Bookworms are such a curious people, I love reading their pop-evo-psych-theory-of-everything articles and counting up all the occult references and hidden meanings. Waiting for a deep yellow sunset with royal blue skies to appear some day where they spill all the beans!
Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex
61–70 of 109 posts
Re: Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read a theory that life in the universe might be favorable because we increase entropy so much.
Life in the universe is pretty unfavourable! A rare thing indeed. Where it has evolved I think it is less about entropy and more about the nature of the matter - atoms, molecules. Particularly carbon and water. And the way they can replicate themselves through chemistry. That had to obey entropy but is not driven by it. Light scattering off the atmosphere will do the entropy trick well enough!
> A rare thing indeed
We can hardly know that, can we? Water and carbon are abundant.
Re: Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex
#63Tried reading the paper [1]. I understand the authors are academics, which is why I'm surprised the paper reads like a layman's attempt at a contributing to a "theory of everything", or at best, an inquiry written by a 18th century European philosopher of science. - "identification of conceptual equivalencies among disparate phenomena were foundational to developing previous laws of nature" - what exactly is a "conce…
I think speculative science always starts out as philosophy. This is as true now as it was in the 18th century. If you look at any thinker on the edge of human understanding you'll find something similar (e.g. I was reading Michael Levin's stuff on bioelectricity recently and it also has a heavy dose of philosophy). I don't really have an issue with any of the points you raised - why do they bother you? The interesti…
> I think speculative science always starts out as philosophy. This is as true now as it was in the 18th century.
Indeed, and Natural Philosophy was the precursor to what we now call Science.
I still think the old name better fit what we’re doing because it admits that the work is still a philosophical endeavor.
This is not to question the validity of what we now call science, but it’s common these days to believe in the ultimate supremacy of science as the answer to questions that are best explored both philosophically and scientifically, and because pure science still can’t answer important philosophical questions that that the entire scientific discipline rests upon.
Re: Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Entropy is always increasing in a closed system, but locally it can decrease, if energy is supplied from the outside. Us evolving on Earth comes at the expense of increased entropy of the Sun.
> Entropy is always increasing in a closed system Only if that system isn’t already in thermodynamic equilibrium. A closed system that reaches thermodynamic equilibrium has maximum entropy. Why the universe as a whole didn’t start out in thermodynamic equilibrium, i.e doesn’t have maximum entropy is something we don’t understand.
Maybe it's not a closed system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_cosmology
I'm partial to the hypothesis that our universe is actually a giant black hole in some kind of larger universe. The Big Bang was really the formation of our universe's event horizon. Cosmic inflation is the result of stuff falling into our universe, adding to its mass-energy -- there is no dark energy, our universe is just accreting mass-energy from something larger.
As for what the larger universe looks like -- in this model it may be impossible to know because the event horizon is impenetrable. It could be a much larger universe or it could be something else, like a higher dimensional one.
Re: Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex
#65How does one measure complexity 'in the universe'?
Re: Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex
#66How does one measure complexity 'in the universe'?
Isn't that exactly what entropy is?
Re: Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex
#67Tried reading the paper [1]. I understand the authors are academics, which is why I'm surprised the paper reads like a layman's attempt at a contributing to a "theory of everything", or at best, an inquiry written by a 18th century European philosopher of science. - "identification of conceptual equivalencies among disparate phenomena were foundational to developing previous laws of nature" - what exactly is a "conce…
>- "identification of conceptual equivalencies among disparate phenomena were foundational to developing previous laws of nature" - what exactly is a "conceptual equivalence"? You mean models?
No, a model is not an "identification of conceptual equivalencies among disparate phenomena". It's a simplified representation of a system.
"identification of conceptual equivalencies among disparate phenomena were foundational to developing previous laws of nature" could be called an analogy, an isomorphism, a unifying framework, etc.
>Unifying disparate observations into models is basic science. Not sure why it is highlighted here as some important insight.
