Free will and unpredictability

So I'm reading this book "Chaos" by James Gleick about the choas theory. You're probably familiar with the Butterfly Effect - that if a butterfly flaps its wings in New York it changes the weather in, say Tokyo. The idea is that each tiny change in the world induces the whole system to function differently, in an entirely nonlinear fashion such that one small perturbation could have vast consequences. 

I want to combine this with the idea of nature and nurture influences on the self. Our bodies are just a biological consequence of our parents, informed and shaped by our parent and their friends and their community. We make decisions by the way our neurons fire in our brain, and our neurons fire in this way due to either our biology or our environment. I am going to argue that nature and nurture here are not important distinctions. What is important is that they are both ultimately out of our personal control. So, the first human born long ago would make decisions based on factors outside of his control and by doing so he/she directed our future by making small perturbations that would amplify to become the world we know. 

If our decisions truly rest in our genome and with our upbringing, then each decision is dependent on previous ones and if you trace this back to the conception of humanity, you get to a point where the first decision ever must have created all future possibilities. If you trace this idea into the future, you find that we are enmeshed in decisions we have to make because of who we are, and the idea of free will becomes pretty much impossible. 

Do you agree with my logic? Must there be a third influence on decisions in order to permit free will?

Uncertainty in death

Now lets talk about something pretty different - game theory. In game theory the optimum strategy is tit-for-tat: if someone is mean to you, you're mean to them in the subsequent round to punish them. The optimum strategy also includes some degree of forgiveness. Some biologists think that this is the foundation of social behavior - that we interact with those that are consistently nice, punish those who are not... But what I want to explore here is that this tit-for-tat strategy actually only works if you don't know how many rounds there are. That's pretty interesting to me - the game only works if we don't know when it ends. Does that have something to do with why we don't know when we die, otherwise life would breakdown because we wouldn't know how to live? 

So, as I see it there are fundamentally two possibilities. Here I will define God as any force of any type, perhaps purposeful and definitely knowing. Either there is a God and he's decided not to tell us what's up or there's not a God and we have to figure it out if we have any shot at it at all. If there were a God, he would have to have a reason not to want to tell us what's up. Perhaps this tit-for-tat idea of social interaction would break down if we knew. I am not sure if we need to be ignorant in order to want to live, but that's certainly another possibility. It seems possible though that the God has created a system for life that only works if we are ignorant.

Of course, the other God problem is that who created God if not God? But that's another whole topic.

God

Our conceptions of God limit our understanding of consciousness.  

In the West, God -- be it bearded Jehovah or younger Jesus -- is a man, typically portrayed with light skin and a beard.  He interacts with other people, curses them, blesses them, and interferes in their lives when people break his rules.   He controls a piece of the universe called Heaven, and grants entry to people who worship him and who obey him at all times.  

This sounds more like a mob boss than an enlightened divinity.  

Yet walk into most churches (or synagogues, or mosques, or temples -- it doesn't vary that much) and you will hear something along these lines.   Follow these rules, or you will go to Hell.  

Even if you don't believe in God, or are agnostic, it is this image that is supposed to shape your "spiritual" inclination.   

God is presented as something to be feared.  So you see most people today live in fear of God, or live in fear of other people who believe in God, or life in fear of the people who make the rules based on the values of a fearful God.  

If we want to plumb the depths of human consciousness, we have to get rid of these limiting ideas of God.  

It is OK to have a connection with the larger universe and to have a sense of spirituality without subscribing to any particular church or doctrine.   

In fact, spirituality is so unique -- and we as individuals are so unique -- that every person probably has their own idea of the nature of God.  

People don't need to agree about their conceptions of God.  It's OK for there to be a difference of opinion about God.  

The important thing is that people make up their own minds about God (or the lack of a God) and not just blindly follow some belief because it makes them feel better.  

That is not genuine investigation, but simply acting like a sheep.   And our consciousness is too precious to behave like a sheep.

Personally -- I view God as being the mind, and as being the universe as well.  This may seem like a paradox, but to me the mind and the universe are one and the same -- and both are God.  

