Does the universe need intelligence to order it?

[shawn001]

Hello Viole,#
The example you give that randomness can in tandem with other mechanisms or processes is just an acceptance of something physical creating some result. My point is, why should it even do that? Why should things that are random assemble themselves in such a way? It appears to be an acceptance of the natural being able to do all things. But can it?
And natural selection has to work on random mutations to start with, which luckily bring up the kind of mutations that we need to exist. The argument that if they did not, we would not, is not much of a counter-argument.

But if the universe is a closed system completely automanous, then it would not need to be fully random, rather following something already existing. That would explain why mutations mutate enough beneficial ones for us to exist in the first place.

Yes. Chaos is chaos, and stays that way. For it to form any patterns (which it does) there must be something in the universe that makes it order, as all other things seem to do, even the assebling of atoms in the early universe.

they are both valid arguments... whether they can be used at the same time matters not. Anyway, i answered the above as an answer, not because it would exist. Nothing exists without God. What you see is the divine expressed in physical terms.... - keeping it short.

I don't. I think God is evolving consciousness and this is the physical side of it. But it shows us something in this realm that we need intelligence to order it.

Entropy is a good example. Why should all things seem to move to a worse state if left (such as coffe going cold) and yet the universe evolve into something which appears to be quite the opposite. It orders.

Why is it necessary to create mess somewhere else?
As God, as we think of him, is evolving consciousness, the ''mess'' started as soon as we departed from the Source. After that, all things went inevitably down hill. That is why we have gravity... it is how it is seen in physical terms.

Please explain the ''mess'' point at the end.

"Entropy is a good example. Why should all things seem to move to a worse state if left (such as coffe going cold) and yet the universe evolve into something which appears to be quite the opposite. It orders."

This is wrong. The universe is just like the coffee getting colder.

Because its a Law, Second Law of Thermodynamics

"Why is it necessary to create mess somewhere else?"

That's the other part of the law.

"
The End of Everything
by FRASER CAIN on JULY 25, 2007

The End of Everything

In cosmology right now its looking like the universe will keep expanding until it cools down to absolute zero.

"yet the universe evolve into something which appears to be quite the opposite. It orders."

It may kind of look that way to us, but that's now how it works. Even the sun will go. The universe is hostile to us, even though we came from star dust. Nucleosynthesis.

The most ordered was the singularity, if that is what caused the bang and its gone to disorder ever since. That would have been the low entropy and and we are headed into high entropy. Either way, singularity or not.

 

[Rick O'Shez]

This is wrong. The universe is just like the coffee getting colder.

Well said. I'm afraid that you will find an abundance of new-age pseudo-science in this thread.

There is so much misrepresentation going on you almost don't know where to start.

 

[shawn001]

This is a question that Physicist G. Schroeder asks:

Q: Very occasionally monkeys hammering away at typewriters will type out one of Shakespeare's sonnets.