Perhaps because the most important insights are the most basic ones - it's upon those eveything else sits upon.
>At this point, I gave up
If you can't bother beyond the abstract or 1st paragraph, or are perplexed that the abstract has a 10,000ft simplistic introduction into the basics, then it's better that you did :)
Re: Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex
#68"In this new view, biological evolution appears not as a unique process that gave rise to a qualitatively distinct form of matter — living organisms. Instead, evolution is a special (and perhaps inevitable) case of a more general principle that governs the universe. According to this principle, entities are selected because they are richer in a kind of information that enables them to perform some kind of function."
Sounds like they're struggling to accept that the cosmos is not conscious and it doesn't design, and possibly confuse the fantasies we construct to, as it might be phenomenologically put, make sense of our environment, with the environment itself.
In ancient abrahamic cosmology it was proposed that the cosmos was designed, and first it was stone and water and so on, and then the biological matter was put in there, segmenting stone, hippopotamus and human into a kind of cosmological hierarchy of ethical and divine importance. Famous ancient greek philosophers imagined that there was another world shaping ours, geometrically purer and to people with a particular taste perceived as obviously more beautiful and holy.
Different strains of similar thinking survived in parts of the world for a long time, and had a renaissance due to european colonialism spreading it with a diverse set of tools.
One of the strongest views that followed is a cosmological dualism, the belief that there is something like soul or mind that is different from matter, usually paired with the belief that this is how truth enters the world and that truth is otherworldly, etherical.
Modern physics turned out to be absolutely brutal towards ideas like these. For a hundred years experiment upon experiment just smashed such segmentations and expectations against a growing mountain of experiential evidence. As of yet we have no evidence of the cosmos being governed by laws and selection, it just is what it is and the supposed laws are human interpretations, hopes and fantasies.
Protestant christianity is in an especially bad place due to this development, since it bets all it has on mental phenomena being more real than matter. Catholics and muslims can fall back on arguing that the divine is unknowable and that the effects of certain acts and traditions are socially beneficial, which sometimes puts them at odds with or makes them absolutely incompatible with worldly regimes of power. Protestant ideology on the other hand, can be fitted in with basically any regime, material conditions just aren't that important, ethically or otherwise.
Looking at the micro-perspectives we didn't find geometrical simplicity, instead we found weird, messy fields and almost-existences, putting all sorts of expectations about the foundations of the cosmos into question. Maybe it'll change, but at the moment there's no evidence for some grand principle or cosmic selector or whatever. One might argue something here about cosmic constants or the symmetry Dirac sussed out but that's still just pushing human experience into an algebra.
The expectation that life is somehow special is wrong. There is, as far as we can see, no difference in the quarks in a dog and those in a rock. The argument that 'DNA encodes more information' is childish, there are repetitive structures everywhere, like in the crystalline structures in a piece of rock. Protein sacks carrying their own emulation of a particular old ocean on a particular planet and flubbing around on land, carefully putting in salts and carbon and so on to keep it going, is neither more or less complex, neither more or less "information dense" in itself, than a photovoltaic panel pushing electrons to light up a screen.
There is a good book from the nineties on this topic, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Prigogine#The_End_of_Cert.... One should be very suspicious of people that talk about being cosmically selected, or about natural laws.
Re: Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex
#69I remember reading somewhere that maybe the purpose of life is to increase entropy in the universe. If that is true and we haven't found any sound evidence of life elsewhere, I don't know.
I read somewhere that life is more efficient at dissipating energy and faster at increasing entropy than non-living physical/chemical phenomena. Citation needed.
Right, it's less about the purpose of life (which implies a directive force) and more that a characteristic of life is it's an emergent complexity that finds more efficient ways of increasing entropy.
It gets a bit blurry when you start to substitute "life" for any "complex cosmological system" though...
Re: Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex
#70so at heat death of the universe, things will be more complex? i think not. There is clearly a limit to complexity, where that is when that is we don't know.