The Philosophy of Everything 2e — Part II, Ch 6: Eternal Laws

Omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient. Religion saved those words for God, but they fit eight blind rules far better. Nobody wrote them, nobody can bend them, and they run everything you will ever see.

In brief: In this chapter I walk you through the eight rules that sit underneath everything that happens, from a cup of coffee going cold to a marriage holding together. Nobody wrote them and nothing can bend them. I show how I came to see them, and what they say about the soul, about chance and about right and wrong. I also show why a life lived with them, rather than against them, carries far less needless suffering.

Eight. That was the number, when I counted. Not the thousands you would expect from the size of the universe these rules govern. Just eight, sitting underneath the playground, doing all the heavy lifting between them.

The thing about the rules of a game is that you do not see them on the field. You see only the players doing what the rules tell them to do. The rules are inferred from the patterns. A child watching her first football match cannot tell you what the rules are. After two or three matches she can guess most of them, because the players keep behaving in particular ways and the patterns give the rules away. This is how the eight rules I am going to walk you through became visible to me, eventually. Not because somebody handed them to me. Because the patterns kept showing up, in every direction I looked, and I had to keep asking what was making the patterns. The answer, every time, turned out to be one or more of these eight.

For most of my life I thought that whatever held the world together had to be one of two things. Either it was a watching authority somewhere above it, or it was an arrangement too complicated for an ordinary mind to understand. Neither is true. The eight rules I am going to walk through with you are not complicated. They were not voted on. Nobody wrote them. They have no reason for being. There is no one to have put them in place. They have always been there. They will still be there long after the last human being and the last hydrogen atom have stopped meaning anything.

They are what philosophers and theologians used to point to when they reached for the words omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient (present everywhere, all-powerful, all-knowing). These are the words religion has always reserved for one being it could never quite describe. The words fit the rules better than they ever fit God. The rules are everywhere. The rules are everywhere unopposed. The rules contain, between them, every consequence that can ever follow from any arrangement of energy under any condition. The vocabulary belongs here. I am taking it back.

The rules are not in the patterns. They are underneath the patterns. They are like the code underneath every app the screen is showing you. The code is invisible most of the time, and you can perceive it only on careful inspection, but it is running every shape that appears on the surface. A hair cannot fall, nor a planet orbit a star, without obeying them. They are unaffected by what they cause. They do not care about you. They will work whether anybody is watching them or not.

Let me walk you through the eight, slowly. By the end you will be holding a small bundle of rules that, between them, explain most of what we ever see.

Energy first, because everything else is energy in some shape or another.

Energy cannot be made out of nothing. It cannot be unmade. It can only change shape. It goes from heat into motion, from motion into electricity, from electricity into light, from light into the chemical bonds inside a leaf. From those bonds it goes into the food on your plate, and from the food on your plate into the small ordinary work of you reading this sentence. The total amount in any closed system does not change. What physicists have measured, again and again, since they started measuring at all, is that the books always balance. Nothing comes from nothing. Nothing goes to nothing.

There are, in this universe, two kinds of system in which the energy is doing its work. A closed system is one in which the energy cannot get in or out. A thermos flask is the everyday example. The coffee stays hot for a few hours because the heat has nowhere to go. Truly closed systems, the kind a physicist would accept as perfect, do not actually exist in this universe. Everything is in contact with something else, eventually, and the energy always finds a way to leak.

The other kind is the open system, and most of what you and I see and live inside is this kind. An open system is one that energy can flow into and out of freely. Our planet is an open system, receiving sunlight from the sun every morning and radiating heat back into space every night. The cosmos itself, at the very largest scale, is also an open system. All the energy in it is slowly trying to spread out into a state where no piece of energy has any more than any other piece. That would be a state too dilute, too thinly spread, to do anything. I should say that most physicists would put this the other way round. They treat the universe as a whole as the one truly closed system, because there is nowhere outside it for energy to go.

This tendency for energy to spread from higher concentrations to lower ones is what physicists call entropy. The word is technical. The thing the word names is not. Entropy is what makes the hot cup of coffee cold while you are reading this. It is what makes the room dustier than it was last week. It is what is currently pushing galaxies away from one another, at speeds that would have shocked the people who first measured the expansion of the universe. The original guess was that at some point in the deep past everything was packed into a small, enormously hot region. The rule of entropy has been spreading it out ever since. Physicists would not put this part quite the way I have. In their account the galaxies move apart because space itself is stretching, and entropy grows alongside that stretching rather than driving it.

Entropy is the slow assassin that undoes every arrangement, given enough time. The only thing that holds the assassin off is work. To keep the body well, you have to feed it and move it. To keep a relationship well, you have to attend to it. To keep a house in order, you have to clean it. Otherwise the slow drift takes over.

