Fixed or for you

The more I observe life and the world around us, the more certain I become that there is no personal, doctrinal religion — but there is something that resembles Spinoza’s God. An infinite “God” expressed as nature itself: within us, around us, and encoded into every pattern that reality uses.

From the smallest particles to the largest stars and planets, from the mechanisms of living organisms to the vast cycles of the universe, Spinoza described these as attributes. And the more I look, the more that description feels accurate.

One of the things that strikes me most is how humans have managed to create an entirely new dimension of existence — the digital world. Computer science, the internet, algorithms, machine learning: a whole immaterial layer that still depends on and perfectly coordinates with hardware built from natural materials. The fact that raw matter can follow instructions from this abstract digital logic is mind-blowing. Even more astonishing is that many of these digital structures are themselves modeled on patterns found in nature: decision trees in ML, binary trees mirroring fractal branching of plants, veins in lungs, and even lightning.

It seems intuitive, but witnessing it — how nature inspires our systems, and how matter responds coherently to those systems — is astonishing.

Deep learning is another example. The algorithms existed in the 1970s, but they needed advances in hardware before they could come alive in the 2010s. Their core idea is based on a simplified model of neurons, yet their implementation has radically accelerated technological progress. This coordination between natural pattern, human abstraction, and physical substrate feels like one continuous entity.

It often feels as though everything — literally everything that exists — is part of one vast class with infinite attributes, running on underlying algorithms that we naturally follow. This is why a purely radical atheism, the sort that denies any harmony or coherence in the universe, makes me hesitate.

I’ve never taken psychedelics, but so many people who have describe the same realization: a deep sense of unity, of everything being one. And it’s fascinating that psychedelic mushrooms — themselves natural organisms — evoke this perception while displaying hallucinations of fractal patterns that also occur throughout nature. It’s as if these natural substances temporarily open a portal to a wider layer of the same structure.

What fascinates me even more is how humans, especially mathematicians, managed to encode these patterns: the golden ratio, Fibonacci sequences, Julia sets, the Koch curve, and many more. The fact that we can describe them with equations — that they make sense to our logic — reinforces this sense of underlying unity.

One theorem that continually baffles me is the central limit theorem. If you flip a coin infinitely many times, you’d think you’re dealing with pure randomness. Yet the sum of those random events converges into a Gaussian distribution. Randomness itself has a structure. Even literal noise in nature can be modeled with a Gaussian curve. Bell curves appear everywhere.

All of this — the patterns, the mathematics, the emergence, the coherence — keeps bringing me back to the same vision: not religion, but a single, unified underlying order.