Order vs. Randomness

[Rayaan]

Have any of you watched ants or a busy train station?

Yeah, I know about the ants. The insects are able to execute remarkable and sophisticated collective behaviors which are known as "swarm intelligence." Fishes, birds, termites, bees, and many other animals display such a self-organized behavior. Computer scientists and engineers who deal with the issue of complexity in artificial intelligence have often been inspired by this type of behavior.

Swarm intelligence (SI) is the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems, natural or artificial. The concept is employed in work on artificial intelligence. The expression was introduced by Gerardo Beni and Jing Wang in 1989, in the context of cellular robotic systems.

SI systems consist typically of a population of simple agents or boids interacting locally with one another and with their environment. The inspiration often comes from nature, especially biological systems. The agents follow very simple rules, and although there is no centralized control structure dictating how individual agents should behave, local, and to a certain degree random, interactions between such agents lead to the emergence of "intelligent" global behavior, unknown to the individual agents. Examples in natural systems of SI include ant colonies, bird flocking, animal herding, bacterial growth, and fish schooling. The definition of swarm intelligence is still not quite clear. In principle, it should be a multi-agent system that has self-organized behaviour that shows some intelligent behaviour.

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


I especially like it when the birds do it.

Raayan, I think I disagree with your assertion that order = intelligence. Its not demonstrable as far as I can tell because it appears that intelligence emerges from order, which apparently emerges from randomness.

But again, you don't really know whether or not the "randomness" is truly random.

Perhaps there is some underlying fundamental uniforming principle but I don't see this as suggestive of anything like an intelligent being, as that only brings us back to the question we initially set out to resolve--which is how intelligent beings got here in the first place.

Well, you know that the act of searching for an answer to such as question would be obviously impossible without the existence of our intelligent, order-seeking brains.

But if reality was fundamentally non-intelligent, then it is simply not conceivable to me that we this "non-intelligent" thing would be able to transform its random behavior into order in such a way that some parts of it would eventually become orderly and "intelligent" enough to start contemplating about its own nature, without possessing any amount of intelligence itself. This idea is just too paradoxical to be true.

I also want to add that abductive reasoning is necessary and helpful to a point but when we are confronting questions about the fundamental nature of reality, I think it would be a mistake to assume that the ultimate answers to these question are going to conform to our common senses. Undoubtedly, as physicists continually demonstrate, it's the other way around.

You're right. The ultimate answers may not actually conform to our common senses or our intellect.

On the other hand, science will only go so far, and itself is a product of our intellect working together to understand everything. So, ultimately, our own intellect is all we really have for making sense of our existence and the rest of reality. That's why I believe that I can use it and depend on it as an informing tool in my life, even for things which science has no answer to.