I had to learn this slowly. I had taken a lot for granted about keeping order in a life: relationships staying healthy, a body staying well, a project staying on track. Most of these things turned out to be the same kind of work as keeping the dust from settling on a shelf. There is no version of any of these in which you can stop doing the work, walk away for a few years, and come back to find the order still standing. The order is the work. The moment you stop, the slow assassin starts. This is not a sad fact. It is what ageing gracefully means. It is what tending a marriage means. It is what running a country well means. None of these are states. They are all verbs. The people who do them best are people who have understood, at some level, that what they are pushing back against is entropy itself. And they have understood that the pushing back is itself the life.

All of life, in one sense, is anti-entropic, which means it works against entropy. The body holds itself together against the slow drift by burning energy. The forest holds itself together by turning sunlight into structure. The star holds itself together by fusing hydrogen until the hydrogen runs out. Everything alive, including the person reading this, is a temporary anti-entropic arrangement, pushing back against the drift until the day we stop pushing. The other things in the world are doing the opposite work: the rust on a fence, the rock weathering into sand, the abandoned house collapsing on itself. They are letting entropy through. Both kinds of change are happening everywhere at once, every moment.

How anything new comes into the world at all was the next thing I had to look at. The rule that handles this is change.

A change, in the simplest language I can find, is what happens when the conditions arrive for some pattern to come into being. The pattern had been latent, that is, present but hidden, the way a tortoise's limbs are latent inside the shell. When the conditions arrive, it extends into view. A blooming flower is a change. A caterpillar becoming a butterfly is a change. A boy becoming a man is a change. A river is a change moving across a continent. Each one is a state that already had the possibility of becoming visible, and then the conditions came, and the state became visible.

The transition is happening every moment. Most of it is too slow for any of us to see, which is why time-lapse photography was such a small revolution in how we look at the world. We do not see the flower opening. We see the flower before, and the flower after, and we infer the opening. Most of life is like this: we see the before and the after, and we infer the changing in between.

Every change runs through five phases. There is the birth of the new pattern. This is the moment the caterpillar has become unmistakably a butterfly, the moment the baby is unmistakably a baby and not still inside the mother. There is the growth, which is the slow unfolding and strengthening of the new shape. There is the decay, which begins more quietly than anyone notices. Old age starts decades before the first wrinkle. There is the death, when the pattern stops being able to hold itself together. And there is the transformation, when whatever it was made of returns to its source. It waits there, like a seed, for the next set of conditions that will let it come back as something else.

This rule is what makes the world a set of cycles. Water becomes vapour, vapour becomes cloud, cloud becomes rain, rain becomes river, river becomes sea, sea becomes vapour again. Migrations of birds happen on a yearly cycle. Hibernating animals run on a longer one. The circadian rhythm (the sleeping and waking and feeding) runs on the cycle of a day. The sun travels around the centre of the galaxy on a cycle so long that no human being could live to see the smallest part of it complete itself. The cycles are nested inside each other, smaller ones inside larger, and almost everything we recognise in nature is one or another of them.

There are two kinds of cause that drive any change. The natural cause is the world doing what the world does: entropy, again, doing its slow work, and the anti-entropic work of life pushing back. The natural changes are mostly unidirectional, which means they run one way only, and move either from simple to complex or from complex to simple. The artificial cause is a person making something happen on purpose: a potter shaping a pot out of clay, a tailor stitching a shirt, a writer assembling a sentence. The two work side by side, all the time. Most of what is around you right now is the work of either entropy or some human being using energy to push entropy back into a particular shape.

I want to say something here that, when I finally absorbed it, changed how I felt about being alive. There is no thing inside you that continues after you stop. The self you have been calling "I" since you were a small child is not a soul, in the sense the old books meant. It is the continuation of a particular point of view, in a particular body, with a particular history. And it dies when the body dies. There is no part of you that flies off and takes the same shape somewhere else. Your body is energy in a particular arrangement, governed by the rules I am walking you through now. When the arrangement ends, the energy goes back to where energy goes. The arrangement does not somehow keep itself together as a separate thing, watching the world from above. It is gone.

This was hard to hear, and harder to believe, after a lifetime of being told otherwise. I held a quiet version of the soul-belief much longer than my reasoning would have allowed if I had pressed it. The version I held was not the cartoon version. It was the slightly more sophisticated version, the one where some essential thread of you continues without quite specifying what kind of thread, exactly. When I finally pressed on the thread, it gave way. There was nothing underneath. There never had been. The self feels so continuous from childhood to old age for a simple reason. The first-person point of view, the witness in here, has been one person's all along. The witness is not a soul. The witness is a function of the body. When the body stops, the witness stops with it.