God is the bridge that connects my intentions, desires, hopes, and prayers to their material manifestation.  

I sit, and quiet my mind, and then I open my mind to all of creation and feel a comfort that all will be well, all can be healed, everything will be OK.  No need to worry.  

In this state, you can formulate an intention and ask that it come true, so long as it is in the best interests of all involved.   And if it is, then it happens.  

God is the connection to all of consciousness.  When you sit by yourself, and you feel the presence of a loved one who may be thousands of miles away -- that moment is God. 

Or when you sit in a garden and can delight in beauty, happy to be alive -- that moment is God.

Our purpose here on this Earth is to obtain ever greater freedom.  Freedom means the defeat of fear, and values promulgated on such fear.  When you confront a fear, and you knock it down, and you obtain greater spiritual and psychological freedom -- that moment is also God. 

And because freedom is always growing, always expanding, always evolving, so too does our own conception of God grow and expand, and evolve in tandem as well.  

Spore: A God Game, now with Evolution!

This upcoming video game looks pretty fantastic, and it may be of interest to this community. You start out as a single-celled organism and evolve your way through time to the point where you can travel through space and colonize the galaxy. Perhaps a little more thought-provoking than Halo. Really, the point here is that you are IN CONTROL OF EVOLUTION. The species you create spread through the internet for other people to find as they travel around the Universe with their own species. Sounds pretty rad.

As always, Wikipedia has tons of information on the game: Spore (video game)

Why the HTE can work now

I'm just going to provide a link to an interesting article about social projects on the internet, because there's no sense in my summarizing it when these quotes do the job:

So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.
[...]
Just to pick one example, one I'm in love with, but it's tiny. A couple of weeks one of my students at ITP forwarded me a a project started by a professor in Brazil, in Fortaleza, named Vasco Furtado. It's a Wiki Map for crime in Brazil. If there's an assault, if there's a burglary, if there's a mugging, a robbery, a rape, a murder, you can go and put a push-pin on a Google Map, and you can characterize the assault, and you start to see a map of where these crimes are occurring.
[...]
Maybe this will succeed or maybe it will fail. The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don't pan out. But the ones that do are quite incredible, and I hope that this one succeeds, obviously. But even if it doesn't, it's illustrated the point already, which is that someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough of the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you couldn't have imagined existing even five years ago.

With the right tools on the internet, we can use some of those free-time television hours to come up with some really solid thoughts. Now we just need to get those tools in order and maybe we'll be one of the experiments that works...

The whole article is definitely worth reading:
Gin, Television and Social Surplus

Time

From our facebook group discussion, courtesy of Ruth:
So this summer I had a boring data monkey job and I spent a lot of time listening to podcasts about everything. Anyways, one of my favorites is wnyc radiolab, which is two guys who cover a whole bunch of topics that are super interesting. Some of the ones they've done are on the concept of time. They go around an interview legitimate scientists and put together their knowledge in a 1 hour show. It's actually pretty sweet.

Point is, one of their shows on time has an interview with Oliver Sacks who is this crazy British neurologist who writes popular books about case studies of patients who reveal something about the way the human brain works. In the episode on time, they talked to him about this story of two patients he had that perceived time totally differently from normal people. But the weird part is, not only do they think time is moving faster or slower, they actually act faster or slower based on that.

So there was this one guy who looked like he never really moved. If you left him alone for a long time you would come back and he would be frozen in a slightly different position. What Sacks did was tape him for a period of time and then watched it and sped it up. It turned out he was just like wiping his nose, but it took him all day! And then there was a girl who had the exact opposite problem. She talked so fast you couldn't understand her; she caught a ball with record-breaking fast reflexes. Everything in the world for her was just moving super slow. And this is all because some mechanism in the brain got messed up. Pretty cool.

Here's the link if you want to listed to the show. Oliver Sacks also has a book or article about this, but I can't find it again. http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2007/07/15

Options in the Future

At each moment in time, we are making decisions about what each of us individually is doing and each small decision made by each individual changes the options for the future by shaping the world as it exists. There are two fundamental possibilities here, I think: either, at each junction there are infinite possible decisions or there are a finite number of possible decisions - let me discuss the implications of these two possibilities.