A: Not true, not in this universe. But it is a popular assumption that the monkeys can do it, a wrong assumption that randomness can produce meaningful stable complexity. But let's look at the numbers to see why the monkeys will always fail. I'll take the only sonnet I know, sonnet number 18, “Shall I compare thee to a summer's day …” All sonnets are 14 lines, all about the same length. This sonnet has approximately 488 letters (neglect spaces). With a typewriter or keyboard having 26 letters, the number of possible combinations is 26 to the exponential power of 488 or approximately ten to the power of 690. That is a one with 690 zeros after it. Convert the entire 10 to the 56 grams of the universe (forget working with the monkeys) into computer chips each weighing a billionth of a gram and have each chip type out a billion sonnet trials a second (or 488 billion operations per second) since the beginning of time, ten to the 18th seconds ago. The number of trials will be approximately ten to power of 92, a huge number but minuscule when compared with the 10 to power 690 possible combinations of the letters. We are off by a factor of ten to power of 600. The laws of probability confirm that the universe would have reached its heat death before getting one sonnet. We will never get a sonnet by random trials, and the most basic molecules of life are far more complex than the most intricate sonnet. As reported in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, when the world’s most influential atheist philosopher, Antony Flew, read this analysis of complexity and several analyses related to the complexity of life brought in my third book, The Hidden Face of God, and Roy Varghese’s excellent book, The Wonder of the World, he abandoned his errant belief in a Godless world and publically apologized for leading so many persons astray for the decades that his atheistic thoughts held sway. (Gerald Schroeder Home Page
~~~~~~~

In my own humble way, I could have said that monkeys would not have done that, no matter how much time they had. Time was at one time seen as the ''hero''. But monkeys are monkeys!

Yet time does not always mean there will be sufficient change in order to facilitate the change needed in the first place. Why do we think it does?

So, my question is this: If that is so unlikely for monkeys to do... then, if the multiverse exists, how can we even be sure that they would all be different universes, thus giving us sufficiently correct odds that our universe could develop the way it did. I don't see we have licence to expect such a positive result.

Now there are those who say that this universe might be the proverbial bouncing ball, forever coming into existence and then dying only to be reborn. If so, why should we think that would be any better with the odds?

In other words, if it is so difficult to do, how is time going to help?

A dice with six sides is one thing.... eventually we know that the six will come up. But what of the dice with a trillion sides. Is a six going to come up then?
It is hard to say it ever would, there are just too many chances of it falling onto another number. It might never do! Are we mistakenly thinking it would have to do, just because of an allegiance to some kind of worldly thinking?

And why does probability act the way it does anyway? What drives that?

It appears without intelligence involved in creation, we have no right to expect anything positively happening at all.

Well first he is connecting science and god. His choice.

Second, take a computer screen (using dot matrix) run it for 13.7 billion years and will it create a picture? How about longer.


Life in the universe
Life in the Universe - Stephen Hawking

Explains some of what your talking about here.

This is why there are cosmologist, astronomers and others that study the universe.

You could argue on the design itself of humans, they could have been better designed.

But you also have another issue called the anthropic principle.

 

[Rick O'Shez]

It reminds me of a Homeopathic "doctor" on the radio the other day giving all sorts of recommendations to people, even though there is virtually no scientific basis for her recommendations. The people who called in didn't seem to care. It was genuinely breathtaking.

Studies strongly suggest that homeopathy works on the placebo effect. Here in the UK you might get 5 or 10 minutes with a busy general practitioner in a surgery, whereas a homeopathist will give you up to an hour and take a real interest in you - I think that's why it's effective. The active ingredient in the remedies is diluted down to a vanishingly small degree, as one British comedian quipped: "It's just f*cking water!"

 

[MonkeyFire]

No it comes as such. Really would depend on ones idea of the universe and where mind fits in. Our minds come pre arranged, like the cosmos we can only understand what God gave us. Consciousness can authoritate, and replicate the universe for our people and our own desire. Knowledge is sweetness, how and why is meat and potatas.

 

[Rick O'Shez]

Consciousness can authoritate, and replicate the universe for our people and our own desire.

Could you unpack that sentence a bit? Sorry but I have no idea what it actually means.

 

[MonkeyFire]

Could you unpack that sentence a bit? Sorry but I have no idea what it actually means.

Consciousness understands the universe for its mind and self.

 

[godnotgod]

Hehe, so I suppose the title at the top of the page "The Zen way of Counseling" is just misleading. Oddly, I didn't see any quotations used, but rather, I did see the authors esteemed interpretation of what Buddha was supposed to have said.

The author is a psychiatrist and Zen meditator. He marries the two practices in the counseling of his patients. I don't know of the specific passages he is referring to, but I have no reason to doubt they are true. The author would have no ulterior motive in telling a lie.

If you check out enough of my posts you will see it plain as day, my friend. I think my favorite was when I got a PM from the brother of a fellow who was suffering from schizophrenia and having a meltdown on RF. I think I still have the PM around somewhere offline. It was really very thankful for all my help in getting his brother the help he so desperately needed. Et tu?

I, too, have aided many, but I never advertise the fact. Just because you make it known does not mean that I have no compassion. You don't know anything about me. I operate on a very valuable lesson a Japanese girlfriend of mine once said: 'I do things for people all the time, but never let them know it'.

 

[godnotgod]

Indeed. It reminds me of a Homeopathic "doctor" on the radio the other day giving all sorts of recommendations to people, even though there is virtually no scientific basis for her recommendations. The people who called in didn't seem to care. It was genuinely breathtaking.

