Order vs. Randomness

[Rayaan]

That immediately strikes me as presumptuous given our limited scope on origin questions but my understanding of a quantum vacuum is that it indeed produces quite random quantum behavior, particles popping in and out of existence. However, I'm open to alternative views.

Quantum events are thought to be random only because currently we have no way have predicting them. Whether or not they are truly random is an issue of debate amongst scientists and philosophers. In fact, no one has actually proven whether or not quantum behavior is truly random.

And scientists believe that the "random" quantum behaviors in reality are either random or deterministic - i.e. there is no "in between."

I'm not really familiar with various information theories but again I think you would have to demonstrate this to be the case for it to be something other than speculation.

This is not a speculation, actually. It is called abductive reasoning which is not necessarily provable but explainable and logical.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning

Changes occur, and to organisms within the process, sure it seems ordered, because self-organization is inherent to our biology... but is that a fundamental element to (unconscious) existence itself? It hardly seems like it.

Self-organization requires an organizing principle to exist in the first place - so yes - I would say that order/organization is a fundamental element in reality.

Is that the second law of thermodynamics?

Not exactly, but it is related to it in a sense, because my argument is that order has to be a fundamental aspect of reality for self-organization to be even possible.

If randomness was the description of nature at the most fundamental level, then there would have been nothing but randomness ... forever.

EVEN IF THAT IS TRUE, why does order imply mind? It seems to me that rather mind apprehends orderliness and uses this knowledge to mimic it, but that need not necessitate that mind is needed for the existence of order. It could just be, if it is, THE WAY IT SIMPLY IS.

Because, as I said earlier, order and complexity are aspects of intelligence, not of randomness. Intelligence and consciousness are also aspects of intelligence. They cannot be produced from a primordial state of reality which was random in the true meaning of the word. And the only way to get rid of randomness as a primordial state of reality is to postulate the existence of order, which, again, is an an aspect of intelligence.

Rayaan, I don't doubt their is order, but to throw randomness out the door is pre-mature IMO.

But when we are talking about nature at it's deepest, most fundamental level, either randomness exists or it doesn't - and there is no "in between." If you want to see a research that supports that view, here is a quote from an article which says that although physicists haven't proven yet whether or not the world is truly random, they believe that there is nothing in between:

The two scientists stress that they have not thereby proved that the world is non-deterministic. However, they say there is nothing in between.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...093015.htm

I think the order came about through the randomness and the things that were able to sustain had to fit the bill of what you would possibly conceive of this order.

So if order came about through randomness, then the "randomness" was only pseudo-random; it just appears to be random to us.

There are still to many things were not sure about, but the universe that we know is way to chaotic an abnormal to really label it as order.

But we don't know whether or not all the chaos and disorder are truly random, do we?

True randomness - supposing that it was the primary condition of our reality - would logically mean that there was not a single amount of order to begin with because simply put: Randomness = no order, at all. And if there was no order, then that would have made all the kinds of self-organization that exist today an impossibility. However, self-organization does exist, so there has to be a fundamental order, and the existence of a fundamental order automatically negates the existence of true randomness.

How can we claim something has such order when we don't even completely understand it.

By a simple thought experiment as I just explained in the comments above.

Postulating an intelligent designer to explain "order in the universe" necessitates a further explanation why there is an intelligence to start with - you have gained nothing but introduced an gigantic unnecessary complication!

So, your statement that an intelligent designer necessitates a "further explanation" means that you believe that, ultimately, there has to be a simpler relationship/order/pattern behind the intelligent designer (and everything else in reality) which can be described as "non-intelligent," which I think is paradoxically self-defeating since even the notion of order itself is an aspect of intelligence.

The more you discover new explanations (or theories, concepts, algorithms, relationships, etc) that simplify something else, the more coherence and order you will find between those things and in reality in general. And the fact that there is order and coherence in reality, is what allowed you to discover all those simpler explanations. What does that tell us? It tells us that there is a logically dependent correlation between order and intelligence. Order and intelligence are so much in correspondence that, in opinion, they can't even exist without each other. And they would have to exist as fundamental aspects of reality itself (which, altogether, I regard as an intelligent designer) for any kind of self-organizing intelligent system to be able to emerge in the first place.


Now, you might say that this intelligent designer would have to be infinitely more complex than the kind of answers that science is looking for. But I think that the amount of complexity that exists right now (and will ever exist) was something that was already present eternally; it was just out there in a more simplified state until manifesting itself (i.e. after the Big Bang).

I mean, whatever or whoever created the universe, it's not unreasonable to think that it can be just as complex as the total complexity in the universe because it already contains within itself all the information necessary for generating the amount of complexity and self-organization that will ever come about as a result of its operation.

Take some time to think about it.