Order vs. Randomness

[Rayaan]

Yes, order and intelligence correlate because ORDER CAUSES INTELLIGENCE, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND!

What needs to be emphasized is that order not only causes intelligence, but the intelligence itself is literally composed of order (such as the order in our bodies).

We are, essentially, patterns in spacetime. We are patterns in spacetime which are interacting with other patterns. And these patterns interacting with other patterns generates even more patterns, which we call things like "knowledge," "understanding," and "self-awareness." What we perceive as "knowledge" are rather simply patterns in spacetime that have been copied into our brains as "mental information" as a result of interacting with those patterns. These patterns themselves are what we perceive as intelligence, not just what causes intelligence. Therefore, at a fundamental level, order and intelligence are like the two sides of the same coin; they are one and the same thing.

The only difference is that order is visible, while intelligence is invisible. But as a single entity, the invisible is manifesting itself through the visible in every creation, invisibly, and the visible is manifesting itself through the invisible in every creation, visibly. Some people just look at the surface and that's why they don't realize that they are both real and both aspects of one another.

* * * * * * * * * *

That being said, since you agree that order causes intelligence, you are technically agreeing that the cause for intelligence boils down to orderly behavior, as opposed to random behavior.

And orderly behavior cannot emerge from pure randomness. That also means that if physical interactions changed from an "orderless behavior to an orderly behavior," then that change itself is governed by a more fundamental order, so the "orderless" behavior only appears to be random but not truly random ...

... which now makes the idea in letter B untenable in the formulation that I posted earlier:

---

1. If there was no fundamental intelligence or a mind behind reality, then it is simply not logical to think that the initial physical interactions changed from a seemingly orderless behavior to an orderly behavior all by themselves (especially to the degree of order we see in intelligent beings such as ourselves), unless you believe that:
A) all those interactions which created us had some kind of "a mind of their own" or
B) that the interactions going from an orderless behavior to an orderly behavior and then working in tandem to create us was purely a random/accidental process (of which the probability of happening is vanishingly small), or
C) that the laws of physics were finely tuned for intelligence to emerge, i.e. known as the anthropic principle.

2. If there is no fundamental order behind reality, then there would be nothing but randomness, since "randomness" means the absence of order.

Therefore, it is illogical to eliminate order and intelligence (either one or both) as being fundamental aspects of reality.

---

If you think it's letter A, then you're being contradictory, by assigning a mental state to inanimate matter while rejecting the existence of a fundamental intelligence behind them.

That leaves you with C as the last possible hypothesis, which is the anthropic principle, which states that the physical constants were so perfectly designed for life to exist that it is almost impossible that all of this was simply the result of a mindless, accidental cause. Therefore, it is more likely to be an intelligent cause.

Physicists have discovered that the constants and their values are so delicately balanced that if they were to be altered by even a hair’s breadth, then life could not exist. Thus, it is perfectly reasonable to think that such a balance and harmony between the constants can be best explained by an underlying intelligence behind them.





Leonard Susskind (at the 17:16 mark in the video):

The fine tunings ... how fined tuned are they? Most of them are 1% sort of things. In other words if things are 1% different everything is bad and the physicists could say, "maybe those are just luck." On the other hand, this cosmological constant that's tuned to 1 part and 10 to the 120 ... [he repeats] 120 decimal places. Nobody thinks that's accidental. That is not a reasonable idea ... that something is tuned to 120 decimal places just by accident. That's the most extreme example of fine tuning.

Then the narrator in the documentary (David Malone) says:

No force in the history of cosmology has ever been discovered to be that finely tuned. The cosmological constant needs to be set to 1 part in a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion. Otherwise, the universe would be so drastically different that it would be impossible for us to evolve. That the cosmological constant arrived at such a tiny value by chance seemed to be out of the question.

The beginning was either an accidental beginning or it was an intentional beginning. The highly finely tuned forces suggest that the latter is much more probable.

[Mudhammam]

The only thing I have to add to that is that I would not describe inanimate matter as having a "mind of its own." There are "rules" in our universe, that cause local patterns of order to emerge, and among these the possibility of actual minds. For all we know, "the cosmological constant" that "needs to be set to 1 part in a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion" was a lucky shot that fails a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times every trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillionth of a second in the "quantum vacuum" or whatever is the state of existence prior to universes. Like I said, that one very, very, very small feature in our Universe is intelligence is the "luck" of having an almost infinite number of various physical states emerge, as it happens in a flat universe, and among these include organs called brains.

[Angrboda]

Oh look. Another theist repackaging the same old, many times refuted bag of shit and presenting it with a shit eating grin.

@Rayaan: At what point in time was the universe pure randomness?

[Whateverist]

The universe is not even chaotic. Everything in it are obeying the laws of physics. And laws are lawful, and orderly, which is clearly the opposite of chaotic.

What an odd expression: "everything is obeying the laws of physics". I thought the laws of physics were our construct to describe patterns in what shit does. I don't see anything that looks like "obeying". It is we who must ensure that our laws we note remain descriptive. Really, everything is just doing what it does anyway and it is our so called laws which must conform to what it does.

[Rayaan]

The only thing I have to add to that is that I would not describe inanimate matter as having a "mind of its own." There are "rules" in our universe, that cause local patterns of order to emerge, and among these the possibility of actual minds.

I agree.

But, now, since you just said that local patterns are caused by "rules," you can't say that order comes from disorder because "rules" are orderly, not disorderly. Therefore you should agree that order/pattern/complexity arises from a pre-existing order, not from disorderliness or randomness.