What does continue is everything you did. The thoughts you had, the words you said, the actions you took: all of these go on living inside the people you touched, for good and for bad. The man who raised you well lives on in how you raise your own children. The teacher who told you that you were stupid lives on in how you flinch from your own ambition. The friend who showed up for you when nobody else did lives on in how you show up, decades later, for the next person. Nothing of you survives in the form of a private continuing thing. Everything of you survives in the form of what you set in motion in other people. Your karma (your thoughts, your words, your actions, and the long quiet consequences of all three) keeps going, even when you do not. That is the only afterlife the rules of the game permit. It is also, when you think about it carefully, more than enough.

One small thing about a word I used in passing a few chapters back: intuition. Chapter 2 mentioned it without unpacking it. This is the place it gets unpacked, briefly. When you walk into a room and immediately know what mood the person at the back is in, you have not had a mystical insight. You have read, in less than a second, the small signals you have learned to read in human beings over many years. You have read the tilt of the shoulders, the speed of the breathing, the angle of the head.

The reading is so fast it feels like a sixth sense. It is not. It is your ordinary intelligence, running on memories so well-laid that the recognition is faster than thought. There is no soul moving between two people. There is just one body, with a lot of experience, recognising what another body looks like in a particular state. This is worth knowing because the more mystical version of the same fact has been used by many people to justify many strange beliefs. It is not mystical. It is well-trained memory.

What this rule asks of you, in the end, is the same small instruction that runs through most of this book. Let go of what is temporary. Be careful what you build a life around. If something will not last (and most things will not), then loving it too tightly will be expensive. Love it lightly enough that, when it goes, you can still walk. The permanent half of reality (the eight rules I am walking through right now) is the only thing that does not go. Build the spine of your life on what stays.

After Energy and Change I had to face the rule that decides how anything connects to anything else. Causation.

This rule gave me trouble for a long time, because the word "cause" is used so loosely in daily speech that it had stopped meaning anything precise. When I finally sat with it, the rule itself turned out to be simple. Nothing in the universe happens by accident, in the casual sense of "accident." Every event has a cause. The cause may be hidden, may be distributed across many smaller causes, may be so far back in time that nobody could ever trace it. But it is there. A continual flow of cause and effect is what time looks like from inside it. The whole universe, at any moment, is a particular consequence of a particular previous arrangement.

The cause of any effect carries inside it the seed of what the effect can be. You cannot make a thing out of materials that do not contain it. Clay can be made into a pot, into a brick, into a tile. It cannot be made into a song. Milk can be turned into yoghurt, into ghee (clarified butter), into cheese, into curd. It cannot be turned into bread. The materials decide the range of what is possible. The conditions decide which of the possible things actually arrives. This is true of pots and it is true of people. What a person can become is decided, in part, by what they started with. What they actually become is decided by which of the available outcomes the conditions of their life have allowed.

One useful test of any claimed causal relationship is whether changing what you think is the cause actually changes the effect. If you suspect that high salt intake is driving your high blood pressure, reduce the salt and see what happens. If the pressure goes down, the causal claim looks sound. If it does not, you had the cause wrong, or there was another cause running that you had not noticed. The same test scales up. Keeping a neighbourhood clean reduces the mosquito population, and the mosquito-borne illnesses that come with it. If the illnesses had stayed at the same rate when the mosquitoes were gone, you would have to look for the cause somewhere else. The willingness to actually run this test, to change the supposed cause and see if the effect changes, matters a great deal. It is the difference between thinking causally and just naming pairs of things that often appear together.

A long single thread of cause and effect, running through one person or one idea or one arrangement, is what I came to call a causal plane. The phrase is slightly old-fashioned but useful. The food chain is a causal plane: what eats what, what becomes what, traced as a single line. The progression of your own career is a causal plane. The shape of your friendship with the person closest to you, from the day you met to wherever it ends up, is a causal plane. Each plane is a sequence of events, each event the consequence of the one before, each event the cause of the one after.

The planes are not deterministic (fixed in advance) in any clean sense. A random event can shift a plane in directions nobody could have foreseen. A gene can mutate, for better or for worse. A lightning strike can rearrange a forest. A stranger in a queue can become the most important person in your life. The plane carries forward whatever has happened to it, including what arrived by chance. This is part of why nobody can fully predict the shape of a life from its beginning.

A life is rarely run by one causal plane alone. A life is the intersection of many, crossing through each other, sometimes accidentally, sometimes on purpose. A man and a woman, on a flight, sit next to each other for the first time. Each of them was on a causal plane that had been moving along just fine without the other. They talk. They like each other. They marry. From that point on, their two causal planes are no longer separate. They merge into a larger plane that carries both. Their children's planes, when they arrive, are folded into this larger one. Most of what is interesting about a human life is the slow interleaving, the weaving together, of one's own causal plane with the planes of other people and other ideas.

