Imagine you had a line, and you wanted to understand it. You break out a ruler, and it’s 36-inches, one yard. You mark the inch increments on the line, all 36 of them. But there are gaps between the marks. You get a more detailed ruler that has half-inches, you mark those too, all 72 of them. Still, there are gaps. You get the quarter-inch ruler, there are 144, you invent software to print rulers with finer and finer increments until you have billions of marks on the line. But still there are gaps.

You invent software that makes ever finer measurements and that learns how to make finer measurements, and even learns how to learn how to make ever finer measurements. You churn out some Impressive rulers, able to measure the line in 1/`10^100 increments.

But still there are gaps. For example, between inch 3 and inch 4, there is pi. Your 1/10^100 increments don’t capture it. Neither do they capture the square root of 2, or the square root of the square root of 2. No matter how how much your AI software can improve in its measurement capacity, there will always be gaps. It will always miss the vast majority of the line. In fact, the ratio of the part of the line it can measure to the gaps is effectively zero.

The ruler is AI, which only operates in the realm of 1s and 0s, in the digital, in the mapping of the line. The line itself is the irreducable territory, unfathomably more infinite in its myriad unmappable points.

No matter how powerful the ruler, it will never cross the chasm Into reality.

This is important because technocrats conflate Creation with digital creation, argue we’re in a “simulation” as though some advanced techno-savvy race could “program” our reality. But if fundamentally misunderstands the difference between programs which operate in the abstract, conceptual, digital level and reality which operates in a higher order of infinity.