For all we know, "the cosmological constant" that "needs to be set to 1 part in a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion" was a lucky shot that fails a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times every trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillionth of a second in the "quantum vacuum" or whatever is the state of existence prior to universes.

But is that really a "lucky shot" if the universe and all the patterns it generated came into existence as a result of non-random processes?

Oh look. Another theist repackaging the same old, many times refuted bag of shit and presenting it with a shit eating grin.

Oh look. Another person touting the same, old "This Has Been Refuted Many Times Already" bag of shit without even presenting anything to demonstrate that. How very convenient.

I seriously forgot that you were a theist when I planned to reply, but it's not much surprising why.

@Rayaan: At what point in time was the universe pure randomness?

I never said it was pure randomness, but I said the opposite: i.e. that the fundamental/initial state of the universe cannot be pure randomness.

And, technically, the word "randomness" means an "absence of order" which is the same meaning as "pure randomness."

What an odd expression: "everything is obeying the laws of physics". I thought the laws of physics were our construct to describe patterns in what shit does. I don't see anything that looks like "obeying". It is we who must ensure that our laws we note remain descriptive. Really, everything is just doing what it does anyway and it is our so called laws which must conform to what it does.

"Our laws" and "our construct" ... Frankly, those expressions are even odder to me ...

I disagree because we didn't "construct" the laws of physics. Rather, we discovered the laws. The way that we express/describe the laws is our own construct indeed, but that doesn't mean that they are simply that. The laws of gravity, for example, can continue to exist if all of us completely disappeared from this universe tomorrow. The "our construct" part only applies to the way that we describe those laws. The laws themselves are real, regardless of what we call them or how we describe them.

[Alex K]

I disagree because we didn't "construct" the laws of physics. Rather, we discovered the laws. The way that we express/describe the laws is our own construct indeed, but that doesn't mean that they are simply that. The laws of gravity, for example, can continue to exist if all of us completely disappeared from this universe tomorrow. The "our construct" part only applies to the way that we describe those laws. The laws themselves are real, regardless of what we call them or how we describe them.

I have to disagree here. None of the "laws" are "real" in any sense. They are parts of or consequences derived from theories, which themselves are approximations of nature. To give you an example, the 1/r^2 law for gravity is only an approximation, and thus a mathematical construct which fits nature kinda nicely, but isn't true in the philosophical sense such that you could discover it in nature like you discover a new planet. You can say that we discovered them in the realm of mathematics and found that they approximate nature well, but if you go that far you basically abolish the notion of constructing anything in a perverse platonic sense.

[Mudhammam]

I disagree because we didn't "construct" the laws of physics. Rather, we discovered the laws. The way that we express/describe the laws is our own construct indeed, but that doesn't mean that they are simply that. The laws of gravity, for example, can continue to exist if all of us completely disappeared from this universe tomorrow. The "our construct" part only applies to the way that we describe those laws. The laws themselves are real, regardless of what we call them or how we describe them.

I have to disagree here. None of the "laws" are "real" in any sense. They are parts of or consequences derived from theories, which themselves are approximations of nature. To give you an example, the 1/r^2 law for gravity is only an approximation, and thus a mathematical construct which fits nature kinda nicely, but isn't true in the philosophical sense such that you could discover it in nature like you discover a new planet. You can say that we discovered them in the realm of mathematics and found that they approximate nature well, but if you go that far you basically abolish the notion of constructing anything in a perverse platonic sense.

Precisely. Likewise, I didn't mean "rules" (notice I purposefully put it in parantheses) in the sense that the Universe is a football game being overseen by some strange extra-terrestrial referees. We must remember that the words we use to express the phenomena we observe are descriptive, not prescriptive--we create the words and their definitions to communicate our ideas and theories, that's all--we don't impose them on nature, it imposes them on us and we try to understand them the best we can. Sometimes we must change our definitions and ideas if they later turn out to be incorrect.

This is why I am weary of your whole approach, Raayan, to use abductive reasoning in trying to solve the puzzle of the Universe's origin. Your reasoning seems so contrived, so anthropomorphic, it most probably does not reflect the nature of reality in any metaphysical sense.

[Rayaan]

I have to disagree here. None of the "laws" are "real" in any sense. They are parts of or consequences derived from theories, which themselves are approximations of nature. To give you an example, the 1/r^2 law for gravity is only an approximation, and thus a mathematical construct which fits nature kinda nicely, but isn't true in the philosophical sense such that you could discover it in nature like you discover a new planet. You can say that we discovered them in the realm of mathematics and found that they approximate nature well, but if you go that far you basically abolish the notion of constructing anything in a perverse platonic sense.

I agree that laws are not real except in a mathematical sense. Of course, I know that laws are not anything physical (duh), so we can discover them only in the realm of mathematics.


But then this brings us to the question:

If mathematics can capture the essence of everything that goes on in the universe, does that mean that reality itself is a mathematical structure?

If the answer is yes, then that would mean that math is just as real as reality itself.

[Mudhammam]

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathemati...hypothesis

---

I'm inclined to think that mathematics is a language us apes evolved in Africa to help us cooperate and problem-solve, and that is precisely why it so perfectly resembles physical nature--because we are part of it!

[Rayaan]

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathemati...hypothesis

Lol, yeah, I recently learned about the mathematical universe hypothesis and that's why I asked that question.

To my understanding, I think it's a pretty reasonable philosophy, too.