Consider Chetan, a management consultant who works for a multinational. His causal plane runs through expensive education, a series of promotions, the office, the airport, the company car. The plane was inherited from his parents' planning more than it was chosen. Then somewhere in his thirties he realises he no longer wants to be on it. He has been writing stories on weekends. The stories are starting to be the part of the week he looks forward to. His work suffers. He is short with his colleagues. One morning he stops trying. He quits the job. He writes a novel. He has, deliberately, shifted his causal plane. The new plane carries forward: readers, royalties, a second novel, a different kind of friendship circle, a different relationship with his own mornings.

He has not escaped the rule of causation. He has used the rule. He has placed himself, on purpose, on a plane that turned out to be more his own. This is what the rule allows. It does not free you from cause and effect. It lets you, with patience, choose which causes you will become the effect of.

Probability comes next. It is the rule I had to be careful with, because it is easy to confuse with the one I just walked through.

Causation says everything has a cause. Probability says that even when we know the cause is there, we usually cannot say in advance exactly what the effect will be. There are too many variables. The chain of causation is too long. Small differences in the starting conditions produce large differences in the outcome. So what we get, when we predict, is not certainty. It is a likelihood. The weather forecast does not say "it will rain tomorrow." It says "there is an eighty-four per cent chance of rain in Ujjain tomorrow." That is honest. That is what the situation allows us to know. Eighty-four per cent is closer to the truth than ninety-nine. A small depression in the Bay of Bengal (an area of low air pressure, where storms are born) could grow into mild rain, into a heavy storm, or into a cyclone. It depends on conditions nobody can fully account for in advance. The meteorologists look at many factors and produce a probability for each kind of outcome. The probability is the best honest answer they have.

What this rule does for an ordinary mind is moderate it, which means it makes the mind less extreme and less sure of itself. There are scales at which our predictions can be very accurate. Think of the planet's path around the sun next month, the boiling point of water at sea level, the timing of an eclipse three hundred years from now. There are scales at which our predictions can only ever be likelihoods. Consider the path of a single grain of sand in a windstorm, the choice a single human being will make under pressure, the outcome of a complicated election.

Newton's laws of motion describe how things move at the size and speed of everyday life. They work beautifully there, and start to come apart at the very small and the very fast. To handle the very fast you need relativity. To handle the very small you need a different set of equations again, the ones physicists call quantum mechanics. The closer something is to our daily life, the more we can pin it down. The further away, in size or speed, the more uncertain everything becomes. A physicist would correct me on part of this: relativity is every bit as exact as Newton, and the satellites behind the map on your phone depend on it. The real uncertainty, they would say, comes in at the very small scale, and in tangled systems like the weather at any scale. Truth, in this sense, is determinate (fixed and knowable) at human scale and grows indeterminate as you move away from it.

When I started taking this rule seriously, certain arguments I had been having with my own beliefs got quieter. I had been trying to be sure of things. The trying was the problem. Knowledge is not certainty. Knowledge is the best picture we have at this moment, with the variables we know about and the instruments we have. Tomorrow somebody will know something we do not, and the picture will improve. The willingness to update is the strength of the picture, not its weakness. A picture that nothing could change is not a strong picture. It is a frozen one. Anyone who tells you they have a final picture is, almost always, either lying to you or lying to themselves. The world is too full of uncertainty for any final picture to be available. We are condemned to approach the truth without quite arriving at it. This is uncomfortable at first. After a while, it becomes a relief. The pressure to be right gives way to the more humane pressure to be more right than you were yesterday.

Duality took me the longest to see, because it is so woven into everything that, when I first noticed it, I could not believe I had not noticed before.

Every idea in this universe comes paired with its opposite. Up and down. Hot and cold. Light and dark. Hard and soft. Active and passive. Permanent and altering. Good and evil. Without the opposite, the original idea has no shape. There is nothing for it to mean against. The two opposites pull on each other constantly, each trying to overpower the other, and out of the pulling and pushing comes everything we see. Energy itself comes in this kind of pair: the stored potential and the moving kinetic. Each one becomes the other and back, all day, all night, for the whole life of the universe.

The two halves of any pair are not usually equal at any moment. One is dominant. The other is in retreat. Over time, the dominance shifts. The golf ball is rolling, and motion is winning. The grass and the air drag at it, slowing it. By the end of its roll, stillness has won. The pendulum swings forward, then back. The dominance of one side is what makes a particular moment particular. The interplay over time is what makes things move at all.

