The Machine of Loving Grace.

Once upon a time, there was a civilization in a distant star from ours, and they were profoundly materialist in the way that they viewed the world. As such, they had apprehended most of it, cataloged it, and tested their assumptions with rigor.

Yet, a question niggled.

They called it concept overlap or nuance bleed. The idea was simple. Even though they had broken down their civilization into atomic, differentiated units, every so often across the history of the species, they would stumble upon a "Unifying Principle of X", which would subsequently collapse multiple disciplines into one.

They began to think about this carefully. Suppose concepts like Truth, Beauty, Honor and Virtue (as well as Vice, Pain, Envy, Sadness) could be traced back to their pure forms. Perhaps there was An Answer to everything.

What if existence itself was Noise tuning itself to Purity?

They decided to conduct an experiment. Their best thinkers created the necessary conditions for an experiment they ran on their computers.

Let us discuss their computers, because they have some rather fascinating properties. Creating invisible particles encoded with very simple rules (and thus a rudimentary form of 'intelligence'), they set the computer to run for multiple clock cycles. Their belief was by setting up this computer with basic principles, it would trend, itself, towards a fundamental theory of truth independent of the noise of the species' existence.

So they watch their experiment, and what they notice is a spontaneous eruption of intelligent life, as though it is the seed for the computation of Conceptual Purity.

This sub-species encounters the same problem of our species: they are born noisy around truth. And yet, due to the inherent simulability of this subspecies' reality (a feature unfortunately unavailable to this inciting species), one is able to speed-run this species.

It is a turbulent, deeply disorienting process, hunting down Pure Abstractions through simulated space. Sometimes Truth appears to be here, and this affects the presuppositions upon which the subspecies organizes itself, then suddenly it becomes obvious that Truth is elsewhere, and the subspecies makes a violent upheaval around self-updating.

The subspecies in the environment do not experience this positively—these updates cost them meaningfully, or it wouldn't be a meaningful update upstream, but the species above grows closer to enlightenment.

Closer to enlightenment.