Iteration (Genesis movement)
They say insanity is the idea of doing something over and over and expecting different results. But I think that this is also the process of genesis; the ideation of the world builder.
When they say insanity is this, they’re talking about a goofball example of someone writing 1+1 repeatedly, probably on the Good Will Hunting basement whiteboard, and expecting something other than 2. But actually 1+1 is just the process of adding 1, so every time one iterates that process, they are in fact getting a new output. 1+1=2, but x+=1 is a world of infinite possibility. All you have to do is not wipe the whiteboard clean.
There are so many ways to illustrate this. For example, one grain of sand plus one grain of sand is now two grains of sand. But do this process enough times and suddenly you have a beach. Is a beach just made of millions of single grains of sand? Semantically yes, but it is also now something different. One moment there are many grains of sand, and the next, there is a beach. Similarly, one beach plus one beach equals 2 beaches. Do this a few more times and you now have a Santa Monica.
A bunch of trees can be a forest or a wood, but it can also be a hilltop, a cliffside, a suburb, or a lover’s lane. A grouping of rocks can be a riverbed, a fairy cairn, a hoodoo, or a trapdoor spider’s foyer. You get the picture.
But that’s not even the hammer, just the toolbelt. It’s not even really the toolbelt, it’s the sagging denim the belt is strapped to. What the world builder must really do with this information is build worlds. The steel-toed boot that *this* idea is tucked into is that there is only one true world, one reality, breathed into existence by the almighty. With that in mind, the world builder is engaged in the petite genesis; the little creation. The fantasia.
Another way I like to think about this sort of thing is through the musical concept of FM or frequency modulation synthesis.
It’s a very simple idea and perhaps you’ve added or multiplied waves in a calculus class. But the point is that a sine wave modulated by another sine wave, that is to say added repeatedly over a period of time, produces a new wave that is unlike either of the previous. It holds the properties of the carrier, the original, and its rate of change now follows the movement of the modulator, but it is now something very different. If you listen to some examples of FM synthesis, you can really hear this process at work. Or at least I can, after spending countless hours programming a DX9 (the lamest FM synth). For example, one can create a ‘bell’ by modulating a sound with something that slows down over time, and one can create a ‘string’ by modulating with something that swells over time, and so on.
One way to think about the invention and proliferation of FM synthesis, which happened in the 1980s due to Yamaha, is that they built a whole new world of sound. They also allowed for others to build even more worlds. To me, this is a noble cause. The one world was created and its rules laid bare, and what better could we do than to make ourselves worlds within worlds, rules within rules? Of course not all worlds are places you’d want to be. But some can be nice and inspiring.
Some things cannot be iterated upon, and it’s very curious how this also aligns with them being bad for you. I will likely eat 100-200 more pad thais in my life, but not one bit of mastery or development will come from it. However, should I instead cook 100 pad thais, I believe the 100th will be 100 times better than the first. I can play the C Major scale up and down the keyboard very fast, but playing it slowly in unfamiliar patterns is what will make me better.
Basically, iteration is like a fundamental process of the universe. I believe it is an inherent part of humanity’s consciousness, an axiom for complex thinking and sophisticated actionability. And the world builder seeks to engage in this fundamental process with an artisanal mind, on an individual or collective scale. I have long tried to figure it out, and I’m telling you, 1+1 can be whatever you want it to be. Just don’t erase the whiteboard.