I stopped getting the flu every year when I began taking homeopathic flu medication. My chemist friend is always telling me about homeopathic and herbal remedies that work for her, where standardized medications have not only not worked, but have caused side effects. In some cases, her successful self medication has impressed her medical practitioners so much that they are asking her for advice. Modern medicine has just begun to learn that centuries old alternatives, such as acupuncture, can be more effective in addressing many ills. Many of the drugs from western science and technology have proven detrimental and even deadly, as is evinced by the current outcroppings of lawyer ads seen on tv about drugs and procedures gone wrong. And it's all because we have lost touch with nature, placing our faith in bright shiny new but sometimes deadly techno-products. Oooooooh! science-schmience.

 

[godnotgod]

. Consciousness can authoritate, and replicate the universe for our people and our own desire. Knowledge is sweetness, how and why is meat and potatas.

Man, are those statements ever distilled! I don't think most understand what you're really saying here. But bravo for being one of the very few who has the cart properly placed behind the horse. In just a few words, you've cut right to the heart of the matter.

Really great post!

 

[godnotgod]

The Universe, Order, and Intelligence from the Hindu perspective:

"....the central theme of Hindu mythology-the theme of Brahman, the supreme Self, [is]manifesting itself cyclically as all these worlds. Furthermore, in the Hindu myth the stages through which the maya is developed correspond to the sort of progression that would be followed by the person who could dream whatever he wished. The cycle of time during which the worlds are manifested is, as we saw, the kalpa, lasting 4,320,000 years. The kalpa is divided into four yugas, named after the throws in the Indian game of dice: krita (the perfect throw of 4), treta (the throw of 3), dvapara (the throw of 2), and kali (the worst throw, of 1).

The first epoch is thus the krita yuga, lasting 1,728,000 years, during which the maya-dream is a paradise of shadowless glory. The second epoch is the treta yuga, lasting 1,296,000 years, when, although the paradise remains, there emerge certain uncontrolled factors, surprises that are thus far pleasant, but contain the apprehension of something unwanted. The third epoch is the dvapara yuga, lasting 864,000 years, during which the negative principle of disorder attains equality with the principle of order. And in the fourth epoch, kali yuga, lasting 432,000 years, the principle of disorder is triumphant. At the end of this epoch the forces of destruction grow and grow in fury, until, at the very end, the universes are dissolved in fire. Whereupon the Brahman awakens from the maya-diesim, and remains in luminous peace through another 4,320,000 years before beginning the cycle again.

Note, however, that the principle of disorder can claim only 1,296,000 years of the whole kalpa: a third of the treta yuga, a half of the dvapara yuga, and the whole of the kali yuga, amounting in all to one third of the kalpa. This is a chronological symbolism for the principle that the continuance of the game depends upon the subordination of disorder to order, so that the former may always be in the situation of being overcome by the latter, despite the dramatic moment in which it appears to have the victory, at the end of the kali yuga. (According to Heinrich Zimmer, the kali yuga began on Friday, February 18, 3102 B.C., which means that there are 426,935 more years of it to come! But be consoled-for as the yugas draw to their close, time passes faster and faster.)"

excerpted from an essay entitled: 'Is It Serious?', by Alan Watts. The rest of the essay can be found here: recommended reading.

Is It Serious? by Alan Watts

 

[Rick O'Shez]

The author would have no ulterior motive in telling a lie.

Apart from self-promotion and selling books, of course. In any case we are looking at one individual's interpretation, and it is a very idiosyncratic one

 

[Rick O'Shez]

The Universe, Order, and Intelligence from the Hindu perspective:

Yes, this is predictable. Your attempts to validate your "cosmic consciousness" theory with Buddhism and quantum mechanics have now been thoroughly discredited, so now you are going down another track.
As I observed earlier in the thread your theory does in fact sound more like Hinduism, so you may get some mileage out of it.

Perhaps you should become a Hindu.

 

[Rick O'Shez]

Modern medicine has just begun to learn that centuries old alternatives, such as acupuncture, can be more effective in addressing many ills.

I've had acupuncture and it was totally ineffective. The only person I met who was convinced about a benefit from acupuncture was the acupuncturist himself. But then he would say that.

 

[Rick O'Shez]

'I do things for people all the time, but never let them know it'.

I'm afraid that sounds horribly patronising coming from you. All you have done here is preached and thrown personal abuse at people who dare to disagree with your peculiar ideas.

 

[Rick O'Shez]

Consciousness understands the universe for its mind and self.

Sorry but I'm still struggling, it's far too cryptic to be intelligible. We're on a discussion forum here so it's helpful if you can explain things in a way that the rest of us might be able to understand.

So in what sense do you mean that consciousness understands the universe? What does consciousness understand about the universe?

 

[Midnight Rain]

OMG! First, you tell me it is not matter, and then you tell me it is still matter! Come on now. Can't you see just how erroneous your logic is? But anyway, thanks for making my case. I'm done with this part of the discussion. Ciao.

I've never stated that it wasn't matter. But the concept that we had of "matter" many years ago was simply wrong. Just as we thought the earth was flat we now know its round. It doesn't mean that the Earth is just an illusion. It just had the illusion of being "flat".

 

[Midnight Rain]

As a human animal who lives in the wilderness, FAR from city lights, I can testify that on a moonless night, I would hardly describe starlight as being illuminating. It's farking dark out here.

As another human who lives in the wilderness miles away from streetlamps and lights I can concur.

 

[Rick O'Shez]

As another human who lives in the wilderness miles away from streetlamps and lights I can concur.

I sometimes wish I did too! I've developed an interest in astronomy and now have a telescope, but there is quite a lot of light pollution where I live which does tend to limit things. It is fascinating though.

 

[Thief]

I sometimes wish I did too! I've developed an interest in astronomy and now have a telescope, but there is quite a lot of light pollution where I live which does tend to limit things. It is fascinating though.

Check the Big Dipper ....see if you can spot the 'double star' in the handle.