Does the universe need intelligence to order it?

[godnotgod]

you must own a lettuce farm.

There is no lettuce farm, nor anyone who owns one.

 

[shawn001]

Q: What does a Zen monk say to
a hot dog stand vendor?
A: Make me one with everything.
Q: What does the vendor say when the monk
asks for change for his twenty-dollar bill?
A: Change comes from within.

 

[shawn001]

Yes, but the eternal Tao itself is not, which is what I was referring to. Lao tze's 'Tao te Ching' is also not a philosophy. Philosophy is an intellectual process. The Tao itself and its practice and realization are non-intellectual, just as Zen is not. IOW, these are mystical practices, direct, wordless experiences with nature.

"In neuroscience, the default mode network (DMN) is a network of brain regions that are active when the individual is not focused on the outside world and the brain is at wakeful rest. "

 

[godnotgod]

I had that kind of as a pun on your song and dance on the questions and on the cosmic song and dance.

 

[Rick O'Shez]

Well, duh, eh?

I thought a bit of light relief might be in order....

 

[Rick O'Shez]

I still haven't seen anything remotely convincing in this thread to support the OP, just a lot of speculation, most of which is pretty incomprehensible.

 

[Thief]

There is no lettuce farm, nor anyone who owns one.

Let me know when you return to reality.

 

[Thief]

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.

Hey Robert!....di you get a response that you prefer?......ever?

 

[Rick O'Shez]

Let me know when you return to reality

 

[Thief]

I've played that coin more than once......hehehehehehe

and did you take the red pill?..... or the blue one?

 

[Rick O'Shez]

and did you take the red pill?..... or the blue one?

There is no pill...

 

[Thief]

There is no spoon!

But there is this discussion and the people that participate.

Denial is futile....you will be assimilated!

 

[Rick O'Shez]

Denial is futile....you will be assimilated!

Yes, it certainly feels that way.

 

[godnotgod]

Let me know when you return to reality.

No one can return to reality; everyone is always in reality, but some simply do not realize it, so they invent a God and a Heaven in some afterlife, terrified to death that they will spend eternity screaming their bloody heads off in some long forgotten grave, while an equally imagined Devil dances gleefully on top of their coffin, laughing his fool head off. Still others think they can realize reality by banging their heads against brick walls until bloody. These types also think they must use force against their children to make them 'understand', while they themselves have no understanding. This use of authoritarian force has been handed down through the generations as sacred tradition, because 'our parents and those who went before them used it, so it must be OK' It's called things like: 'putting the fear of God in 'ya 'ta make 'ya unnerstand, see?', and 'this is gonna hurt me more than it does you', and the like. My mother's folkways taught us that, if we weren't good, a big bird called 'El Pajaro Cu' would sweep down out of the sky and snatch us up and carry us off, never to be seen again.

 

[YmirGF]

No one can return to reality; everyone is always in reality, but some simply do not realize it, so they invent a God and a Heaven in some afterlife, terrified to death that they will spend eternity screaming their bloody heads off in some long forgotten grave, while an equally imagined Devil dances gleefully on top of their coffin, laughing his fool head off. Still others think they can realize reality by banging their heads against brick walls until bloody. These types also think they must use force against their children to make them 'understand', while they themselves have no understanding. This use of authoritarian force has been handed down through the generations as sacred tradition, because 'our parents and those who went before them used it, so it must be OK' It's called things like: 'putting the fear of God in 'ya 'ta make 'ya unnerstand, see?', and 'this is gonna hurt me more than it does you', and the like. My mother's folkways taught us that, if we weren't good, a big bird called 'El Pajaro Cu' would sweep down out of the sky and snatch us up and carry us off, never to be seen again.

This certainly goes a long way in clarifying what may have precipitated your contempt for your fellow human animals. Keep up the good work. Freud certainly would have had a field day with this nugget.

 

[godnotgod]

This certainly goes a long way in clarifying what may have precipitated your contempt for your fellow human animals. Keep up the good work. Freud certainly would have had a field day with this nugget.

Freud had a few screws missing.

Why is it that you read my pointing out the fact of human suffering and its causes as contempt? It is true, however, that I don't put much faith in most of the empty pursuits of the world, and once it is discovered to be so by those seeking happiness in the three lower centers of consciousness, namely: Security, Power, and Sensation, then they too begin to take steps to change their goals in favor of something more satisfying. I would venture to guess that most of the people on this forum are here for that very reason, because they have found something not quite right with the world. The problem many have in doing so, however, is to continue to apply their old socially conditioned mentality to the new path. The old concepts and habits that were previously found wanting cannot bring the happiness they seek. Hence, the finger pointing to the moon.

In dealing with Thief, of course, I am just having some fun with him and admittedly exaggerating. I appreciate his dogged determination, if not his POV.

 

[Rick O'Shez]

I think that people who believe in the idea of an intelligent or conscious universe are just projecting. Misguided anthropomorphism, nothing more.

In any case I think it's often more instructive to look within than to look without.

 

[godnotgod]

 

[Robert.Evans]

heh...heh...so 'evolution' is a conscious entity, eh? You talk about 'evolution' as if it is some kind of conscious, active agent. Evolution is a process. It is consciousness that is the directing force behind the process of evolution.

Again, it is consciousness that relegated certain autonomic activities to the brain so it wouldn't need to have them up front all the time, interfering with immediate reality. This is intelligence at work, but as psychoslice pointed out, this kind of intelligence is not the intellect

Goswami has a book out a about consciousness being behind evolution...have you read it? I haven't, but I was mighty impressed he have written such. Makes sense to me just as an idea without going into the detail.

 

[Robert.Evans]

Why bother, GnG? I'm not going to waste more time than is necessary that would lend a smidgeon of support to your abject disdain of the plight of your fellow human animals. Like with everything else you twist and warp things to make them fit into the neurosis of your understanding. Then again, that is somewhat expected. You don't actually have much to offer your fellow human animals.

Since when has enlightenment been called neurosis?