Let's say that there are a finite number of possibilities. In this case, if there are options A, B, and C and you choose A, you can never again choose B or C or any of the other options stemming from these. Thus, you have narrowed the possibilities in the future to 1/3 of what they otherwise would have been. Over time then, each set of decisions would further narrow the possibilities and the ultimate implication of this would be that we would approach a single moment in time when there was only one option remaining - the apocalypse? If that event is pre-determined, does that mean we have no free will?

Otherwise, there are infinite options generated at each moment in time and as time passes you are not limiting future possibilities only creating new different sets of possibilities. One of my friends said she'd read something about how some physicists believe that different decisions can have long-term implications, creating parallel paths between people that re-intersect based on an earlier decision.

Let me explain what I mean by parallel paths. For example, Sarah Broudy and I met in Oxford summer camp junior year of high school and were placed two doors apart in the dorm there. We then saw each other admit weekend here at school and then were placed into the same freshman dorm, two doors apart. Our parents met as we were moving in, and we found out that her grandfather taught my father medicine and further our parents had attended the same college and the same classes in college and could reminisce about specific lectures. This theory would apparently suggest that all of these connections may link back to an earlier decision made by, say, her grandmother. That single decision made it more likely that each of these following events would occur. An interesting explanation for a set of pretty improbable events. I'd be interested in if others have heard of this theory and can elaborate or if you have other ideas for why connections like this may arise and what this might imply for our options in the future.

Dimensions

So I've stepped up how much I discuss things like this, and as a result I've had some really interesting suggestions from others which I'd like to share. This one I owe to Kick Kennedy, who owes her thought to "Flatland" - a short book.

In this book, they present a 2D world with a 2D person that lives in a square. Imagine a 3D sphere now passing through his world. That sphere would translate into the 2D world as a series of circles small to large to small.

So, if a 4D object were to pass through our 3D world, it would probably be distorted like that. Time certainly appears to be a good candidate, but I am very dubious that we will ever learn to travel through time because if anyone in the future figures this out, they probably already would have come back to today and we'd know. But just because humans can't travel through time, doesn't disqualify it from being the fourth dimension. I wonder what other possible dimensions exist?

Energy, separation, and love

The currency of the universe is energy.  Everything around us, everything in us, everything that takes shape in the totality of existence is nothing but energy.  Physics explains that matter is never created or destroyed, but just takes different shape.  The stars, the planets, life on Earth -- all is merely a different form of energy that has taken different form. 

From birth, humans eat and grow tall; their brains develop, and with that comes the ability to use their mind.  With the mind, we learn to direct our energy with thought, in order to get things done.  In fact, it is this ability to focus our energy that differentiates us from the rest of life on this planet.  Human beings are so talented that with their focus they can build pyramids that last for millenia, rockets that can escape the force of gravity, weapons that can obliterate life.  

Our minds have so much power.   With our minds, we give ourselves meaning, and purpose.  

When we experience trauma, or otherwise forget how to use the power of our mind, we feel helpless and distraught.  Many psychologists speak of "learned helplessness" as the basic form of depression.   Through therapy, they try and teach people how to re-use their minds and re-focus their energy so that they can experience joy in life.  

In modern times, we have arrogant ideas about what we know and do not know.   Many of us take the view that we know everything.   What we see with our eyes, hear with our ears, feel with our fingers -- this, for many people, is the grand totality of the universe.  We do this in spite of the fact that there is energy everywhere, that there is energy that we cannot see -- infrared and UV light, for example.  Cosmologists are at a total loss to explain "dark matter" in the universe, which by their estimates comprises 74% of the universe.  Yet for many people today, if they do not see it, then it doesn't exist.  

In other cultures and in other times, people realized that this universe was grander and more mysterious than conventional human perception.  They realized, as physics recognizes, that energy is neither created nor destroyed, but only changes shape.  They deduced that when a human dies, for example, that energy cannot be destroyed -- it must go somewhere, or transform into something else.  So these cultures developed the doctrine of reincarnation to explain what happens to this energy. 

