zen_tom, you have a gift of taking concepts that are difficult for me to comprehend and putting them into words that make sense to me.
Quote:
Observations have shown that systems can be described in terms of a 'phase-space' where each parameter of the system is laid out as a dimensional axis, and the values of each parameter are used to plot a point in the multi-dimensional phase-space.
When systems are plotted like this, they can easily be described as falling into 3 main classes.
1) Systems that rapidly expand out from their initial parameters - explosions, chain-reactions etc
2) Systems that converge onto a single stable point, or attractor - water flowing down a hill, or a marble at the bottom of a bowl, a spring-wound clock that is allowed to run without re-winding the mechanism.
3) Systems that fall into a stable pattern of motion, normally around one or more attractors
Of the systems that fall into type 3 there are two subtypes
a) Ones that show stable, periodic patterns of behavior
b) Ones that show chaotic yet stable, a periodic patterns of behavior
|
If as I have read elsewhere speculation that there was a big bang and the universe will expand then contract back into a singularity, then perhaps it is a type 2 system with a lot of type 3b systems operating within it. Like one huge strange attractor. Or maybe we are out of control and will expand forever (whatever forever means). This type of thinking begins to drive me crazy when I start to speculate what was here before the big bang and the possibility of multiple universes. One can get into an infinite regress.
Quote:
|
I can see the same process being responsible for everything we see around us. Nature seems to create and develop itself. That appears to be what nature does. One of the more recent developments is what we call intelligence. Whether it resides in the bacterium that swims up a chemical gradient towards food, or a computer programmer laying out a set of abstract structures and parameters for a machine to work within - it is matter behaving in complex ways, temporarily (or not) flouting the second law of thermodynamics.
|
Do you think that there is a point between the bacterium's intelligence and the human's where self awareness and/or conciousness evolves? Or are these terms just a degree of intelligence and meaningless as far as this discussion goes?
Quote:
|
What if matter evolved from some unbalance in the fundamental fabric of the universe? It would mean that everything we know might spring from this same process of self-complication. It would be pleasing to my mind anyway to think that there is some single, universal process or law that is responsible for life, the universe and everything. All that is required for it to be possible is for there to be some initial imbalance that allowed for a single 3b type system - that imbalance could be tiny, almost infinitesimal - and from there onwards, everything is not only possible, it becomes inevitable.
|
I also find this concept pleasing. However once again I find myself getting into an infinite regress when speculating what was here before the initial imbalance and what was here before that and so on.. There seems to be something fundamental about the nature of our existence that I do not have the ability to comprehend. The terms finite and infinite for instance.