**Links to**: [[Simplicity]], [[Complexity]], [[Computational irreducibility]], [[Communication]], [[Information]], [[Individuation]], [[Pattern]], [[THE PATTERN SHIFTER]], [[THE PATTERN BUTCHER]], [[On the importance of vegetables and sand for philosophy]], [[Difference]], [[Equivalence]], [[Equivalence and difference]], [[Difference and Repetition]], [[Rifference and Depetition]]. ### [[Postulate]]: It’s nice to compress, but we cannot always compress what is nice. The above is a playful take on an oft heard refrain. The implication is that, while compression—defined as the reduction of a complex structure down to the fundamental patterns that compose it, therefore providing ways to reconstruct it—is extremely useful, the phenomena we tend to show interest towards are those which appear to increase in complexity, rather than Jürgen Schmidhuber says “science is data compression” (by this he means _simplification_). Sure, but it depends on what we define as data, and as compression. Science also obviously means _expansion_, the results of science lead to more results and more results and more results: something problematic compels us to think, and this is not compression. When I look at a tree and see how all of its leaves resemble each other, am I _seeing_ a tree solving a complex problem by way of a self-similarity, fractal-pattern solution, or am ***I*** solving a complex problem by producing a self-similarity phenomenon, when “in reality” the tree is actually aiming for absolute difference in all its differential leafy glory?