They also realized that the way we focus our energy with our mind has consequences.   If we focus our energies in a certain direction, it will reap certain fruit.  They called this the doctrine of karma, related to the word karna -- "to do".   They understood, as physics teaches, that any action must be met with an equal and opposite reaction.  What we are doing at this very moment is a reflection of our past actions, and will seed what we will reap tomorrow.  Our lives are not governed by an outside capricious force -- rather, our lives respond to our own actions, perspectives and emotions.  For all these things comprise energy, and the activation of this energy must produce a reaction.   This is the way of things.

Many of us may recognize these patterns, even in the form of anecdote.  The insecure boy who likes the girl will, because of his insecurity, engage in actions that will turn her off; the woman who is afraid of losing something will, because of her fear, engage in actions that will result in the feared loss taking place.  The energy we bring to an activity has already determined the outcome.  As the Art of War states, the general who knows neither himself, nor the enemy, has already lost the battle before the first sword is drawn.  

So these first explorers of the universe decided that humans can determine their own futures through their direction of energy (karma); and they decided that the universe itself is composed of energy.  When they combined these two thoughts together, they deduced that every human possesses the ability to see the entirety of the universe itself, and can become one with the universe.  They called this state nirvana or moksha, and they developed meditation techniques in order to reach this state.  They discovered that if they could train the energy of their minds to vibrate at the wavelength of the Universal wavelength, then the energy of their own individual mind would resonate at the Universal resonance.  The two would become one; the individual drop of water would reconnect with the vast ocean of existence.

Many great teachers, knowing the effects of energy in reaching union with the cosmos, realized, as well, that the energy of love is a powerful vehicle in connecting with a universal consciousness.   It is a teaching that we laugh at today, because we do not (at least conventionally) "see" the workings of love.  But we do this in our ignorance.  

One of the teachers of this philosophy was an Indian prince who is known by his title of the Buddha.  In addition to teaching the effects of karma, he emphasized that within every human is the radically transformative energy of compassion.  With compassion, one can end the illusion of separation that exists between various energies and reach a state of union with all of existence.  

Somewhere else, in a different time and culture, a radical preacher was teaching the same thing.  The person known as Jesus, who is deified by Christianity, taught that the energy of love went straight to the Kingdom of Heaven.   When asked what was the greatest commandment to follow, he responded, "Love the Lord your God [e.g., all of existence] with all your soul and with all your mind.  That is the first and greatest commandment.  And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself." 

Why is love such a powerful energy?  Because it breaks down barriers; it removes the fallacy of separation.  Just as we cannot perceive UV or infrared light, we cannot perceive the effects of our emotional energies.  But emotions are powerful, and like all energy, our emotions dictate our future.  When a person begins to "see his neighbor as himself," he begins to realize that the distinction between them is really quite meaningless.  This is the first step to deep wisdom.  

If a person seeks greater understanding of his or her place on this planet, they cannot do it out of fear, or anger, or hatred.  They must realize that the separation of energies that we perceive is really an illusion; that all is one; that the differences that seem to exist are just a product of our limited perceptions.   

It is this separation that prevents humans today from unlocking their true potential.  We all make mistakes; we have all hurt others, or harbored anger, or guilt, or envy, or shame; and we will all make mistakes in the future as well.  If we commit a wrong, it is in our nature to lock it up away in a dark place in our mind and seek to separate it away from ourselves.  There are few honest people today who will look within and see their insecurities, their fears, their flaws, the darkness of their very being; in Jungian terms, they have repressed their shadows, and thus never have access to their full mental energies.

Yet what great souls have strived to teach in different eras and in different languages is that we can use love to end this separation within ourselves and create better futures.  A person who has made a mistake must forgive himself first; and when he has done that, others will naturally forgive him because he gives off an energy of forgiveness, kindness, and healing.  And he, as well, will forgive others.  A person who lives in fear must tame his fear first, or else he will encounter in his life nothing but the effects of this fear.  And his courage, produced from his self-love, will resonate with others and inspire.  

