this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2023
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This one's easy, it's a succession of random events without purpose and it's random luck that made it so we developed enough intelligence to be here to talk about it today.
Not all things need a nature or purpose.
The universe is, and we are.
Yep, pretty much! If randomness had made things happen another way we could just be another branch of primates without technology and the Earth at current age could be going on like it did for millions of years and maybe life with technology would only develop in 500m years and it would be based on an evolution of gorillas ๐คท
People have a hard time grasping that evolution is random, things happen, sometimes they give an advantage and it helps the individual pass that change on to their kids, sometimes it might be recessive and it won't (imagine an human born with perfected knees but the genes weren't passed on!) and sometimes it's not beneficial but because it doesn't hinder the individual they still get to pass that evolution on to their kids... We don't evolve from hitting our head at a problem long enough that we suddenly have a child that's born with a fix...
This is just an easy way to avoid the question...
While that very likely describes the origin, it doesn't necessarily describe successive layers of creation.
And assuming that we are in fact currently in the origin and not a successive layer of recreation of that origin seems like an increasingly difficult argument to make as each year passes by.
Just like the new layers we are starting to build right now have processes by which continuous functions convert to discrete units in order to track interactions by free agents, the smallest building blocks of our own existence convert from being modeled as continuous to discrete based on interactions with them - and perhaps even more oddly go back to continuous if the information about those interactions is erased from existence (as if memory optimized to require the least degree of quantization to model the interactions of free agents with the universe).
We have a trillion dollar company that has been granted a patent on resurrecting the dead using AI and leftover social media data investing billions into AI companies with early models built on social media data claiming they want to experience being human. Another trillion dollar company named after the concept of a virtual parallel world is attempting to improve AI by virtually embodying it as closely to subjective human experience as possible.
And these are developments growing over the course of only a few years. Do you think these kinds of efforts will end? Or will we continue to push these boundaries as far as we are capable of doing so?
And given that the quantization of matter into a specific sized building block is one of the key limiting factors in how far we are able to push these boundaries, how confident should we be that a world without the same building block size limits might not have pushed the boundary much farther than we might conventionally imagine ourselves doing so?
TL;DR: Just because things begin in chaos does not mean creation and existence will remain chaotic and without purpose.
The day we are able to predict the movement of a speck of dust on a planet in another galaxy is the day where randomness will stop managing the universe.
You are conflating local vs nonlocal knowledge.
The system could be nonrandom with all states known while the knowledge of that entire state in any moment of time could be impossible to know within the system.
In fact, we're increasingly finding that the concept of absolute local knowledge in and of itself is on shakier grounds than previously thought.
But the ways in which that occurs can be explained in several ways that are deterministic non-locally and thus in an overall system that can be explicitly described and predicted.