Order vs. Randomness

[KichigaiNeko]

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

[Mudhammam]

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. 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.

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.

[bennyboy]

Everything is perfectly ordered. We see chaos only because we are too limited to see that everything is, in fact, ticking along just as it should.

[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.

[Mudhammam]

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

Sure, I can grant that. But these are just descriptions, words to distinguish between our perceptions of what appears orderly and what appears random. What if it is both... or neither (if that is even intelligible in any fathomable way)? Even if the universe is fundamentally ordered, however, this is not suggestive, in my mind, of intelligence, any more than hurricanes, mountains, gravity, or atoms would be "ordered" but are not intelligent!

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.

I'm with you there.

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.

But let's break that down to a real-life example. Take an atom. Is an atom intelligent? Not in any way that I can imagine, unless by intelligence we are applying the term to literally everything we see! Perhaps it is orderly though. Are two atoms, chemically bonded, intelligent? Still, no. But orderly? Even more so than one, at least! I think you would agree. But what about a trillion atoms, bonded to form molecules and subsequently nerve cells. Is a nerve cell intelligent? Again, no. But definitely ordered! But how about 10 billion nerve cells that interact to form something like conscious awareness? Now we're talking intelligence! Take my example and apply it to quantum particles and waves, or even the laws of physics themselves. It might make sense to call these ordered but... does it make sense to call these things intelligent? If not, why do their preceding causes need to be?

I think you raise a very interesting philosophical question about order vs. randomness and I don't expect it to be resolved anytime soon. But that's just my two cents.

[Alex K]

@Rayaan,

I would like to think about it longer, but your post did not contain enough meat for me to think about it. I would be glad if that changed.

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.

*You* are willing to postulate an intelligent designer, and somehow this is supposed to be more justified than simply postulating a universe with a certain set of simple laws?

Your litany that "order is an aspect of intelligence" is so weasely and vague. Intelligence as we know it needs a certain amount of order as prerequisite, but not the other way around! Intelligence is what a neural network does. You simply don't have a good reason to think that intelligence is a more fundamental aspect of nature than that.

. Order and intelligence are so much in correspondence that, in opinion, they can't even exist without each other.

No they aren't *in correspondence*

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.

It what sense and why?

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.

Not infinitely more complex. Much more complex, yes. And entirely 1) unevidenced and 2) unnecessary

But I think that the amount of complexity that exists right now (and will ever exist) was something that was already present eternally;

You can think all you want. Can you give me any reason why I should think so, too? I would like to know it! Start with a sensible definition of what you mean by complexity.

it was just out there in a more simplified state until manifesting itself (i.e. after the Big Bang).

Where and in what sense, and why do you think so?

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.

How do you define complexity, and in what sense is there a conservation law for it? There is one thing that comes near what you are saying and is well-defined, namely thermodynamical quantities such as entropy. The reason why we have structure and intelligence in the universe is that it started in a low entropy state. Why this would have anything to do with the presence of an intelligence is beyond me, but I am open to explanations, but please be more specific than "they are linked together" or so.

[Mudhammam]

One further thought came to mind. When I think of intelligence I think it includes something along the lines of intentions, goals. Perhaps this is somewhat how we get from intelligence to non-intelligence, roughly traversing our lineage.
Raayan's goal to be a Noble prize winner - a genuine goal, in the upmost sense of the word
A chimp's attempt to get the banana off the tree - a genuine goal, but only "as-if" in comparison to Raayan's goal
A shark's pursuit of a scuba diver - not quite a goal, in the sense of the first two, maybe more like pseudo-goal
An ant colony building a hill, or a plant attracting an insect - an "as-if" pseudo-goal?
A microbe reproducing - an "as-if it is as-if" a pseudo-goal?
Eventually, we get far down enough, we reach NO GOAL. No guidance. No intention. No intelligence.

[Alex K]

One further thought came to mind. When I think of intelligence I think it includes something along the lines of intentions, goals. Perhaps this is somewhat how we get from intelligence to non-intelligence, roughly traversing our lineage.
Raayan's goal to be a Noble prize winner - a genuine goal, in the upmost sense of the word
A chimp's action to get the banana off the tree - a genuine goal, but only "as-if" in comparison to Raayan's goal
A shark's pursuit of a scuba diver - not quite a goal, in the sense of the first two, maybe more like pseudo-goal
An ant colony building a hill, or a plant attracting an insect - an "as-if" pseudo-goal?
A microbe reproducing - an "as-if it is as-if" a pseudo-goal?
Eventually, we get far down enough, we reach NO GOAL. No guidance. No intention. No intelligence.

We are lucky that EgoRaptor is banned for a while, this would be the perfect place to start rambling about Nietzsche's "Wille zur Macht", the Will to Power, which he thought was the fundamental principle driving the universe.

But seriously, these goals are more or less complicated consequences of Evolution by natural selection. This is what happens when evolution selects for intelligence to increase fitness, if only for funny reasons such as sexual selection. The desire for a Nobel is more or less collateral damage in the quest for evolutionary fitness.

[Mudhammam]

Ha how did EgoRaptor get banned?

[houseofcantor]

Ha how did EgoRaptor get banned?

Trolling, flaming, and general douchebaggery. Not a ban but a two-week suspension.