And this is done by loving oneself with every fiber of one's being, of accepting one's faults and imperfections, embracing the dark shadow -- coming to terms with our own beautiful flaws and cherishing them as divine gifts. 

When we start to love ourselves, when we have ended the separation that we all have within us -- then, and only then, do we realize the power of the cosmos and the power we have to commune with it, to bend it to our will, to create our own realities.  

400 years ago, Western philosophers realized this concept, but they called it something else -- they called it liberty.  They argued that all people are endowed by Creation with certain rights that are inherent to the definition of humanity -- that we are gifted with free will, and deserve the right to pave our own road to happiness and fulfillment.  

It is no surprise that the English word "freedom" traces its roots to the Indo-European word for love.  Because the two are one and the same.  The energy of freedom -- spiritual, political, economic -- is activated at the same resonance as the energy of love.  The ancients realized this, and they taught that these energies allowed union with all.  

Asking the nature of consciousness -- "What is this universe, and what is my place in it?" -- is more than just a personal question.  It is a spiritual challenge.  Think of all the energy that exists in this universe since its creation, and consider the fact that at heart, there is no difference between the energy vibrating in our atoms and elsewhere in the universe.  We think and assume there is a difference -- and that, in itself, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  

If we are up to the challenge of really uncovering what it is that separates our minds from the universal essence, we will ultimately find ourselves on a road of discovery that is virtually endless.  Did not Prometheus give us the divine fire for us to use at our disposal?   Are we not made in the same image as the God of creation, and thus by very definition, bestowed with those same powers and authority?  

Thus, the question, "What is the nature of consciousness?" is very much related to the question, "What is the nature of my own mind?"  In fact, it is the same inquiry.  The energy of the universe is at the disposal of every free human.  This is a profound fact that few people realize.  Yet it is the key to liberation in every sense of the word.

Drawing on Buddhism

Buddhism has always appealed to me because it's such a flexible and varied religion and also because rather than starting with a story about creation it skips this step and shoots straight for understanding the world as it is.

Buddhists believe that you accumulate both positive and negative karma in your life and that as you cycle through reincarnation, you pay off the good karma by being born into fortunate circumstances, or visa versa. They set up a hierarchy of being on which humans rank just below gods - which they believe we cycle through. The hierarchy doesn't make much sense to me because I think there's a high likelihood that there is other life out there, potentially at a much higher karma level than we are. The whole idea of reincarnation is a bit hard for me to accept, but let's set that aside for a minute and look at what makes sense about their model.

So on the entropy topic, we've been discussing whether the world is tending toward order or not. Perhaps this is too black and white of a model; the Buddhist theory takes the natural system swings into account by placing ones self in eternal disequilibrium, stuck in the system of swinging from good lives to bad ones. I think there's something to be said for that kind of an explanation.

They suggest that the number of beings in the universe is constant and that we are reincarnated from that pool. But if the big bang is true - there was no life at that point, which causes a bit of a problem. And if life takes a while to develop, as it did on earth, then it seems like life would not be constant at all. Perhaps one could theorize that the universe of beings only exists in the time after the big bang and potentially before the next one (astronomers thing the universe will collapse back on itself, right?) ?

Also in Buddhist theory is the distinction between ones mind an the world around it, with ones mind acting as a light to cast meaning on the world around. Buddhists seek to separate the consciousness from the world during meditation. Ultimately, through this means, Buddhists seek to free themselves from the karma cycle through such techniques, achieving "enlightenment" in which they experience neither extreme pleasure nor extreme anger/sadness. If anyone has experimented heavily with meditation, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this and on where one's emotional life as an enlightened being might fall on the scale of normal human emotions. For me, it's a bit tough to want to seek that end because I like the lows and highs of life - a lot of art extols this and I think there's a lot to be said for it.

This video is actually saying something

And it is relevant to what we've been talking about. Really.