In a human being, the same logic runs. A person is not made of one quality. A person is the moving balance of many opposite qualities. Some people lean towards action. Others lean towards reflection. Some lean towards gentleness, others towards force. Most people lean in different directions at different times. And every human being is born carrying, in some proportion, what older traditions have called masculine and feminine qualities. The proportions are different in every person. They do not line up neatly with whether the person was born with male or female reproductive organs. Some bodies that look male are run by a mind in which the feminine qualities are dominant. Some bodies that look female are run by a mind in which the masculine ones are. This is not new. This has always been true. It is only the willingness to admit it that has changed.

One consequence of this rule that the world has been dishonest about for a long time is what it implies about gender. We have spent most of human history assigning gender as if it were the same thing as the reproductive equipment a body happened to be born with. The equipment is one thing. The mind running the body is another. The two often line up. They do not always. A society that pretends they always do is a society that punishes the people in whom they do not. It punishes them for no reason other than that the punishing has become traditional. The rule does not care which body the masculine quality landed in. The rule does not care which body the feminine quality landed in. The rule produces the variation. We get to live with the variation decently, or to live with it cruelly. The variation is not the problem. The cruelty is the problem.

Between any two opposites, the world produces intermediate states. Black mixed with white produces every shade of grey. Add red and you get all the shades of red mixing with grey. Add green and you get all the shades of green. Add blue and you get all the shades of blue. The interaction of two opposites, on a third dimension of variation, produces an endless gradient of in-between states, each shading into the next. This is why no two people are alike. The basic ingredients are not many. The proportions are infinite.

If there were only one element in any pair (just black, with no white, on no plane of variation), there would be no possibility of anything. The black would just be the black. No shape. No motion. No story. The world only happens because the opposites exist, and because they keep pulling on each other long enough for the pulling to produce something interesting.

What this rule asks of you, finally, is not to fight the existence of the opposites. They will not go away. Inside a person, virtue and vice trade ground every day. The trading is not the failure of being a person. It is the substance of it. The work is to accept that, recognise which side is currently dominant in you, and live with the dominance honestly. The pendulum will swing. The dominance will shift. The point is not to lock yourself permanently to one side. The point is to know yourself well enough that you can notice which side you are leaning towards today, and to act with that knowledge.

What makes the universe interesting at all, what makes it produce variety instead of staying flat, is the rule of evolution.

If there were no tendency in any arrangement to seek a more stable state, the world would have nothing to show us. Everything would either fly apart or sit still. What actually happens is that anything in an unstable arrangement looks, slowly, for an arrangement that is more stable under whatever conditions are prevailing. Two hydrogen atoms are unstable on their own. They combine. Hydrogen gas is more stable than two free hydrogen atoms. The two have traded a small amount of their energy for the security of being together. Multiply this by billions of years and you get the variety we live inside.

There is a built-in preference, in this universe, for similar things to find each other and arrange themselves into something larger. This is true of atoms. It is true of the metals: the graphite in pencils, the copper in wires, the iron in girders all came from atoms drawn to other atoms of the same kind. Strictly, graphite is not a metal. It is a form of carbon, though its atoms gather with their own kind in just the same way. It is true of stars: clouds of hydrogen pull together over millions of years until the pressure inside makes them hot enough to ignite. It is true of human beings. We are drawn to people like us, instinctively, before any deliberate choice. The drawing is the rule at work, on the level of people instead of atoms. Cities form because of it. Languages form. Nations form. The drawing is not consciously decided. It is the rule running.

The rule, in the world of life, is what biologists have spent the last century and a half calling natural selection. The arrangements that fit the conditions survive. The arrangements that do not, fail. Over very long times, the surviving arrangements get more complex, more capable, more articulate. This happens because the conditions keep changing, and only the arrangements that adapt go on.

A few million years ago an ancestor of ours started walking upright. The upright posture had advantages. It freed the hands for carrying things. It gave the eyes a wider field of view. It changed the kinds of things the species could move from one place to another. Generation by generation, the bodies that walked best survived best. The hands, no longer needed for support, developed the opposable thumb. Biologists would correct me on one detail: opposable thumbs are far older than walking upright, and most apes and monkeys have them. What changed in our line was a longer, stronger thumb with a finer grip. The brain, now able to spend energy on something other than balance, grew. Intelligence developed. None of this had a designer. It had a rule, and time, and the rule and the time were enough.

In the biological world, this rule runs through genes and the bodies they build. Each organism receives feedback from its environment, every day of its life. The food is harder to reach, the predators are coming earlier, the temperature is wrong, the season is short. The variants of a species that respond usefully to that feedback survive long enough to make more. The variants that respond badly stop being passed on. The loop runs, on the scale of generations, in every species that has ever lived. Without it, a species cannot keep up with a world that does not stop moving.

