Is the world one giant algorithm?

Who is actually thinking when I think? That question has been stuck in my head for months, so I ended up turning it into the animated piece you can explore on this site. Here's the thinking behind it.

IThe AI

It started when I tried to understand how AI actually works. When you look at the base of the base, it's just math. Words get turned into numbers (vectors), the model calculates the probability of every possible next word, and then it picks one. Not always the most likely one: there's some randomness in it. There's memory and a lot of advanced machinery on top to follow the context, but the core is math and probabilities.

IIThe world

Then I started looking around me, and I kept seeing the same thing. A tree is pretty much one rule repeated: split in two, a bit shorter and thinner each time, same angle. Waves are simple waves added together. Sunflower seeds grow at 137.5° from each other, and that's why you see spirals in them. A rock falling off a cliff follows a parabola; you can calculate where it lands before it even drops. Everything seems to have a mathematical cause.

IIIChance

So I thought: okay, if we had all the data about everything, we could predict everything. But the more I read, the less it worked like that. With something like the weather, a tiny error at the start ends up changing everything later (the butterfly effect), so you'd need infinitely precise data. And at the atomic level, nature seems to be genuinely random.

The world might be calculable without being predictable.

More probabilistic than anything. Which is funny, because that's also how an AI picks its words.

IVThe brain

Then I turned the question on myself. A thought is electrical signals moving between billions of neurons, nothing magic about it. Some neuroscientists even describe the brain as a prediction machine, constantly guessing what comes next. And DNA is literally code: four letters, read three by three, with a start signal and a stop signal. It's a bit like the starting instructions of a life.

VThe mirror

But when I push the comparison further, I don't think we're really like an LLM. An LLM starts from language, and we don't. A baby is scared, hungry and curious long before it can talk, and most of the brain is busy moving the body and sensing things. Language came last.

Memory is different too. Every memory physically changes the brain, so we're basically retraining all the time, while an AI's weights stay frozen after training. And DNA is far too small to describe a whole brain; it's more like the recipe to grow one. What we learn in our lives doesn't go into our children's DNA anyway. What gets passed on and improved every generation is culture.

If anything is humanity's prompt, it's probably culture.

VIAlive

Same with the question of being alive. I used to think it was one or the other: either I'm a calculation, or I'm alive. But I don't see why it couldn't be both. Being alive is mostly about keeping yourself going: eating, healing, not wanting to die. An AI doesn't do that. Unplug it and nothing in it fights back. We do. And we do it on about 20 watts, when AI needs huge datacenters, which is kind of insane when you think about it.

VIIThe origin

As for whether something, or someone, set all of this in motion, I honestly don't know. Evolution works a bit like training an AI, trial and error over billions of years, so it doesn't need anyone behind it. But that doesn't prove there's nobody either.

VIIIWhere I've landed

So right now, I think I might be a calculation. A probabilistic one, a bit like an AI, just with a body that keeps itself alive and a brain that rewires itself all the time. The part I really can't explain is why all of that feels like something from the inside.

If everything is math, why does it feel like anything to be me?