While our purpose here is to try to make progress on big questions by sharing ideas and just basically thinking really hard, let's never forget that regular scientists are also looking at some pretty big stuff (and of course thinking hard while measuring it). Here's a brief excerpt from a fairly non-technical article on the entropy of the universe:

It is amusing to speculate about what will happen to the Second Law of Thermodynamics if the universe is closed, so that at some point the expansion stops and reverses.

Even more wild is the idea that if the expansion of the universe determines the direction of time's arrow, then if the universe starts to contract the direction of time will also reverse.

For our purposes, it is not only amusing to speculate about this possibility but absolutely necessary. This is a good introduction to the subject and discusses other interesting topics such as the negentropy of information in our minds, so go read the whole discussion here: Black Hole Thermodynamics

Here David Harrison proposes an interesting new concept in physics, and if you've got a new idea that could explain how our minds are relating to the physical universe, get in touch and share it with us. Physicists, please feel free to share any responses you know of that have been floating around in your community regarding the idea in the linked article.

Humans and Sustainability

Julian clarified the idea of how order (negative entropy, or negatopy) is proliferated on this planet by suggesting that this comes from the entropy of the sun – this is an idea I’ve seen elsewhere that I think is quite useful. Given this framework, we would have a set amount of order we can derive on planet Earth from the sun.

Since I study the earth sciences and many of you have touched on sustainability , let  me bring in some of my thoughts from that discipline. Luckily for us, the earth takes our waste and converts it to to resources for us, but humans are now taking resources and converting them to waste faster than the earth can regenerate. In one model, as humans we are demanding an average of 5.5 acres but have only 4.5 acres per person (globalfootprintnetwork.com).  Invasive species are characterized by decreasing the biodiversity of an ecosystem - humans are doing just that in nearly every ecosystem on earth. Most biologists now agree that we are headed for a mass extinction - that other species are being driven off our planet en mass. Certainly this is because we have limited resources and a growing population, but is it also driven by a limit on how many species can exist given the negatropy we are given by the sun? Lack of resources could certainly lead to world works like we've never seen and a post-industrial society, as Jesse suggests. But if we are able to collaborate and come up with a solution, the ultimate sustainable society would be extremely organized with fantastic public transportation, compact living situations, etc. Perhaps human order in society would further decrease the negatropy available on earth for other species?

One more thought: how are we directing our own evolution? Globalization means that we are not separating out populations and allowing for speciation ; doctors are actually creating population problems by increasing life expectancy and are also proliferating disease rather than allowing Darwinism to eliminate it; genetic engineering creates possibilities for the future. This seems to imply that we are mainly disrupting the natural emergent systems of evolution, perhaps destroying some of the order that would help us progress beyond homo sapiens. 

More on entropy, evolution and energy

Evolution is pretty neat. Garnet has gotten me thinking about it, and my discussion here is similar to hers but takes a slightly different direction.

* * *

Garnet’s professor points out that entropy is not strictly increasing here on Earth. Humans are a highly organized bunch of matter. We are so organized that we go around organizing all sorts of things besides our own bodies. Most of the history of our species has been the story of increasing ability to organize: societies, economies, technologies.

One of the biggest problems we’re facing right now is how to organize energy into more useful forms. This is contrary to its entropic tendency. We’ve spent about 150 years taking somewhat organized bits of energy contained in fossil fuels and converting them to less useful forms, namely heat to run turbines. But now that this is becoming a problem, we are spending more time focusing on how to take fairly disorganized energy like heat from the center of the Earth or light from the Sun and turn it into more useful electricity. Because Earth isn’t a closed system, the letter of the second law of thermodynamics is still upheld when we increase order by using the Sun’s energy (by generating electricity or simply by eating food that ultimately came from the Sun), but it is hard to say that we follow the law in its spirit.

The interesting problem I see here is that we humans demand organization, but the odds are stacked against us. We’ve done pretty well organizing ourselves so far, so can we buck the cosmological trend? The universe may try to spread its energy as far and wide as possible, but our survival depends on making sure we can collect enough of it in one place in a useful form. Since we have the Sun, that gives us a couple billion years, but it’s never too soon to start thinking.