And we are running a fast version of the same loop, on other species, right now. We have deliberately selected dogs, cattle and crops, choosing the variants we liked and breeding for them. We have also, less deliberately, killed off the variants we did not. The species of bird, plant, and small mammal that have survived contact with the human world are, mostly, the ones whose feedback to us produced something we wanted. The ones whose feedback we ignored are mostly gone. Artificial selection by an indifferent species is what most of biology now lives inside.

There is a political consequence of this rule that I want to be open about. Systems that allow many small experiments to run, and let the good ones survive, work better than systems that try to plan everything from a single centre. A free market with sensible rules adapts better than a centrally directed economy. A government in which decisions are made closer to the people they affect adapts better than a heavily centralised one. The whole biological universe runs from the bottom up. Political and economic systems that try to override this tend to collapse in interesting ways. I am not saying this is an ideological preference of mine. I am saying it is a description of which kinds of systems actually hold up under the rule.

There is one more thing about this rule I want to test with you, using a thought experiment. The thought experiment makes a point that goes very deep into how we sometimes confuse ourselves about origins.

Imagine that, some centuries from now, human beings have wrecked this planet and migrated to Mars. Suppose, generously, that it has taken a thousand years of careful work to terraform the red planet, that is, to give it air, water, soil, a chance at sustaining a body. After the terraforming, the survivors of our species move there, with their animals and their seeds, and settle in. Now suppose that the leaders of this Martian civilisation decide, in their wisdom, to delete the history of life on Earth. They do it so that the new arrivals will not repeat the mistakes that drove them off the old planet.

A million years pass. A Martian Charles Darwin is born. He examines the fossil record of Mars. He finds that all life arrived, in fully formed shape, in a single short period of a thousand years. He has no choice but to conclude that some intelligent being must have made it. He is wrong. He has only been kept from the longer history. The longer history is what he is missing. The intelligent-being conclusion is the conclusion you reach when you do not have the data.

This is, in essence, what has happened to our species on this planet. We have been around, in the geological sense, for a very short time. We do not see the slow processes of evolution directly. We see the products. The products look so finished, so designed, so meant, that we conclude there must be a maker. The conclusion is the same mistake the Martian Darwin would make. The conclusion is what an ordinary mind reaches when it is missing the data. The data are now available. They have been available, in the libraries of the world, for more than a hundred years. The honest thing is to look at them. The dishonest thing is to keep reaching for the older story.

A finished design produced by a chance process takes a long time. A watch can be designed by an intelligent person in under a year. The same watch produced by chance, by the rule of evolution operating on its own with no person guiding it, would take longer than the universe has existed. That is because the parts of a watch have no natural reason to come together. We force them together against the grain of the world. This is why everything human beings make tends to fall apart faster than what the world makes for itself. Entropy is higher for things we have built. The natural world, built by the rule, holds itself together with much less effort.

Association is the most consequential of the eight. The rest of this book leans on it more than on any of the others.

Everything in the universe arranges itself together with other things, in such a way as to spend less energy and survive longer. This is the rule of association. It is older than life. It is what makes electrons stay near nuclei. It is what makes planets orbit stars. It is what makes molecules stable. It is also what makes you and me prefer the company of people we already know to the company of strangers. And it is what makes us, when alone for too long, look for somebody.

In the world of life, this rule produces three flavours of arrangement. The umbrella name for all three is symbiosis: any close, ongoing arrangement between two parties where at least one of them is benefiting from the other. The three flavours are told apart by how the other party is doing in the deal. They are worth knowing the names of. Each of the three shows up in human relationships, in business arrangements, in politics, in every part of the world we share with each other.

The first flavour is mutualism: the arrangement in which both parties benefit from being together. The small bird called the oxpecker sits on the back of the rhinoceros, eating the pests that live on the rhinoceros's skin. The bird is fed. The rhinoceros is cleaned. Both are better off than they would be apart. Two atoms come together to share their electrons and stabilise each other. Both are more stable than they were alone. Two roommates split the cost of a flat, and each has more money at the end of the month than either would have had renting alone. A friendship is mutualism made human. A good marriage is mutualism made deep. Most of what is well in the world runs on this kind of arrangement. And the resources on this planet are now scarce enough that the species' future, more than ever, depends on more of us learning to organise ourselves this way.

Water is the universal example of this on the chemical scale. The water molecule is bent, with two hydrogen atoms on one side and one oxygen atom on the other. The arrangement makes water a solvent (a liquid that other things dissolve in) for a stunning range of other substances, far more than any other common liquid. Most of the chemistry of life happens in water, including the chemistry that built the person reading this sentence. That is because water can hold so many other things in solution at once. The shape of the water molecule is the rule of association made physical. The shape is what lets it do its work.

