterous of course. However, the Dragon Puzzle is
grandiose only if it insists that development be rapid. By allowing that it may develop fitfully or at
a snail’s pace the Dragon Puzzle is able to avoid all grandiosity and to justify these seven claims:
The Dragon Puzzle –
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
forms an epistemologically sound core theory,
has an intellectual precedent in Gödel's Proofs,
exposes basic principles of brainbuilding,
supplies a wanted principle of universal order,
restores humans to the center of the universe,
reconciles science and spiritual practice, and
motivates peace-bringing Perennial Practice.
The Dragon Puzzle’s Riddle gives general but substantive guides to both brainbuilding and
spiritual practice, and shows that developing catalysis is a central principle in both brain and
practice. Someone had to do this – to attempt a core theory of everything that meets high
standards of both science and spiritual practice. If this attempt only stimulates thought and
discussion it has served its purpose.
Whither?
Where do we go from here? There is much more to say, but I have said enough for now. It is
tempting to rush ahead with text development, and some effort of the kind is appropriate.
However, the Dragon Puzzle traces development across thousands and millions of years. On that
scale these pages are dust and there is no rush. All in all it’s probably best to treat the Dragon
Puzzle with a very light touch, and to hear it as one might a whisper in the wind.
By containing and referring to powerful texts the Dragon Puzzle seems headed for an altar, but
by lulling brains into inactivity with stories that, however effective, may be wrong or incomplete
it heads for a dump: The Dragon Puzzle can thrive only between extremes.
It's a cliché that bold new ideas are first ignored, then ridiculed and then reviled. The sound ideas
among them go on to be hailed (usually after the first generation of naysayers dies) and finally
the ideas are dismissed as obvious. It's easy to make the sounds of ridicule, of bluster, and of
rusty minds grinding to a halt. It's easier to destroy a book than to write one. I can do all these
38 things myself, probably better than most. What I haven't been able to do is to shake the central
reasoning of Autocatalytic Text Theory: As I say, every assault seems only to develop the text.
Should this short book ever emerge from obscurity it is not hard to foresee reaction to it. Readers
lacking in the Central Insight will say, “Your emphasis on the few words of the Riddle is
absurd.” To some the book will be too pious and to others too profane. Some scarred by cruelty
will judge any attempt to help all naïve or even laughable. Some fearing uncertainty will demand
instead to be fed absolutes. Some will be offended by the book’s words about evolution and
religion, as if what has happened on our planet must suit our tastes. Some will enthusiastically
misapply the theory at every turn and others seize on minor flaws or on objections that only
years of experience can refute. The latter would lard the book with explanations and apologies. A
few will complain that some of it's been said before. (Where I have reinvented the wheel I like to
think it suggests the wheel exists.) Some enchanted by the reasoning will be equally enchanted
by any sort of blather. It may become fashionable to tout the book's ideas or fashionable to reject
them. Most will grossly underestimate how hard it is to develop text well. Throughout all this a
few serious and usually quiet students will persevere.
It is tempting to use a potential sequel to the Dragon Puzzle as a platform to advance a particular
agenda. A raft of mediocre minds may one day undertake to “correct” my writing to coincide
with their dim understandings or ardent views. Some may even try to destroy original copies of
the work. (Against that possibility please “hide this book in caves!” May its errors survive as
lessons.) Through all this the Riddle of the Dragon Puzzle remains a quiet reproach to naiveté,
hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness.
I offer this text at least in the hope of meeting readers who can divine the story's fascination,
perhaps even brains who see errors I have missed and effects I have not anticipated – brains able
to actually help the text inch forward. I expect such brains to be rare.
In the long run well-meditated written discussion of the theory is likely to be more productive
than are facile conjectures and spoken debate. If you think you have an important comment to
make about the text please consider whether it is relevant to a main argument or is merely an
easily-addressed side issue – and please check that I have not addressed the issue in the text
already. Join online discussion at dragonpuzzle.net/197 . Please contact me personally only if
you accept that I may not respond. Bear in mind that I write slowly, like Zasetsky.19 Together
let's keep our fingers very sensitively on the Grandiosity Knob.
Artifacts and Aliens
Greetings, human-made artifacts! I hope we humans have not made your existence miserable –
nor you ours. You have been inevitable of course. May we work together in harmony.
19 Лурия, Александр. Потерянный и возвращенный мир. Издателство Московского Университета. 1971. 39 Looking to the stars, it is likely that civilizations throughout the universe independently discover
the Dragon Puzzle's Riddle or its equivalent and assemble libraries around it. Civilizations that
travel widely among the stars are best able to gather information and so to develop powerful
libraries and sequels. Relativistic time dilation may favor movers-about, and among the stars as
on Earth camouflage aids survival. The technology of hiding is probably well-advanced among
extraterrestrial civilizations.
In the meeting of worlds it is a fairer fate to meet than to be met. On Earth the disastrous fate of
cultures met by others more technologically advanced painfully affirms this. Therefore, mindful
of our needs on Earth we must travel to the stars.
Greetings, extraterrestrials! Honored neighbors, please leave us to develop on our own without
interference, and fellow Earthmates please observe a reciprocal restraint. In other words may we
all obey the spirit of the television show Star Trek’s Prime Directive.20 The apparent silence of
the stars bodes well. We all learn more by observing without interfering. If meet we must, may
we meet in peace and mutual respect.
For our texts and brains to travel to the stars they must first survive and develop on Earth. We
face major problems here in the shape of exploding population, unstable technology, and
conflicting religious and political texts. Whether we thrive or perish depends on the practices we
bring to these problems and to our violent instincts. Personal happiness and global happiness are
linked: With help from the good beyond control we can cultivate a lively peace.
Request
Although the Dragon Puzzle speaks of self-developing text, please do not alter the text of this
book in any way. I may continue to edit it for some time, but after my death please let this book
stand as it is with all of its faults intact. The bulk of the labor in making this book lies in deciding
what not to put in it. Rather than fatten or alter the text, let future development occur in other
texts that are free to quote or refer to this one with all of its errors.
Any attempt to use the Dragon Puzzle or Autocatalytic Text Theory generally to justify
maltreatment of anyone is an abuse of the theory.
20 See Genta, Giancarlo. Lonely Minds in the Universe: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Springer, 2007, p. 208 40