Is there a force driving us to this highly organized model, as Garnet suggests there might be? Humans have carved out a niche as intelligent creatures who can constantly find new advantages, so it seems evolution has created order in its drive for a more effective animal. The "force" driving this order could just be an inherent property of life. It's entirely possible that some "force" created life that works this way, but it's probably not the best model this higher power could have created; life and evolution happen without much regard for the constraints we will eventually face, for the order we create comes at the price of the disorder we create in our environment. Now if God (for example) is pushing us towards the evolutionary outcome, He had better have a good idea that we will be able to sustain it, because it will be pretty poor planning if innovation ends up failing us and we can’t keep organizing. Intelligent designers, here’s your chance to discuss how this is all going to work out in the end.

Whatever the root cause, our organized intelligence seems to be one factor that allows us to make this organization happen. We are confronted with problems of disorganization and can clearly recognize that we need to act to reverse them. In fact, we do it without thinking; creating technology and procreating—two big ways we spread our style of organization—are pretty natural things for humans to do. Because we seem to be smart enough to know that we should reverse entropy, perhaps we have reached a tipping point where order begets further order.

Or perhaps it applies to all plants and animals: while working at NASA, James Lovelock proposed that the ability to reduce entropy is a characteristic of life in general. Maybe we're not as special as we want to think, and we just happen to be good at what we do through random chance making it that way. Something had to get us as far as any tipping point we may have hit.

I’m too new to this topic to draw any conclusions, and I’ve touched on several different topics anyway. If you have had thoughts, have read someone else’s, or have met someone who’d like to talk about it, let us know. Share a link or write something. This is why we have the internet.

* * *

On a different note, here is an excellent example of the sort of organization we can create and what it may allow us to do:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080305.html
I include this mainly because it’s cool and might spark your imagination. Did you know the space station was this established? We can do this now.

On Entropy

In lecture last quarter my professor mildly remarked that the second law of thermodynamics did not always apply. The second law of thermodynamics states that “the entropy of an isolated system never decreases; the entropy either increases, until the system reaches equilibrium, or, if the system began in equilibrium, stays the same.” Entropy is the concept that all things tend toward disorder – a cup breaking, ice melting, perfume smelled from a distance, the choas of your room on a bad day. Imagine you have two bags of marbles – one black and one white. If you cast both bags onto a table, the two colors will not remain separate but will tend toward disorder, scattering randomly. Shake the table a bit and the system starts toward equilibrium, with the marbles scattered relatively uniformly.

And yet, my professor pointed out a key exception: from a chemical soup arose humans – highly complex beings. Through the mechanism of evolution, random, chance events have actually (on our planet, at least) tended towards order. This draws on the concept of “emergent systems,” the idea that highly complex structures can arise from the combination of simply programmed agents. This can apply to the way that a school of fish swim, the way ant colonies operate, or the way neurons fire in your brain.

In addition, it seems doubtful that we are progressing toward equilibrium on the planet. Though we began with a fairly homogenous system of molten, we are now driven by disequilibrium – specifically, by the disequilibrium the sun creates when it warms our equators more than our poles. By this logic, we are tending away from equilibrium and toward some type of order.

I grew up mostly atheist and though the harshness of death and the vastness of the universe often frightened me, I now find myself perhaps more disturbed by the possibility of a meaning beyond our comprehension. The nice thing about entropy and atheism is that if everything is tending toward disorder, you don’t need anyone or anything driving the system. But if we are instead tending toward order, this implies the need for a driving force. At least in human experience, order arises from effort; governments form after many people get together and organize and write documents and choose leaders. This type of human induced order appears to require effort, but also arises from a fundamental attribute of humans – that humans like order and strive toward it. If then, that idea holds in the greater context of the universe, something (a God or force of some type?) is exerting effort toward our planet that is driving the order. If it is instead not the case that order demands effort, then for some unknown unexplained reason, order arises naturally. In either case, order of some type is imposed upon us and yet we do not understand what type of order this is or why it exists.