The second flavour is commensalism: the arrangement in which one party benefits and the other neither benefits nor is harmed. The hermit crab takes up residence in the empty shell of a snail that has already died. The crab now has a home. The snail does not care, because the snail is no longer a snail. The crab is better off. The shell is unchanged. This is fine. Most of what we call borrowing, when one person borrows something the other person was not using, is a commensal arrangement.

The third flavour is parasitism: the arrangement in which one party benefits at the cost of another. The roundworm lives inside a mammal, draining the nutrients the mammal needed for itself. The roundworm thrives. The mammal weakens. In nature, parasitism is common and not always disastrous. Many parasites are mild, and many hosts have evolved to tolerate them.

In human affairs, parasitism is more often catastrophic. Corporations that survive only by undercutting their suppliers, or by squeezing their workers, or by manipulating their customers, are parasitic. They thrive in the short term. They eventually exhaust whatever they have been living off, and then they fail. Empires that grew by extracting wealth from colonies were parasitic. They prospered for a century or two. They collapsed when the extraction ran out, or when the colonies pushed back, and the prosperity of the centre collapsed with the loss. Parasitism is a strategy that always works for a while. It never works in the long run. The rule does not allow it.

Among human beings, this rule produces an instinct that is worth naming. People look for stronger people to stand near. We sense, in someone whose life is going better than ours, the possibility that standing near them will improve our own chances. We outsource decisions to them. We rally around them. We give up some of our own independence in exchange for what we hope will be a better life. This is the underlying psychology of every cult, every devoted following, every charismatic political movement. It is not, by itself, irrational. The instinct works often enough that the species has kept it. It is, however, easy to abuse. The strong person we attach ourselves to may not actually have the interests of the people standing near them at heart. The history of human suffering is largely the history of people standing near strong leaders who turned out to be parasites in disguise.

The same instinct, dressed differently, is what makes governments form at all. People with similar tastes or similar troubles gather under a shared idea. They agree to be governed by a smaller group, in exchange for safety and order. This is, in the strict sense, a contractual association. When it works, it is a kind of mutualism between the people and the people they have given decision-making to. When it stops being mutualism, when one side starts taking from the other without giving anything back, the contract has been broken. The contract being broken is what most political collapse, eventually, comes from.

And the same rule explains why the assembly line was such an important invention. In the early twentieth century, building a car was a slow process. A small team did the entire car from start to finish. Then somebody noticed that the same team could build many more cars if each person did only one part of the work. The cars would move past each station on a slow-moving belt. Each worker became expert at their small task. The work, distributed, was many times more efficient than it had been when concentrated. This is the rule of association applied to a workplace. Specialisation is itself an instance of the rule. We are more productive together than alone, if the together is organised well.

I want to draw something out of all of this. The rule of association lets us put down a single, working version of what right and wrong are, in language an ordinary person can use. It runs like this. A person does no wrong when their actions do not threaten another person's survival. They do right when their actions enhance another's survival. They do wrong, to themselves, when they harm themselves, whether by accident or by choice. Three lines. They are enough. Most of the moral codes in the world's books, when you strip the decoration off, come down to something close to this. Carry these three lines with you when you are deciding what to do, and when you are deciding whether someone else has done you wrong. Most of the difficulty in moral life turns out to be the difficulty of applying these three lines honestly.

Time, finally. The simplest of the eight.

Time runs in one direction. It does not stop. It does not reverse.

The absolute version of time (the universe's clock, if such a thing exists) moves forward at one rate, indifferent to anything else. The subjective versions of time, the ones each of us lives inside, however, are everywhere different. Time runs at slightly different rates for two people moving at different speeds, or sitting in different strengths of gravity. The time zones on this planet are a small version of the same difference. The time experienced by a child waiting for school to end is not the same length as the time experienced by the parent waiting at the gate. Each life keeps its own running clock, even though the absolute clock underneath is one.

The subjective experience of time is one of the strangest things in a human life. A year of an ordinary working life can pass in a haze, the months blurring into one. You finish the year and cannot remember much of it. Then a single afternoon, the afternoon of a hard conversation or a small surprise, can feel longer than the haze of months around it. Grief stretches time. Joy compresses it. Boredom drags it out, even though the bored hour is exactly as long as the joyful one. As we get older, the years seem to come faster. They are the same length by the clock, but shorter on the inside. That is because by then we have done most things at least once, and the brain stops bothering to lay down new prints for what it has already seen. The absolute clock underneath is one. The clock each of us experiences is many, and changing.

What this rule does, for a person trying to live well, is keep them honest about what can and cannot be changed. The past is fixed. Whatever you did, you did. No prayer, no ritual, no later piety can reach back and edit it. The future, by contrast, is open. What you do now becomes part of the past for tomorrow. The only place from which any work can ever be done is now. The present is, in the strictest sense, infinitesimally short, so short it can hardly be measured. It is gone the moment you reach for it. But it is the only place a hand can move.

A careful person can in some sense run their attention forwards and backwards in time. Not in the magical sense. They cannot change what happened or see what has not happened yet. In the more ordinary sense of replaying what they did yesterday to see what they could learn from it, and of rehearsing tomorrow in order to choose the best version of it. The looking forward and looking backward is what the careful mind does in the now. It does not change the rule. It uses the rule. Most of my own losses of time have come from doing this badly. I was relitigating yesterday (arguing it over again in my head), or trying to anticipate next year. All the while, the work I actually had to do was sitting in front of me right then. The only freedom this rule gives you is the freedom to act inside the present moment, with whatever clarity the looking-around has produced.

These are the eight. Energy. Change. Causation. Probability. Duality. Evolution. Association. Time. Other rules can be built out of them, and the working sciences spend their days doing exactly that. The smaller rules sit on top of these and are mostly part of an ordinary education by other names. The eight underneath are the spine of everything.

The image I keep coming back to is the one I started with: the eight rules are like the code underneath the apps on a phone. You do not see the code. You see only the icons doing what the code tells them to do. The code is not in the icons. The code is what the icons are obeying. The eight rules are not in the universe in the way the trees and the stones and the people are. The eight rules are what the trees and the stones and the people are obeying. You can spend your whole life looking at the surface and never see them. You can also, with patience, start to see them in everything you look at.

A person who lives in accordance with these rules will not be saved from death. The rules are not a religion. They do not promise an afterlife. They do not promise a reward. What they offer is something quieter: the small daily peace of moving with the world instead of against it. The world will not bend for you. The rules will not bend either. But once you are working with them instead of against them, an enormous amount of the unnecessary suffering in a life simply falls away. The body holds up better. The relationships keep their shape. The work goes forward. The slow assassin gets less ground because you are doing the small work of pushing back, every day, without complaint.

We can ignore the eight rules. People have, throughout history, ignored them. The consequences are not punishments. They are not lessons handed down from above. They are simply what happens when you try to live in a universe whose rules you have refused to look at. The bills come due in their own time. The world does not warn you when. The path that ends all miseries is not a path of escape from the rules. It is a path of working with them. It means knowing them well enough that they stop surprising you. And it means arranging your life so that what you put into the room is what you would still want when it comes back to you.

The rules I have walked you through are one half of how the world holds itself together. The other half is what the rules act on: the energy that fills the universe and arranges itself, under the rules, into everything we ever see. That was the next thing I had to look at.

Words to Keep

• the eight rules: the eternal laws under every pattern we see. Nobody wrote them, nothing escapes them, and they do not care about you.

• entropy: the tendency of energy to spread from where it is packed to where it is thin, the slow assassin that undoes every arrangement.

• anti-entropic: holding an arrangement together against entropy by burning energy, as every living thing does until the day it stops pushing.

• karma: your thoughts, words and actions, and the long quiet consequences of all three, which go on in other people after you stop.

• causal plane: a long single thread of cause and effect running through one person, idea or arrangement, each event caused by the one before.

• probability: the honest likelihood we can give when the causes are too many and too tangled to say exactly what will happen.

• duality: the rule that every idea comes paired with its opposite, and that the pull between the two produces everything we see.

• evolution: the slow search, by anything in an unstable arrangement, for an arrangement that is more stable under the conditions it meets.

• association: the rule that everything arranges itself together with other things so as to spend less energy and survive longer.

• symbiosis: any close, ongoing arrangement between two parties where at least one benefits. It comes as mutualism, commensalism or parasitism.

• right and wrong: you do no wrong when you do not threaten another's survival, right when you enhance it, and wrong to yourself when you harm yourself.

Sources and Further Reading

• Most of this chapter comes from my own observation, not from any one book. These are the works and ideas it names or leans on.

• The laws of thermodynamics. The physics under my rule of Energy: energy is never made or unmade, and it always tends to spread.

• Edwin Hubble, A Relation between Distance and Radial Velocity among Extra-Galactic Nebulae (1929). The first measurement of the expanding universe that I mention.

• Isaac Newton, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687). Where the laws of motion for everyday size and speed were first set out.

• Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory. His own plain account of the physics that takes over from Newton at very high speeds.

• Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859). Natural selection, and the real Darwin behind my Martian one.

• Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651). The classic case for people agreeing to be governed in exchange for safety and order.

• Henry Ford with Samuel Crowther, My Life and Work (1922). Ford's own account of the moving assembly line.

• The Indian idea of karma, which I use here in a plain sense: what you think, say and do, and everything that follows from it.